Content warning: depiction of death or terminal illness.

The JDA

          I shouldn’t have found out like this. I don’t know how I should’ve found out. From my mom, probably. She should’ve found the obituary—old people always find obituaries—and called me up, because that’s what you do when there’s bad news. I’m so sorry, Amber, she should’ve said in a wobbly voice. Darlene Mitchell died.

          Instead I found out from Jackie’s Instagram. I unfollowed her in high school, but her profile is public and I check it every once in a while when I’m bored, which was the case that night. I needed a break from the maternity shoot photos I was color grading, the sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to find a way to hide how poorly the mother-to-be had blended her foundation. I typed in Jackie’s handle without thinking, and there it was. A picture of a picture. Jackie and Darlene, at nine or ten, at some sort of fair; Jackie holding a stick of cotton candy the size of her head, Darlene with a purple butterfly painted on her cheek. Their arms were slung around each other. Their gap-toothed smiles were wide.

          Heaven has gained an angel, but I’ve lost one of my oldest friends. Rest in sweetest peace, D. It was punctuated with two red heart emojis. I looked through the names of everyone who had liked or commented on it, but I didn’t recognize a single person.

          There was somebody standing on the other side of Darlene. They’d been cropped out, but their arm was still visible, wrapped around Darlene’s shoulder. I could just make out a short, pink-and-white polka dotted sleeve. I knew what the rest of the shirt looked like. It had been my favorite one.

***

          Jackie and I were friends first. That’s important to know. On the first day of kindergarten we both brought in the same snack; chocolate Teddy Grahams and a box of apple juice. From then on we were inseparable. She could’ve picked anybody to be her best friend; even as a kid she had that kind of charisma that turns people into puppies, desperate for her attention. But she chose me. We held hands side by side when the class walked in single file lines and made beaded bracelets for each other during arts and crafts. Even when we got in trouble for talking during storytime and the teacher moved our desks to opposite ends of the room, we made a game of making faces whenever her back was turned, trying to make each other laugh.

          Darlene’s family moved to Laconia in the middle of second grade. One gray January morning she just appeared, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and raising her hand in class like she’d been there all along.

          She walked up to Jackie and me at recess on that first day and asked if she could play with us. I was ready to tell her to fuck off, in so many words, but Jackie said yes. In a few minutes she told Darlene all the details of the mermaid princess kingdom we’d spent two years cooking up. She asked if Darlene wanted to be our secret long-lost sister, and was excited when Darlene suggested that her character had been captured by a sea witch as a baby. Darlene fell for Jackie right away. I was part of a package deal; buy one friend, get the other free.

          I didn’t resist Darlene for long, though. On my birthday, she brought me a cupcake she’d turned purple, my favorite color, with food dye. She never had an agenda for performing tiny kindnesses like that. She didn’t know how else to be, and I loved her for that.

          We called our group the JDA, the least bad acronym we could think of from our first names. Our brand was strong. We didn’t just have sleepovers, we had JDA sleepovers, where we huddled in Jackie’s basement reading aloud bad Wattpad stories and struggling to stay up until sunrise. We called each other by our first initials and shut down anyone else who tried to do the same. In middle school we came up with codenames for our crushes and passed each other notes about them during math class. Dear A, Fuck fractions tbh. P.S. Flamingo said hi to me!!! – J. When I got a photographer position at the newspaper freshman year, Darlene filled my locker with balloons. The night my parents told me they were getting divorced, Jackie biked over to my house in the rain. I know I talked to her all night, but I have no idea what I said. All I remember is the constant rhythm of her hand rubbing my back.

          Then, the summer before our junior year, Jackie decided she was going to do conditioning training and try out for cross country in the fall. Darlene and I were confused—the JDA didn’t do sports—but supportive, promising to hold up signs and cheer her on during meets. Darlene went off to be a counselor at a horse camp in Vermont. I drove to Cape Cod with my dad and the first in a series of girlfriends auditioning to be my stepmom.

          It happened so slowly that we didn’t even realize it, like frogs in heating water. Jackie responded to our texts and FaceTime invitations less and less until she stopped replying altogether. On the first day of school, she ate lunch with the varsity runners, people she’d had no interest in just a few months earlier. We kept trying to catch her eye but couldn’t. After about a week of ignored calls and brush-offs in the hallway, we got the message. Jackie had found better, cooler friends. She’d moved on.

          Darlene was devastated. I was pissed. We spent the bulk of that year dissecting what had happened, where it all went wrong, whether something one of us had done had pushed Jackie away. We never settled on any answers, and eventually we stopped asking. By senior prom, when someone started a rumor that Jackie had given handjobs to the Roberston brothers behind the gym during “Stairway to Heaven” (which everyone knew was only half-true at best, though no one could agree on who the lucky brother was), I didn’t feel at all bad about laughing. Darlene, always the angel, never joined in.

          The two of us had enough history and inertia to keep us together through the start of college, but over those four years we fell apart in slow motion. We made stabs at staying close, went on increasingly awkward visits to each other’s campuses and met for dinner over Thanksgiving break to talk about old memories without ever making new ones. The last time I saw her, after graduation and before I moved to Portland, she was planning to stay with her parents while she applied to grad school, though she didn’t know what for. The most recent message in our text history was her wishing me a happy birthday two years ago. I meant to respond, to thank her and ask how she was, but I never did.

          There’s a scene in that movie The Talented Mr. Ripley where Gwenyth Paltrow is talking about her boyfriend Jude Law, after Mr. Ripley becomes obsessed with him but before he beats the shit out of him with an oar. She says that when Jude Law pays attention to you, it’s like being in the sunlight. And when he stops paying attention to you, the sun is gone, and you’re left in the cold. When I thought about Darlene recently, that’s what I thought of, how without our Jude Law neither of us had enough warmth of our own to give each other.

          As for Jackie, she went to one of the big schools in Boston to study public relations. Got an internship and then a job with a firm in the city. She was now the assistant to a woman who had her own Wikipedia page, though I suspected Jackie had made it for her.

          I knew all this from Jackie’s TikTok. She had a couple thousand followers who tuned in to watch days in her life as a PR professional living in Boston. Lemon water and yoga in the mornings, busy days at the office (Jackie always filmed herself staring at her desktop with furrowed eyebrows), and then dinner at some chic restaurant with a gaggle of look-alike friends or her financial analyst boyfriend. Her routine rarely changed, but I watched every video anyway, even the ones I’d seen before, her familiar voice in my earbuds relaxing me to sleep.

***

          That night, after I saw Jackie’s post, I googled “Darlene Mitchell obituary”. Her college graduation photo stared back at me with that thin-lipped smile she used whenever she didn’t want her picture taken. I read the whole thing once, and then the first sentence over and over: “Darlene Rose Mitchell, age 25, of Laconia, New Hampshire, died on Monday.” I stared at that
word, ‘died’, like an explanation was going to emerge in invisible ink. I thought about how easily she cried at bad grades or sad moments on TV, remembered all the days and weeks when Darlene was in one of her “moods” and Jackie and I knew to give her space. I thought about unanswered texts, and I didn’t sleep at all.

          The engagement shoot I had the next day wouldn’t have gone well even if I’d been better-rested. I could tell right away they’d hired me thinking they’d get a more traditional Amber, someone chipper and stupid who’d gush about the bride’s tiny ring. Instead they got me.

          It didn’t help that it was a crowded Saturday in Portland and tourists kept walking in front of the shots, or that neither member of this brain trust had looked up the weather and were sweating through matching jackets and jeans in a 21st century November. Their blame followed me from one setup to the next. I caught snippets of whispers: can she slow down, she was nice over email, would it kill her to smile. It occurred to me that they might leave a bad review.

          “I’m so sorry,” I said, “if I was a little quiet today. I got some bad personal news last night. My best friend died.”

          The shift was immediate. The bride-to-be put a hand to her heart. His mouth was a grim, sympathetic line. They told me they understood, and they were so, so sorry for my loss. They clearly felt bad for talking shit about me.

          “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

          They weren’t going to last. I knew this with some of my clients, as if I could read their futures on their faces. The women were on the verge of turning matronly and sexless. The men were starting work on their beer guts and receding hairlines. I could already see them ten years from now icily exchanging their kids for the weekend. But they’d be happy for long enough that they wouldn’t regret paying me so much to take these pictures, including the generous tip they insisted on.

***

          The next morning I drove to Laconia. Darlene’s service was at noon, at a funeral home across from a Best Western and next to a McDonald’s that used to be a Friendly’s. A lot of work had gone into making the inside of the building nice: soft overhead lights, plush beige couches. Three employees offered to take a coat I wasn’t wearing. They asked if I was here for “the Mitchell service” and whispered that I should “go right this way.”

          Forty or so people were gathered in the reception room. Some of our old classmates caught my eye and waved. A couple of Darlene’s ex-boyfriends fidgeted in new suits. Darlene’s parents looked smaller and older than I remembered them.

          I merged into the receiving line. I reached the front and Mrs. Mitchell looked at me, her face tired and unrecognizing. “Hello,” she said.

“Mrs. Mitchell, it’s me, it’s Amber.”

          “Oh, Amber! Yes, yes, of course it’s you. You’ve gone and grown up. I’ve been foggy, forgive me. Dear, look, it’s Amber.” Mr. Mitchell was too locked into his conversation to hear her.

          She gave me a quick hug, two pats on the back. She smelled like she always did, like bread and moms, and for a second I was eleven again. “How are you, dear?” she asked.

          “I’m okay. Obviously I wish I was seeing you under better circumstances.”

          She squeezed my arms. “Yes, yes, of course. Well. It’s very good of you to come.”

          “How are you and Mr. Mitchell hold—”

          She wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her attention had fixed on something over my shoulder. She smiled, which struck me as inappropriate for her kid’s funeral. I turned around to see what had caught her eye.

          Jackie looked incredible. Her blonde hair was like this silky waterfall that ended just above her waist. If mine gets even half that long it’s a dull, flat mess. She wore a tight black dress and gray tights and kitten heels even though she was 5’7”. She used to hate being tall. Now she seemed comfortable towering over everyone.

          She was also holding, in both hands, an enormous wreath of white roses. I hadn’t brought flowers, because the obituary said to make a donation to a local animal shelter in lieu of them.

          “Oh, Jackie,” Mrs. Mitchell brushed past me. “What beautiful flowers.”

          Jackie leaned down to accept Mrs. Mitchell’s hug. “I know,” she said. “They’re from my absolute favorite florist in the city.”

          “All the way from Boston? Oh, wow.” Mrs. Mitchell said. People around here talked about Boston as if it was Paris or Tokyo, a glamorous far off place, thought it was only two hours away, just like Portland.

          I stayed where I was for a few moments until it became clear that Mrs. Mitchell was abandoning me for Jackie. I wandered to the other side of the room, where everyone else who had no one to talk to had gathered around a flatscreen TV playing a photo recap of Darlene’s life. I counted two appearances of the JDA dressed as witches for Halloween, beaming at middle school graduation.

          Every few transitions I checked over my shoulder. Jackie and Mrs. Mitchell were still talking. Mr. Mitchell had been pulled into orbit as well, along with a few other hangers-on. They were the centerpiece of the service; I wasn’t the only one watching them. This was how it always went with Jackie. She sucked up all the oxygen in a room and left everyone else lightheaded.

          Mrs. Mitchell was saying something, her hands worrying, and Jackie nodded, an empathetic expression on her face, like she understood completely what Darlene’s mom was feeling.

          When Darlene turned sixteen, she’d invited Jackie to her birthday dinner at Bertucci’s. Jackie never responded, and I remember Darlene picking at her pizza, eyes darting around the restaurant, confessing to me as walked through the parking lot that she’d blown out her candles and wished for Jackie to be her friend again.

          The slideshow had looped back around to the beginning. Baby Darlene at the hospital. Toddler Darlene in a Barbie Jeep. The school years were just starting when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

          “Hey, A,” Jackie said. “Long time no see, huh?”

          “Yeah. Definitely.”

          “So strange, isn’t it?” She gestured a manicured hand to the TV behind us. “It’s like a JDA reunion special.”

          What a stupid fucking thing to say. During the end of high school when I was looking for reasons to hate Jackie, I’d decided that she was an idiot.

          “That’s one way to look at it.” I said.

          She hugged herself around the middle. “Felt weird driving here today, didn’t it? I was so aware of everything that could go wrong. I mean, Boston drivers always want to kill you, but that’s part of the culture, you know? It never felt so scary before.”

          Had she always been this bad at conversation? The possibility made me stand taller. “I guess so. I’m a really good driver, though.”

          She tilted her head. “So was Darlene.”

          It took a second for her meaning to sink in.“Is that what happened?’ The room was too hot. There were too many bodies in it. “She was in an accident?’

          “Yeah. Asshole ran a red light and crashed into her.” She blinked. “I figured everyone knew.”

          It was an accident. Terrible. But also, thank God. The blame lay somewhere far away.

          “I had no idea,” I said. “How did you find out?”

          “Her parents called me a couple days ago.” She shrugged like that was no big deal.

          The other mourners were taking their seats. Mr. Mitchell stood at the podium, leafing through a stapled stack of papers. Someone had leaned Jackie’s fancy city wreath against it.

          “I should go,” Jackie said. “Her mom said they want all the speakers in the front row.”

          “You’re speaking? As in a eulogy?”

          “Yep. After her old roommate and before her grandma, I think that’s the order.” She began to walk away, then whirled around again. “I almost forgot. Mrs. Mitchell just told me that with all the stress and confusion they didn’t get around to hiring a photographer. Do you still take pictures?”

          “I’m a professional photographer.”

          “Are you?” She looked surprised. I could’ve smacked her. “Good for you. That’s even better. Could you take some pictures of the speakers? And maybe the guests, too? I think the Mitchells would really appreciate having a record of all the people who came out to celebrate Darlene.”

          I’d forgotten how intense Jackie’s eyes were. She was like that snake in The Jungle Book when she wanted something from you.

          “Um, I didn’t bring my equipment.”

          “I’m sure your phone will be fine. You always did take the best pictures, even with our dinky old iPhone cameras.”

          “I don’t know…”

          “You’d be doing everyone a massive favor.”

          I wanted to do a massive favor. I wanted to do something for Darlene. “Sure. I can take a few.”

          “Thanks. You know, I wasn’t expecting to see you here. But I think it’s great you came. It would’ve meant a lot to Darlene.”

          With that, Jackie left me for the front row, where she inserted herself with Darlene’s parents and relatives and almost all the other people who’d loved her best.

***

          No one else had gotten the memo about my assignment. I got glares every time I took out my phone, especially because I was in the third row, and to clear people’s heads I had to raise it up really high like an asshole.

          “Seriously?” I heard somebody mutter across the aisle, and when I glanced over I saw Darlene’s college boyfriend who had cheated on her glaring at me.

          They weren’t going to be good photos either. Almost nobody who gave a eulogy that day was camera ready. Mr. Mitchell’s face reddened as he struggled to get through a story about Darlene’s first trip to Disney World. One of her teenaged cousins read a poem in a rushed monotone, his hands periodically shooting up to push bangs out of his eyes. Darlene’s former roommate actually gave a pretty nice speech, but she had a huge zit in the corner of her mouth, and I thought it would be best not to immortalize it.

          And then it was Jackie’s turn. She walked to the podium with her hands crossed in front of her. She looked subdued but hot, like a movie widow who misses her husband but is absolutely going to fuck the male lead. She didn’t have any papers with her; she was going off the dome.

          “Hi, everybody. Thank you all for coming. It’s great to see so many familiar faces, some of you for the first time in years. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jackie, and for most of my life I had the privilege of calling Darlene Mitchell my best friend. We met as kids and had the most immediate connection, even though we couldn’t have been more different. I was outgoing and she wasn’t, she was a genius, and I definitely wasn’t.” She paused for laughs, which she got. “But those things don’t really matter at that age. When you find someone whose soul matches yours, you just know.”

          There were some sniffles and nods around me. I put my phone away.

          “But those kinds of bonds get harder to recognize as you grow up, even for the people in them. Superficial differences get in the way. So Darlene and I drifted apart, the way teenagers do. But I never forgot about her. And a few years ago, when she reached out and asked if we could grab coffee while she was visiting Boston, I felt so lucky and honored that she hadn’t forgotten me either. When we got together it felt like no time had passed. And we didn’t seem so different anymore. Because we had history, and we had both, um, grown up, and we’d been through…” Jackie took a deep breath, and I was horrified to see that she was crying.

          “Anyway. My life these last few years has been so much better for having her back in it. But it’s not enough to make up for the time I missed, or for the rest—I’m so sorry.”

          She bolted for the emergency exit. A sharp ray of sunlight peeked in before the door slammed shut behind her.

          I slipped out once it became clear that no one had done edits on Grandma Mitchell’s speech. The attendees weren’t paying attention, anyway; they were whispering about poor Jackie, wondering if she was all right.

          Outside of the reception room, a long hallway ended in another door with a glowing EXIT sign above it. I opened it to the noise of rushing traffic. I turned a corner and found Jackie sitting on the ground, knees hugged to her chest, shoulders shaking. There was nothing dignified or pretty about her crying. There were open-mouthed sobs that came straight from the chest. People over in the McDonald’s drive-through line were staring at her from their cars.

          “Jackie?”

          She seemed to know who I was, even though her eyes were closed. “She’s gone. I’m never go-going to see her again.”

          “I know,” I said. I stared down at the top of her head while she wiped her eyes. “I know.” And then I asked, “Why did you lie back there?”

          Jackie looked up at me then. She sniffled. “I didn’t lie.”

          “Spare me. That whole thing about Darlene reaching out to you, getting coffee. That never happened.”

          She pushed herself up off the ground, teetering for a second in her heels. “Of course it did. Why would I lie about that?”

          “Maybe because your whole Princess of the Funeral schtick would fall apart if everyone knew the truth. You didn’t care about Darlene, or me, since I was there too, by the way. You left us. You dropped us the second something better came along. And then you have the nerve to come to her funeral, bringing flowers nobody wanted and demanding glamour shots and running away crying so that this day can be all about you and how much you loved Darlene. Well, I’m not falling for it. I know you too well, J.” My last words came out in a harsh whisper. My throat was dry. I never spoke that much.

          Jackie stared at me. Her beautiful face was red and puffy, but she’d stopped crying. After a few seconds, she smiled. And then she did the worst thing she could’ve done. She laughed.

          “Jesus Christ, Amber.”

          “I’m serious.”

          “Oh, I can tell. That’s why it’s so funny.” She wiped away new tears. “It’s just so rich, coming from you. I’m the one that didn’t care about Darlene. I’m the one that left her.”

          “You did.”

          “So did you.”

          “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

          “Uh huh. We talked about you a lot that first day, you know. Not as much after that. But she told me how obsessed you were with me, how I was all you wanted to talk to her about. How you spread that rumor that I fucked the Robertson brothers at prom.”

          “I never said you fucked them. You gave them handjobs.”

          “No, I didn’t! And then, she told me how when she didn’t want to talk about me anymore, you just stopped responding to her. Stopped reaching out or visiting her. And like, yeah, I know I made you guys feel shitty in high school. It wasn’t great of me to just ditch you like that. But I was a dumb kid. What’s your excuse?”

          Jackie hadn’t moved, but she felt way too close to me. I stepped back.

          “I don’t believe you. You’re lying. I just don’t understand why.”

          She rolled her eyes. “Tell yourself whatever you need to. I don’t care. I’ve been out here for way too long, anyway.” And then Jackie went back inside.

          I’d had the foresight to bring my purse with me. I got out my keys, went to my car, and maneuvered over to the McDonald’s line. I kept glancing over to the emergency exit door, in case Jackie or anyone else came out to look for me. But no one did. Once I got my food I pulled out onto the road and headed home.

***

          That night, back in the comfort of my apartment, I lay in bed and looked at Jackie’s post again.

          Darlene and I talked about other things besides Jackie in the couple of years we had together after her. Even the last time I saw her, when she stopped by my college graduation party with a lovely store-bought cake, we talked about all kinds of stuff. Her postgrad plans, the neighborhoods I was looking at in Portland. We chatted about the new season of Love Island, which she hadn’t seen yet but kept meaning to. We had stuff in common, history and experience and all that stuff Jackie said in her eulogy. Her eulogy, which, I’d decided, she absolutely had written and rehearsed, she just wanted everyone to think that she hadn’t. And she’d probably fooled them. Not me, though. I saw right through her.

          I closed Instagram and then reopened it. There was nothing new from Jackie yet. I’d emailed all the pictures I’d taken to Mrs. Mitchell. No doubt she’d sent them along to her best friend Jackie. Any second now, Jackie would put up one of the photos of her speech. There was no way she was going to stop milking Darlene’s death, not when her last post about it was so
popular.

          Close, reopen. Close, reopen. I lost count of how many times I did this. Eventually, though, I knew I’d be proven right. It was only a matter of time.

 

 

 

About the Author
Gracie Schufreider is a writer from Massachusetts. She is a current MFA candidate at Boston University.