“Let’s go, girls,” Camila repeats into the mic for maybe the fifth time, just before she accidentally drops it. Her sisters rush to pick it up, two of them bonking heads.
“Lights on, nobody’s home,” Gio says.
We call Ubers soon after, and the Sanchez women stumble offstage, piling into the rides with lyrics still humming between their lips.
“Are you even drunk?” Cami whines as I pull her up the stairs of our Airbnb. The two of us are sharing a room, which is already destroyed with clothes and makeup and jade rollers. Back when we lived together, we could hardly keep the place in order given how manybelongingswe each needed to function.
“Tomorrow,” I promise her.
“Can you tell Will Grant I said thank you again for getting us a reservation tomorrow night?” she mumbles. “Even if it is atWagon Wheel.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I sing. “How much water have you had tonight?”
Cami laughs maniacally. I push her onto the bed and take off her shoes, then head to the bathroom and fill up a glass. When I come back, Cami is in tears, slumped on her stomach across the whole bed.
I’m notthatalarmed—she’s a drunk crier—but still, I rush over and kneel in front of her, pushing the glass against her cheek.
“Hey, we’re going tobring the partyto Wagon Wheel.”
“That’s not why I’m crying!” she wails, wiping at her eyes, smearing mascara across both her face and the bedspread. Her forehead thunks down.
“Then why are you crying?”
Muffled, she says, “Josie. I have to tell you something.”
My stomach drops.
Here it comes. Part of me was expecting this.
I’m having second thoughts about the bridal party.
Actually, I want Patricia as my maid of honor.
David has never liked you.
Every villainous thing they say about you in the press is true.
But it’s none of those fears.
It’s worse.
“I’m leaving Revenant,” she says to the bedspread, and my heart cracks right in half.
I met Camila during freshman orientation.
My first impression of her was how short she was. Camila had a bob back then, dark hair that was almost black, messy curtain bangs. (These days, every time she gets stressed, she threatens to cut them again. Only it’s not the threat she thinks it is, because David and I have both agreed Cami looked great with bangs.) That day,she was wearing the coolest earrings I’d ever seen in my life. They were gold, Egyptian-looking, and they wrapped up and down her ears. Once we became friends, I borrowed them all the time.
Cami and I got paired up during a breakout discussion. I remember her telling me, completely unprompted, that she wanted to do marketing for a fashion brand when she graduated college. Maybe Anthro, maybe Reformation, or maybe a company that didn’t exist yet.
Here’s a truth I’ve never admitted, even to myself: part of the reason I had the balls to turn Revenant into what it is today is because I knew it fit into Camila Sanchez’s plan.
I was fragile my freshman year of college, and Cami, very quickly, figured that out. She didn’t knoweverything.Not at first. But she knew I didn’t have social media, and she knew I didn’t go to many parties. I think she was drawn to me because I made her feel like she wasn’t the only person missing out.
We became friends slowly. Migrating toward each other in lecture halls, eating together in the cafeteria. Neither of us was an open book at first, but that changed one afternoon in the library—when we accidentally spotted a couple going at it in the stacks. We ran away giggling loudly in tandem, and it was like the frost melted. We were in on a secret, together.
I don’t know that I ever thought of Cami as fragile, but shewascracking. As the year went on, it became more and more obvious. Her grandma was getting sicker. Her younger sisters had been reliant on Cami and her cousin Mariana for years by the time Cami went to college. She was struggling with a full course load, trying to balance it with her responsibilities as a caretaker. Her family lived forty-five minutes away. She spent a lot of time driving back and forth between campus and their place.
Sometimes, she’d come by my dorm room well after midnight when my roommate was out at a party. I could always tell she’djust gotten back to campus based on the weary look on her face. She would jump on my bed and watch me sew something or draw a design at my desk whileNew Girlplayed on my TV in the background, and we’d talk.
