We fucked up the corkscrew, badly. Neither one of us knows how to use a bottle opener and it shows, cork crumbling onto the hotel desk like confetti. Nadia’s holding the bottle and I’m maneuvering the stopper and we’re bent over laughing and, somehow, we pop it off, acrid odor wafting free. The cheapest bottle of wine in all of France: impossible to open.
After a long day of eating croissants and drinking spritzes and wandering through art museums, Nadia and I are spending one of our two precious nights in Paris rewatching a cinematic masterpiece: the 2023 film adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s breakout novel, Red, White, & Royal Blue. This movie, which we’ve both seen thirteen times, follows Alex (the First Son of the U.S.) and Henry (the Prince of Wales) as they fall in love amidst the reelection campaign of Alex’s mother, President Ellen Claremont-Diaz.
I can’t quite explain how our fixation on Red, White, & Royal Blue (better known to us as RWARB) began, but I do know that watching it, and rewatching it, and rewatching it has become our most time-honored ritual. We’ve watched it to kick off new semesters, we’ve watched it in three different countries (with plans for a fourth over spring break), we can quote it line for line. The acting is terrible, the writing is terrible, and yet, we keep coming back.
Nadia and I met on the very first day of freshman orientation in a first-floor room in James-Mead. Everyone says that no one meets their best friends on the first day of college, but in our case, everyone is fantastically wrong. We hit it off instantly since we loved the same pop music (we went as Charli xcx and Lorde last Halloween), and in the years since, we’ve been to twenty concerts together (including waiting for seven hours to get barricade at MUNA and nine for boygenius). And RWARB isn’t the only movie we ritualize—we’ve seen Catching Fire in practically every place we’ve been together, including her first visit to me in New Jersey, multiple of my visits to her in San Diego, and on my twenty-first birthday in Copenhagen.
But come back to this night in Paris: The next day, we’ll go back to living in separate countries, Nadia in Spain and me in Denmark. And one day not so far after that, we’ll grow up. We’ll become seniors and we’ll share an extremely thin wall in a shitty off-campus apartment, and then we’ll graduate and move to different cities, maybe permanently. For now, though, we are drinking wine in our hotel room, two twin beds pushed together to make a queen, watching our movie. We’re right where we’re supposed to be.
*
We snag the only two neon green library passes available for third period study hall, same as yesterday and every day before. Z (I’ll keep her anonymous), one of my very best friends at the time, and I sit hunched over the media center desktop computers lined neatly amidst the bookshelves. We keep giggling—we’re only twelve, we can’t be blamed—but the media specialist, Mrs. G, doesn’t stay too mad at us since we spend more time in the library than anyone else in the sixth grade. And that counts for something. Our keyboards clack, the overhead lights burn fluorescent, and our cursors blink back at us from our shared Google Doc.
Back then, Z and I loved all of the same books, and we loved them profoundly, obsessively. We read Divergent headcanon posts on Tumblr and Pinterest, cried over The Maze Runner film adaptations, and shared joint custody over a now-battered copy of Legend by Marie Lu. (We even met Lu at a 2016 book signing in Manhattan, to which we wore handmade paperclip rings, which were a staple symbol in the books.) And during third period study hall each day, we ditched algebra worksheets and social studies essays, instead writing fanfiction or co-authoring a novel that never got finished.
In eighth grade, we bought tickets for a Thursday night showing of Love, Simon at the run-down AMC behind the mall alongside a big group of our friends, and the two of us sobbed through the last half hour. Huddled in a corner of the lobby, against the screaming pattern of the movie theater carpet, saturated with the smell of popcorn butter, Z told me that she was gay, and asked me if I was too.
I panicked, told her no, then regretted and repressed it for years afterwards. Even as I tried so hard to push that memory away, I never forgot how it felt to hear someone say those words to me—words I had never before heard spoken aloud. Like she’d fiddled with a radio until the static faded out, everything suddenly at top volume, high definition.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love the band Bleachers (and even got a commemorative “Rollercoaster” tattoo when I was nineteen), but not many know that I first discovered Bleachers from the Love, Simon soundtrack back in 2018. For weeks after we had first watched the movie, I kept that soundtrack on repeat, thinking about what Z had told me in the AMC lobby and what I’d so badly wanted to say back. Even as I outgrew the film itself many years ago, I still feel so brave whenever I listen to Bleachers—I feel big and open to everything.
My friendship with Z was very volatile—I almost definitely had a crush on her that I couldn’t acknowledge, and we fought often, practically never speaking again after middle school. But when I flip through our battered old copy of Legend and find her annotations, or when I am swept up strongly enough by nostalgia to press play on the Love, Simon soundtrack, I think of how she was the first person who understood me in a way that no one else had before.
*
We’re holding up the end of gym class because we’ve got a dance routine to showcase, and everyone is exasperated. Yesterday after school, Anjali and I had painstakingly choreographed an elaborate performance to “Back for You” by One Direction, filmed by my mom on her not-yet-ancient camcorder. Late afternoon sun filtered through the blinds and we moved as shadows against the walls. Today, we begged our gym teacher until he let us allocate the final minutes of the period to perform for our whole third grade class.
Anjali and I never cared about what everyone else thought of us, and everyone else knew that we came as a pair. And no one at Randall Carter Elementary School loved One Direction as much as we did. During lunch, we’d stand in the all-purpose room, transformed temporarily into a cafeteria—long benches pushed out onto the gym floor, steeped in the sour smell of school lunch—and belt the lyrics to songs like “Rock Me” and “Up All Night” and “Diana,” loud and hoarse and out of tune. Totally immune to the laughter of the boys in our class.
When we were in fifth grade, Zayn left One Direction, and we sobbed (of course). And after fifth grade, Anjali moved away, and we didn’t see each other for six years. When we finally reunited during junior year of high school, we bought matching keychains—when scanned, they’d link straight to “History” by One Direction on Spotify. You and me got a whole lot of history: That was us, our friendship already spanning a decade.
A few semesters ago, I visited Anjali in Dublin, where she now attends medical school. It was mid-November and Grafton Street had just been decked in Christmas lights, fake snow drifting onto the cobblestone roads from someone’s apartment window, wreaths and ornaments dripping from awnings and eaves. We wandered between bars for a while before Anjali pulled me into a packed pub, and we spent the rest of the night dancing and jumping and spinning around without an ounce of grace, singing loudly and out of tune until our voices were completely hoarse. Just like in third grade.
*
I am not a casual consumer of media, and I never have been. I grew up on Wattpad and AO3 and eventually “stan Twitter” (where I still very proudly run a well-followed account). I’ve seen my favorite sitcoms so many times that now I just listen to them like podcasts. My walls are plastered in concert wristbands and movie tickets (I still have my Love, Simon stub from that night eight years ago), and I keep all my old Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games books packed neatly in a cardboard box back home.
For me, though, the joy of being hopelessly obsessive about my favorite books, music, TV, and movies lies not only in each piece itself. When I share media with my friends, we form bonds that transcend distance and time. An endless exchange of This made me think of you <3 and Did you see that they’re making a sequel?! and Oh my God, I just finished listening, let’s please discuss. It doesn’t matter how many months have passed since we’ve last seen each other or how many miles are between us—it only matters that I love this band, you love this band, and we will forever associate this band with our love for each other.
That joy is there when my mom and I drive back up the Garden State Parkway from the Jersey Shore, sun slanting golden on the dashboard, blasting our favorite songs by Harry Styles, Joe P, and yes, even The Chainsmokers (who, I’ll admit, we saw in concert together when I was thirteen—the same year I got a dog named “Paris”). That joy is there when I find the bright blue Post-Its that my hometown friend Emily left behind in my copy of RWARB a few summers ago, when we spent humid days driving aimlessly around the suburbs and coaching each other through breakups. When Lana, my unofficial fifth roommate, turns to me at dinner and asks, “Hey, you love Challengers but I’ve only seen it once, wanna watch it again with me?” When Anjali and I send One Direction TikToks back and forth across the Atlantic in the spare minutes between my thesis research and her med school exams.
That joy is there because sharing media allows me to recognize pieces of the people I love everywhere—to stay connected with them, to learn from them, to find scraps of home all over.
*
My twenty-first birthday falls at the end of my semester abroad in Copenhagen, the first birthday I’ve ever spent away from home. It feels strange to be on the other side of the ocean, away from almost everyone I’ve ever known, as I move into a new year of life. The sun sets so early here, the days gray and fleeting and unfamiliar.
But Nadia’s here for the weekend, days spent catching snowflakes in our hair at Christmas markets and eating pastries beside the near-frozen canals. And nothing new and unfamiliar feels all that impossible when Nadia and I are together, sitting on my bed with my laptop balanced on my knees, watching Catching Fire (our movie!) once again, giggling and commentating over Tupperwares of pad thai. I am right where I’m supposed to be.
