Chapter 1 - The Hanging

This is the opening chapter that describes my discovery of my best friend's suicide, guilt of nearly leaving my child in her care and beginning of our friendship.

My best friend Marietta hanged herself from a ceiling fan, two weeks before we were scheduled to drive cross country and she was to become my live-in nanny.

My first thought upon hearing of her death was, how could I let a person who would hang themselves care for my child? Even as a reluctant mother, a hollowness ran through me like an icy headache that demanded I answer to having judgment that poor. In the months after Marietta died, I often woke with slivers of dreams where a terrible car crash injured my daughter, instead of me, so I would pay a karmic price for putting my daughter at risk.  

My second thought was - there went my life’s history. In one selfish decision, Marietta erased half my life, some of best and worst parts and certainly the most dramatic ones. She stole them when she died.

There were no other witnesses to the immortality Marietta and I felt driving home from a Grateful Dead concert on LSD; no other witnesses to my wildest sexual adventure and no new witnesses to her relentless struggle to feel loved and valued and worthy.

My third thought, how will I live without my best friend? How will I live without the person to whom I can tell the real truth, the uncensored truth, to whom I can be my ugly self, my living wrongly self instead of my public self?

The thought I didn’t have when I heard about her suicide, was surprise. Marietta’s emotional surges over the previous 20 years crept more dangerously toward destruction with every birthday. She mourned each passing year for what she had not become.

We met in an auditorium at NC State in 1989 when we both turned up to freshman orientation for students with an UNDECIDED major. After listening to a depressing sermon about how less than 50% of us would graduate, Marietta introduced herself.

“You’re the only other person I know who can tie her hair in knot,” she said. We both had long hair that stretched down our back and that we habitually knotted in a bun. That was all we had in common, physically.

Marietta had auburn hair and spring-colored eyes. She was tall and lean with stick straight hair and teeth she bragged were from her Native American roots. People remarked that she looked like the actress Demi Moore. But in truth she was more exotic looking - beautiful but not ordinary.

I was more ordinary, in appearance and in experience - at least until we met. I wore monochrome sweaters that suited a sorority; Marietta wore scarves and glitter better suited for Paris or a Burning Man festival in Nevada.  

We went out the same evening we met, with Mary, a not-so-close friend of Marietta’s who attended a nearby girls school and had a car. That night, we drove 45 minutes to an alleged “underground” bar and while we were driving, Marietta slipped her hand into Mary’s purse, unscrewed a prescription bottle and emptied it into her palm. I watched while Mary drove unaware.  

The underground bar turned out to be an average sports bar that retained a sense of mystery only because it was off campus. The bouncers wouldn’t let us in. We were underage without fake IDs.

The drive back to the dorm was excruciating. I was anticipating a catfight when this girl spotted the missing Ritalin bottle. But instead when we got back to campus, Marietta fained sleepy and asked that we be dropped off. She hugged Mary goodbye and we climbed out of the Honda Prelude.

“Ever done this before?” She pulled a hand full of Ritalin - the ADHD drug - out of the pocket of her Calvin Kleins. I had smoked some pot but had mostly just been drunk a few times in my last year of high school. I had not been wild but willing to take a chance, as long as someone else made it easy for me to do. Marietta made it easy to take chances for the next 20 years.

We chopped up the Ritalin, snorted it and stayed awake for 12 hours. We had no access to alcohol, no friends or anywhere to go. So we roamed around campus, ended up in my dorm room where I paged through my high school yearbook pointing out all the friends I’d known since I was a child.  

“ I have two sets of friends, the ones I met at Brauner and the ones I grew up with.”

“What’s Brauner?”

“Mental institution,” she laughed.

“Really?”

“Sort of. It’s a place for fucked up teenagers. I starting going there when I was 16.”

“Is it a school?”

“It’s everything. Live-in. You go to school and therapy and school and therapy and more therapy and more school.”

“Why did you go there?”

“I was kind of messed up when I was in high school, so my parents put me there. But it was actually fun. Sort of like boarding school except you spend half your days obsessing over yourself and your motivations. It made me want to study psychology.”

“Why were you messed up?”

“I tried to commit suicide when I was 16.”

“Jesus. Why?

“Long story. I was just really, really unhappy and confused.”

“So they locked you in this place. How was it?”

“It was easier than real life. No homework, no proms or cliques and we could go out on weekends if it was approved by our parents so we would go out in Atlanta to nightclubs.”

“How did you manage that?”

“We’d create plans so confusing the teachers couldn’t figure out where we really supposed to be sleeping. But we really had nowhere to sleep until we dragged ourselves back to Brauner on Sunday mornings. We had total freedom on the weekends.”

“Where did you sleep?”

“We had some older friends with apartments or we’d hook up with someone and go home with them.”

“With strangers?”

“Sometimes.”

“You never got caught?”

“Nope and if we had I am not sure they would have told our parents anyway. It would have made them look irresponsible. They are supposed to be transforming lives, not losing their charges.”

“Sounds fun. I think.” Marietta laughed.

“It was. We’ll have to go to Atlanta some time.”

“Has to be more interesting than Charlotte. I only ever skipped school once. We were heavily monitored. The teachers knew where we were supposed to be every second.”

“Well not anymore! We’re free.”

The night we met formed a long-lived paradigm - Marietta took the initiative and risk for our adventures and I followed. Not until my late 20s, did I question that fun may not be the most rewarding of goals, that the endless pursuit of fun can turn empty and dark.

But that took years. From the day we met, we were attached. We did laundry together, we ate dinner together, we made friends together and we partied, together. We shared every detail of our psyche, insecurities and hopes. We witnessed every single event in each others lives for the next 6 years.

Author's Note

Most interested in knowing if this is something you'd keep reading. Is it completely boring? Is the structure too much telling and not enough showing? Do you get a feel of who the characters are?