All Girls, But One
Katherine Dykstra
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
"The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out." —J.M. Barrie
Once upon a time, I knew a girl who was magic. On Friday nights, beneath the emerald grass and ivied facades of our Midwestern college campus, she and I danced in dark basements. She would pull me into the center of the floor, cup my face in both hands and say, "Only me. Only pay attention to me." If anyone dared creep up on us, she'd hold up her palm, No, and that person, whoever he was, would shrink back into nothing.
She twirled her index finger over my head, and I transformed from a slump-shouldered thing, sick with shame, friendless, breasts too big, boring even to myself, into a real live girl, one with allure, an air of mischief and of cool. It was a good trick, though it would not be her best, which was disappearing near completely 20 years later in the age of the Internet. Though that was still to come.
Back then, when I entered her orbit, I was tabula rasa—far enough away from my parents to be unaffected by their expectations, unencumbered by responsibility save maintaining my good grades, finished with the morose outcast I'd been in high school, nauseated by the sorority girl I'd become upon entering college, just waiting for someone like her to bestow on me the right to decide who I would be.
That summer, I moved out of the sorority house and rented a room off campus. A meth lab had burned to the ground in the unattached garage next door and the blinds on its side of the house all sagged like Dali's melting clocks. I slept on a mattress on the floor of an otherwise empty dining room with windowed pocket doors that opened to the living area on one side, the kitchen on the other. In order not to be seen by any of my five roommates, I'd crouch in the corner to dress. For these accommodations I paid $73 a month, which I earned serving pub fare to fraternity alumni while wearing a forest green polo shirt and khakis. This sounds bleak, I realize, but I'd never been so happy. During that brief time in my life—when suddenly I found myself able to hold my head up as I entered a room and when those things that interested me, music, photography, words, began to crystallize into possibility—everything felt like ease and open arms.
My magic friend lived nearby, and she'd pick me up in the morning so we could walk to campus together. We identified as good, smart girls and took our studies seriously. Diligent students by day, she and I were anything we wanted by night. "We're sisters," she told strangers at the bars, "No, actually, we're twins." "Also, we're in a band." "We're famous." "We're rich." "Shots!" she'd call out, and they would appear. "Dance with me." And they did. "Your name is DJ Nero," she said to the club kid who tended bar. And so it was. One night, I'd had too much to drink, and she ordered me a glass of water. When some boy made a snide comment, she narrowed her eyes at him and said, "My sister is not drunk. She's drinking water because she had ham for dinner." We died laughing at that one. The joke was always on everyone else.
The gag was that even as we (she) charmed everybody around us, we had no use for them. "We do not need boys; we only need each other," she would say. She kept a running list of requirements any boyfriend of hers must meet—proficiency with the bass guitar, a love of the Beastie Boys, a gig as a deejay, long hair, an earring. I can't remember them all, only that I considered them evidence of her discernment. It would be years before I realized that this list of superficial traits was just a way to ensure my friend never had to enter into a relationship with anyone. Our friendship was predicated on this, my lack of insight. To ask what my friend was so afraid of would have negated my purpose, which was to live her fantasy. "We will never grow up," she'd say. "We will never get old."
***
Four years in, five for her, long after we should have graduated but couldn't seem to leave the little town where we felt so big, I took a small step toward breaking free by accepting an editorial internship in New York City. I was gone for less than three months, but when I returned, everything was different, destabilizing because I was the one who was supposed to have changed.
I moved back in with my friend and discovered a new cast of characters. A mousy girl I'd never seen before now slept on the couch. She had ideas about people being like groceries, and you with a shopping cart, choosing who you wanted to take home and leaving others to molder on the shelf. At the bars there was a new clutch of people, many of whom were named for animals. Spider had tattoos on his face. He never smiled but once, which was how I knew he didn't have a tooth in his head. And Crow, hair dark and oily as a slick, who cornered me one night on a humid dancefloor, held open her palms like a witch revealing a poisoned apple and said, "Do you want some drugs? Do you want to dance with me?" Our game had evolved while I was gone, everything rife with slightly more risk.
Things started to go sideways. One morning, my friend woke me in a state of agitation. Her car was missing. She had driven the night before but had no recollection of getting home. We climbed into my car—me in sweats, her in pajama pants and a sequin halter top—and drove around our small town searching for her rusting maroon four-door. Eventually, we gave up and headed to the police station to declare it stolen. "Let's just do one last turn around town," the officer said, putting us in the back of his cruiser.
The cop seemed to drive directly up to my friend's car. It was parked in an alley behind a dive bar in a spot marked with a sign that read: "Don't even think about it." We were sheepish before the cop, but once we were safe inside my friend's car, we died laughing at that one too. But underneath our mirth, I felt the first notes of foreboding. Others could also pull the strings. This time the joke was on us.
One night, we took ecstasy and walked a handful of blocks from a bar to someone's loft apartment. Outside, there was fog, thick and low like the steam off a cauldron. During that short walk, not one, but two sets of cars collided in front of us. Crash! And maybe three minutes later, Crash! It felt, in my altered state, like a warning. I became convinced that it was time to leave. That if I stayed, I might forget that this was supposed to be the beginning and not the end.
***
I talked my friend into flying away with me. We would be adults in New York City. I promised her that she would love it. I would teach her how to navigate the subway, where to buy a convincing knock-off designer bag, which bouncers would unlatch the ropes for us even though we were nobody at all. But this was a ruse. It was I who needed her. New York was where I wanted to be, but I was too afraid to go alone, to make the leap without her beside me ensuring I would land.
She and I took a cab from La Guardia to a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of an Upper East Side walk-up. It had no furniture and, when we arrived, no plumbing. We walked down the nearest avenue to find dinner like grownups, marveling at the bustle of the city even in subzero weather. The January cold bit through our too-thin pants, and we arrived home with thighs red and stinging. We laid our sleeping bags on the living room floor. Sometime during the night, I woke to find my friend vomiting and shitting her shrimp cocktail into a trash bag a few feet away from me (no plumbing, remember). I did not know how I could help her, so I did nothing. She survived the food poisoning, but it was a foreshadowing of what it would be like to live in a city that didn't need us to survive.
Our plumbing was connected, and our furniture arrived. Another roommate moved in. My friend and I had agreed to share a bedroom; it was the deal we made so we could afford the rent while searching for jobs. We took the bigger room, which was still so tiny it only fit our full-sized bed with no margin around which to walk. Upon entry, one had no choice but to fall onto the bed.
I got a freelance job at a legendary celebrity magazine in Soho. My friend got an internship with a fashion designer uptown. We'd set to constructing new lives, though I see now how they didn't look all that different from the ones we had left.
My friend's magnetism had followed her to New York, and just like in our little college town, she was able to whip any bar into a frenzy of idolatry. She was an acrobat setting plates to spin—people all over the room either vying for her attention or presenting her with drinks or hanging on to her every word or scanning the crowd hopeful to catch a glimpse of wherever she'd moved on to. And just like in our little town, I was only grateful to be the planet in closest rotation to her sun, soaking up confidence by way of association.
One Friday, as I packed up to head home from work, the managing editor of the celebrity magazine called me into his office and told me not to come back on Monday giving no further explanation. Then my friend told me she'd found a new apartment, one where she wouldn't have to share a room, much less a bed. "I mean, we can't do this forever, Katie," she'd said. I felt sick. I hadn't known she was looking. We can't?
I found an assistant job at a dying Seven Sisters magazine. I paid a third more rent. Our ground-floor apartment was broken into three times over six weeks—my roommate's TV stolen again and again and again. I went days without a call from my magic friend, which left me with the aching feeling that I had misplaced some crucial part of my being, the cog that forced one foot in front of the other. When I confided in a mutual friend from college, she told me that everyone was our magic friend's best friend, and that she had learned long ago not to expect anything, only to be happy when our friend shone her light on her. I was stunned by this. She thought she was our friend's best friend, too? Who on earth did that make me?
One weekday morning in September after I came up from the subway and the elevator opened to my office, another editorial assistant met me in the hallway. Her cheeks were tear-slicked, her hands covered her mouth. "Oh my god," she said. "You don't know." In the conference room, we watched the planes fly into the buildings over and over and over again, just fifty blocks from where we stood.
For weeks the air was thick with the smell of burnt flesh. The faces of the missing stared out from every lamppost. Petrified over what might happen while I was below ground, I stopped taking the subway, walked the 45 minutes to and from my meaningless job. A wagon train of tanks slow rolled past me down Fifth Avenue. Beneath camouflage helmets, above leather chinstraps, I searched for the men's eyes. I was looking for reassurance. Is everything going to be ok? Am I going to be ok? One day the line of tanks turned into dump trucks heavy with debris and moving in the opposite direction.
The bartender I'd mooned over and who'd ended our tryst by never calling again, slit his wrists in a bathtub. He'd once told me a secret but, no matter how I tried, I couldn't recall what it was. Everything happening around me—the crumbling of the city I'd chosen, the death of a man I thought I could know, my abandonment by my friend—felt like some failing of mine. Not that I'd caused these events so much as that, had I been a more perceptive person, smarter, more aware, I would have seen them coming.
I got in the habit of numbing out by taking bong hits and eating baked potato tuna melts with a girl who lived a few floors above me. She was always around because, apparently, she didn't need to work. I gained a ton of weight. I hated my job. I had few friends—so many of the people I'd known had moved away, too freaked out to wait around and see what would happen next. I also was freaked out, but I was just as afraid to leave as I was to stay. Where would I go? What would I do? Inaction being the easiest route, I stayed put. I asked my magic friend to meet me for drinks at an Irish pub. Over vodka tonics, I told her that I thought I was depressed, that I was considering going on medication. She took me by the shoulders and shook me, "No, you are not, Katie! You are not depressed!"
One night she and I took ecstasy and, in the company of a cute but dull boy, ended up in the bed we'd once shared. There was kissing. Him and her. Him and me. Hands moving over clothes, slipping underneath. I took a risk and stretched over to kiss my friend, hoping that maybe she still loved me. Her lips were soft, the first girl lips I'd ever kissed, and I would have kept kissing them, left the boy to see his own way out, but my friend gently pushed me away. No, no, she scolded, wagging a finger. I knew then that I was truly on my own.
The next time my friend and I went out, I flirted shamelessly with a Brit she had lifted out of the throngs and thus laid claim to. He was her prop for the evening, a pretty face to ogle as he fawned over her, laughed at her jokes, bought her drinks, but never getting anywhere because she did not hook up.
I flirted unabashedly until he suggested we go back to his hotel room, and then I followed him without saying goodbye. Halfway through our fumbling, he placed his hands on my ribcage like he was holding a precious vase and said, "Your tits are absolutely incredible." I've never forgotten that moment. What I have to strain to remember is the look on my friend's face as we walked away.
***
Sometime during that period, I heard that our giraffe-legged friend—a roommate of mine from the house with the melted blinds who had been with us on the night of the fog and the accidents, and whom we left behind in our college town because she had insisted on staying—shot herself in the face with a deer rifle in front of the boy who'd just broken up with her. I was shocked, not exactly with grief, but with the realization of how little I'd known this girl with whom I had once spent so much time. I'd had no inkling she ran so deep or carried so much pain. I began to think of her death as a reminder to keep moving forward. Stasis can corrode.
I made a new friend at my job. She placed a good book in my hands. She told me she was applying to creative writing programs. I'd never heard of such a thing. I protested the impending war in Iraq. George Bush's second term. I scribbled furiously in my journal. I went to a concert in Central Park where the music was so transcendent, I was certain it had reconstituted my atoms. A man turned to me halfway through the show and yelled into my ear, "Every song is an anthem!" I quit my job. I found a part-time gig reporting for a daily newspaper, another part-time job working with kids. I applied to creative writing programs. I was accepted. I went back to school.
After months of silence, my magic friend called, nonchalant. Could I go with her to Planned Parenthood? Of course, I said, as if she called me all the time. I met her on the A train and worked hard not to let on to my shock as she briefed me. Her first time, wouldn't you know? And with a guy who was only in town for the weekend. Not that it mattered. She wanted nothing to do with him or with it.
We came up from underground in the Village. I took her elbow and guided her past a knot of halfwits carrying signs. I waited in the sterile lobby, a tabloid magazine open on my lap. Afterward, my friend groggily told me she hadn't been alone during the procedure. There were a half-dozen other girls who all got vacuumed together. That's the word she used. Vacuumed.
A few days later, she called me again. Her voice was desperate this time. She hadn't stopped bleeding. She was soaking giant pad after giant pad. She felt dizzy. I rushed to her apartment in a cab, took her back past the halfwits and waited for a second time. When I saw her next, she made no mention of Planned Parenthood. Instead, she told me about a bender that left her vomiting on the floor of her bathroom while two go-go boys waited in her living room. "Katie, I almost died!" she said, her eyes big as disco balls. "I'm done now. Never ever again." But then I met her, glassy-eyed, at a motorcycle-themed bar with red lighting where the air was ripe with the acrid smell of burning plastic. Turned out, there was a too-tall man with hair like Twisted Sister who was taking a lighter to his head, the ribbons of hair going up like flash paper.
Another night, I followed her to a walk-up studio apartment where two men were waiting as if expecting us. My friend handed me to one, like a gift, and he went straight for my lips. He was cute in a dirty sort of way, and so I went with it. He pushed me back onto the bed, burying his face in my neck. I looked over and saw my friend beneath the second man. When the cloying smell of heroin hit me, I noticed the third guy smoking in the corner. I felt nauseous and like now was one of those moments where I was supposed to understand something unsaid. From underneath the man, I reached for my friend's hand. I'm leaving, I said. She shrugged. Come with me, I said. When she didn't answer, I unearthed myself and walked to the door, leaving my friend with three men I didn't know.
***
Years passed. I met the man who would become my husband. I turned 30. My friend attended my wedding.
***
A girl who had lived with me in the house with the melted blinds flew to New York to visit. At a bar, she told me and my magic friend, whom I hadn't seen in months, about her divorce, about single parenting. My friend turned to me and asked if I remembered taking her to Planned Parenthood. I nodded, "Of course."
"No!" she grabbed my hands in hers in the same way she used to when we danced in dark basements. "I need to know what you remember."
My ballooning belly loomed between us. I was seven months pregnant, and even sober, I squirmed with how few details I could call up—the recycled air, the halfwits, my magazine, the word "vacuum". Just broad strokes. "I remember," I said. "I promise."
My friend squinted at me. "It's important that you remember because you saved my life," she said. "Do you know that, Katie?" I was skeptical, but I nodded anyway. "You saved my life and that was the most important thing anyone has ever done for me."
My friend didn't show up to my baby shower even though she'd rsvp'd yes, then she apologized by taking me to brunch. Over eggs, she told me that she was dating a DJ, that he had long hair and an earring. "You did it!" I said, thinking of her list. But this didn't seem to register with her. She told me that her DJ never got off work before four in the morning, sometimes later, so she spent a lot of time waiting around in strobe-lit warehouses, which was leaving her exhausted at work. It did not sound ideal. It did not even sound good. But now that I was mature enough to drum up some insight, I was no longer close enough to my friend to share it with her, if I ever was.
That was the last we chose to spend time together.
I ran into her on the street once near her apartment. "I'm in a rush!" she said and kept walking. And then a second time at a party to celebrate the premiere of an independent film. "Wow!" she said, "It's been so long. I'm going to get a drink and then I'll come find you!" I never saw her again.
My son is ten now. My friend has never met him.
Every now and then I dream about her. I wake with new missing and decide I should find her. A Google search of her name turns up two hits. One is from a collection of party pics taken at a D-list fashion show in 2009. She is posing with three guys she affectionately called The Gays, whom she hung out with after moving on from me. The second is a LinkedIn profile last updated 20 years ago. The profile picture is a photograph that had to have been taken just after we moved to New York. My friend is fresh-faced, twenty-something, looking exactly how I remember her—long dark hair like mine, her big brown eyes containing so much light and mischief they make my heart skip.
But that's it. No Facebook or Instagram, no Pinterest board, no Twitter. I can't pinpoint exactly what I'd expected to find when I typed her name into Google. Definitely not some social media page with her mugging beside a man and a clutch of kids. Though she never said it, I knew that wasn't the goal. But I thought I'd turn up something. Perhaps a recap of her accepting some award at a seated dinner thrown by some society that celebrates fashion. Or a spray of photos of her on the cobblestone streets and in the museums of some European city. Or a view over her knees out onto the ocean. But these aren't there either.
When I see the scant hits, it feels as if I made her up. As if I concocted this plate-spinning spell-casting girl who had the power to get me from there to here, to give me the confidence to be. And I wonder if she got even close to as much from me. I wonder, if she was best friends with everyone, did she feel anyone was best friends with her? I wonder, what would have happened if I'd asked why she wouldn't let anyone love her? What was so scary about adulthood?
My gut tells me I will never have the chance. And all I can hope is that wherever she is, she has what she needed. I suppose as far as the Internet is concerned, she does. She has never grown up, has never gotten old, is eternally 23.
