I didn’t have sex for almost a year after she died. At first I didn’t want to. Next to Alison, the girls at college were so mind-numbing. I’d go to parties and they’d be wearing all this makeup and this perfume or fruity shampoo or whatever makes them smell like that, and while they were talking to me they would pose and giggle like it was an audition, and it made me feel dead.

Later I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I’d go back to a girl’s dorm room and she’d light a vanilla candle or something, and all of a sudden I just had to get out of there. The girl would be embarrassed and hurt and insulted. She’d say, “Did I do something wrong, Drew?” I’d pull on my pants real quick and bolt. I’d go back to my apartment, which was a real shithole I shared with these guys I’d ended up living with, and drink beer and play Mario Kart until four A.M. I haven’t kept up with any of those guys. I can’t. I thought Alison was the love of my life and she was dead and that was it for me.

But things changed. Alison changed. With time, she stopped being this guilty conscience or this barrier or whatever she was. She became a way of … opening up, I guess. I told Shannon about her after two months, in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. I told Anjali after only two weeks, when we snuck away from a friend’s housewarming party. I’d tell the girls about Alison and they’d tell me about their mother’s drinking, or their brother’s depression, or being bullied.

I told Hayley after three months, on a road trip to her cousin’s wedding in Cleveland. After I told her, she stroked my arm and said, “You poor thing.” I drank too much at her cousin’s dumb wedding. I got loud and obnoxious with her blowhard father. I spent the rest of the night puking into the toilet at the Best Western. Hayley stayed awake all night taking care of me and the next morning she sucked apologies from me and I gave them to her, tail between my legs. I did behave badly. It would take a few more months for me to admit to myself that I hated her; I’d hated her from the moment she stroked my arm in the car like that.

With Rachel, I waited almost a year. I didn’t want her to feel like she had to compete with my murdered high school sweetheart. When we got married, Alison changed again. She became a past I was ready to leave behind. A ghost I no longer invited inside. We’re divorced now, but that was about other things. She wanted kids, I thought I did but changed my mind. “But don’t you want to see who we’d make?” she’d say, like she thought it could only end well.

Sometimes I can’t help it. Alison forces her way back in and I start litigating the whole thing all over again. She had a temper, no doubt about it. I think about how riled up she could get about things that were, I don’t know, just the world being the world. Like when Nick cheated on Becca and Alison slapped him. Or that teacher, I forget his name, but he had this policy where if you were late he shut the door, and if there was a test, tough luck, you failed, and once this kid Paul, this poor fucking fat kid everybody gave a hard time, I think he was probably gay, too, and this was before you could be, he showed up late on test day and this teacher wouldn’t let him in, and she went off on him. The star student challenging the teacher in front of the whole class. The rest of us sat there slack-jawed. She thought everything was her business, I guess is what I’m saying. I’ll think about that and wonder if maybe it got her into trouble. Maybe she stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.

But I don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about this stuff as I used to. Alison’s death is a mystery like God or Stonehenge or intelligent life in the universe—if you aren’t careful, that shit will consume you, and in the end you’ll still be no closer to solving it. I’m thirty-seven years old, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that you can live a pretty decent life without unpacking life’s mysteries.