Kath

Kath’s friendship with Taylor begins in adolescence and becomes one of the central relationships through which she learns to interpret desire, distance, and her own past. A perceptive observer who can turn friendship into close scrutiny, she eventually makes a life of her own as a lawyer in Brooklyn. Yet the old attachment does not simply disappear: years later, while helping prepare Taylor’s wedding celebrations, Kath finds herself watching her friend for signs and acting on a wish she has never fully named.

Identity and Early Friendship

As a teenager, Kath is close to Taylor and Lizzie. At a sleepover, Taylor asks to watch a film again, sitting so near the television that its pastel closing credits reflect on her cheekbones. Lizzie complains that she had hoped to play levitation, but Taylor is already crawling toward the VCR and wants to know everyone’s favorite scene. Kath suspects Lizzie likes the film as much as Taylor does, despite being embarrassed to show it. Taylor, by contrast, is unembarrassed in her enthusiasm.

That night the girls try levitation, briefly lifting Taylor above their heads before she falls; they play MASH to learn the names of their future husbands, then try unsuccessfully to make the sleeping Lizzie wet the bed by putting her hand in warm water. The film remains a sleepover fixture for weeks, until Taylor’s mother finds and confiscates the tape. The girls move on to Candyman, and Taylor’s intense interest shifts elsewhere. When Taylor begins spending time with Greta Jorgensen, whom both Kath and Lizzie dislike, the friends stop speaking for several weeks. By the time they resume their friendship, their sleepovers already feel like something from a much earlier age.

Love, Observation, and Distance

In high school, Kath uses the image of the Pool Boy to understand Taylor’s choices. When Taylor explains that she is dating Jason McAuliffe because she likes the way he looks at her, Kath recalls the film’s figure: someone who kisses Taylor’s feet and is happy to suffer for her. The image becomes Kath’s way of making sense of Taylor’s repeated relationships with depressed, troubled, and alcoholic boys. At parties, strangers ask what Taylor, beautiful and popular, sees in one of her unhappy boyfriends. Kath’s private interpretation turns this recurring mismatch into a pattern she can recognize, though not necessarily change.

During their senior year, Kath comes out as gay without drama. Soon she falls in love with her first real girlfriend, which makes it easier to loosen her hold on the years spent longing for Taylor. In retrospect, she partly recasts that past as an intensely close teenage friendship; it was friendship, but not only that. The crush leaves her with a lasting habit of examining Taylor closely and trying to read every sign.

That habit briefly breaks into speech one night when both women are very drunk. Taylor is crying over yet another relationship that has ended badly, and Kath tells her that she is a disaster and that Kath cannot believe she was in love with her for so long. Taylor stops crying in shock and asks whether Kath loved her. Kath immediately withdraws the admission and tells her to forget it. Neither raises the subject again after they sober up. The confession changes what Taylor knows, but not the terms of their friendship; the feeling becomes something both leave unaddressed.

The three friends scatter to colleges around the country. Taylor meets Gabriel during orientation, and she and Kath grow apart over the following four years. Kath hears about the relationship mostly through Lizzie: it involves recurring fights, painful reconciliations, infidelity, suicide attempts, and police intervention. When Taylor follows Gabriel to California and puts college aside after he agrees to reconcile, Lizzie visits and reports that Taylor has lost weight, drinks vodka tonics one after another, and has dark circles under her eyes and bruises on her arm. Kath’s access to Taylor’s crisis is thus indirect, mediated by the friend who knows more of its particulars.

Adult Friendship and the Wedding

Ten years later, Kath and Lizzie live in Brooklyn. Lizzie works for a nonprofit organization in education; Kath is an attorney specializing in contract law and dates both men and women. Taylor remains in California. Her relationship with Gabriel is over, and she appears to be doing better: she has changed jobs, found a new therapist, and earned her degree. Lizzie tells Kath that Taylor is seeing Ryan, whom she describes as a good match. When Taylor announces on Skype that they are getting married, Lizzie exclaims with joy. Beside her, Kath experiences a sudden return of her younger self and privately wonders who Ryan is. She recovers and offers congratulations, working to match Lizzie’s excitement.

Kath initially finds it difficult to plan a bachelorette weekend around Taylor’s tastes rather than her own. After Lizzie challenges her to stop centering herself and think about Taylor, Kath makes a serious effort. She emails the other bridesmaids to ask about dietary, religious, and pregnancy-related needs, builds a spreadsheet combining their preferences and availability, narrows the options to three, and runs a poll. The selected plan is a weekend at a cabin in the Sierras, whose website advertises a large fireplace, a luxury hot tub, and striking views. Kath is proud of having organized it, and she and Taylor have a couple of pleasant conversations alone. She learns that Ryan is from Colorado, that the couple met on eHarmony, and that Taylor values his calmness, sincerity, environmental concern, and close but not overly dependent relationship with his mother. Kath allows herself to hope that their friendship is entering a happier second act, with old distances closing and old hurts healed.

The plan changes: Lizzie tells Kath that Taylor is embarrassed to say she wants a different bachelorette arrangement. During the celebration, Kath continues to study Taylor’s face, projecting possible futures onto it—from a home full of children and cheerful disorder to a body disciplined by diets and cosmetic procedures. The intensity of this attention prompts an internal check. Kath recognizes that she often makes herself central to matters that do not concern her, a tendency she has heard about from former partners. She also refuses the simplest explanation for her free-falling feeling around Taylor: that she is still in love. She does not know what to call it, but will not call it love.

The Poolside Ending

The bachelorette party moves through brunch, a spa, and a sangria-fueled happy hour before the group gathers at a hotel patio beside an infinity pool overlooking the night lights of Los Angeles. After eight hours together, the bridesmaids are tired, their conversation has run thin, and continued drinking is making them feel worse. Taylor has been texting Ryan; each time she picks up her phone and puts it down again, Kath reads the gesture as evidence that they have argued.

At the pool, the Pool Boy from the film Kath remembers becomes a real, paid performer. He swims butterfly for several lengths, then waits beside Taylor, seated at the pool’s edge. Taylor removes a sandal and offers him her foot. He takes it and puts her big toe in his mouth as the bridesmaids watch. Taylor then presses her foot against his bare shoulder and forces him underwater. Kath imagines the performance as a scene of confinement, though she knows it is play and that he is being paid. When he finally surfaces, Taylor looks down at him and ends the encounter.

Kath understands the surprise as having given Taylor what she wanted, but what follows remains uncertain. Taylor laughs and says the performance is enough for the night. As she pulls her foot from the water, Kath comes up behind her, puts both hands on her shoulders, and pushes her into the pool. The action converts Kath’s long habit of watching Taylor into a physical intervention: she does not explain the old love or resolve its ambiguity, but answers the evening with a sudden, intimate shove. The poolside scene also brings the teenage film back into the present, making the remembered Pool Boy both a private interpretive image and the staged spectacle through which Kath and Taylor’s unresolved closeness reappears.