The last ordinary Friday of Julian Hartwell's life began, as most of his Fridays did, with a text from Emmy.
coming over tonight? dying of boredom and also possibly of a textbook
He read it sitting on the edge of his bed in the amber light of a September evening, still in the clothes he'd worn to his nine o'clock lecture on the pre-Socratics. The text had arrived forty minutes ago. He'd read it then, smiled at his phone in the way he'd trained himself not to do where anyone could see, and set it face-down on the desk while he finished his notes. Discipline, he told himself. Finish the thought. Textbooks wouldn’t finish Emmy off tonight, he was sure of that. Trashy romance novels, her balm of choice between trashy romances, could. But it was a risk he was willing to take.
The thought had taken forty minutes and three drafts and still wasn't finished.
He typed back: when am I ever not coming over
Her response was immediate, as it always was, as if she'd been holding her phone and waiting — which she probably had, because Emmy's relationship with patience was one of cheerful mutual nonrecognition.
yay. bring the good chips not the sad ones
Julian looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Good” chips were kettle cooked and crispy. Sad ones were flimsy and “unfulfilling” according to Emmy. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Then he got up to go to the pantry to grab a bag.
The Hartwell house had a particular quality in the evenings that he'd never been able to adequately describe — to himself or to anyone else, not that there was anyone else to describe it to. It wasn't silence exactly. The house was too old for silence, too full of its own small sounds: the particular creak of the third stair, the pipes that knocked once around seven o'clock as the heating settled, the way the kitchen window rattled faintly when the wind came from the east. It was more like the house was breathing. Like it had a rhythm that had been established long before Julian was born and would continue long after he was gone. The house turned 100 last year, it would likely be there generations more.
He stood in the kitchen for a moment before he left, as he sometimes did. The corner where his height marks lived under fresh paint — he could still feel the ghost of them if he pressed his fingers there, the pencilled increments of a childhood that had ended too abruptly in a phone call from a port authority office in a Caribbean island whose name he could never afterward remember without his stomach dropping. David and Marie Hartwell. Snorkelling excursion. We're so sorry.
He didn't press his fingers to the wall tonight. He just stood in the kitchen in the yellow evening light and looked at it for a moment, which was something he did occasionally and had no name for.
Then he picked up his jacket from the hook by the door — the dark green front door, its brass knocker gone the color of old pennies — and stepped out into the September evening.
Fifteen minutes across Crestfield. He knew the route the way you know a route you've walked so many times it has become less like a series of decisions and more like a fact of the body: left out of the gate, along Marlowe Street past Mags’s bookshop (dark now, closed an hour ago, the bay window display barely visible in the streetlight — something about autumn reading, orange spines, a ceramic fox she'd placed among the books for reasons she'd explained to him once and he'd found completely convincing), right onto the university path, through the south gate, across the courtyard that smelled of cut grass and approaching autumn, up the worn stone steps of Pemberton Hall and along the third-floor corridor to room 312.
He knew, walking this route, that he would feel better when he arrived. This was a fact about himself that he'd catalogued years ago and examined occasionally from various philosophical angles without it ever being less true. Emmy's presence had a quality he thought of, privately and with some embarrassment, as corrective — not in the sense that she fixed things, because she was categorically not a person who fixed things so much as a person who sat with you in the middle of things and made the middle less terrible. But corrective in the sense that the world, when Emmy was in it, seemed to be running at the right resolution. Everything slightly sharper. More itself.
He didn't examine what this meant. He had a policy, carefully maintained, about not examining certain things.
He knocked twice — their knock, two quick and one slow, a code of such long standing neither of them could remember establishing it — and heard her voice from inside saying it's open, Jules in the particular tone that meant she was on the windowsill and too comfortable to move.
Emmy Calloway had been on the windowsill for forty minutes and had accomplished the following: eaten two thirds of a granola bar, reread the same paragraph of her Developmental Psychology textbook four times without retaining a word of it, sent six texts across three conversations, and had a series of increasingly abstract thoughts about whether she was, as a person, fundamentally capable of sitting still.
The answer, she suspected, was no.
The evening light was doing its best work through the west-facing window — thick and golden and making everything in the room look slightly more significant than it was, the open textbook on the bed transformed by it into something almost artistic, the fairy lights along the wall above unnecessary right now but on anyway because they were always on. The campus path below sent up its usual Friday evening sounds: groups forming and dispersing, someone laughing at something, the universal human noise of people who have finished their week and are figuring out what to do with the fact.
Emmy was figuring out what to do with several facts.
Fact one: Cara had texted this afternoon. hey stranger, which in Cara's economy of language was approximately a novella. Cara was seeing someone now — a girl named Sophie or Sofie (one of those, Emmy had never asked how she spelled it) — and appeared to be happy in the effortless way of someone who had found the right person without too much searching, which Emmy found both genuinely lovely and faintly irritating in a way she didn't examine too closely. The text had arrived alongside a photo of the two of them at some event, both laughing, Sophie-or-Sofie's arm around Cara's waist.
Emmy had looked at the photo for a while. Had felt, as she sometimes did in these moments, the vague shape of something she couldn't quite name — not jealousy exactly, not longing for Cara specifically, but something adjacent to both of those, something that had more to do with the ease in the photo than the people in it. The way Sophie-or-Sofie's arm sat around Cara's waist like it had always been there.
She had replied: not a stranger!! looks amazing, you both look so happy and meant both of those things and had then set her phone down and stared at the ceiling for a while before picking it up again to text Julian.
Fact two: the Developmental Psychology textbook was not going to read itself, and she had a paper due in eleven days, and she was constitutionally incapable of sitting alone in this room on a Friday evening making herself care about Erikson’s developmental stages when Julian was twelve minutes away and had, as far as she was aware, no better plans.
Fact three — and this was the one she was least inclined to look at directly, had in fact developed quite sophisticated techniques for not looking at directly — was that she had not, in five years of Julian, figured out what Julian was to her in a way that felt complete. He was her best friend, obviously. He was the person she called and the person she texted and the person whose particular dry observation in the middle of a situation always made it approximately thirty percent more bearable. He was the person who knew where she kept the wine and had never mentioned it. He was the person whose spot at her desk had simply become his spot, organic and unannounced, over the years.
He was, in other words, several things at once, and Emmy had a researcher's instinct for categorization that kept trying to resolve him into one thing and kept failing.
She heard two quick knocks and one slow one at the door.
"It's open, Jules," she called, tucking her feet more firmly under her and picking up the granola bar. She had decided, in the last thirty seconds, on a strategy: she was going to say something outrageous. Something to make him sputter and adjust his glasses and give her that look — the one that was trying to be disapproving and wasn't quite managing it. This was a reliable technique and she had no idea why she found it so satisfying and had no interest in finding out.
She would ask him something ridiculous. They would talk. He would sit in his spot at the desk, and she would sit in her spot on the windowsill, and the fairy lights would come into their own as the evening settled around them, and for a few hours the world would run at the right resolution. It would be quiet, comforting, and cozy. A perfect Friday night for both of them, they didn’t need a social life more complicated.
The door opened.
Julian stood there looking exactly like himself — jacket, slightly rumpled, glasses, the expression he carried into most situations of polite uncertainty about what was expected of him. A bag of chips in one hand. The good ones.
"Hey," he said.
Emmy looked at him across the warm and cluttered room, the last of the evening light halving her face through the window, and felt — as she sometimes did — the particular frustration of a feeling that refused to be filed.
"Tell me," she said, "that I'm not insane for considering a threesome with my ex and her new girlfriend."
She watched him choke.
There it is, she thought, watching the ears go pink, watching the hand go to the glasses. There you are.
She had no idea, not yet, what she was actually looking for when she said things like that to him. She had no idea that in approximately twenty minutes Julian would excuse himself to the bathroom and the world would stop running at any resolution she recognized, and everything — every careful category, every maintained policy, every comfortable distance she had kept between herself and the fact of him — would simply cease to apply.
For now, she watched him recover, watched him reach for the desk chair that was his, always his, had been his for five years.
For now, it was just a Friday.
The last one.