There were things I had done to avoid this reunion.
I’d made a list. Made a plan. Justified it by reminding myself that these were not really my friends, and ten years was long enough.
This yearly trip wasn’t helping anyone. This promise. We had been too young when we’d agreed to come together for the anniversary, as a way to keep one another safe. It had been a misguided impulse, an overreaction. A panicked grasp for control, when we all surely knew better by then.
I’d begun the process of disentangling myself six months earlier, in the hope of becoming invisible, unreachable. Three simple steps, seen through to the end:
I’d changed my number when I switched carriers, transferring most of my contacts, while deleting those I’d hoped to leave behind. A clean slate.
And when the group email from Amaya arrived in January, I marked it as junk, deleted it immediately. Unopened, unread, so I could claim ignorance. Though the details bolded in the subject line were already seared in my mind: May 7th—Be there!
Instead, I’d planned to stay at Russ’s for the weekend, the final step of evasion. I needed to move forward. I was twenty-eight, with a steady job and a semi-serious boyfriend who cooked breakfast on Sundays and owned reasonably decent sheets.
But on Sunday morning, my phone chimed as I was finishing up my omelet and Russ was at the counter, back turned, refilling his coffee. There was a flash of light on the display of my cell, faceup on the table. A North Carolina number not in my contacts, a message in all caps: DID YOU HEAR?
My fork hovered over the plate.
“Who’s that?” Russ asked as he sat back down across from me, hands circling the mug. He must’ve seen it in my expression, the blood draining, my shoulders tightening.
It had to be Amaya. She was the one who reached out with the details each year. She cared for us deeply, as a collective. She cared about everything deeply.
“Just spam,” I said, dropping the fork to the plate, pressing my hands to my knees under the table, to keep them still. I fought the urge to turn the phone facedown.
It didn’t have to be a lie. It could’ve been a wrong number, instead of Amaya tracking me down, making sure I knew that today was the arrival date. As if she knew I was sitting at my boyfriend’s kitchen table hundreds of miles away at this very moment, with no intention of hitting the road.
But just in case, when I thought Russ wasn’t watching, I would delete the message. Block the number. As if it had never happened.
We took the plates to the counter, and I waited for him to turn his back, for the water to run, before picking up my cell.
But by then a second message had come through. A link to an article. No, not an article—an obituary.
Ian Tayler, twenty-eight
I sank into the nearest chair. Read the notice of his unexpected death, words swimming.
Beloved son, brother, uncle, and friend. Donations to be made to the Ridgefield Recovery Center, in lieu of flowers.
They had used an older picture—when his face was boyishly full, blond hair just long enough to catch a breeze, tan skin and brown eyes and a smile I wasn’t sure I’d seen in over a decade. So different from the last time we’d been together, one year ago, at our meeting place in the Outer Banks.
His face had been gaunter then, his hair cropped short. He seemed beset by a fidget he couldn’t shake. Until next year, he’d said, one arm hooked awkwardly around my neck in half a hug.
We didn’t like to stand too close anymore, because all I could picture as we lingered in those moments was the same thing I was seeing now: a flash of his brown eyes, large and wide, mouth open in a frozen scream as he faced the river—
I pressed my fist to my teeth, let out one single gasp, hoped it was muffled under the sound of running water.
Then, a second shock: the obituary was three months old, and I hadn’t known.
Out of contact. Unreachable.
Shouldn’t I have felt it somehow? That bond, connecting us all across time and distance? Ian, I’m sorry—
I left the room. Left Russ at the sink. Made a new plan: stop by home for the right clothes; email work with a family emergency; start driving.
It had been a mistake to believe I could just disappear. That I could forget any of this—the memories, the pact. That I could leave it—and them—behind for good.
On my way, I responded, my hands still trembling.
I shouldn’t have tried to fight it. There was a gravity to this ritual week, to the past, to them. The only survivors. There were nine of us, at the start.
Their names were a drumbeat in my head, our lives perpetually bound. Amaya, Clara, Grace. Oliver, Joshua, Ian. Hollis and Brody. Me. A miracle, it seemed, that there were any of us at all.
In truth, they represented the facet of my life I wanted most to forget. An exorcism of my past that I couldn’t quite complete. But, like Amaya, I did care, and deeply so. Because we had all made that promise: Then and always, we would see each other through this week. Keep our borders close, keep our secrets closer. One moment, pulling the rest of us back together, year after year.
Only now we were seven.