About a week after returning from Mansfield Reformatory, I received a Facebook message from someone named Jason Patterson. It was Laura’s youngest brother. The last time I had seen Jason, he was about seven years old, sitting with his parents on the couch watching television with a coloring book in his lap. Now about thirty, he was the family’s only surviving child. His parents had received my letter, then mentioned it on the phone to Jason. I got the distinct impression that Jason was intended (by himself or his parents) to be the gatekeeper. His responsibility was to check me out.

It seemed that Jason, who was ten when Laura died, had started his own quest to learn more about his sister. She seemed as enigmatic a presence in his life as she was in mine. Jason and I helped each other, shared stories, and started connecting each other with friends we knew how to find. Over the next few months, a small network of people emerged—other friends, Laura’s boyfriend at the time of her death, and her parents—people reconnecting to talk about a young life we all missed so badly.

I eventually worked up the nerve to ask Jason if their family still had her copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and if so, would they be able to look inside it for me to see if there was an envelope. I felt completely ridiculous asking, partly because I feared the answer and partly because it felt like a potentially semi-creepy thing to ask. Part of me hoped that Jason or his parents would still have it sitting on a shelf in their living room. Then they could pull it down and easily determine if there was a letter nested inside. If it was there, unopened, that meant that Laura had never seen my letter and probably never knew (for sure) how I felt. If the book was there but the letter wasn’t, then it was reasonable to assume she had found the letter and, thus, read it.

Jason and his mother looked, but the book wasn’t around anymore, nor was it in any of the remaining boxes of Laura’s things. I don’t know why I was surprised to learn this. I’m not sure I could put my hands on any given possession I owned twenty-five years ago. At the time, I surrounded myself with trappings I considered absolutely essential to the life I led: books, magazines, tapes, albums, clothes, et cetera. They defined me. Yet I probably couldn’t fill a shoe box with the things that have stayed in my life since then. Tapes and albums were replaced by CDs, which, in turn, were replaced by binary computer files. Clothes were worn out or became dated. Books were loaned, stolen, lost, forgotten, or sold for rent money. I guess they were, in hindsight, the most meaningless parts of me.

As I connected with the Pattersons and others who’d passed in and out of Laura’s life, I had to let go of any notion that Laura and my relationship was in any way a unique one for her. I didn’t want to, but I kept finding a web of people throughout her life, men and women, with whom she had similar deep, intimate, and intense one-on-one friendships. Yet, just like me, no one knew much about anyone else. Every single one of them admitted that when they first heard from me (and why I was contacting them), they initially felt a bit threatened. They all thought their relationship with her was unique and were a bit jealous to hear they weren’t the only one. I have to admit I felt the same way about them. Laura was my best friend; she was a lot of other people’s best friend as well.

I think that was Laura’s gift. She was a mysterious girl who had an amazing talent for making you feel like the most interesting and important thing in the world to her. You just naturally assumed that you were as special to her as she made you feel.

I learned a lot of other things about Laura as well. I learned how badly New York hadn’t ended up the way she’d planned.

When she moved to New York, she changed her name. For no clear reason, she started going by her middle name, Lee. When I spoke to anyone who’d met her after she left Ohio for college, they always referred to her as Lee and found it kind of silly that people from Ohio know her as Laura. She got a job at a bookstore and started assembling a new life. But school was hard, New York was overwhelming, and she seemed to become a magnet for dark people and dark situations.

After Laura had dropped out of school entirely, her mother got a call from her roommate. Laura had been living in some crappy apartment with a woman and her child, who noticed that Laura hadn’t been home in a few days. No one knew where she was. Her things were still in the apartment. She had simply vanished. A few days later Laura’s mother got a phone call. The other end of the line was silent, then the phone was hung up. Laura’s mother managed to get the number of the caller, somewhere in New Orleans, and called back. She asked if Laura was there. The voice who answered said there was no one by that name there. A few hours later, Laura called.

From talking to people who were in and out of Laura’s life at this time, I gathered that she worked very hard to hide what happened to her in New Orleans. Laura knew no one in New Orleans, had never been there before, and had no apparent connection there at all. One day she had simply gotten it into her mind to go and was gone. She seemed to have befriended a group of homeless kids and gotten immediately caught up in the drama that surrounds homeless kids. Different people heard different versions of different stories, but some people thought there may have been drugs involved and some run-ins with police. A few suggested that Laura had been assaulted during her time there, which just drove her further underground.

After several attempts, Laura’s mother convinced her to leave New Orleans and come home. Laura agreed, on the condition that her family not ask why she had gone to Louisiana or what she did there. Once she got back to Canton, she seemed fine—until it was time to return to New York.

On the way to the airport, Laura started crying that she didn’t want to go back. They turned around and went home to Canton. Laura and her dad did drive to New York a few weeks later to retrieve her things, but otherwise she never returned to her life there. She got a job as a waitress in Canton and started looking for an apartment.

While learning all this deepened my understanding of her and what she went through in the time after our friendship, it felt so foreign to hear these things, which were so unlike the Laura I knew. I still can’t decide if this bothers me because her life headed in a direction that was so different from what I expected or because I have locked into my head a vision of her that can’t be changed or grow into something different. I can’t imagine I will ever be able to fully reconcile the two.

All this new information provided no insight about our relationship, how she had felt about me, or what kind of significance I had to her. Outside of a single birthday card, none of the letters or scribbling I gave her have survived.

One of her best friends throughout her life, a girl named Kris, wrote me a letter after a long phone call, a pile of emails back and forth, and reading some of my reflections on Laura. She told me something I heard regularly from people and had to admit to myself. Despite her thirst for life and singular personality, Laura was an insecure kid. Though she may have looked and acted a bit different, she wasn’t all that different from other eighteen-year-old girls. The big difference was that Laura decided not to settle. She cast herself out into the ocean but had trouble keeping afloat.

“It’s so clear to me how much you meant to her,” Kris wrote. “I believe she gave you her all as a friend, but not more, because that was what she had to give at that point. I feel strongly that because you and your friendship meant so much to her, she valued you too much to delve into territory where she did not have the confidence to handle. When you really care about someone, it’s too scary to embark on a path that screams out danger the way intimacy does. It was because she loved you that she couldn’t go there with you.”

While Laura was back in Canton, Kris was camping with a boyfriend in California. One evening she had a terrible dream (which she does not remember) and woke up worried about Laura. Even though it was the middle of the night, Kris was so freaked that she went to a pay phone and called Laura back in Ohio. They talked for a few hours, the conversation ending with Kris apologizing for calling so late.

“You never need to apologize for that,” Laura told her. “I love you. You need to remember that I am always here. Always here for you whenever you need me.”

The next morning Laura was on her way home from the drugstore and was killed.

When I spoke or corresponded with Jason and the others, I kept hearing references to Other Laura. I’d come to learn that Laura Patterson had a deep friendship with a girl named Laura at the same time she was friends with me. Not at relatively the same time, but at exactly the same time. When I spoke to Other Laura, we realized that we would often be hanging out with Laura Patterson on the same night. Other Laura spoke about Laura Patterson showing up at her house late at night with some clove cigarettes and wine—clove cigarettes and wine she’d taken from me when I dropped her off. Laura Patterson and Other Laura would go see concerts together, drive off to remote places to talk for hours, and treat each other like best friends. And yet Laura Patterson had never said a word to either of us about the other one. Until I contacted her, we were complete strangers.

“I remember one night we were in the Flats in Cleveland before a 7 Seconds concert,” Other Laura told me. “She liked going around there. We were walking around some old useless warehouses, then we came across a brick wall where someone had spray painted IF YOU CAN’T COPE, USE THE ROPE. Hanging in front of the wall was a noose, suspended under an overpass.”

The noose was high off the ground, but not that high. Laura and Other Laura were a little drunk at the time but figured they could reach it.

“I think the conversation went, ‘You probably couldn’t hang yourself in that, could you?’ ‘You probably couldn’t die here, could you?’ ‘Let’s try it,’ ” Other Laura told me.

Eventually, Other Laura ended up on Laura Patterson’s shoulders putting her head inside the noose, just for kicks. The noose looked like it was long enough for Other Laura to reach the ground, so Laura Patterson started to step away and let go of Other Laura.

The noose wasn’t long enough to reach the ground.

It quickly tightened around Other Laura’s neck. She called out to Laura Patterson for help, and Laura quickly put herself under Other Laura to support her weight.

Other Laura struggled with the noose. The rope, thick with hardened grime, wouldn’t loosen. Laura Patterson happened to have a pocketknife and gave it to Other Laura. The pocketknife was about as effective as a toothpick would be for cutting a steak.

“And the more I struggled with the noose,” she said, “the tighter and tighter it became. I was choking and struggling and thrashing around. Laura was holding on to my legs and trying to prop me up on her shoulders.”

The Lauras had no idea what to do. Laura Patterson was struggling to hold Other Laura up. Both were at the point of exhaustion. The noose was in a small open area surrounded by abandoned buildings in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings. There was no one around. No way to call for help.

“I kept telling Laura that it was okay. I told her, ‘You have to just let go. You aren’t strong enough,’ ” Other Laura told me. “She refused. She told me that she wouldn’t let go. That she’d never let go.”

Eventually, Other Laura forced the noose open just enough to pull it over her face, causing lacerations and burns over her cheeks and ears and even pulling some skin off. They both fell to the ground. They cried and laughed and held each other. They sat there smoking and talking and trying to recover. Then, with Other Laura still bleeding from the rope burns, they decided to go ahead and see the show anyhow.

While listening to her tell the story, I could practically see it playing out in my mind. I knew those warehouses—the same ones that Laura and I had visited. I could see the rope, I could see them horsing around. I could see them getting into trouble. I could see their gratitude at finding a way out. Had I heard this story when it happened, I probably would have seen it as a metaphor for Laura’s strength, pushing herself to the point of exhaustion and refusing to let go of her friend. But hearing it now, I see it with another, darker dimension. Knowing more about the complexity of her later life, I can’t help but wonder about what she’d do if it had been her neck that ended up in that noose. I’m not sure she’d have struggled so much.

“That was the moment,” Other Laura recalled. “I knew. I just knew I loved her and I knew that she was the best friend I’d ever have. I know it sounds so bullshit and cinematic, but it was probably the most real moment of my entire life.”