CARRIE, 9 March 2016

She was glad her birthday was over.

Now it was finally time to retire to her ‘studio’ among the boxes in the attic. 

Carrie Reese, born McDonnell, put the ‘I LOVE YOU’ necklace from Emma on her wobbly secondhand desk and hoped the gift wasn’t just because they had finally agreed to try and find a new school for her daughter.

But the necklace had been the only thing she was really happy about after the awkward celebratory rites, with various incompatible family members who had dutifully shown up. 

And it wasn’t that she couldn’t handle 37. Heck, with two troubled kids, no job, and a marriage in name only, age wasn’t exactly at the top of her list of problems, although she knew it would probably soon be. 

You only had so much time to course-correct your life.

She opened the special box from the years when her divorced mother had relocated herself and Carrie to a lonely Cleveland suburb. 

Carrie’s hand-painted name sign for the one room that had been hers—out of two—greeted her as it always did, on top of the other mementos that she had stacked in chronological order.

Carrie carefully removed the items one by one and placed them on the desk—from old drawings of horses she could never have to faded analog photos in albums, and of course her battered copy of The Great Gatsby from Portree High School’s library. 

The irony … this Great American Novel was one of the few good things from her childhood on a Scottish Island. Her favorite teacher had commended her for an essay about it, and for once most of her classmates didn’t try to put her down afterward. She could even forget that her father probably wouldn’t come home from the pub until very late for some time.

But those years until the divorce … they were mostly a blur.

And you had to start all over again, hadn’t you? How can you do that at 16? The answer is – you can’t.

You just … muddle through, she thought. And what has changed?

There was a photo of Alan after a party, and one of Lars and his band, but none of her other class mates. Those two she knew why she wanted to keep.

They had given her back her belief that she could actually have decent school mates. She wondered where they were now?

Their group – ‘The Gang of Four’.

Carrie took out a carefully wrapped package, opened it gingerly, and pulled out a long velvety white dress. It unfolded itself like a dream, sleek and shiny.

The gift tag said, ‘Happy 21. To the only Nick Carraway I care about’. 

Carrie held the dress close to her chest.

Lin Kouris was the missing member of that ‘Gang’.

In a few weeks, the funeral would be 16 years ago.

So the Fellowship could never be reunited, not all of them. And if they could, would she and Lars and Alan still care about each other after all this time?

Probably not. And maybe that was a good thing, too. At least as regards the two boys.

Carrie smiled.

So yeah, perhaps it didn’t matter that your old high school friendships were gone forever. Even if Lin had been alive, who knows what would have happened?

She was … very different than Carrie.

Would it really be realistic that they could have remained so close in all those years? Lin always said, ‘I’m never going to have kids – I hate families, except my friends’.

How would she have liked Carrie’s husband then? Her kids?

Maybe she wouldn’t. And that would have been okay, strangely enough.

Life happens, right?

But it mattered that they had all cared so much about each other back then.

Even if it had been clumsy and awkward. It had still been fun and beautiful, too. At that particular time.

And there weren’t boxes enough in the world for all of those memories.