The sun bled through the blinds and cut her body in irregular slices. In the far corner of the room a television ran through old episodes of Friends, emitting a dull orb of light from above, while the cell phone on her lap lit up her face from below. 

 

The nurse had given her Meredith’s phone when she’d arrived. To see if she could identify someone better to call, since she, Catherine, was not a suitable Contact. She didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know. But she faked it, slipping into the role of Meredith’s actual friend and thumbing through contacts and old texts. Truthfully, she didn’t know if Meredith even had friends. Or if they were all like Catherine, occupying that awkward limbo between friend and acquaintance. 

 

She had known that Meredith often called her parents by odd names she’d given them, which is why the nurse couldn’t find a number for a Mom or Dad. Catherine had been able to locate them, though, buried in a family chat several messages below her own exchange with Meredith.

 

After that, she really could have left. The nurse had told her as much. But she’d insisted on staying. Why, she wasn’t sure. 

 

It wasn’t as though they weren’t friends—though glancing around the waiting room, she felt out of place. The other people were surely family members of patients. 

 

She almost caught the eye of the father sitting across from her and, feeling found out, immediately pretended to look at the phone. It lit up as she touched it, a dark background lurking behind the clock’s large white digits—8:27pm. She felt vaguely unsettled by the background, a painting of some kind, but also unwilling to ponder it, because she wouldn’t know what it was, and she’d feel, as usual, stupid alongside Meredith. Her own background was an image of latte art. She’d ordered something called a birthday cake latte on her birthday months ago and received it with an elaborate, multi-colored peacock design in the foam, complete with bright sprinkles. But she’d recently learned that this type of image identified one as basic, and so she’d been meaning to replace it. 

 

She ran her thumb back and forth over the lock screen, revealing the image and then hiding it, until, increasingly curious, she slid the phone open. 

 

She wasn’t usually a snoop. She’d never been the kind of person to peruse other people’s medicine cabinets when she used the bathroom, and she didn’t internet-stalk her blind dates. Not much, anyway. 

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She wasn’t usually a snoop. She’d never been the kind of person to peruse other people’s medicine cabinets when she used the bathroom, and she didn’t internet-stalk her blind dates.

 

Her motives were pure. She wanted to reconstruct the experience of the medical staff who had opened the phone, to imagine what they thought as they determined that she was the most logical person to contact.

 

It wasn’t a complicated task. She completed it within seconds. There was Meredith’s text to her from that afternoon, at the top of the inbox: 

 

Junot Diaz is a fucking genius. 

 

She hadn’t responded yet because she was still wading through Oscar Wao and didn’t want to say anything stupid. She scrolled through the text chain, noting the dates as she did. Today there was only Meredith’s single text to her. Two weeks ago, twenty texts back and forth in a span of twenty-four hours. Nothing for a month. Then another mass of texts back in February. 

 

Catherine read back through the past year fairly quickly. Meredith was an erratic communicator, inclined to intense communication followed by strings of silence. Catherine was inclined to be hurt by the silence, but also to doubt the justification of all her emotions. She didn’t exactly forgive Meredith each time, exactly. Instead, she rewrote the tacit rules of communication and the story of friendship surrounding it. 

 

It was not invasive to read these texts because they were housed on Catherine’s phone as well. They were directed to her and she had already read them. But she felt odd about it anyway, as though the father and daughter at the other end of the waiting room were looking at her funny, which they weren’t. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but it did feel different, seeing the texts in Meredith’s phone directed to Catherine-book-emoji. 

 

She took some pleasure in that name, but wondered. Did Meredith call her this because she thought of her as being smart and insightful about books? Or because their friendship had its origins in a Spanish literature class they’d taken together during study abroad? Or because Meredith had never actually registered Catherine’s last name, never thought of her as anything beyond Catherine-lit-classmate followed by Catherine-from-post-college-book-club?

 

This train of thought irritated her. She shifted her position on the waiting room chair, glanced behind her shoulder as though someone might be watching, and closed the texts. 

 

The book club was working through a list from a professor’s blog. She and Meredith had taken his class together senior year, though not on purpose. Aside from study abroad, they hadn’t been in any of the same classes. But this one had been right on the heels of Toledo confirming their friendship. Not that the friendship ever solidified or cemented. But the class gave them a reason to keep speaking after they came home from a few intense months in a small Spanish city. 

 

It was the right kind of interaction, too. Meredith’s assertiveness in class dazzled Catherine, who was uncertain of herself discussing books or art or really any subject that felt secretly designed to measure her intelligence. Conversations with other students, as students, scared the shit out of her. But for whatever reason, in this class, she found she had enough to say. Whether she had actually learned something the previous three years or she’d just finally stumbled upon the right course, she was never sure. She was smart, but ordinary smart. Work relatively hard and care enough smart, but not dogged or passionate. Certainly not brilliant. She liked learning and was good enough at it to end up in rooms with smarter people and feel dumb. She wished, sometimes, that she could dive single-mindedly into her studies. Other times she wished she could say fuck it all and party as much as she wanted, trusting that she’d pass in the end. 

 

But Meredith didn’t say fuck it all, and she didn’t consecrate her life to books. She just dropped casually intelligent things in the middle of a bar or a party, without much pretension and without a full grasp of the subject. She didn’t care about being wrong or saying she didn’t know, and Catherine found this ballsy and impossible to emulate.

 

But then Meredith would say things like, “This is Catherine; we’re in that contemporary lit class together, you know, the one I was telling you about? Catherine, remind me what you were saying about whats-his-face, you know, ah fuck, I forget his name, the dude we were reading last week, I was trying to tell James about it—” 

 

Never mind that Catherine did not feel she’d adequately expressed herself in that discussion, or that her attempts to reconstruct her comment were muddled, or that she didn’t know whether this James guy had read the book in question. Never mind any of that; it felt wonderful and odd to be half shouting that zombies and apocalyptic stories had something to tell us about what it means to be human. She loved the feel of her voice floating under the music, standing with a solo cup of vodka cranberry in hand, being Catherine-the-girl-from-Meredith’s-lit-class who drank basic drinks but said insightful things.

 

Anyway, they’d graduated, moved to the same part of Chicago, and occasionally hung out with a fluctuating group of recent alums. Grabbed the odd cup of coffee or happy hour here or there. And, more recently, partook in this book club. Meredith had started it. All recent college grads, all women, with a broad range of interests that baffled Catherine. They’d read novels and self-help books and political memoirs and then started on the professor’s blog booklist. 

 

Catherine preferred the lighter, more popular books they’d started with. She realized that she had fewer things to say about books once they weren’t in class; it was as though whatever critical apparatus the professors had constructed for her had been dismantled after graduation and she was left with shallow comments about liking or disliking characters, relating or not relating to certain events. The most she could summon was a comment on a passage with language she found lovely, and she was increasingly uncertain about the ones she selected. She wondered, on more than one occasion, whether the passages she liked were actually trite—whether, in fact, they were meant to be trite and she’d missed it. Perhaps the author was being tongue-in-cheek and she’d taken sincerely what was meant archly, ironically. 

 

Some of the women in the group were not insightful enough to call her out on this, were wowed by comments that even Catherine knew were simplistic or rough paraphrases of obvious truisms. But others were far smarter than she was, and she knew that they knew they were smarter than she was because while they would challenge one another, they rarely challenged her. When they did, she knew she’d said something good. Best was when one of them came to her defense, when the conversation went back and forth and landed on her side in the end. She never took part in the debating. Just sat on the couch, balancing a wine glass on her knee, awaiting judgement.

 

She should have brought Oscar Wao with her to the hospital. Should have been reading him earlier tonight and not rewatching Gilmore Girls for the umpteenth time. She could have used her phone to access Netflix now, could have used it to do something more intelligent than that, but instead here she was in Meredith’s phone, convincing herself that this was a suitable form of diversion.

 

She wasn’t looking at the app icons on the screen, not exactly, and this was on the more-or-less public part of Meredith’s phone anyway, the part most people would see if Meredith opened it to show them a photo or get their number. How revealing could that be?

 

Hinge, Tinder, Bumble. The usual social media suspects: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. MyFitnessPal, which surprised her, since Meredith was tall, angular, slim. Effortlessly so, Catherine had thought, but maybe not. In subsequent tabs, she noted Audible, Duolingo, and several apps that she either didn’t recognize or found too boring to register.

 

The sun had reached the edge of the window and lay in a blinding plate across the room. Above it, the sky flushed brilliant pink. The television screen became, for a moment, all glare. But the phone in her lap: still readable. 

 

She was descending the slippery slope of the public-facing parts of Meredith’s phone to what felt like a certain barrier now. She ran her finger over the screen so that its apps toggled back and forth. If she held it right, the screen rested on the liminal space between one window of apps and the next. But it took concentration.

 

She looked away from the screen. The current Friends episode playing overhead was the one in London. She’d been to London once before, technically with Meredith, but they hadn’t really known each other yet. Their entire study abroad group had flown to England from Spain for the weekend, but she couldn’t actually remember Meredith from that time, just as  one face among many in pictures from bars.

 

Further into the semester, they’d spent the night in the Madrid airport together. Meredith was heading to Prague, Catherine to Paris, both with early departures. They’d taken the bus together after their last class, art history. In the hours before they were tired enough to attempt sleeping on the airport’s stiff chairs, Meredith had moved through a series of questions that started with the books they were reading for class and branched off into the more personal. Facing up at the ceiling, she spoke matter-of-factly about her brother’s problems with alcohol, the details of her past romantic entanglement with one of the guys in their program freshman year, her desire—if she could instantly obtain a random talent—to design things, fashion or buildings or interiors of some kind. She wanted to live in New York for a year. She liked seafood but hated salmon.

 

Catherine felt ill-equipped to reciprocate. She remembered lying on the ground with her head on her suitcase, Meredith above her, spread across two chairs. She was flattered that Meredith was having this conversation with her. But she stumbled over her own answers, unable to say anything that felt true about her greatest fears, her most embarrassing moments, her plans for the future. 

 

Now, two years after graduation, she was used to the way that Meredith could plunge suddenly from surface level to the deeply personal. Meredith always achieved a certain distance from events in her life before she admitted to them, and so she remained, in these conversations, coolly controlled. Whereas Catherine stayed personally embroiled in whatever emotion she’d felt at the moment, regardless of how much time had passed. Confessions incited in her a sort of regret hangover. Words, once spoken, were not retractable, and she found them to be both insufficient and superfluous at once. 

 

In the hospital room, she shifted her eyes from the TV, to the window, to the other end of the room, where one of the middle-aged men had his arm around one of the middle-aged women. They both looked exhausted; the woman was playing with her hands nervously and staring straight ahead. Waiting for some kind of fraught surgery, Catherine guessed. The man kissed the side of her head and squeezed her shoulder. 

 

Clearly husband and wife then. Such an act of comfort could be done platonically, between siblings. But more likely husband and wife. The other two must have been his brother and sister, and surely another sibling was the one in surgery. 

 

She felt, momentarily, a perverse satisfaction that Meredith did not have a boyfriend waiting for her. That her family wasn’t yet here. That the closest friend she could summon had been Catherine. A payment of sorts for coolness and distance. 

 

It was a terrible thing to think. 

 

She slid Meredith’s phone open again and clicked on a dating app. She’d thought of Meredith as being above dating apps. The kind of person who uses them disinterestedly, toying with people or meeting them out of boredom. Nothing like the panicked investment Catherine felt about such apps. They intensified the feeling she had whenever she encountered a vaguely attractive single guy: Is this the one? Is this? Is this?

 

Meredith had 15 likes in the middle of the screen. Preposterous. Catherine checked hers daily and she only ever had one or two. 

 

She clicked on the small heart where Meredith’s likes were enumerated. The profiles were better than her own, as a whole. Still a few douchey-looking gym selfies, but not as many granulated close-ups where you couldn’t even see the person’s face or profiles that read like they’d been copy-pasted from a Hallmark card with poor spelling.

 

But—but!—Catherine could view all of these likes at once. That meant Meredith had paid for premium—on a free plan you only see one like at a time. Catherine would never dream of paying for a dating app. That Meredith had—

 

Though maybe this was just a reflection of wealth. Or Meredith’s disinterest, not just in the dating scene but in money and frugality and anything of purported value. Why not pay for a stupid app? Why not satisfy curiosity, no matter how idle? Maybe there were so many likes because Meredith hadn’t opened the app in weeks. 

 

She should not be looking at this. Any of this. The fact that these were public profiles of sorts didn’t justify her looking. 

 

She closed the app. Perusing Meredith’s photos would be a lesser evil, since photos were often shared with other people anyway. She could picture Meredith at book club or happy hour opening her phone, clicking the photo app, scrolling, and then turning towards the group and saying, “Look!” A picture of a small chunk of the Pacific Crest Trail after they had read Wild. A snapshot of Meredith in college alongside well-known football players. She’d shown photos to outside eyes many times. Ergo, the photos weren’t really a private space.

 

The logic of Catherine’s reasoning did not hold. The photo reel would be more or less uncurated, a stream of all images for all audiences. Unlike the ones selected for Tinder, the ones filtered for Instagram, the ones texted to a group of friends or held up as a visual illustration to accompany conversation.

 

But it was late, and she was tired, and it was easier to be bold and uncaring in the dim glow of the TV screen. 

 

She ignored the most recent photos and jumped back several years to when they’d been in college because those photos let her tell herself a more flattering story: she’d wanted to revisit their study abroad photos and had only later drifted into other recesses of the phone.

 

She skipped to their freshman year, two years before she even met Meredith, and mentally compared photos to her own transition to college. Catherine’s own pictures from this time showed a college freshman trying too hard (heavy make-up and high angled shots and her hand always on her hip, angled to the side to appear slimmer; lots of college gear, tight tanks that she pulled low to show cleavage, short skirts). They were embarrassing not because they were unflattering candids. But because, back then, she’d thought them polished, posed. 

 

She ran through freshman and sophomore year quickly, got to study abroad, and found familiar images. She clicked on one and began going image by image, swiping from one to the next before halting on a large painting. The same one from Meredith’s lock screen, but here hanging in an art museum—the Prado. Now she recognized it. Ghostly flame figures on a dark backdrop. She’d seen them before.

 

An incoming text appeared at the top of the screen, somehow startling her. She jumped in her chair. 

 

It said Betty Draper, and it took Catherine half a beat to remember that this was Meredith’s mom, whose name, of course, was not Betty Draper, but, according to Meredith, was Betty Draper in all things that mattered. Both were overbearing and bitchy, but you couldn’t help feel sorry for them every once in a while.

 

That had not been Catherine’s experience watching Mad Men, but the members of the book club had nodded at Meredith’s assessment. A few expressed amused shock that Meredith would speak about her own mother this way. So Catherine hadn’t said that she always felt sorry for Betty Draper, especially when she was overbearing, and, well, she didn’t know the right word but it wasn’t bitchy.

 

She clicked on the text message, which began with Hello Catherine and continued this is Meredith’s mom. Could you send us your number? The hospital must have told them about her hours ago.

 

She clicked back to the photos at the thought, delaying her reply to Meredith’s mom. She’d met Meredith’s parents only once, at college graduation, and only in passing. The graduation photos were a bit above where she’d left off, two of them the ones she remembered with their abroad group posed beside a fountain.

 

Following them, however, were a few photos that gave Catherine a jolt and reminded her that she was, in fact, snooping: a few semi-naked pictures of Meredith in front of a mirror, and a screenshot of an online mental health assessment indicating that she was, in fact, Not Depressed.

 

She flipped through these before she felt what she was doing.

 

She closed the phone abruptly and set it face down on the adjacent seat. She felt the press of everyone’s eyes on her, but when she looked, the group of siblings and spouses were all dozing, and the young girl appeared asleep. Only the father was clearly awake, and he was staring at the floor.

 

She could leave. Find a nurse and ask them to take the phone and belongings back, say she was going to sleep at home and come back in the morning. 

 

It struck her that Meredith’s mom might be able to see that the text to Catherine had been opened and read. Sometimes you could tell that, depending on the phone. She reopened Meredith’s phone, clicked on the text, and slowly typed her number. Was she supposed to say anything else? It seemed rude and stark to just shoot back a string of digits. She added Of course! before the number and tapped send.

 

Too chipper for the situation, but too late to change it now. She could have tacked on something like Call if you need anything. But she didn’t want them to call, or to need anything. She didn’t want anyone to call or come or make her account for who she was and why she was here. She didn’t know either of those things. 

 

If she left now she’d just feel worse. And she hadn’t really done anything that bad; it had been accidental. She’d only been looking at college photos, study abroad, graduation. 

 

She sank into the chair, closed her eyes, and pretended that she might be able to sleep. Gave up after two minutes. Sat up, trying to reconcile what she’d seen with the version of Meredith she’d had in her head.

 

The photos themselves were less revealing than the fact that Meredith had taken them.

 

(Catherine played idly with her sleeves and flipped the phone up and down on her lap, screen off.)

 

Thus it was worse that she knew of their existence because it was their existence, not their content, that mattered.

 

(Overhead, the television had moved from Friends to Seinfeld, split screen as the credits rolled for Friends on the left and Seinfeld began on the right.)

 

Not Meredith’s body, stripped to a bra and underwear in one photo, and relieved of the bra in the second. 

 

(She set the phone on the chair again and uncrossed herself, soles on the ground.)

 

Not Meredith’s nakedness, but the fact that she had stood in front of a mirror and taken such a picture.

 

Not the breasts themselves, but the fact that Meredith had cupped one in her hand, held it up, and aimed a cell phone camera at its reflection.

 

And the fact that the picture had somehow captured her face in this last one, looking at the camera but doing so less with the focus of a difficult selfie and more with a gentle kind of curiosity.

 

Meredith’s face was probably there by mistake; it was a poor photo. Maybe the lighting was bad, or Meredith’s phone was set on the wrong mode. Regardless, the most naked part of the shot was the camera reflected in the mirror and Meredith’s gaze, directed at it.

 

It occurred to her that putting the phone on sleep would leave the camera app open. If Meredith’s family arrived suddenly, they’d see what Catherine had been looking at when they opened it. She ran her index finger up over all the tabs, sending them away one by one. 

 

That last photo, the screenshot of the mental health assessment, illustrated Catherine’s interpretation. Here, clearly, the content was not actually private—to be Not Depressed reveals nothing. But the act of taking such a test is highly revealing.

 

And—a new level of meaning occurred to her—to save an image of the test reveals even more. 

 

She folded her legs up again, fixed her gaze on the dark window across the room, and considered. Meredith must have taken the test in a moment of doubt. Wondering, for a moment, if she was, in fact, Depressed, she’d taken an online test and saved the results as something to return to whenever she needed assurance that she was Not Depressed.

 

Catherine ended the thought experiment there. True, she wondered what led to Meredith’s initial depression-like feelings and her need to diagnose them as non-depressive, clinically speaking—but she didn’t wander into the territory of 

 

was-Meredith-a-self-centered-over-analyzing-millennial-inclined-to-self-diagnosis or 

 

was-Meredith-actually-genuinely-borderline-depressed or 

 

was-Meredith-momentarily-curious-about-the-line-between-clinical-and-ordinary-everyday-life-forms-of-depression. 

 

It was late and she was tired. And starting to fall asleep. At last.

 

She exited the phone a final time and noticed, as she set it down, the lock screen again, with its dark figures illuminated from below. One of them matched the museum picture she’d found in the photo reel.

 

She remembered a group trip to the Prado in which she’d found Meredith sitting in front of a large El Greco, almost meditating on it. Catherine had taken a different approach, circling from room to room, pausing in front of paintings for a bit, moving on, and then returning to them in a continuous loop. Each time she came back to the El Greco, Meredith was there, in a slightly different position—standing, then sitting, chin on hands and arms on knees, then legs tucked under—for at least a half an hour.

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