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By Root 299 0

boredom to a higher art form. (In fact, publishers later developed a series of books with page after page of either/or hypotheticals. Hope and I felt royally gypped out of the tremendous profits made from what we self-centeredly considered our idea.) At the time this favorite photo was taken, we were less than a year into our best friendship, having found each other at the start of seventh grade when our town’s separate elementary schools merged into Pineville Middle School. And yet while we already appreciated our friendship for the rare and precious thing we knew it was, we had no way of knowing that we’d only have two more summers together before Hope’s family would decamp to Tennessee in the wake of Heath’s death….

Wait.

It just occurred to me, right now, in the middle of all this reminiscing, that these events harken back to the summer of your druggy precocity. It’s quite possible that you don’t need to imagine the scene because you had eavesdropped on it while altering your own reality in Heath’s bedroom on the opposite side of the wall. As day turned into night and again into day, Hope and I stayed awake playing round after round of Would You Rather? Meanwhile, you and Hope’s doomed older brother passed the bowl around and around, laughing over inscrutable insider stoner jokes, laughing at us. Chances are that you and Heath even earwitnessed the most controversial question in the history of the game.

“Would you rather kiss the same guy for the rest of your life,” I asked, “or never kiss the same guy more than once?”

Neither Hope nor I had kissed anyone at this point in our young lives, and we could think about little else. It was somewhat miraculous that this question hadn’t already been asked. Hope cried foul, claiming that I had broken the cardinal rule of the game.

“Can’t be answered with the information given!”

“Yes, it totally can,” I said, slipping down my training-bra strap to compare the pale, unexposed flesh against the dangerously red “tan” I’d roasted all afternoon.

“No, it can’t!” Hope was—and still is—incapable of sounding pissed off, even at her most pissed off. “The most crucial variable—the Guy!—is unknown.”

Then she went on to explain how if the Guy was an amazing kisser but a jerk, she’d ditch him for a wandering, wanton lifetime of one-time-onlies. But if the Guy was her soul mate, she would forsake all others…even if he came on with all the finesse of a saliva-soaked toilet plunger.

My rebuttal came in two parts:

1. By its very definition, her soul mate wouldn’t be a mediocre kisser, because true soul mates bond on all levels: physical, emotional, spiritual, and so on.

2. The question was still answerable even without the specification of soul mate or non, as it had less to do with the Guy and more to do with one’s attitudes about the familiar versus the mysterious. Security versus freedom. Guarantee versus risk. Monogamy versus polyamory.

Before I continue, and before you can beat me to it, I’m just going to call bullshit on my revisionist history. You know as well as I do that I wasn’t capable of using those exact words back then, as my vocabulary was still steeped in “likes,” “totallys,” and “no duhs.” I didn’t even attempt to make vague approximations of those arguments. And as yesterday’s debate in your dorm deftly proves, I’m barely capable of making such arguments now, nearly a decade later.

Okay. So I didn’t really make that apocryphal speech. In truth, I simply told Hope she was right and the question was invalidated because it couldn’t be answered with the information given. We moved on to a more straightforward hypothetical.

“Okay,” I said with a sigh. “Would you rather make out with Bender from The Breakfast Club or Jake from Sixteen Candles?”

And then we started laughing hysterically for no good reason at all, a moment that was first caught with a quick click of my camera, then captured once more through Hope’s painstaking clipping and pasting.

twenty-two

The mosaic is just the first of a collection of keepsakes that had me wallowing in my emotional archives