Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

Her name was Laura—a healthy, Midwestern name—but she’d changed it to Lara. She hadn’t filed any official forms or notarized any documents, just changed her outgoing e-mail name halfway through college and informed her easygoing parents that she was Lara now, the dramatic double ah sound befitting a sleek Bond girl or a mysterious Russian spy.

Looking back on the summer we spent together, it’s easy to see why people thought we were in love. She would stand askew and hook her fingers into my belt loops protectively in crowds. We slept in the same bed while drunk on cheap wine and then woke up and pulled on each other’s clothes from where they lay puddled on the floor of my apartment. Former college classmates ran into my friends at parties and asked about my girlfriend, the one they’d seen in so many of my Facebook photos. She called me from a wedding reception once when she was sitting alone and bored, dictated an address and told me to wear a pretty dress. 

We met, aloof and arms-crossed, at a house party. Leaning into a sheet strung up with clothespins behind us, thinking it was a wall, she crashed through into a stranger’s collapsed laundry baskets, scattering the detergents and softeners. I had just happened to be standing next to her, and I grasped her skinny bare arms and tried to hoist her up, both of us weak with laughter. I swore to her that no one else had noticed, and it was true; other people at the party were just shadows in the blue lights, dancing and drunk and watching their own feet. Lara and I wandered upstairs together and found the kitchen, where we flung open the refrigerator and ate cake by the handful.

We were immediate best friends, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since junior high school. We held hands and shared makeup, touched each others’ faces tenderly. Lara had gapped front teeth and long, messy bangs that fell in her eyes like a teenager’s; she tossed her head back constantly to look at you while she talked. She was twenty years old to my twenty-two for most of that summer; I bought two cocktails at every bar, would set one on the table abstractly. Our laughs started to mirror each other; I absentmindedly copied her lisp, adding a flat-tongued sh to my plural words.

Lara always had boys falling in love with her, planning surprise night-picnics and writing her love letters on actual notebook paper. They proposed spontaneous weddings or overseas trips they couldn’t afford. In her absence, people swooned at her name. They sloughed off their thick skins and exposed their mucky centers.

I was heartbroken a lot then, overwhelmed by my own wanting, and Lara wrote me emails that took half an hour to read, telling me how sick and angry she felt for me, insisting that my great love would come further down the road. I would call her on the phone, sobbing too hard to speak, and she would knock on my apartment door minutes later, murmuring quietly, “I know, I know,” like a mother to a screaming newborn. Our hearts tin cans connected by string.

Too soon, the meteor of summer burned out, and she was back at school. We agreed to visit one another all the time, so sure of our promises that we barely even said goodbye. And soon she had classes, and a steady boyfriend, a house full of roommates.

Five years later, and my best friend and I sit on the front porch swing and weave embroidery thread into bracelets, drink bottled beer and can practically speak in shorthand. She says my summer with Lara felt hurtful and exclusionary at the time, like the two of us had holed up together in a treehouse, hoisted up the rope ladder, never wanted to come down.

Lara. My mother still asks about her, says thoughtfully, “She was so good to you.” 

She’s changed her name back now, I see, from the e-mails she sends me from her desk, she at her managerial job in Chicago and me in my cubicle three hours south. We talk about our cats and our jobs; we promise a visit sometime soon. Boys whose names are unfamiliar to me crow “Laura!” on her Facebook page. But she was Lara then, and will be to me always—a lisped voice singing, an ah and again, an ah.

(Originally published on youareamongfriends.com)