GROUP CHAT: Group Chats

For the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip,” our editors started a group chat on group chats.

By Jamie Hood, Sophia Stewart, Hillary Brenhouse, Daniel Lavery, Tal Rosenberg, Summer Kim Lee, Whitney Mallett, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Sophie Kemp, Natasha StaggAugust 26, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

This group of essays is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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WHEN I WAS a girl, my mother spent whole weekends on the telephone. As she worked two jobs and went to night school, only Saturday and Sunday were for the girls. I’d find her perched at the dining table in the chair beside the window, one knee up to her chest, her foot on the seat—my astonishing flamingo—and the cordless balanced between left ear and left shoulder, a Marb Light 120 burning perpetually in hand. I never listened in on what she and her friends talked about. I wasn’t especially interested. Really, I couldn’t understand the habit at all. I hated the phone: a tiresome distraction, some tinny echo chamber that sought to seize me from the lives I really wanted to live, nearly all of which were to be found only in books. I was a quiet child, sort of somber. Not nervous, but not sociable either. I was what we used to call an introvert, though today I’d probably be diagnosed with some awful condition. Mainly, I just liked to be alone.

I get it now: my mother’s ache toward accumulation. Her desire for daily chatter, for interconnectedness—her need (as men were the bane of her days) to be down among the women. “Low Engagement, High Breasts” is the name of my group chat. A silly name, yes, but I can’t think of one that would suffice to describe the membrane fastening me to H and C. Even the term “group chat” feels circumscribed as, practically speaking, we’re on a 24-7 phone call coordinated primarily through voice memos, and secondarily punctuated by memes, selfies, links, live-texted reactions to the aforementioned voice memos, and videos of our various animal companions.

I am lately separated from a man I once loved. In the aftermath, I see he’s the only man I ever truly loved, and besides, is the only one I’ve ever lived with, which renders the dissolution particularly protracted, particularly perilous. I am waiting for him to move out of our apartment. I am waiting to grieve. For three weeks now, I’ve apologized each morning to H and C before proceeding to record my sorrow. For three weeks now, they’ve reminded me that they want to hear about my life, that it has matter to them, that our daily conversations remain daily conversations because we care profoundly for one another, and that care is unconditional, is adaptive, that care shapes itself around the trouble of present circumstance, regardless of how painful.

The other day, I was thinking about how our ceaseless proliferation of words underscores the ineluctable elasticity of speech, how singular the language of a relationship can become, how atomized and unintelligible to those exiled from it, or those who hover along its periphery. I no longer, for example, recall what “Neacvis <3” was a misspelling of, but now it can mean anything: it’s a celebrity name none of us three remember, it’s a gesture of affirmation, a rest in the measure of our prattling. “Neacvis <3” is a signal flare: I’m here, I’m here.

—Jamie Hood

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HAVE YOU HEARD? The cast of Oppenheimer has a group chat—“OppenHomies,” it’s called. Members include Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Emily Blunt; the moniker comes courtesy of Olivia Thirlby. Vanity Fair described OppenHomies as a place where cast members could “trade gossip, insults, and strategic communiques when not together on set, and where they chat now when not reunited at awards events.” Reportedly, there’s a separate chat for everyone who played Manhattan Project scientists: Jack Quaid, David Krumholtz, et cetera; the extent of membership overlap between the two is unclear.

Oscars campaign aside, it’s been two years now since Oppenheimer wrapped—the chat, perhaps, has long lain dormant. But isn’t it pretty to imagine that it might still be going strong, nourished by a steady diet of personal news and witticisms? That the OppenHomies wish one another happy birthdays? That nothing ever really ends?

Just look at the cast of Twilight, who still keep in touch via group chat more than a decade after the final film. “It’s really beautiful to see all these years later—and all these life stages later—that we’re so supportive of one another,” Ashley Greene told E! News, describing the group as “a big giant family.” So do the actors from Pitch Perfect. “We are texting each other going like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you guys, it’s almost been 10 years and, like, remember this night?’” Anna Kendrick remarked. “It’s very—it’s almost, like, disgustingly adorable.”

For the unfamous, these chats appeal deeply to a collective nostalgia—that the Friends castmates are still friends, as confirmed by the existence of their group chat, is “every fan’s dream come true.” Earlier this year, when Us Weekly rounded up 35 “famous text chains every fan wishes they could be a part of,” most of them involved casts from concluded TV shows like Riverdale, Boy Meets World, or The Good Place. But these close-knit groups of high-profile former coworkers also assuage our deep-seated anxieties about the natural souring or shedding of relationships. “Either constant intercourse and familiarity breed weariness and contempt; or if we meet again after an interval of absence, we appear no longer the same,” wrote the essayist William Hazlitt in 1826; inevitably, “knots of inseparable companions” find themselves “scattered, like last year’s snow.”

Of course, there are baser reasons why the celebrity group chat, now frequent fodder for talk shows and press junkets, intrigues: it is, in principle, a kind of secret society. Actor Olli Haaskivi, who plays nuclear physicist Edward Condon in Oppenheimer, once called the OppenHomies “a way of life more than a text thread”—an in-group within an in-group. These repositories for confidential intercelebrity communications, where famous people can presumably be their unmediated selves, tantalize the imagination. Who are they when they are not performing? What does the cast of The Bear (group chat: “Systems Baby”), or all of the actors to ever play Dr. Who (group chat: “The Whoniverse”), talk about among themselves, away from the camera?

Ultimately, though, we look to the extant group chats of the original Fab Five of Queer Eye and the hobbits from Lord of the Rings for the same reasons we watch movies and television: to imagine a world that’s different from our own. We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of time or changes in geography or individual growth. There’s a glossiness to the idea, like the sheen on a movie poster or a magazine spread. After all, where else can we find last year’s snow still falling, fresh and frozen forever?

—Sophia Stewart

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LAST MARCH, in an effort to convince myself that freedom was still mine, I went camping in a remote part of Costa Rica for several weeks with my almost-two-year-old and a whole lot of strangers. The general idea was to connect with nature and other human beings who were toilet-trained.

Before leaving, I joined a group chat with 209 of those strangers. There was no cell reception on-site in the forest, so the discussion transpired between people on their way to the event, which took place over a month, and people who had just been there. I asked the usual questions: How cold was it at night? How buggy? Was the hike in easy enough that I could do it with a rucksack on my back and a toddler on my front? I did not ask: Is anyone else in here pushing back against the last year of their thirties like a bird slamming into a window?

A woman entered the chat after I did. She also had questions. She thought that maybe her friend or partner or ex—I couldn’t tell who he was to her—was at the gathering and wondered if he was “happy and strong.” Someone answered yes; they’d seen him and he was doing well.

The woman’s relief came through the phone, followed quickly by her desperation. Tell him I love him, she implored no one in particular or all 209 of us.

Every day, my phone buzzed with her texts. A couple of times they woke me up in the middle of the night. Tell him I love him. Then: Tell him I miss him. Then: Tell him I’m sorry. Then: Please tell him I want a better life for us.

Tell him I’m ready to have a baby.

I thought the woman was unhinged. I laughed about it with my husband over dinner. A member of the group chat, not me, gently suggested that it might not be the best place for her to air her intimacy, but the woman didn’t seem to care.

Pretty soon, the notes became voice messages in which she deliberated out loud over whether to go find him in the woods or give him space and wait for him to emerge. Both prospects made her anxious, and she was looking to us for relief. When I heard her voice, teetering aboveground, I stopped laughing. I knew that voice. I recognized it from the inside of my own mind. All of a sudden, I couldn’t remember why it was crazier to ask strangers for help than to spend afternoons lying flat and silent in the back seat of my parked car as regret and indecision pecked my eyeballs out.

I hadn’t told anyone I was ready to have a baby before I’d had a baby. I couldn’t have told myself I was ready. The only thing I’d done was tell my husband to cum inside me, because it sounded hot, and then forget all about it, because we were old and it was just the once.

Three weeks later a perfectly good bag of shrimp, straight from the freezer, sent me running to the toilet, gagging into my cupped hands. My husband put his nose to the pan; the shrimp smelled fine. I loved him. I was sorry. I wanted a better life for us. But I didn’t say any of that. I sat, overcome, in our dry bathtub, and when I was done, I made myself some buttered noodles instead.

—Hillary Brenhouse

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MY EXPERIENCE OF being in group chats has largely been one of a resentful sense of being corralled and press-ganged into consensus. To clarify: Whenever I create a group chat, I am Danny Ocean assembling a crack team of gymnasts and code breakers for a daring heist, or Madame de Pompadour arranging an informal afternoon salon. I feel it’s understood that this is an outing of pleasure, to be broken up at the first sign of boredom or fatigue, that each member has been thoughtfully selected to harmonize easily with the others, and that no detail tending towards mutual delight has been overlooked. What a lark! What fun! If we are in any way bound to one another, it is only by the cobweb-thinnest of ties, easily broken should they interfere with anyone’s enjoyment.

And yet, when I am added to someone else’s group chat—even if I would have been perfectly happy to socialize with all of the other members under other circumstances—I feel as sullen and put-upon as if I’d been forced to attend the birthday party of an elementary-school classmate I particularly dislike because his character defects are so much like mine that I can’t pretend not to notice them. I can feel my personality being squeezed by forced proximity, presumed intimacy, and regulated affect. If I suspect an observation of mine isn’t meeting with collective approval, just you watch as I reword, qualify, and backpedal until someone else says the precise opposite and I can chime in with “Yes, that’s just what I meant, thank you for putting it that way,” before turning off notifications and angrily taking the dogs out for a walk.

Jane Austen’s heroine Emma Woodhouse understood best the two kinds of self-censorship that bedevil the group chat. First, there is what one does not say to the person one disagrees with or dislikes, and second, there is what one does not say to the friend who wants to connect us with the person we disagree with and dislike: 

This was so very well understood between them, that Emma could not but feel some surprise, and a little displeasure, on hearing from Mr. Weston that he had been proposing to Mrs. Elton, as her brother and sister had failed her, that the two parties should unite, and go together; and that as Mrs. Elton had very readily acceded to it, so it was to be, if she had no objection. Now, as her objection was nothing but her very great dislike of Mrs. Elton, of which Mr. Weston must already be perfectly aware, it was not worth bringing forward again:—it could not be done without a reproof to him, which would be giving pain to his wife; and she found herself therefore obliged to consent to an arrangement which she would have done a great deal to avoid; an arrangement which would probably expose her even to the degradation of being said to be of Mrs. Elton’s party! Every feeling was offended; and the forbearance of her outward submission left a heavy arrear due of secret severity in her reflections on the unmanageable goodwill of Mr. Weston’s temper.

“I am glad you approve of what I have done,” said he very comfortably. “But I thought you would. Such schemes as these are nothing without numbers. One cannot have too large a party. A large party secures its own amusement. And she is a good-natured woman after all. One could not leave her out.”

Emma denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private.

Go ahead and beg, go ahead and threaten: nothing’s going to stop me from agreeing with you here. What a marvelous party. And how large it is too! How I approve of everything you’ve done.

—Daniel Lavery

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LAST WEEK, FULL of tequila and psilocybin mushrooms, I made the now-common mistake of staring at my iPhone. It was close to midnight and I’d been enduring the unnecessarily expensive revelry of a bachelor party for five hours. In the interim, Joe Biden went full On Golden Pond in the first presidential debate and more than 200 messages slipped into my jeans pocket.

In my primary group chat, I’ll often send screenshots of my Messages app with an intense number on it: 153, 217, 305. Perhaps I’d been in a movie theater. Or maybe I just walked away. What could possibly be so urgent that more than 100 exchanges needed to occur to address it?

The Biden night was an exception: there was actually something important taking place somewhere. Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing happens. Most often, someone had posted something stupid on Twitter. Within an hour, a prolific and varied stream of shit-talking, jokes, bits, and remember-whens issue into gray bubbles of fluctuating sizes.

This used to be called hanging out. But the difference between the hang and the group chat, aside from plasma, is spontaneity. The hang is now ever-present and constant; it doesn’t require plans. Yet while all the other advents of instant communication—email, breaking news, Twitter, [shudder] Slack—fill me with dread, I can’t wait to open the group chat. It drives my wife crazy: what does the group chat offer that surpasses interfacing with real life? When real life is so slippery, a faceless forum counts for feeling alive.

—Tal Rosenberg

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IN A GROUP CHAT, a friend in New York is telling the rest of us about a “nightmare situation.” The night before, he went out with a couple friends who ended up not getting along. As a result, he had to mediate between the two. The night was messy, and the story is harrowing. While we in the group chat express our sympathy for the ordeal, we are also loving every detail. We hang on every text, waiting for the next, indulging in what Lauren Berlant might call the “conspiratorial pleasure” of being privy to a point of view in a story that others, particularly those featured in the story itself, may not have access to. This distinguishes a conspiratorial “us” from everyone else in the story.

To be in a group chat is to be reminded, in the most mundane, quotidian way, that “hell is other people.” Berlant opened their book On the Inconvenience of Other People with this famous quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit. For them, the phrase implies that not all people are hell, because if you are the person who hears it, “it’s other people who are hell, not you.” “Other people” are not in the group chat, although they are probably in group chats of their own that you don’t know about and where you yourself are “other people” too.

I asked everyone in the group chat for permission to refer to the conversation about our friend’s terrible night and promised to do so in very vague terms. For that reason, I can’t tell you more, which is a little disappointing, but you likely understand. Generally, permission comes up in a group chat. Someone might ask, “Can I be a bitch for a second?” (the answer is always “yes”), or they might ask if they can relay something shared and discussed to another group chat, made of other people that are not just “other people” because they know that would be hell. When you send a message to a group chat, and especially when you have good story to tell, you know your audience. A story has to land with the right people—people who will find it funny instead of offensive, who will be interested as opposed to bored, who will know to keep a secret when necessary.

Our friend with the “nightmare situation” had not only found his audience; he also knew how to tell a story specific to the form of the group chat. Sentences were broken up into several short, separate text messages, which functioned like expertly placed line breaks to convey comedic pauses; he left space for the rest of us to interject with questions or reactions. He knew that his story should not be written and sent as a condensed block of text—this is a conversation, not an essay or an email. Attention to the form that a story takes, and the style used to tell it, is part of the “conspiratorial pleasure” that the group chat has to offer. It comes with knowing that a story has been narrated, edited, and tailored specifically for you because you are not “other people”—you are the right people, who will respond the right way.

Without an awareness of permission, audience, and delivery, which is to say, without an attention to form, the group chat becomes a bore at best and a liability at worst. Conversations in the form of screenshots or copied-and-pasted text are leaked, gossip gets warped into a tattle, names are named carelessly, details of a story are forgotten and misremembered, or else no one cares to know, no one has follow-up questions, or worse, no one responds or reacts at all. Without the effort of appealing to the group, the group chat becomes filled with the hell of everyone else, made random and estranged. Like any literary form, the chat depends on constraints, and those constraints are social ones too. All this might make the group chat sound strict and unforgiving. But the next time you pull up the group chat on your phone and ask permission to be a bitch for a second, it is likely at least one person will soon after say yes. Without them, without the group chat, other people would truly be hell.

—Summer Kim Lee

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I MUTE group chats. I resent them. I will not participate if you invite me to one. I may passive-aggressively exit. But I’m still going to take it as a personal attack when you post a screenshot from your group chat and everyone with rich husbands and award-winning bisexual novels is being cute and funny. I don’t want a rich husband, just like I don’t want to be in your group chat. Still, I can’t help feeling triggered sometimes by everyone I don’t like who doesn’t like me. I imagine my tether loves group chats. She’s the girl who can drop an i want to kms and you know she doesn’t mean it—she’s just got a dark sense of humor like that. Not to mention effortlessly beautiful skin. She commands the group chat like it’s a dinner party, playing favorites for entertainment, possessed by the sedentary bourgeois energy of a chain-smoker at the beach. She always says the right thing. Even if that’s nothing at all, just a reaction GIF you’ve never seen before: something like young Cher dancing, skinny and sparkling. She has dirt on everyone’s ex’s new person, the kind that boosts your ego but nothing so bad that knowing it makes you feel worse than you did before.

—Whitney Mallett

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THE HISTORY OF the world is, you could argue, the history of advances in the technologies of organizing the collective to various ends: the nomadic tribe, the citadel, the infantry battalion, the joint-stock corporation, the group text. The latter may be loved, feared, lurked within, or eschewed altogether. What it has not been: Sufficiently theorized. Which is to say: Respected. This is unfortunate because group texts are, at this point, historical forces in their own right. Used by white supremacists planning insurrections at the Capitol, billionaires coordinating anti-Palestinian agitprop, homies making weekend plans, and creatives sharing industry-melting gossip alike.

The first group chat, named Talkomatic, was developed in 1973 by Doug Brown and David R. Woolley at the University of Illinois. It operated on PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), which was the first comprehensive computer-assisted instruction system. It could allow for up to five participants at a time; it had a designated area on the screen, similar to a sectioned bulletin board, and messages were displayed letter-by-letter as they were typed.

More than 30 years later, in 2008, Apple introduced the ability to send SMS messages to multiple recipients simultaneously. This feature, added in iOS version 1.1.3, unified “texting” and “messaging” into a single thread of organized conversations. Since then, the mainstreamed form of the group chat has remained static, though the ways we speak in them have evolved as the internet has, and as new features have been brought into being. Some of the features are useful; some of them, like the thumbs-up react, are demonic instruments of ambiguity and chaos. (On this particular subject, I agree with the writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires, who once said to me that “anything less than a heart is so cruel.”)

Talkomatic was synchronous, and its heirs, from WhatsApp to iMessage, are generally asynchronous. People tap in when they can and want to; group chats are not required to conduct their business in real time. But the root, the essential strangeness at the heart of how group texts function, has remained constant: the enormity of information they obscure. Who is to say what a couple of “!” tapbacks really mean? What are we to make of a formerly engaged, chatty, locked-all-the-way-in grext member’s current silences, their nonreactivity?

I should not have been, personally, an intuitive target for group chats, being, as I was once, an intense serial monogamist in friendships, and being, as I am now, easily overwhelmed by the great garbage deluge of digital signal and noise that crashes over me daily. Most of the group texts I’m added to are seasonal, ephemeral, weak flames soon quenched in my phone’s womb. Some persist. Some are large and freewheeling purveyors of chaos and news-you-can-use, like my extended family WhatsApp or 10-plus-person groups that exist primarily to coordinate nightlife or bike rides. But with love for the wonderful denizens of the unspeakably named “million $ listings BK,” “bitcoin bathers,” “🚽🕺🚽🕺🚽🕺,” “freak matchers llc,” and “do the right thing 😤,” my personal One Group Text to Rule Them All is simply titled “the grext 🕳️.”

The grext 🕳️ is three people strong and I text it nearly every day. Into its benevolent void go internet scrapings, emotional confessions, logistical squaring-up, idiot patter, collective problem-solving, breaking news, homosexual and bisexual gossip, and occasional genuinely breathtaking intellectual analysis. My friends are, of course, a great part of why I enjoy the grext 🕳️, but I think it’s important to create some demarcation between my love for my friends and my feelings about a technological entity. The fact is that the grext 🕳️ itself, in all its iMessage-enabled high jinks and meaning, brings something important and joyful and ineffable into my life.

Many people I know have versions of what I do, citing these group chats as ways for them to have stayed meaningfully connected to far-flung family, to have gotten through divorces and postpartum blues, to have found their way back into a creative or spiritual practice. Sometimes the group chat is a group chat and sometimes the group chat is a prayer circle, you know?

In seriousness, my theory is that a certain kind of group text is a modern form of the interaction ritual chain, a concept developed by sociologist Randall Collins. Collins understood humans as seekers of emotional energy, and believed that the unintrospected objective of most social interaction was to acquire and spread emotional energy. He envisioned a kind of perpetual marketplace of cultural, social, and emotional exchange that in turn creates a “microfoundation” for what we understand as class, race, gender, scene, subculture, and, simply put, group life. The interaction ritual chain could be any sequence of social interactions that produce emotional energy and reinforce group solidarity; it could be a standing weekly gathering of old friends or that transition between meeting and hanging out that creates a friendship over time. Successful interaction rituals generate or deepen a sense of connection, confidence, validation, affirmation, enthusiasm, or initiative. Failed interaction rituals degrade, erode, or reduce emotional energy. Individuals, Collins theorized, are motivated to repeat interactions that result in high emotional energy, and to avoid those that reduce their emotional energy.

I come to the group texts I love because present within both their culture and their technological mechanism is the opportunity to quietly, and in light-touch ways, replenish the well of my emotional energy. Friendship and love are many things, and one of them is a quiet commitment to taking on and meeting each other’s bids for connection, support, and reprieve from the strange lonelinesses of existing as a single self.

The self. That vast and churning ocean, that shimmering soap bubble wafting through the air. Perhaps our exchanges, our communions, our formations with other people, are rain and river and factory runoff, are dish soap and water and small bright-colored plastic hoop. Fundamental to Collins’s theory, after all, is the idea that interactions generate the individual, not the other way around.

The sustained group text creates a sense of belonging and mutual understanding among participants that is no less meaningful for its digitality. Its shared moments, its failed or successful interaction rituals, contribute to the group’s identity and cohesion, much like traditional face-to-face interactions. The group text is a place of unserious seriousnesses, of information exchange, of shared webs of reference, of bids for coordination and connection met again and again. At a specific and difficult moment in my life, thinking of a particular group chat of my kin, I once joke-tweeted: very slowly healing my familial trauma through daily wordle score sharing; I received a flurry of messages saying some version of “real” and “if you know you know.”

It is in the lightness of most of what is shared in the group chat that many of us find ballast for the heaviness of life.

None of this changes, for me, the fact that grexts are fragile and potentially ephemeral, as all digital constructions are. There have been periods of silence and inactivity and disinvestment in any and all of mine. But in an age of a certain kind of co-optation and blind adulation of Community in the abstract, I am grateful to the group text for its reinforcement of certain truths: that community intimacies function best with some degree of boundary, that collective culture is a tenuous and shifting thing, that privacy and containment are crucial wellsprings of the self, and that any community is only as good as the people who make it up.

That we, those people, are continually, slowly being formed, through interaction, through ritual, through practice with each other.

—Sarah Thankam Mathews

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I’M NOT MUCH OF a texter. I don’t like seeing a block of blue bubbles on my lilac iPhone 11. Do not send me a TikTok. Do not send me a meme. I won’t open either. I won’t engage you in it. For me, the ideal medium is talking on the phone, or maybe email. If someone sends me more than three texts in a row, I will call them up. It is a waste of my time to respond to all of that. I think this makes me Gen X, even though I was born in the mid-’90s. I can’t be bothered. If I want to ask someone out, I usually will resort to going through a friend. Or maybe sending an email. Or just telling them to their face. I wouldn’t put that in a text. I’m not a child.

Given all of this, I think it can be safe to say I am not really a group chat person. When I want the gossip, I want it over a martini. I want it while sitting in a cracked vinyl booth. I want it with a side of fries. I want it with my ear glued to my phone while I’m walking to my Korean dry cleaner on Nostrand Avenue. I want it while I’m wearing my hot pink Manolos and biting my nails.

But okay—I do have a few exceptions. I think the key is that the group chat needs to be small. It needs to be fewer than five people. It needs to be well composed. The best group chats I am in are purely tactile and puritanically organized. Where the agenda is set: Did you hear the gossip about so and so doing blah blah blah? Where the multimedia is labeled. Where I know what I’m getting into.

Otherwise, just call me, baby.

—Sophie Kemp

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“I JUST HEARD the most nuclear-grade gossip of my whole life,” a friend texted the group chat a few weeks ago.

“Spill.”

“It’s too powerful. I’m scared.”

“Why would you taunt us this way?”

“I need each of you to take an oath: you didn’t hear this from me (I’m not telling you who told) but … it’s a thing people know, and I’ve heard it’s being published in a column, and, wow. It changes everything.”

“Who what why where when?”

A voice note follows. I’m in my bed, alone, but feel as if I’m in a café with my friends. One of the people in the chat is asleep. We are all in different time zones. She will wake up to all of this.

“Can you even? It’s, like, everyone’s worst nightmare, but to the extreme. What’s amazing about it is they both deserve it. One really soiled the other’s perfect world.”

“The dollar amount is so funny. Like, what.”

“Imagine this happening to you, at all, and then imagine it happening at a friend’s house, and then imagine it is at THAT friend’s house.”

“I can’t.”

We are all laughing, in our beds, telling one another that this is what is happening (laughter).

“The ultimate social climber,” I summarize, “gets to the top of the A-list and shits the bed.”

“Apparently, the rumor has spread. Hell.”

“Is someone on suicide watch?”

I wonder if any of this could possibly be true, and if so, whether many of the details have been rearranged to make it a better story. I’m happy if they have, because it is.

“Will they ever live this down once it’s officially out?”

For some reason, I can’t imagine it will ever be, because there is no lawsuit to report. It is the ultimate gossip because it won’t be disputed. It lives as a whisper, a disappearing sound bite, an unnerving image in our minds. As I am writing this, another group chat I’m in has started to discuss the story, only it is getting distorted, no one confident enough to confirm who what why where and when they first heard.

—Natasha Stagg

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 Featured illustration by Elena Megalos.