“I haven’t had an orange soda in years,” I said.

I promised I would visit every month. Pomona was right next to Chino, it would hardly be a drive. I told her I would send her all my books I read, and it would be like she was going to college with me, and we could have a book club by mail.

But then I started college, and I did not visit her. I was absorbed by my new world. I also didn’t want to go to the prison. It was as simple as that really. I didn’t want to go, and so I didn’t, even though I knew I should. Our pattern had always been that I sent two letters for every one she sent me, but now it dropped to an equal one-to-one ratio. And then it began to slip further, and I would wait sometimes a week or two weeks to write her back. I did not visit her again until the spring semester of my freshman year, on a Saturday in March.

The moment I saw her, I knew she was on drugs. Her eyes were glassy. The muscles in her face were slack. I didn’t know what drug she was on, but I knew she was on something.

“What did they do,” I asked, “put you on lithium?”

“What? No,” she said, after hugging me.

“Seriously?” I leaned in and whispered, “You’re not on drugs?”

“I swear,” she said, “I’m not!” She laughed and I knew she was lying to me. Everything was different. The way she looked at me, the way she laughed, the way she talked, the way she held her shoulders. She had this new snicker that was near silent, just bursts of air through her nostrils.

“Well, how are you?” she asked, oddly formal. She was hostile, but she was smiling. I didn’t know what to do.

“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m great, I’m fucking great, I’m taking this amazing course on Sartre and the existentialists.”

“No, really?” I asked, leaning forward.

She laughed. “No. Get out. They don’t have that shit here. That was straight from one of your own letters, you don’t know your life?”

“I’m sorry I haven’t been writing as much,” I said.

“Oh, believe me, I get it,” she said.

“I meant to,” I said. “School is just really busy, and I have a job, and between the two—”

“No, don’t apologize,” she said, “I’m the one who should apologize. Everyone in here told me it would happen. They told me, eventually your friends, your family, they will stop thinking of you as you, and start thinking of you as a prisoner. The letters will stop. They won’t put money on your books. Eventually, they will look at you just like the guards.”

“Bunny, no,” I said.

“And I thought maybe that would happen with my dad, and it did. Believe me, he stopped visiting long before you did. But I didn’t think it would happen with you. Because I thought we were real friends. I fucking told people that. Whatever, I would say, you don’t know him. But then you did what they all do. So it’s me who should apologize,” she said. “Because I was the one who was wrong.”

We stared at each other for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to have the conversation because she was high and I hated talking to intoxicated people. I had done enough of it with my own mother. You never got anywhere. They just got sort of stuck in a thought cycle, and if you were interrupting it or contradicting it, they literally could not hear you. They would do anything to just cycle through the thoughts again and stoke the anger and the hurt.

But that was only part of it. Really, I was so ashamed that I was almost unable to speak. I liked to think of her as hulking and invulnerable, but the truth was Bunny was a terrible victim. Ann Marie had been bullying her for years. The whole school had piled on the abuse. Ryan Brassard and the ear thing. And then what had lit the match of the whole powder keg was me. Was her love for me. Her defense of me.

And here she was, paying the price every day while I played around at college, examining texts and fucking boys and wrestling with the “big philosophical questions.”

I wanted to throw up.

“I brought money for snacks,” I said finally.

“That’s cool,” she said. “Buy me some Ding Dongs.”

I bought an obscene armful of chips and cookies and candy and sodas, and carried them back to our table.

“I want to say something,” I said, “that I’ve never said before, but I feel like we should really talk about it.”

She raised an eyebrow, cracked a soda.

“Thank you for defending me,” I said, my voice shaking. “When Ann Marie—thank you for defending me.”

She looked at me for a very long time. Then she looked at the table. She peeled open the slippery, thin skin of a Snickers. “You’re welcome,” she said.

“And also, also: I’m sorry. I am so sorry that all this happened to you. I’m sorry you’re in prison. I’m sorry Ann Marie died. I’m sorry for all of it. I’m sorry I didn’t visit.”

“Thank you,” she said formally, as though I had presented her with a ceremonial gift.

We talked more easily after that, but I knew things still weren’t right. I knew that the kind of transgression I had committed against her was large, was maybe the largest transgression I had made in my life. And I couldn’t undo it.

Worse than that, I found myself disliking her. Disliking her new affect, her new slang, whatever was going on with her glassy eyes. We didn’t have anything in common anymore, our worlds were so different. It was painful for me to hear about her world, and painful for her to hear about mine. Part of the social armor she had acquired to survive in prison was a nonchalant apathy that was anathema to intimacy. Every single thing I told her about my life she managed to imply was subtly stupid. Every single thing she told me about her life I was visibly troubled by. She told me about making pruno, about getting elastic strings out of the waistbands of underwear and making tiny woven rings with them, about tattoo guns made out of CD players, about some girl having an allergic reaction to calligraphy ink someone had snuck in. “Like, bitch, don’t put that in your skin, that’s for fountain pens and shit.”

I wanted to love her again so I could forgive myself and I could not, so I could not.

That day I left, and I didn’t go again. I didn’t write her, and she didn’t write me, except for one letter right before she was released, telling me I was her best friend and she hoped I still loved her. She signed it with a million x’s and o’s.

I did not know what to make of that letter. It was so saccharinely sweet that it was hard not to feel it was artificial.