A few years later I reached out to Anna.

I don’t know what I expected. She had said the thing she said and I had picked up my wine and left and that had been the end of it. But she was still in my head in the way unresolved things stay there, taking up space. So I messaged her. We made plans.

I taught her to drive a stick shift. She had never learned and I had a car and somehow this seemed like the right activity. We drove to an empty parking lot and I talked her through the clutch. She stalled it four times and didn’t apologize once. She just tried again with the same flat composure she had always had about everything. By the end she was doing it. She seemed neither pleased nor surprised. This was simply a thing she had decided to learn and now she had learned it.

She got a call. I could see it occur behind her eyes, the moment she went against her better judgment and included me in her plans. “Andy is with me. He is driving now.” The car really might have had something to do with it.

Her friends were not what I expected. She had always struck me as a socially average person. But the people she had somehow found herself living with were electric. His name was something like Emilio, and he seemed like an Emilio. He was a charismatic frontman from a band that didn’t exist. His girlfriend, whose name was something like Janinah, moved through a room the way his girlfriend would. They lived together, the three of them, in a studio near the old viaduct.

At the bar we stood in the crowded middle of it and socialized. When I turned my head, she was right there.

Carly. A year below me in high school. She was in the same general tier as me without ever quite converging. But she wasn’t that girl anymore. She was a woman. She had aged in a specific way that looked good. I recognized her and she recognized me and for a moment neither of us said anything.

I went first. We know each other. The conversation quickly found its footing.

Somehow, Carly and my groups merged. The rest of the night we moved from bar to bar, her group and mine folded in one. Anna was receding. Not dramatically. Not with any visible hostility. She was just slowly making clear that whatever tonight was, it was not going to include me in the way I had hoped. Carly was clearly uninterested in the direction her boy wanted the night to go. He was openly annoyed about it. She was unconcerned.

Eventually we split off and ended up back at Emilio’s place. Anna had completely frozen me out by this point. Just a temperature change that had been happening all night and was now complete. Emilio and Janinah were very warm toward me. They said they hoped to see me again.

I took an Uber home. They would not see me again because Anna did not like me, and it was Anna who had brought me there.

On my way home I added Carly on Facebook and sent her a message.

I have never had a stronger opening in my life.