DEVOTION THEORY

That fall was so gray and achingly cold it turned the world frail, like we could bruise a tree by simply pressing a thumb into the bark, like we could snap rocks in half until they were the right size to skip across the lake.

Marie started her boyfriends that fall, one every few weeks, sprouting up as if on a scheduled order. All blond, or close to it, and tall.

They were gentle, obedient—stirring soup on the stove, pouring glasses of wine, not even flinching when our cats scratched each of them. In hindsight, we didn't see them bleed, either, their scrapes pale and ragged.

They orbited Marie, constantly assessing her with fluttery eyes. They pulled her coat off upon arrival in our apartments, they unlaced and later retied her boots, kneeling before her like a knight greeting a princess. When we went shopping, they dutifully carried our bags and stayed a measured three feet behind us.

Before the pattern became pronounced, we would quietly swoon when one of them kissed her temple or stroked her hair. This was love, our first grown-up, non-fraternity boy experience of it, and it felt like gentle rain. We had the phantom feeling of lips on our foreheads, faint butterflies flapping in our stomachs.

After three had come and gone, we gathered to discuss, weighing our comparisons between them. The age-old convention of concerned, but not too concerned, gossip. Robin had seemed younger than the others, possibly younger than us. Peter had those little worn dots on his nose, indicating glasses, but he never wore them. Logan had scars like thin lightning bolts just barely cresting over his shirt collar.

"They're from some sort of laboratory.”

"No, it's like a cabbage patch thing! We've got to find the meadow."

"Maybe they're all related, all brothers.”

"One of them will stick around," Allie said, "and then we'll find out."

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Our friendship originated with Allie and Marie. Their history ran deep, backwards through high school and all the years before it, all the way to the sandbox at the Montessori preschool they attended.

Their first memories were of each other and of the creative liberties they were granted. Finding hiding places, snapping twigs off of bushes, layering chalk lines on top of each other until their misshapen drawings became gray. We heard legends of the potions they concocted, mud and crayon shreds and hair they secretly clipped off each other’s heads.

They carried this spirit through high school, cycling through everything the world offered them—cheer and band and yearbook and temporarily joining the clique of goth kids. Drinking, marijuana, sneaking into concerts, sex, poke and stick tattoos. Their parents weren’t absent, but not quite present either, and maintained the philosophy that freedom would form decent adults.

The rest of us swarmed around them in college, drawn in by the inexplicable experience they possessed and the bond they shared because of it. We were sheltered, hailing from worlds that yielded only a few mouthfuls of wine at Thanksgiving, hands on our breasts only over the thick layer of our sweatshirts, staying out just a few minutes after curfew and feeling grateful about getting away with it. Meanwhile, Allie and Marie were fiery, beautiful, wise. They crafted delicious cocktails with mixers swiped from the dining hall. We stuck with them, all of us living together in a rambling college house after the dorm. And when we graduated, we scattered into a handful of apartments around the same neighborhood, never more than a few minutes away from each other. Whenever we saw a map of the city, we pictured pulsing lights layered over the top for each apartment, our little sisterhood illuminated, remembering it was all because of the shared beacon of Allie and Marie on our dorm floor. We wanted what they had, that immeasurable closeness of a fully intersected life, and surrounded them until we felt it too.

It wasn’t perfect, though. Allie and Marie used to fight. It was rare, but when it happened, it was a volcano—screaming, flying objects, more than one visit from the police who lined us all up outside to verify we were alive and unharmed. We always made sure to file in between Allie and Marie, their heat radiating through all of our bodies in the middle, our eyes trained to the ground as the cops lectured us.

The origin point of each fight was never quite clear, but we could feel the usual mild air of competition between them expand, wavering. Sometimes they wanted opposite things for our group, different fraternity parties or brunch cafes, and the tension would slowly build up. They had to stop taking classes together in college, and whenever it couldn’t be avoided, we forbid them from pairing on group projects. They interned at the same advertising agency and that had to be cut short, too, after they both fell in love with their manager, who eventually gave Marie a better performance review. Allie threw a stapler at her and it grazed her ear, creating a long thin bruise. Marie somehow talked the company, including the panicked manager, out of calling the police or pressing charges, which felt like a miracle.

We hadn’t seen a fight in the two years since graduation. They worked for separate companies, lived in separate apartments, but loved each other as only best friends can. Our friendship was truly glowing across the city, gossamer strings that couldn’t be severed.

One of us found a Real Boyfriend in November. We referred to him lovingly as RB. He liked red wine and danced badly and wore a cologne that made us sneeze. We flushed in half-humiliation, half-pride, our cheeks mirroring the contents of his glass, when he told stupid jokes too loudly at trivia night.

Allie asked Marie what she thought about RB during his third outing with us.

"He's kind of an idiot," she said, her narrow eyes darting at each of us for a second, lingering on Allie’s. "It's nice, though."

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While shopping along a string of boutiques at the city’s edge, the seventh boyfriend—Mark—in tow, we stopped to look at a cat sleeping on a windowsill. Some of us pulled out our phones to snap photos.

A narrow-eyed girl in a yellow sweater weaved through us and paused by Mark, carefully scanning his face. “Fred?”

Marie stepped to his side. “You’re mistaken, sorry. This is Mark, he’s visiting me from Boston.”

We all glanced at each other, wondering if maybe this was the secret: mail-order boyfriends. At this point, we had already asked Marie where she found them, and she’d just waved her hands and listed an assortment of dating apps, an explanation digested by no one.

The girl turned her tight gaze to Marie. “He looks a lot like my brother’s best friend.”

Mark looked at Marie and then back to the girl. “I don’t have a best friend, so it can’t be me.”

She reeled back a step. “Weird. Okay then.”

We huddled into a tight group as the girl walked away. “I feel like she should’ve apologized for interrupting us like that,” Marie said. “And questioning you, Mark. I’m sorry that happened.”

We mumbled agreement and apologies to Mark.

“Are you really from Boston?” Allie asked him.

Mark looked at Marie as he answered. “No. And it’s okay. This is a cute cat.” He stepped closer to the window, his smile still stretching across his face.

The cat pulled away, exposing her sharp teeth in a hiss we could hear through the thick glass. Mark’s smile didn’t falter.

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After Mark came Tommy. We met him at our New Year’s Eve party. He was stunning, a figure wandered out of a catalog, or maybe a Hallmark Christmas movie, with a seemingly permanent smile.

"Please, please keep him," we begged Marie as soon as Tommy left the room to grab more wine. "He just improves us. Aesthetically, you know?"

"He seems great,” one of us said, and we all nodded enthusiastically.

"I don't know," RB said from the floor, where he tossed popcorn into his mouth, only partially successfully, "something seems off about him. He didn’t react at all when he accidentally cut his hand making the cheese board."

We were tiring a bit of RB. He spilled things, swore, spoke too loudly too close to our heads. Sometimes he got into long arguments with another table during trivia, and we all cringed in embarrassment.

Marie winced and then smiled. "He's fine. He said he wants to dance later." She disappeared into the kitchen.

Allie glared after her. "I think we need an experiment."

"What do you mean?" someone asked.

"I'm going to flirt with him. See what he does. See if I can get him to say more than just a few words."

We gasped, muttered discontentment. RB glanced around nervously.

Allie rolled her eyes. "I'm not planning on sleeping with him. But if I did, it's not like he's staying with her anyway. Her limit is two weeks and I think he's already over halfway. Distract Marie for me, will you?"

That evening comes back to us only in a few sharp details—whispered protests until the couple returned, someone’s shaking fingers braiding Marie's hair to trap her on the rug. Allie’s lipsticked mouth by Tommy's ear, the two of them fading into the black hallway. Allie returning flushed and wild-eyed, Tommy sitting on the couch and gazing at Marie. The two of them dancing, spinning around the living room, Marie's skirt billowing, her new braids swinging in wide arcs. His hands deftly tying the laces of her winter boots before they walked out into the night. All of us fraught with a sick type of tension, a closing feeling in our lungs.

After they left, we all turned to Allie, who burst into laughter. "Yeah, he's a real guy. Fucked me on the dresser."

One of us, the hostess, shrieked. "You broke girl code in so many ways tonight. I'm locking my room next time."

"There was a weird thing, though," Allie continued. "Before, he asked me if this was something Marie wanted, if it would make her happy."

"What did you say?" the hostess asked.

"I said yes," Allie whispered. She was pale, the slatted moonlight through the window turning her stark and cold. "Did I... did I coerce him?"

We looked through the gap in the blinds at their retreating figures, and maybe this makes us bad people, worse than we already were, but we feared a rupture between Allie and Marie more than hurting Tommy, more than anything else.

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We realized then we had come to think of the boyfriends as disposable, not human. We acted as though they really did come off an assembly line. But the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth all sort of resembled Tommy, and it didn't disabuse us of this feeling. Especially because they seemed to inherit something of Tommy's mind. They still orbited Marie, but their eyes occasionally flickered on Allie for just a second too long, making all of our skin burn in shame. We knew we had to solve this mystery.

In April, the hostess from the New Year’s party figured it out. She burst into one of our apartments, where we had all gathered for a Friday night in. Marie had cancelled on us last minute.

"I followed her," she said, twisting out of her coat. "I followed her, to a graveyard."

One of us paused the movie we were watching, some romantic comedy where the guy gets the girl but doesn’t really deserve her.

"She walked out into it and I followed her for a few minutes. She was kneeling next to this grave and had all these jars she was pulling out of her bag. I had a bad feeling she would turn and see me, so I went to look at her car instead. She had cutouts from the newspaper on the passenger seat."

"The classifieds? Lonely hearts?" someone asked hopefully.

"No," she said. "Obituaries. For young men."

Allie vomited suddenly onto the rug, causing us all to shriek.

"Oh my God!" one of us screamed. “That’s the new one from HomeGoods.”

"No, what Allie is thinking is right," the hostess said. "I hid in the parking lot and waited.

Marie came back with a naked man covered in dirt. They're dead, all of them."

"I fucked a corpse," Allie cried.

"Reanimated, though," one of us said, already working on the stained rug with paper

towels and a spray cleaner. "I mean, I presume Marie is also... enjoying them. Like, you’re not

going to get sepsis."

"You don't get it," Allie cried. "I'm pregnant."

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We didn’t tell Marie. We couldn’t. We knew now that the playing field wasn’t even, had never even been close. She had something we didn’t, something we couldn’t begin to understand, and we were afraid.

Allie didn’t know what might be growing inside of her and feared something would go wrong. She tried to make an appointment, but it was too late, too far along. And a pregnancy is not a secret you can keep within a group as tight and constant as we were. Marie had to be cut away entirely.

It was like having a limb removed, the phantom pain of it excruciating, her dot still bright on our maps. We felt drawn to her street whenever we walked somewhere by ourselves. It was easier when we moved as a group, our arms locked, no room to think of anyone outside of the sisterhood. But on our own, our bodies seemed to drag to her apartment, our minds mentally plotting the route to her apartment–left at the next intersection, right at the ice cream shop.

Marie felt it too. She texted, called, emailed, begged to come back into the fold. At the rare moments we saw her, when she showed up to knock at our doors, she was alone. No man accompanied her at all. We hadn’t seen her single in months. It made her look smaller, weaker, as though a strong wind would toss her off the surface of the world and into the sky.

She left us long voicemails, telling us that she understood we knew her secret. She said she had stopped, would never dabble again in witchcraft. Her voice shook, sobs threatening to break out. She described an intense loneliness that led her to that graveyard in the first place, that the first man she brought back was the manager from the failed internship. He passed away in a car crash and she was the only one of us who knew, because Allie had been fully blocked away by the company after the stapler incident but Marie wasn’t, and she saw their tribute to him on social media. How he was so gentle and easy to be with, after his death. They talked for hours about everything, her semi-neglectful parents, her bond and competitive nature with Allie, the suffocating but lovely animal of our friendship. On top of the emotional support, he helped her with her marketing class homework and refined her resume as she neared graduation, putting his experience as a junior advertising executive to use one final time.

But the body only lasted so long, she said, and then faded, rotting away in the grove of trees where she kept him. After two mournful years, she finally found out through her occult research that she could replicate a piece of his soul into a new body, and the cycle began. She couldn’t stop bringing him back, even though his soul was so diluted by the end that each iteration had to relearn how to uncork a wine bottle and lace her boots. She began to pick bodies that had lived very different lives, chefs and dancers and mechanical engineers, aiming for distraction instead of disappointment when each man failed to remember her in entirety, couldn’t recall those hours in the grove of trees. To do it all again each time would be like restarting therapy, she said, pulling off old bandages and ripping open half-healed wounds.

She described herself as selfish for not finding enough love in us. She explained that she really knew nothing about the manager, had never even asked, and as a compliant corpse he had never complained. Marie couldn’t do the same with us, we assumed a level of integration that left no one on the edges or in the spotlight, all of us our own flame but coalesced until we were brighter than anything else we may have had individually. We would talk in near-equal measure, care for each other as a matter of triage, whoever was bleeding out was the first to speak. But Marie, who remembered what it was like to have a single best friend always listening, who had secrets, was drowning with us. Now she was truly alone, and felt it, an oppressive and constant cold even on those warm spring days.

We ignored her messages because our love for Allie demanded it. Allie needed us. More than Marie could. We joked sharply that she could create a new set of friendships with another trip to the graveyard. And we prepared, too, because the doctor said everything was fine. Nothing wrong with the baby or with Allie. We crowded into the room at one of her ultrasounds, watching the strange white-blue shape moving on the screen, translating it in our minds until we could picture the curve of a head so small it would fit in our palms. And then we couldn’t wait.

Allie and some of us rented a new apartment together. RB assembled a crib and a changing table. We would do this, raise this baby together. It would be the most loved child in the city, with a network of aunts, women who had been moving together as one already. A hum surrounded our group, a pure vibration, all the love and joy that was to come.

It wasn’t all perfect, that summer. Allie was in mourning for Marie, a deeper pit than any of us had fallen into. We were moving forward without her. Those initial sharp pains had faded into a dull itch. But Allie still felt it. We caught her, sometimes, walking in Marie’s direction. Snooped through her phone to delete drafted texts, and then removed Marie’s number entirely so she wouldn’t have the opportunity to send something new. It wouldn’t be safe to talk to Marie, she might hurt the baby, might hurt our Allie. We couldn’t allow it.

She researched Tommy, who was a dance instructor at a community college and modeled in his spare time. We stopped her, more than once, from contacting his family. We reminded her, gently at first and then sternly, that the timeline wouldn’t make sense from their perspective. Besides, we would be all she needed, we already were.

When Allie started labor, we rushed with her to the hospital, each of us with a hand placed somewhere on her body, whispering encouragement. Our baby, our baby, our baby.

But when we arrived, the nurses told us only one person could accompany Allie into the delivery ward. We froze there, not at all expecting this hurdle on the big day. She turned to look us over, her eyes roving over our faces with bitten lips, our twisting hands. We each wanted to be selected, to be her best friend, to fill this vacuum. She stared at us for a long time, until it started raining outside, until the nurse returned with a wheelchair and tapped her foot impatiently. Until it became clear she could not, would not, choose. She sank into the wheelchair.

“I’m going alone,” she said quietly, and before we could protest, the nurse wheeled her away through swinging doors into a pure white hallway.