If You Were Here Read Online Free PDF

and typed: “Chapter One.”

CHAPTER SIX
    I t was a Thursday, right around the time when single, childless city dwellers had labeled Thursday “the new Friday,” meaning it was the night to go out, get drunk, and forget that one more day of work—albeit a casual-dress one—still awaited us.
    It wasn’t just any Thursday but a first Thursday of the month, meaning it was the night of a Susan Hauptmann happy hour.
    I arrived late, even relative to the obscene hours we all kept back then. I had been burning the midnight oil that entire week. I told my colleagues I was taking the extra step of preparing written motions for all my upcoming trials. Their deadpan looks were the silent equivalent of “Whatever, nerd.” But I’d been in the district attorney’s office for four years and was still trying drug cases. I had vowed that this would be the year when I got some attention.
    By the time I made it to Telephone Bar, it was well past ten o’clock. The party was in full swing, meaning fifty or so friends and at least three times as many drinks consumed.
    Susan raised her arms in the air and reached across two guys from the usual crew for a long-distance hug. “McKenna! You made it!”
    Vocal exclamation points were a sure sign that Susan was getting her drink on. The girl worked her ass off at one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. She deserved to cut loose every once in a while. Back then, we all did.
    “Pretty good turnout,” I yelled over the thumping soundtrack. That was the year when you couldn’t help but Get the Party Started with Pink everywhere you went.
    Susan was beaming, which made her even more gorgeous than usual. She was always so proud when the happy hours went well, as if they somehow validated all the steps she’d taken in life to lead to all those friendships. Now some people were leaving the city. Others were getting married and having children. They couldn’t stay in their twenties forever. That night, though, everyone seemed to be there, just like the old days.
    “McKenna, this is my friend Mark Hunter.” He was one of the two guys I recognized next to us. “McKenna was my roommate the first year I came to the city. She went to Stanford for undergrad and law school at Berkeley. Mark just left a dot-com, but his MBA’s from Stanford. You guys could have bumped into each other at a Stanford-Cal game.”
    And then off she went to introduce some other solo attendee to another friend. That was Susan’s thing. She collected friends. Back before random strangers “friended” each other online after a chance meeting, Susan was that person who found something interesting about every person she met, then pulled out her cell phone with an easygoing “Give me your digits. I’m getting some friends together in a few weeks. You should join us.”
    Unlike most of the people who do those things, Susan would actually cultivate the friendship. As a result, her happy hours brought together an eclectic crowd that mirrored the divergent pieces of Susan’s impressive life: military friends, business school friends, gym friends, “just started talking at the bookstore one day” friends, childhood friends from all over the country, thanks to her army-brat youth. Her capacity for socializing had earned her the nickname Julie the Cruise Director, at least among those friends who remembered The Love Boat .
    Unfortunately, Susan didn’t always recognize that she was singular in her ability to connect to people. To her, my non-overlapping undergraduate years at Stanford should have been common ground to bond with Mark the former dot-commer. Instead, the two of us stumbled awkwardly through a series of false conversational starts before Mark pretended to recognize a friend farther down the bar. I let him off the hook before he felt pressure to pay for the Westvleteren Trappist I had just ordered.
    As I took the glass from the (of course) scantily clad bartender, a small wave of foam made its way over