Brett Reconnects with Carrie Newsome

Brett Bohlinger’s reconnection with Carrie Newsome begins with a search and a friend request Brett is not ready to send herself. It brings back the childhood friendship she believes she betrayed, and makes a tentative new meeting possible when Carrie responds with affection rather than reproach.

Finding Carrie Again

After searching unsuccessfully for Carrie, Brett opens her computer again and types Carrie’s name. With Megan beside her, she looks through several pages before finding Carrie in a Wisconsin sweatshirt. Carrie looks remarkably unchanged to Brett: athletic, wearing glasses, and smiling. The photograph does not make the past feel safely distant. Instead, it sharpens Brett’s guilt, and she wonders how she could have been so cruel. Looking at the image through tears, she recognizes the force of her attachment in the simple admission, “I loved this girl.”

Megan sees the photograph differently. She makes a teasing remark about Carrie’s appearance, but Brett tells her to stop. Brett cannot explain away her old sense that Carrie was somehow out of her league; Megan, she thinks, would never understand it. Her hesitation is not indifference. It is the shame of wanting to recover a friendship while fearing that Carrie has every reason to refuse it.

The Friend Request

Brett’s anxiety becomes visible in the small physical and digital actions around the search. When Megan asks whether she has found Carrie, Brett shuts the laptop and says she has not; she waits until Megan is on the other side of the table before opening it again. After they find Carrie’s profile, Megan takes over the cursor and clicks “ADD FRIEND” before Brett has agreed. Brett gasps that she cannot believe Megan did it. Megan celebrates, while Brett imagines the request as a cruel reminder to Carrie of the friend who once loved her and then betrayed her.

The intervention moves the story forward without resolving Brett’s guilt. Megan is already ready to move on to the next item on Brett’s agenda, suggesting that they go to a pet store to find a dog. Brett, by contrast, remains fixed on what the request may mean to Carrie. The gesture is small, but it exposes the distance between taking a first step and believing oneself entitled to forgiveness.

A Friendship Broken

The importance Brett gives this contact comes from a long intimacy, not merely from nostalgia. Carrie was the friend who could read Brett’s thoughts, challenge her, and laugh at her jokes. When Carrie’s family moved from Rogers Park to Madison, Brett experienced the departure as the end of her world. For the first year after the move, the girls wrote to one another faithfully. Then Carrie returned for a weekend visit, after which they never spoke again. Brett recalls that last rupture as the consequence of her own cruelty and says that, despite the atoning she has done, she has never forgiven herself.

Carrie’s childhood nickname for Brett makes the lost closeness especially tangible. After Brett complained about having a boy’s name, Carrie proposed alternatives, and the two settled on “Bretel.” The name, associated in Brett’s memory with candy houses and quick-witted children, belonged to their private bond: everyone else called her Brett, but Carrie called her Bretel. The nickname returns when Carrie writes, making her message sound like an opening from the friendship they once had rather than a note from a stranger.

Carrie’s Reply and the Invitation

Later, while Andrew sleeps, Brett leaves their bed, takes her laptop and robe, and goes to the sofa. She intends to search for Johnny Manns, but first finds a Facebook message from Carrie. Carrie says she has fond memories of Brett, is surprised and happy that Brett remembered and found her, and will be in Chicago the following month for the National Association of Social Workers conference at McCormick Place on November 14. She suggests lunch or, better yet, dinner, and says she has missed Brett. The warmth of the message meets Brett’s fear that Carrie will see the friend request only as a reminder of betrayal.

Brett responds by calling Carrie “Care Bear,” apologizing, and saying she would love to meet on the fourteenth, then asks whether Carrie will be staying at a hotel. She presses Enter. The response does not erase the years of silence or establish what happened during the visit that ended their friendship. Instead, it turns remorse into a concrete invitation: for the first time in years, the two have a date and a place to begin speaking again. Immediately afterward, Brett returns to her search for Johnny Manns, so the renewed friendship sits alongside, rather than replacing, the other unresolved questions occupying her life.