The Night He Said No One

The Year

For the next year, Brody basically disappeared from all of us.

He stopped coming to Ryan’s on Fridays. He left the group chat. He skipped Ryan’s birthday, and Tess’s birthday, and the fantasy draft he had run for five years. When people asked, he said he was busy with work and Kenzie. Kenzie’s friends became his friends. We saw him on Instagram at her family’s lake cabin, at a Huskers game with her brothers, at her cousin’s wedding in a suit we had never seen.

He didn’t just avoid me. When we ended up in the same room, which happened twice, he was cold in a way that took effort. At a mutual friend’s housewarming he walked past me in the hallway and said, to the guy next to me, “Careful, Nate’s going to leave a bag of trash in your kitchen.” People laughed because they didn’t know what else to do.

I got a little better that year. I’d like to say it was something brave, but mostly it was that my mom drove up one Saturday, saw my new apartment, and cried in the parking lot. I found a counselor through work. I started going on Thursdays. I cut down to one double a week. I bought an actual bed frame.

Our friends talked about it, of course. Not every week, but it came up. Somebody would have a few beers and say, “Do you think Kenzie knows?” and the table would go quiet.

“Somebody should tell her,” Tess said once.

“Who?” said Ryan. “You? You’ve talked to her four times.”

“Nate should.”

Everybody looked at me.

“Nate’s the only one who actually saw anything,” Tess said. “The rest of us just saw a car leave.”

She didn’t even know the half of it. I had never told anyone about the screenshots. Not Ryan, not Tess, nobody.

But she was right. I was the one who heard “no one.” I was the one who watched the phone tilt. I was the one sitting on the couch watching his dot sit on Pine Street until 6:41 in the morning. Rumors from a party, Kenzie could wave away. Two screenshots with a timestamp, she couldn’t. If anybody could take this from “people are saying” to “this happened,” it was me.

And I was the one he had kicked out. If I said anything, it would look exactly like what it was: the guy with a grudge, trying to wreck the life of the guy who threw him out. Kenzie had no reason to trust me. She barely knew me. I had been her boyfriend’s messy roommate who couldn’t look at her when she brought him chicken and rice.

I wasn’t her friend. He was my friend. Or he had been.

Every time I thought about telling her, I thought about that. And every time, I didn’t.