Excerpt from The Friend Who Got Away by Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I don't remember if the boy called Stella from my house, or if he waited a few hours and called her from a phone booth in the train station. I do remember him reveling in his abject abasement. I couldn't believe how much he reveled. He was, among other things, a religious nut. But back to Stella. It's funny how even now my mind wanders back to him. This man I did not even delude myself into thinking that I cared about. This man I did not even like.

Stella, needless to say, was furious, mostly at me. I've noticed, in these cases, one is always furious at the person of the same sex, and one always finds the person of the other sex contemptible yet oddly blameless. To further complicate things, Stella and I were supposed to be roommates in the fall. This made everything infinitely worse: undoing our roommate arrangements proved to be more arduous than one would think. We had to disentangle ourselves officially in the eyes of the bureaucracy, and on paper: it was like getting a divorce.

Before I go any further maybe I should say something about self-destructiveness in those years. That warm July night, there was the pleasure of destruction, of Zippo lighters torching straw huts, of razing something truly good and valuable to the ground; there was the sense, however subliminal, of disemboweling a friendship. I remember filleting fish that I caught with my father on the docks, and seeing liver, kidney, roe splayed open on the slick wooden docks, for all to see. There was something thrilling and disgusting about it. Tearing open my friendship with Stella had the same effect. I felt sickened. I felt the freeing thrill of ruining everything.

Excerpted from The Friend Who Got Away by Edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell Copyright © 2005 by Jenny Offill. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.