I spent the rest of the night scouring your profile. I didn’t play music or say a word, so the only sounds my parents would hear, if they woke up, would be the light click of my fingers pressing the keys.
I remembered setting up our profiles together. How we had no idea that the random things we typed down in a single moment would then linger for years, mostly because we were too lazy to change them. That one snapshot of favorites, of self-description. For relationship status, we said we were married to each other. But eventually we changed that.
I went through all your other photos, but there weren’t any surprises there. Then I looked at your comments page. Even after what happened, it remained active—in the days and weeks after, people wrote down that they missed you, that they prayed for you, that they remembered you. Even Jack. I was shocked to see his name and face there. And his comments.
FEB 11, 2:12 AM
come home
FEB 15, 12:22 AM
miss you
FEB 25, 3:02 AM
I’m sorry
FEB 25, 3:10 AM
Forgive me
As if you were reading it. Could you see it? Was there any way? As if he was going to get you back. Not Forgive us but Forgive me.
I scrolled back to before. I saw the comments I’d left.
JAN 11, 6:20 PM
Whatre you doing Saturday? I have something fun we could do.
JAN 13, 11:11 AM
Hey, Drama Girl. This is Comedy Boy telling you to
“turn that frown upside down” (erg erg erg)
JAN 21, 11:13 PM
You still up? Call call call.
JAN 21, 12:05 AM
The sound of your voice = contentment.
If only you knew, Comedy Boy. If only I could tell you.
I looked on the days 11/11, 11/14 when the photos were taken, but there weren’t any comments that were out of the ordinary. Just me and Jack and two from Fiona and one from this guy Kilmer, who was always trying to convince you to leave Jack do yoga with him.
When I felt the comments were going to overwhelm me, I moved on to the friends page. You had 232 friends—maybe half of whom you’d actually met. I was looking for Sparrow, looking for some clue. First I checked out the profiles of the people I knew, the people from our school. Even with my friends, it had been a while since I’d read their whole pages—usually it was just the updates. There were things on there I didn’t know and probably should have—Matt’s favorite bands, or the fact that Fiona used to go to school in Georgia before she moved here. I clicked on all of their photos, hoping for some kind of intersection, but none of the mysterious photos appeared. If there were any pictures of you, they were offhand, refracted. You never looked absolutely the same—it was like every picture brought out a slight variation. I wondered if it was just because it was a different moment, or maybe each photographer brought out a different you—you could not be who you were without taking into account who was watching. I thought of what you’d say every you, every me and then stopped thinking about it. It was too hard.
Instead I thought about the word profile and what a weird double meaning it had. We say we’re looking at a person’s profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it’s the whole them we’re seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you’re only seeing half the face. Like with Sparrow, whoever he was. It’s never the way you would remember seeing them. You never remember someone in profile. You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.
I turned to the people I didn’t know on your profile. People you had once known who’d moved away. Or people you’d met over summers, or online. You could have one conversation with someone because you liked the same band, and then they’d linger on, attached to you, forever. I read where they lived California London Florida Montreal Chicago, and even though I knew they wouldn’t have flown in to leave photos in my locker, I checked out who their friends were and what their photo albums looked like. I should have felt like I was knowing you more by learning about all these people, but instead I felt I was knowing you less and less. She might not have really known these people, I tried to convince remind myself.
It was three in the morning, and I was looking at the profile for a girl named Kelly in California. She loved the Beatles, Alice Walker, her two cats, and a mix of bad teen drama and bad reality TV. I clicked on her friends, moved to the second page … and there he was.