She’s Still Dying on Facebook

I’ve been obsessed with Lea’s Facebook profile since January 2006, when she joined, just a month after I created my own account. In high school, we had a consuming friendship—together we did things we’d never do alone, like skinny-dip in Lake Michigan while rolling on Ecstasy. In summer, our sleepovers lasted weeks. At 1 a.m., we’d sneak out and trudge through the woods to a field, where we smoked cigarettes and got blackout drunk on wine stolen from our mothers. We talked a lot about getting wasted and breaking out of dead-end northern Michigan; anthems of small-town girls. We called ourselves unbreakable without a hint of irony. Our friendship took place entirely offline—which is strange, because for almost 10 years, most of my interaction with Lea has been with her Facebook profile.

A few months ago, motivated by the purchase of an iPhone 5, I refreshed all the apps on my phone. I barely use any of them—Chase, Twitter, Groupon, Facebook, iPeriod—and normally wouldn’t bother upgrading unless prompted by some breakdown of functionality. One of Facebook’s newer features is a change to private messages, so that they’re less like email and more like instant messaging. Now, if you visit someone’s profile and click on the messages button, a circular icon containing their profile picture appears on the screen,