Boyfriend Island

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 36: SPRING/SUMMER 2026

The hazy Sunday we ship Courtney off to Boyfriend Island I cry. I hold most of it as we say our good-byes and I kiss the soft yellow crown of her head and warn Paul to take good care of her. We watch as they don’t even glance back at the dock sinking under the weight of all the people who love them too. As the ferry pulls away, I break into shoulder-curling sobs. I can’t remember the last time I cried even a little bit, especially not sober, and I consider hiding my face. On second thought I leave my arms at my sides and let the others see. Maybe someone will take it upon themselves to tell Courtney how distressed I was. 

One of her old sorority sisters, Jessica maybe, pats me self-consciously on the back like she’s burping her baby, which is strapped to her chest in a trendy, dove-gray carrier. 

“She’s in a better place,” maybe-Jessica says. 

I nod a little and sniffle and bend down under the guise of cooing over the baby, which the other girls have been doing all morning. “Your mom’s an idiot,” I whisper to the baby who will someday grow up to learn this on its own.

“What?” says Jessica.

I stand back up to my full height. “I said thank you. You’re very wise.” 

Without Courtney, there is no one to link arms with as I walk away and no one to say, “tell me not to get another iced coffee” as she is already turning into a cafe and no one to pick the long white-blonde hairs off the back of my dark jacket and pretend to floss with them. There is no one left in the entire city who would care if Mel from six a.m. spin suddenly heart-reacted to my OOTD Instagram story taken in the reflection of the dirty elevator doors of my apartment building. 

“Courtney would send crying/laughing faces back, but I knew it was what she really longed for.”

I unlock my bike from where I left it around the corner, under the glowing orange arrow that reads “Boyfriend Island Departure.” In grad school, I’d ride past the sign on my way to class and take blurry Snapchats and write captions like “boyfriend pilled” and “pick-me central.” Courtney would send crying/laughing faces back, but I knew it was what she really longed for. She was always spouting off the rules for relationships from the Welcome to Boyfriend Island podcast. Don’t fuck on the first date. Don’t text your friends while you’re with him. Do spray your perfume all over his apartment like a dog marking its territory. For all Courtney’s talk about being content and her Sex and the City “maybe we’re each other’s soulmates” speeches, she longed to be with the girls whose boyfriends were wheeling their new matching luggage sets, fingers waffled together, walking along the rickety dock towards a shiny, constant togetherness. 

What could I offer in the face of all that?

I close my eyes for entire blocks of the ride home, my legs pumping harder and harder. I open them only when I feel the curb kiss my tires or hear a car honk particularly loud as it swerves away from me. I flip off an especially lively SUV who I probably cut off or something. Behind my eyelids, Paul opens his big, cavernous mouth and sucks Courtney inside like Kirby in Super Smash Bros., and she becomes a permanent part of him, and together they become Pourtney or whatever, and Pourtney doesn’t like to go out on Martini Mondays, and Pourtney thinks you’ve been a little erratic lately, and Pourtney is thinking of leaving the city, getting a bigger place closer to Pourtney’s parents so that they can watch Pourtney Jr. OMG, did we just let that slip? We took the test last week. We weren’t even trying. Our love is just so strong. It manifests new life. 

My roommate, David, doesn’t seem to even notice me when I enter, so I tiptoe back out and do it again, this time lumbering and sniffling and swallowing hard, like I’m trying to hold it all in. David is fifty-five and also my landlord and was once my mom’s roommate when she lived in the city, back before she had three children, each one ravaging her body more than the last until she was left scarred and big-footed and flat-nosed and mean. 

“Okay, okay,” he says, not even looking up from his book. “Shall we drown these feelings?”

The bar is a few blocks away and shimmeringly new, all dark blues and gold fixtures, occupying one of the city’s ever-changing storefronts. David orders two briny martinis with onion-filled olives, and after he puts his card down, I carry them both to a shaky table for us. He takes his drink from me and swallows a mouthful. 

“Disgusting,” he announces, though he has chosen the place and the drink and had, in fact, instructed the bartender very carefully on how to create it. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be cheering me up?” I ask.

“Oh, you always need cheering up. Such a morose generation.”

“We have a lot to be sad about.” I say it in an exaggerated way, and David and I both laugh, but a second later the annoyance sinks in because actually we do have a lot to be sad about. I wonder if the rising sea levels will sink Boyfriend Island one day.

We finish our martinis, and I’m sent back up to the bar with a new set of instructions for the next round and demands for a plate of fries, but only if they’re the battered kind, and a side of mayo because David spent a summer in Europe as a teenager.

As we drink and eat, I let myself sink further into the booth until finally David seems to have had enough. 

“It’s normal, darling. They go, they come back,” he says. “Even your mom went. Once, in the eighties.”

“With my dad?” 

He laughs, some martini spewing out of his open mouth and landing on the plate of fries, on the table, on me. “Oh no, no not with Tom.” I pull a face. “Really though, doll, they almost all come back eventually.”

Courtney never should have even wanted to go, I want to say. She should have always, always wanted to stay here with me and 2000s pop spin classes and Diet Cokes so crisp they hurt your tongue a little on the first sip. To David, I just harrumph and scoot even further down into my seat. 

He pats my arm, and this time he extracts himself from the booth, almost sending the table toppling over as he does, and goes to get us the next round. 

“David guides me towards our building and in the elevator I lean forward and rest my forehead against the cool doors, staring at my warped reflection. ”

When finally we step outside again, the night sky is a bright pearlescent gray, reflecting off mounds of dirty snow or maybe the other way around. Is it the sea that makes the sky blue or the opposite? I can never remember. David guides me towards our building and in the elevator I lean forward and rest my forehead against the cool doors, staring at my warped reflection. 

“Do you wish someone loved you?” I ask him.

“Jesssuuus Christ.” There’s a tug from behind—he’s grabbed a handful of my sweatshirt and yanked me away from the doors. “If this keeps going, I’m sending you home for Jenny to deal with. You don’t go around asking people that.” 

I sway a little, my sweatshirt still bunched up in his grasp. “Just asking for a friend,” I mumble.

David ignores me, and when the doors open, he pushes me through them a little harder than necessary. 

In my room, I pull off my sweatshirt, which is damp and seems to have gotten mayo on it at some point, and replace it with a skintight top Courtney and I named Lux after the host of Welcome to Boyfriend Island. Lux, the shirt and the girlboss entrepreneur, know exactly how to make guys fall for you. Deceptively simple, slick and black and tight in a way that manages to hug our tits and show off our clavicles (which we’d both worked very hard for) and look completely effortless in the process. There was only one in our size and we’d fought over it, but ultimately decided on a joint custody agreement that often swayed in my favor. 

I wait until I hear the sound of David’s CPAP before I make my escape. I reenter the bar we just left. It’s started to fill with a younger crowd, the music has gotten worse and also been turned up. Since it’s almost Monday, I order another martini. My hand is unsteady and the liquid keeps sloshing out of the wide mouth of the glass and onto my hand. 

Courtney met Paul on the street. This detail was always stressed because how exciting, how bizarre, how completely miraculous is it to meet someone outside of The Apps these days? How do you meet someone on the street?

Apparently like this: A Man sees A Beautiful Woman outside of Whole Foods. Her paper bag is about to burst (he can tell because in high school his lacrosse team bagged groceries to raise money for new uniforms). He says to her, “let me help you, that bag is going to explode.” And even though we’re supposed to be scared of strange men and he could have thieved all her expensive, organic groceries, she lets him. She doesn’t even know that someday she will be inhaled by him.

“She doesn’t even know that someday she will be inhaled by him.”

Just as I’m lifting the cloudy glass to my mouth, someone backs into me accidentally. I respond by tipping forward and then rocking backwards into them. We both stumble and now more than half of my drink is on my hand and wrist. 

“Watch it!” I say, turning around to face them. 

He’s only a few inches taller than me, but thickly built with broad shoulders and pecs you can see through his sweater, which is an ugly salmon color and too tight. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes dragging over me and Lux and my wet hand. “Let me buy you another drink.”

I smile, letting it quirk up on the left side to show the dimple I alone of my three siblings inherited from our mother. “Well if you’re offering, it’s the least you could do.”

We go to the bar, and I down the rest of the drink in my hand while he orders me another. His name is Daniel. He works in textbook sales or something. He’s here celebrating a friend’s birthday. When we collect my new martini, he leads me over to a group milling around a table full of empty glasses and I reluctantly follow.

We cut into their tight-packed conversation circle, and Daniel gestures to me with his Miller Lite. “This is my new friend, Liv.”

One of his companions, a brunette with an unflattering pixie cut, blinks at me with dark, inset eyes. “Do I know you?” she asks.

“I don’t think so.”

She squishes her entire face together, squinting at me. “OMG, I work at Louie’s. You know, that lunch place on Third. I always see you in there with that other girl. Grilled chicken Caesar wraps, light dressing.”

I scowl. “Oh, yeah. That’s me and my friend Courtney.”

“Is she here?” she asks. “You two seem kind of attached at the hip.”

“Oh.” I laugh uncomfortably and swallow a mouthful of bitter martini. “No, she, uh, left for the Island this morning.”

A thin man with gold-rimmed glasses across from us scoffs. “God, I can’t believe people still do that.”

“So heteronormative,” Deli girl agrees. “It’s actually so reductive to be like, I’m so obsessed with my boyfriend I can’t even be around anymore.”

I glance at Daniel, attempting to gauge his reaction, but his expression remains pleasantly neutral as he nods along to the pop punk song I lost my grinding virginity to at the seventh-grade St. Patrick’s Day dance. 

“But also.” Deli girl is still talking somehow. I realize she’s the birthday girl, denoted by a white sash partially hidden by a chunky, handknit cardigan. “Maybe better to like, separate them from the rest of us. Take them out of the general population until they’re ready to be civilized.”

An image of Courtney and Paul flashes in my mind. She’s naked and shiny, like she’s been oiled down. He’s caressing her face gently, like she might slip out of his grasp at any moment. “So none of you have ever gone?” I ask.

Everyone, even Daniel, laughs. 

“Of course not,” Glasses says. 

Deli girl motions to Daniel, who looks confused but leans towards her so she can whisper something in his ear. He purposely looks away from me as he laughs again. I excuse myself and start to walk towards where a bathroom probably is and then make a quick pivot to the door instead. The temperature has dropped, cold air shreds through my clothes.

In the basement of my building, I grab my bike. Last July, I had a situationship with a Penn Badgley look-alike who worked for the company that rents out the plastic, swan-shaped paddle boats that people can rent on nice days to cruise out on the water, out by the lighthouse and whatnot. They’re kept in a wooden shed by Pebble Beach and the northmost dock. I leave my bike leaning against the side of the structure, not bothering to find a place to lock up, and punch in the combination I remember. It’s wrong, but I persevere, switching two of the digits and trying again. On my fourth attempt, the door swings open and the dank smell of mildew and rot hits me. Did it smell like this when Penn Badgley and I hooked up here? I try to conjure the memory, but everything comes back to me fuzzy and confused, a painting that’s been smudged. Was I happy then? Have I ever been? I shake it off and begin to drag the swan nearest to me towards the murky water. 

“I try to conjure the memory, but everything comes back to me fuzzy and confused, a painting that’s been smudged.”

I feel like this is what I’ve really been training for. All those hours of spin and hot yoga and Pilates were so I could have this day where I bike and haul and paddle and my body doesn't ache at all. I make it into the boat and I close my eyes and imagine Courtney on the ferry earlier today. In my imagination, all the couples are making out, maybe there’s even some light fingering. They’re all so in love they can barely control themselves, and no one blames them at all, not even the yellow-raincoated Boyfriend Island Ferry Captain who doesn’t even get off on that kind of thing because he gets to go home to his wife of twenty-eight years who he took to Boyfriend Island the year I was born. 

Courtney has been mine since the day we met at hot yoga five years ago, she a seasoned regular in a daring fuchsia matching set, me a new-in-town grad student in old bike shorts and an oversized T-shirt I was trying to pull off as the Princess Di look. My college boyfriend of three years, Ian, had just broken up with me. With him, there had been no Boyfriend Island. There had been no meet-cute. There had been only the sticky basement of his off-campus house. He was there and I was there.

“Don’t you think it’s weird we never went?” I’d asked him once in his twin XL, my ear suctioned to his sticky chest after a classic three-position fuck. One of the editors of the college comedy magazine had recently left with his girlfriend for the Island, leaving the rest of the staff in a frustrated lurch. 

Ian laughed, his belly filling with air and disrupting my head’s resting place. “Nah, who wants to? Get so fucked you forget all your friends and your classes and your responsibilities?” Ian was weirdly into responsibilities for a comedian. 

Who would want to be so consumed by love they forgot everything else? I flicked his balls instead of responding. 

When I told Courtney the story of our relationship and its evidential demise, over post-yoga drinks, she was sympathetic. She had been there—if not there, then in a similar spot on the map. But we were young. Shouldn’t these be our Carrie Bradshaw years?

We imagined ourselves as the sexy, skinny, endearing leads in our own hit series. We shaved ourselves down and curated our wardrobes and rehearsed interesting answers to questions, like the night before a big interview. What do you do for fun? How long have you lived in the city? Is this good for you? We staged ourselves in high-traffic areas: looking lost in the middle of a busy Equinox, reading a pop-history book in a deli during lunch in the business district, outside of Whole Foods on a Sunday morning. I loved these days; Courtney and I would giggle at each other from across a crowded room, pulling faces, mouthing insults when the men turned their backs. When she had her fill, she’d saunter up to me. 

“Hey baby, can I buy you a drink?”

In the distance, a cartoonish tug boat, lit by a bright, swirling beacon, motors past, creating a wake that nearly tips the swan over. I’m tossed to the other side, where on a beautiful day another person would sit as we paddle around the lighthouse. My stomach turns, and some of the martini comes back up my throat, burning my tonsils. I clamp my teeth together to stop myself from vomiting fully, scared if I lean over the edge of the swan to let it out, I’ll topple over and drown, and David will have to come to the city morgue to identify my swollen, water-logged body.

The night of their second date I sat on Courtney’s bed as she tried on various bodysuits and little skirts and pants that tied at the waist and lacy bras and then no bra at all (she had asked me to bring Lux over and I had strategically forgotten). She and Paul hadn’t fucked on the first date, but tonight she was preparing. 

“I think this is like, it,” she said, rolling on a pair of tights. Courtney’s greatest sexual fantasy, she had told me many times, was for a man to pull off her tights the way Ryan Gosling did to Rachel McAdams in The Notebook. 

“It?” I asked.

A pillow hit me square in the face. “He’s a consultant. He has two older sisters. He loves his nephews. He said he really wants to go to Tokyo. You know I’ve always wanted to go to Tokyo.” She’d already told me all this, more than once if you counted the voice memo after their first date and when we’d rehashed it again in person, but I closed my eyes and listened to the bright trill of her voice anyway. 

After she left that night, I sprayed half a bottle of YSL perfume on her bed. I didn’t see her again for five weeks. I knew before she told me what was going to happen, but I made excuses anyway. Work was hectic for her. Maybe she was cutting back on spin. Her phone was just always dead haha. 

The boat finally stops rocking and I sit up slowly to take in my surroundings. That’s when I see it in the distance. Boyfriend Island is all fairy lights and trees with long hanging branches of lush green leaves even though it’s winter. There’s the faint sound of jazz and laughter.

“I can’t see their faces, but I know that no one has ever looked at me like that. ”

I paddle closer. There’s a beach covered in little cabanas and striped umbrellas. Near the water, I can almost make out a couple, dancing in the yellow glow of the string lights and the moon, and also maybe it’s emanating from them too. I can’t see their faces, but I know that no one has ever looked at me like that. 

It’s not Courtney and Paul but it might as well be. 

When I got the Partiful invitation to her dock send-off, I deleted the text immediately. She had forgotten about me. The goodbye was a formality, Courtney was already on the Boyfriend Island in her mind. pls i really want u to come, she texted me two days before. ur gonna love Paul. I was sure I wasn’t, but in the end I couldn’t say no to her any more than I could when she stationed me outside the stock exchange for three hours and advised me to bump into men over and over again and then make intense eye contact as they apologized. “Until one really sees you,” she told me. 

I let the boat float for a while, watching the couple sway. Recently I’d seen on Instagram that Ian and his new girlfriend went to the Island. I imagine that maybe this is him, even though it is clear from the man’s height and build that it isn’t. I imagine that the girl, who is short and curvy, is me. I imagine that our relationship had been completely different—that he had loved me entirely, and I had loved him effortlessly, and we had had eyes only for each other, and we had come to this island when we first met despite what it might have meant for the spring issue of the comedy magazine. I throw up over the side of the swan. If I drown now, will Courtney be able to tear herself away long enough to attend my funeral? 

On Monday, I download one of The Apps. 

Mark is the third person I see. He has dark, thinning hair and a soft, squishy-looking body. His second picture is with his mom, which makes me think he probably loves her too much, and his third picture is taken from across the table at a nice restaurant, which means he’s been broken in. Most of his responses to the prompts correspond to popular media, but on the very last one, under “something you might not guess about me,” he’s written, “I’m literally so desperate.” I swipe right, and we match immediately, and I open the messenger and send him a picture of my tits. Two weeks later we’re official.

On the ferry ride over, Mark rests his hand over mine on the railing. 

“It’s a beautiful island,” he says. 

I sweep my hair over one shoulder and look up at him. “Oh, you’ve been?”

“Many times.”