“Just pretend like it’s you and I, having a conversation,” Aaron said. He wanted to get this all in one take. I should keep going, from start to finish, without any break. “The emotional continuity of the story is important. If you feel yourself getting teary eyed, that’s okay. Just keep going. I may jump in here and there to keep you on track if I feel like you’re digressing. But we want you to just go.”

I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t get teary eyed, but I might get sick. Heaving clear syrupy bile into the toilet, my hand, out the car window had been my way of coping for a long time. (“It’s normal and nothing to be concerned about,” the grief counselor had assured my parents.) I took a deep breath. The buttons pulled on my silk blouse as my chest expanded and retracted.

“So we’re just starting with the basics, like I said.” Aaron pressed the bud in his ear and said in a low voice, “Can I get quiet on the set?” He looked at me. “We’re just doing a thirty-second sound check. Don’t say anything.”

The crew—about twelve of them—fell silent as Aaron counted on his watch. I noticed for the first time he was wearing a wedding ring. A gold one. Much too thick. Did his wife have a flat chest and that was why he couldn’t keep his eyes off mine?

“We get it?” Aaron asked, and one of the sound guys nodded.

“Awesome.” Aaron clapped his hands together and backed out of the shot. “Okay, Ani, when we say, ‘Take,’ I want you to state those three things—your name, your age—oh! And this is important. It should be the age you will be when this airs in eight months—”

“We do that in magazines too,” I babbled nervously. “Use the age someone will be when the issue hits the newsstands.”

“Exactly!” Aaron said. “And then don’t forget to add how old you were on November twelfth, 2001.” He gave me a thumbs-up.

In eight months I would be twenty-nine. I could hardly take it. I realized something that made me brighten. “My name will be different in eight months too,” I said. “Should I go by that?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Aaron said. “Good catch. We’d have to film that all over again if we didn’t get it right.” He backed away from me and gave me another thumbs-up. “You’re going to do great. You look gorgeous.”

Like I was there to shoot a fucking morning talk show.

Aaron nodded to one of the crew members. The room was solemn as he said, “Take one.” He cracked the clapboard, and Aaron pointed his finger at me and mouthed, “Go.”

“Hi, my name is Ani Harrison. I’m twenty-nine years old. And on November twelfth, 2001, I was fourteen years old.”

“Cut!” Aaron shouted. Softening his voice, he said, “So you don’t need to say ‘Hi.’ Just ‘I’m Ani Harrison.’”

“Oh, right.” I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that sounds stupid. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize!” Aaron said, much too forgivingly. “You’re doing great.” I swear I caught one of the crew members roll her eyes. The woman had a bouquet of frizzy curls framing her narrow face, the cheekbones probably more pronounced in adulthood, the way Olivia’s might have been.

When they yelled cut this time, I got it right. “I’m Ani Harrison. I’m twenty-nine years old. On November twelfth, 2001, I was fourteen years old.”

Cut. Aaron falling all over himself to tell me what a great job I did. That woman definitely rolling her eyes.

“Let’s do a few where you just state your name, okay?”

I nodded. Quiet on the set, Aaron pointing at me to go.

“I’m Ani Harrison.”

Aaron counting on his fingers to five, pointing at me to do it again.

“I’m Ani Harrison.”

Cut.

“You feel good?” Aaron asked, and I nodded. “Great. Great.” He was all fired up. “So now you’re just going to talk. Just tell us what happened. Better yet, tell me what happened. You don’t have to look directly into the camera either. Just pretend like I’m your friend and you’re telling me this story about your life.”

“Got it.” I fought hard for the smile I gave him.

Quiet on the set. The clapboard came down like a guillotine. Nothing left to do but to tell.

CHAPTER 12

If it hadn’t been for the Swedish fish, I wouldn’t have been there, right in the blue-red, palpitating heart of it. I didn’t even like Swedish fish before I came to Bradley, but they were among the only things Olivia ate, and she was skinny. Rationally, I understood Olivia was skinny not because Swedish fish were an addition to her diet but because they were her diet. It didn’t matter. The urge for that chew, that tang stinging the corners of my mouth, sent me through the cafeteria a second, sometimes third time. Nothing could deter me. Not the table of my former friends located precariously close to the cash registers, not my pants now so tight that I’d taken to using a large clothespin as a button. (It gave me another inch or two.)

I made my way through the food atrium. Passed the deli line, the hot meal of the day, the salad bar, and the fountain soda station—Teddy there, cursing about how the ice machine was always broken—and got in line to pay. Just like at a pharmacy, candy and chocolate and gum were available by the cash register. There were two lines, and there was an awkward moment when I almost ran into Dean, when we both stepped forward to try to get into the shorter line. I gave it to him without a fight—it was the one closest to his table, the one I tried to avoid anyway. I watched Dean shuffle to the front, dragging his feet like the wait was annoying him. There is something about seeing someone from behind, something about the way people walk away, that I’ve always found unnervingly intimate. Maybe it’s because the back of the body isn’t on guard the way the front is—the slouch of the shoulders and the flex in the back muscles¸ that’s the most honest you’ll ever see a person.

The quad drove the high noon sun in from the left; tendrils coiled around the woolly patches of hair on Dean’s neck. I was thinking, how strange that it’s blond, baby thin, when the hair everywhere else was coarse and dark, when Dean went sideways in the air.

Why is Dean jumping? It was the first thing I thought, continued to think even as a dense smoke charged the new part of the cafeteria, the part where I was no longer welcome, my excommunication my saving grace, really.

I was on the ground, my bad wrist irate. I howled as someone rushed past and stomped on my finger. Physically, I had the sensation that I was screaming. I felt the ragged edges of my throat, but I couldn’t hear anything. Someone seized my gimpy wrist and pulled me to my feet, and I felt the pressure of a scream in my chest again, but the release was cut short as my lungs hitched on the smoke. I was racked with a wicked cough, that feeling like you’ll never get a good breath again.

It was Teddy who had my wrist. I followed him in reverse of the way I’d just come, exiting by the entrance into the old part of the cafeteria, where the deli line started for the first lunch shift at 11:51 A.M. I felt something warm and gooey in my palm and I looked down, expecting to see blood, but it was just the bag of Swedish fish, still secure in my hand.

The cafeteria bulged with black smoke. We couldn’t get out the way we usually came in, and Teddy and I pivoted in unison, like we were rehearsing a dance for the talent show. We stumbled up the flight of stairs behind us toward the Brenner Baulkin Room, where I had only been once, to take my entrance exam.

When I recall this moment now, it’s a silent memory. In reality the fire alarm was piercing an unbearably high note overhead, and there was screaming, moaning. Later I was told that the husky voice Hilary took such pains to curate fell away, and she was just a little girl, whimpering, “Mom, Mom,” as she shuddered on the floor, broken glass glinting like diamonds in her pale, parched hair. Her left foot, still in its Steve Madden clog, was no longer a part of her body.