The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Read Online Free

ukulele and singing in a basement lit by strings of plastic red peppers. I remember making two observations during the twenty minutes my friends and I hung around the concert and sipped beers: one, that I wanted her outfit (floral overall shorts and a canvas jacket), and two, that she was skinnier than me, a quality that made her instantly less likable. She was pretty, apart from a very large nose, and I’d seen her around campus, riding her bike along Pear Street or smoking cigarettes outside the library. She had the rare combination of being quiet and popular, a code that made her intimidating to younger, fashionable girls and mysterious to older, confident boys. We moved in different circles and I hardly thought about her again until the morning after I first kissed Brian, whom she had dated intensely and inseparably for two years and nine months.
    I’d never had to deal with an ex-girlfriend before and I didn’t like it. Adam and I were each other’s firsts and I’d only had month-long things since the two of us broke up. One thing I am is self-aware (to a neurotic fault), and I recognize that a massive percentage of my self-esteem depends on the attention of a series of smug boys at the University of Vermont. The problem is I’m good at attracting them: verbally witty and successful at sending texts. I’m also well dressed, or try to be, and make fun of boys in the way that reads as I like you . Perhaps it’s not a problem so much as a crutch, but I have this pathetic fantasy that I’d be more productive if I were less attractive. Finally finish some paintings or apply for funding of some kind. The point is that Lauren Cleaver and I were not friends because Lauren Cleaver and I had all this in common. This, and Brian.
    * * *
    His parents arrived the morning after the accident, and his roommates e-mailed a few people they thought might want to stop by. I wanted to go, and felt like I had to go, so I put on a pair of black jeans and a black sweater and asked Charlotte if I could borrow her black boots.
    “They don’t fit you,” she said. “And besides, you don’t need to have black shoes.”
    I wasn’t sure. And felt guilty for pondering my red ballet flats as I walked the seven-minute walk to his house. I figured I wasn’t supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don’t. My father used to tease me at the table by implying “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than they were, slower to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this.”
    It was cold for March, so I walked quickly. Brown snow still hugged the sides of our streets and the pines leaned in like gray walls, still limp with yellow Christmas lights. Whenever I slept at Brian’s, I called him as soon as I passed this certain stop sign—timing his arrival at the door so I wouldn’t have to wait. “I’m here,” I’d say, a block away, and he’d meander downstairs to let me in. This time, I knocked.
    William let me in. Roommate and rich boy from Los Angeles. We were never friends, really, just occasional cohabiters, but we awkwardly hugged and he asked me how I was.
    “Fine,” I said instinctively. But he understood that I wasn’t.
    We walked upstairs and I felt immediately like I shouldn’t have been there. It was smaller than I’d imagined: Brian’s parents, two adults I didn’t recognize, and five or six of his closest friends. They huddled together in the corner next to a plate of bagels and an untouched platter of fruit. His mother was actually sobbing into the side of one of the women and