Chapter 2 #8
“You’ll never guess who I just saw on the subway,” Susan says to Katie on the phone as soon as she gets to her desk.
“Who?”
“Do you remember Eliza?” Susan feels her cheeks immediately get hot, just from saying Eliza’s name out loud. There’s no one in the office yet, which means she’s free to talk as loudly as she wants to. She starts spinning her desk chair around and around.
“Of course I remember Eliza,” Katie cries. “How could I forget the girl so hot you literally became a lesbian?”
Susan laughs, though she’s also rolling her eyes.
Katie says, “Wait, you saw her? How’d she look?”
“Like shit, honestly,” Susan says, spinning faster, her worry making her feel like she might blast off.
“Like she’s on drugs. And/or homeless.” She doesn’t say this lightly.
The thought of Eliza without a place to live is setting off alarm bells in her head.
She wishes there was something she could do.
“You know, I heard she dropped out of high school,” Katie says.
Susan sticks her foot out so it catches on her desk and she abruptly stops spinning. “She what? Why? Who did you hear that from?”
“Kyle, a while back. I forgot to tell you.”
Susan groans. How could Katie forget to tell her something like that? Or did she just choose not to tell her, because she knows how much Susan hates hearing Kyle’s name? “I can’t believe you guys still hang out with that fuck face.”
“Jake does, not me,” Katie says.
“Yeah, but…”
Katie cuts her off. “We don’t tell each other who to be friends with.”
“Jesus, okay,” Susan says.
Susan hasn’t seen Kyle since 2005, when she’d emptied her checking account and showed up to his house with an envelope of cash to pay for the damage she’d caused to his dad’s car.
He took the cash from her wordlessly, a football game on full volume in the background.
She didn’t know what she was expecting, but some sort of acknowledgment of the transaction would have been nice.
After all, it meant Susan had to keep her summer job through senior year to make the money back.
These days, she doesn’t keep track of him, though she knows vaguely that he lives uptown and has a boring, basic job and is in general way more around than she’s comfortable with.
She sighs, not wanting to have a fight with Katie right now. “I’m sorry. Back to Eliza. God, I hope she’s okay. She looked really rough. It was pretty disturbing, honestly.”
Susan tries to picture the shape of Eliza’s life.
She knows it’s a little melodramatic, but she imagines pills bought in dark alleys, park benches slept on.
How troubling that the popular girl who once sat in the back of her car and accused her of not knowing about metaphors might be fighting to survive.
She knows this is a somewhat dubious line of thinking—obviously there can be smart people in bad situations—but she is struggling to reconcile the two opposing images of Eliza.
Katie says, “I wonder what happened. I mean, she seemed smart and, like, normal. Dropping out is so extreme.”
“I wish we could find out what happened.”
“Why, you need some new material to jerk off to?”
“Oh my god,” Susan says, regretting that she ever told Katie about her Eliza fantasies. “I hate you.”
“Why don’t you just google her?” Katie asks.
Susan has googled Eliza more times than she can count, variations of “Eliza” combined with the name of her town, school district, zip code, the year they met. “I don’t know her last name.”
“Huh,” Katie says. “We could ask Kyle.”
“I’d really rather not involve Kyle.”
“We could ask Jake to ask Kyle,” Katie offers.
“That’s still involving Kyle.”
“Fine.” Katie sighs. “Wait, why don’t you post a Missed Connection?”
Susan pauses. “I can’t tell if I hate that or if it’s brilliant.”
Susan and Katie spend many nights just getting drunk and reading the Missed Connections section of Craigslist out loud to each other.
“It’s brilliant,” Katie assures her. “Send it to me before you post it. I have to go.”
But Susan doesn’t want to send it to Katie.
It feels too vulnerable to share with her, despite the fact that it’s about to be public.
So instead she boots up her computer and goes to Craigslist. Before she can second-guess herself, she clicks into the Missed Connections section.
She types furiously, as though possessed:
SUBJECT: “LOOK AT YOU”—W4W (MISSED CONNECTION)
I almost didn’t recognize you on the train this morning.
I guess a lot has happened since we last saw each other.
Me, speechless in my Volvo on Long Island; you, rightfully angry.
I’m sorry I never know what to say around you.
You look good with purple hair. I wonder who you’ve become and what your life is like. Maybe you want to tell me?
She hopes it’s vague enough to ward off strangers but specific enough to get Eliza’s attention. Surely Eliza will recognize the subject line referencing what they said to each other, and if not, the mentions of the Volvo and Long Island and purple hair should do the trick.
When Susan hits post, her hand is shaking. It’s scary, reaching out into the void like this. She mostly does not expect to get a response, but it’s nice to feel like she’s tried, instead of just mind-fucking about it forever.
After it publishes, she scrolls through the other posts. Others say things like, It’s summer and I’m HOT, who wants to make out??? And Jessica PLEASE give me the cat back. She wonders if she’s made a terrible mistake, exposing herself like this.
She refreshes her inbox a few times, wondering how long it’ll take to get a reply, if ever.
Jonny meets her after work to accompany her while she looks at a room he sent her a link to. It’s a month into her search and she still can’t find an apartment that checks all her boxes—cheap, safe, well located—but is hoping tonight’s viewing will be different.
“How was your day?” he asks, as they walk toward Bed-Stuy. It’s too nice out to take the train two stops—leather jacket weather, at last.
“Weird,” she says. “I posted a Missed Connection for someone I knew in high school. I saw her this morning on the subway.”
“I love doing that,” he says. “I went through a phase of posting Missed Connections for anyone who dared to make eye contact with me.”
“Did it ever work?”
“Depends how you define work,” he says. “So who is she? Tell me everything.”
Susan recounts the story of Eliza to Jonny as they walk down the street. A story which, of course, includes him; he laughs when she tells him how Eliza was the only one who knew he was gay.
She describes how different Eliza looked on the subway, tries to recount exactly what she wrote in her Craigslist post.
“It sounds beautiful,” he says. “I hope she sees it and you fall madly in love.”
“Me too,” Susan admits.