This Is Us
I Lost My Best Friend of Two Decades To Trump
The heart is cruel above all things
We were good girls who drank. We pregamed with Rumple Minze, Goldschläger, and 151, and we winced as the drink burned down our throat. We pounded 50-cent drafts and staggered home. We held our drink until we held our hair back — but the drink was the one thing we couldn’t let go.
And on it went with Thursday night drink-ups and gypsy cabs into the city, and do you think we’ll get in, of course we’ll get in — we’re the pretty ones. We’re the girls boys want to drink with, go home with, make a home with. We’re swathed by the bottles we bought and the warmth they bring.
Remember that time we slid on black ice on Fordham Road because we only had enough money for a bottle of Boone’s?
When we drank, the world was set to rights. Scrubbed clean and raw and everyone was beautiful and nothing hurt. Remember being 19 and feeling so, so young? Faces unmarked by the slow, steady march of time.
Freshman year, I knew of you, but my impression was you that were a bit of a bitch. That persistent hair flipping, the one-carat diamond studs you wore, the Connecticut affectation — I wrote you off. Until my best friend vouched for you and it was second semester and I was 18 with a pile of AP credits, so really I was a sophomore in disguise. And so were you. We were both smart, acerbic women who had unbeatable odds for the best dorm a sophomore could get.
Later on, you told me this: Yeah, I thought you were kind of a bitch too.
We were barnacles. We were twinned. We were as thick as thieves. The poor girl from Brooklyn made passable by Long Island — I made everyone laugh. I was the girl the boys studied with. And you with your blonde hair and good breeding, handing me J.Crew catalogs. We ordered roll-necks, flannels, and scarlet wool scarves that we wound around our necks.
We attended a university planted in the middle of the South Bronx, and everyone was white, monied, and patrician. They hailed from New York, New England, and suburban New Jersey. I borrowed books and clothes and earrings while they collected allowances from their parents.
