Later, she was Lea 30 pounds thinner than I’d ever seen her, her cheeks squirrel-swollen, staring at something beyond the camera. Early-on, she was Lea at the beach, grinning through a sunburn.

A year later they’d become disjointed: Hallmark quotes that the Lea I’d known would have made fun of, misspellings, late-night fragments that had clearly been posted after a hundred drinks and who knows what else. My freshman year, Lea’s status updates were consistently funny and weird and her. So why isn’t it plausible that Lea’s messages appeared in response to how much I miss her, to my own guilt about her death. I still half-believe the Internet is simply air. I know nothing about the way the Internet works. Still, I can’t ignore the pull of my bookworm’s interpretation, arguing that technology is the closest human beings come to magic. I want to say that Facebook put the messages there-that I didn’t click the button, that they just appeared, Lea’s face popping up because she had something to say, she wanted to chat. I don’t know how, exactly, I managed to open up my old messages with Lea. This time of year is when she’s always most on my mind, and I’m sure that some Facebook technician who keeps track of what we all do on the site would report that my visits to Lea’s profile increase exponentially as the weather gets warmer. June 10 would have been her 27th birthday. On March 2, more than four years ago now, Lea died of substance-abuse-related liver failure.

Now, if you visit someone’s profile and click on the messages button, a circular icon containing their profile picture appears on the screen, and with it, the entirety of your mutual correspondence. One of Facebook’s newer features is a change to private messages, so that they’re less like email and more like instant messaging. I barely use any of them-Chase, Twitter, Groupon, Facebook, iPeriod-and normally wouldn’t bother upgrading unless prompted by some breakdown of functionality. 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.Ī few months ago, motivated by the purchase of an iPhone 5, I refreshed all the apps on my phone. We called ourselves unbreakable without a hint of irony. We talked a lot about getting wasted and breaking out of dead-end northern Michigan anthems of small-town girls. 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.

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. I’ve been obsessed with Lea’s Facebook profile since January 2006, when she joined, just a month after I created my own account.

Julie buntin