Molly

The summer I met Molly was humid. Sweat and steam and yeast coming out of concrete — that’s how we found each another in Manhattan, like two feral cats emerging from the gutter on a hot rainy day.

She was the smallest girl with a real ass I’d ever seen, with cheekbones varnished in girl lotion and huge D-cup boobs and a tiny waist and a high ponytail with hair that felt satin. She was gorgeous. We met online through the dating apps, because I’d selected “open to friendship” and she was still “figuring things out,” which is the way to say whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck when you’re an adult and cannot find the courage to cry. When I joined she messaged me instantly: I like ur opening line, let’s be friends, and we were.

We were writer girls. We were in New York. Of course she had been damaged.

“What’s your type?” she sipped over cocktails, and I’d make up a new version of man every time and we’d laugh and laugh and laugh.

The truth was we both loved men too much, which made us the same type of girl even though our types were opposite. I liked IT guys and silly goof-offs who were sweet and cooked and took photographs. She liked rough men who made her feel alive and brought her closer to death. By the time she was 14 she had already fucked four men including her cousin and was giving blowjobs to five more. Her current boyfriend was thirty-one. Because I had an apartment to myself in FiDi I let her have the spare key and pre-game there with hotel-sized bottles of tequila, and she would come home hungover, arms a little cut, sleeping on the foot of my bed like a stray.

How do I get unstuck? she asked one night, shaving her left leg in a bathrobe.

Honey, sweet pea. How does anyone ever get unstuck?

Sometimes people in your life go away and all you have is the memory. Sometimes the people in your life go away and stay in whatever shadows are left. Soon after Molly left New York I adopted a small malnourished kitten, two years old, snarling and shy who refused to eat and had already been returned to the shelter twice. She could not be touched. She could not be loved. She whimpered or hissed anytime you approached her with kindness, this beautiful little calico I bought every flavor of cat food under the sun for.

In the early morning I would be awoken by a light scraping sckhhh sckhhh underneath the kitchen table, the sounds of a cat lapping up leftovers that had fallen from my Chinese takeout the night before. She was there, head-butting the floorboards cleaning up the grease with her tongue. Between the licks she would meow and meow and meow like a lost animal, almost like she was dying.

She wanted so badly to be alive, but didn’t know how. I named her Mollie.