Everything I Told You Was True
The memory of a girl, the industry of forgetting her.
They played a SZA song at my best friend’s memorial. And not even one of the good ones. The low-effort remix version you throw on during brunch when you want to signal you have taste but not too much taste.
I watched the livestream from my phone, lying on the floor of my sublet in Astoria, back flat against hardwood warped with old water damage, hair still wet from a shower I didn’t need to take. My towel was just barely hanging around my waist like I’d forgotten how to use it. I let my skin dry cold.
Luz would’ve hated the playlist. Or at least pretended to. She would’ve hated the entire event. Some girl—I think her name was Dree?—read a poem about grief that didn’t rhyme, which would be fine, to be clear, if it was any good otherwise. “Grief is like a language we don’t speak / but dream in.” I’ll admit the high school version of me probably underlined a sentence like that in a library book once upon a time.
They held Luz’s memorial in the theater on campus, the old one with the Greek lettering carved above the doors and a rat problem they never solved because the donors never saw it, so what was the point, etc. Luz’s photo, the one where she’s got her cheek tilted like the patron saint of extroversion and her lips half-parted, played on a loop behind the speakers. It wasn’t her best photo in my not-so-humble opinion. But it was the one the university already had on file thanks to the “Diversity Mixer” last spring. My name for it.
Also, I’m the one who took that terrible photo. No one to blame but me.
The week before she died, Luz and I were planning to run. Not from anything dramatic. Not the cops, not ICE, not some gym-arm ex-boyfriend with bad credit and a tattoo of his own nickname on his chest. From the university itself. From our own names.
We had this plan—half-con, half-f***-you—to take our grant money and disappear before graduation. Luz had already mocked up fake documents, recut her passport photo. She said her new name would be Nereida. Like the ocean nymphs or maybe her abuela’s favorite novela, I’m not sure. I told her it was too romantic, so of course her counter was, “Well, yeah. That’s why I picked it.”
I didn’t have much in the way of a retort besides an eye-roll or two.
“Listen, you can be the practical one in our capers,” she had said after a beat, draped across the window ledge of our dorm like it was her personal fainting couch.
I said: “And you’ll be what?”
She smiled like a blade. “The bait.”
I met Luz during our scholarship interview. Seven girls in an overlit boardroom. All of us dressed like we’d Googled “professional” the night before and panicked. I wore a navy pantsuit from Zara with the tag still tucked into the sleeve. Luz wore white linen, as if announcing to the rest of us that she hadn’t sweat once in her life. I would go on to consider this a reasonable scientific theory.
They called her name first. She stood. Introduced herself as “Luz, like light.” The white girls laughed, even though they clearly didn’t get the joke.
Luz didn’t seem to notice me until the questions started. But when she did look at me…God. That look. She was practically reading my own human instruction manual. And when she saw I wasn’t laughing, that I hadn’t smiled politely with the others, she looked at me even harder.
I got the scholarship. So did she. Later, she’d claim she only remembered me because unlike everyone else, I didn’t clap for her.
At the memorial, no one mentioned the scholarship or what her name meant. More importantly, no one talked about the bathroom.
No one said found face down in her professor’s empty house with half a bottle of prosecco and a prayer card wedged under her thigh. No one said they think it was fentanyl, or the girl she was with who disappeared the next day, or Renata, I swear I saw you leave that party next door.
No one asked me anything at all, actually. Because no one knew for a fact that I was even there. I made sure of it.
I’m not writing any of this to confess. I’m writing this because someone is trying to option her story.
A blonde producer from a boutique agency emailed me yesterday with lots of exclamation points. She said Luz’s life “has the shape of myth.” She said it could be like “Euphoria” meets “Inventing Anna.” She said she wants “an honest perspective.”
Well, guess what? I’m the only honest person left. And I’m telling you now, before the script gets rewritten and the actress they hire gets her lip injections too early and calls her Luce on accident.
And everything I told you was true.
Even the lies.
The first time Luz and I ran a con together, it was at the Garrison Memorial Art Gala, where trustees wore loafers with no socks and paid six figures to have their names carved into limestone. She called it the Grift Olympics, which made me laugh until I realized she wasn’t entirely joking.
I still remember the password for the door: “borrowed light.” Some shithead intern had probably come up with it, thinking it profound and meaningful. Luz leaned into the doorman’s ear to reveal it as a whispered sin, and we were in.
She wore a navy dress she’d lifted from a consignment rack in Tribeca—pretty sure it was Theory, if you care about labels, which Luz most certainly did—but she cut out the tag so she could claim it was “custom.” She had her hair slicked back in full villainy. Lips the color of candied fruit. She didn’t walk into that room, if you ask me. She arrived with a key in her hand.
I played the part of her cousin visiting from out of town. Visiting from where, no one ever asked. They must’ve assumed D.C. or maybe Miami if I’m being generous with myself. Luz claimed I looked like someone who owned a burner phone. I took that as a huge compliment.
She had this whole backstory cooked up: our father/uncle owned a gallery in San Juan, we’d grown up cataloguing paintings and learning the difference between authentic and intimate…a distinction I still don’t think is real. Luz could say anything with a straight face if she tilted her chin slightly and let her vowels drag. One hedge fund ghoul in particular told her she spoke the way champagne “sounds.” Whatever the hell that means.
I remember standing by the sculpture of a melted-looking horse, watching Luz flirt with a curator whose eye shadow had to cost more than our rent. She touched his wrist, gently, as if she was checking for a pulse. He laughed like he’d never been touched before in his life. Luz had that effect on people.
“Don’t take anything,” she had told me on the way there. “Not yet, anyway. First, we collect.”
“Collect what?”
“Names. Weak points. Offers. Then we ghost them and let them wonder.”
That night, she made off with three business cards, one room key, and an honest-to-god line of credit. Ignoring her instructions, I stole a bottle of elderflower champagne I didn’t even want to drink. That’s the difference between us. Luz could get away with murder if she was so inclined. I could hardly get away with survival.
At one point, I caught her reflection in the window overlooking the Hudson—her arm around my waist, our faces pressed together like we were posing for a magazine spread about ‘Young Innovators of Color’ or whatever.
“Why are you smiling like that?” I asked her.
“Because this is how the world should see us,” she said, as if stating the most obvious truth everyone already knew. “Expensive. Untouchable.”
Later that night, back in our dorm room, she kicked off her shoes and lay on the floor like a chalk outline.
“We could’ve gotten more out of those people,” I said, mostly talking about myself.
She shrugged. “We will next time. And anyway, did you see the way that one guy looked at you?”
I hadn’t. She did this sometimes. Put desire in my mouth. I usually let her.
“You could destroy a man, Renata,” she whispered, eyes shut. “If you let me teach you.”
I sat at the edge of the bed, finishing the stolen champagne. It tasted god awful. She looked up at me like she was trying to peek into my future and was coming up short.
“Maybe you’re not ready,” she said, almost dreamily. “But you will be.”
And she fell asleep, just like that. Makeup still on, necklace denting her collarbone. I remember watching her chest rise and fall in such perfect peace, with me sitting there wondering what kind of girl gets away with living like this?
That’s what sticks out the most to me about the entire night. Not the scam. Not the dress or the cards or the disgusting champagne. It was the beginning of Luz believing she’d never have to pay for any of it.
The producer had already Googled me before I arrived.
Her nails were immaculate and light pink. Her voice hovered in that mid-Atlantic, mid-tired register particular to people who only looked relaxed in elevators and photoshoots. Her name was Hailey, spelled with the “i,” a fact she clearly needed me to know and considered a personality trait.
She motioned to a seat across from her in a café called Prospect that despite being new to the neighborhood already had 300 glowing reviews. More like Suspect. The walls were a scrubbed olive green and everyone inside appeared to be pretending they were cold, just so they could keep their jackets on.
This was how the meeting began: “I’m obsessed with Luz’s story. She’s…just so compelling.”
Right, compelling. That’s what we were calling tragedies now. I could easily picture Hailey with an “i” putting the word “compelling” into a pitch deck between bullet points and bolded adjectives.
“What we’re thinking is something elevated,” she continued. “Something real. It could be a limited series. A feminine mythos. Trauma-forward but with levity, ya know? I’m thinking ‘Sharp Objects’ meets…hm, something with Spanish people in it. Oh, Roma!”
Pretty ridiculous, but I wasn’t surprised. Luz’s death went national because it was neat, tragic, and photogenic. She had all the markers of symbolic loss. She was a Latina Ivy League student on full scholarship. Found dead in an off-campus house owned by a tenured professor who conveniently wasn’t there that night. Last sighted next to a girl who vanished right after the police arrived. And to top it all off, she had a paper due the next morning for said professor’s class titled “Decoding the Colonial Body.”
So of course the news sites called it “a fatal intersection of diversity and privilege.” The university released a statement so sterile it could have been typed up by a college student with a premium ChatGPT subscription.
And oh boy did the social apps have a field day. TikTok found her VSCO within hours. A minor celebrity posted her thesis title over piano music and called her a martyr of the neoliberal dream (Jesus Christ, people). Someone sold a candle with her face on it via Etsy. They chose rosewater as the scent, by the way, which to me was more mysterious than the tragedy itself.
After Luz died, someone at the university had set up a GoFundMe for her little brother. The campaign promised “educational continuity.” It raised thirty-two thousand dollars in three days, then quietly disappeared. No one updated the page. The last comment still read: Fly high, queen. With three dove emojis, naturally.
The university held a vigil, too. The same week, they sent out her posthumous honors list. I had to bet no one actually read her thesis, otherwise there’d be way more of an uproar. It was titled Performing Empire: A Latina Theory of Luxury.
I didn’t mention any of this to Hailey with an “i.” Instead, I nodded again when she said Luz’s life “had the makings of a Netflix documentary series.”
Not even a regular documentary, mind you. A whole damn series. Talk about the big time.
“That said, if we go with the limited series version, we do have options for casting.”
Hailey pulled out a deck with moodboards. They displayed stills of actresses with skin much lighter than Luz’s more bronze complexion.
There was a slide titled ICONIC SCENE: Luz lights a cigarette in the rain. Luz never smoked, which is a shame considering her overall vibe. Also, there was a potential title. MURDER ON CAMPUS: THE LUZ FERRERA STORY.
And a note in parentheses: (Mention her ethnicity?)
Also, and this part really took me off guard, they wanted it to start with me doing some kind of voiceover.
After the meeting, I walked back to my sublet and mentally catalogued the parts of Luz they wanted to keep, which included:
• Her fake personality
• Her real cheekbones
• Her proximity to whiteness
• Her proximity to death
They didn’t want her student debt. They didn’t want her shoebox of parking tickets. They didn’t want the video we made sophomore year, drunk on grapefruit soju, doing tarot in fake British accents.
They didn’t want me either. Not really. They wanted someone who used to know her. Someone pliable. But the reality of what Luz and I really were? Too inconvenient. It clashed with a narrative they concocted in their minds before learning a single thing about the two women they wanted to plaster on blue-light screens all over America.
That night, I sent Hailey an email. I told her I was thinking about saying “yes” to it all. The pay would be pretty generous for my trouble, and I needed cash. No one set up a GoFundMe for the stoner roommate, after all.
Afterward, I opened the Dropbox Luz had shared with me the week we made the plan to run. Just in case things went sideways.
The file contained:
• Three passport photos
• Two Word docs labeled “Nereida”
• One mp3 of her humming into my phone mic, low and off-key
• One note, untitled
The note read: Don’t let them make me small, babe.
I sighed, reading it for maybe the thousandth time. We weren’t even supposed to go out that night. We had promised ourselves ramen, facemasks, and a terribly written movie.
Instead, Luz put on the silver dress. The one that looked wet even when dry. The one that clung to her ribs, to the point where I secretly wondered if the designer had sewn it just for her. She came out of the bathroom just after ten, smelling like grapefruit and—holy shit—rosewater, and asked if the boots were too much. I told her no. Told her she looked like a rich girl pretending to be poor. She laughed. Said, “That’s the look, babe.”
Meanwhile, I had been in sweats all day, reading comments on my latest political Facebook post that no one asked for. But then the invite came from Jessamine—one of those girls who always had coke on her but somehow never paid rent—and Luz said it would be “low-key” if we went. She said it twice, as if the repetition would make it true. I asked who’d be there. She said people. I asked what kind. She said the kind with names that sound a little fake, but if you put up with them, they might offer you consulting gigs.
By 10:30 we were in an Uber with a driver who decided to be blissfully quiet. Luz turned her face to the window and said nothing the entire ride, which was a little strange of her in this context. She was normally a chatterbox after 9, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. She only touched my hand once and not like she needed to. Just enough to remind me that I was hers…even if I’d be sharing her with a bunch of other people for several hours, if not more.
The house was in Fort Greene. Stereotypical as hell. White walls, soft lighting, a couch no one wanted to sit on except for me. Someone handed Luz a drink out of nowhere before we even finished introductions. Someone else handed me a look that said: oh, hey, you’re the friend, right?
She moved fast, like always. Circling conversations without entering them. Laughing with her head tilted back, like she'd just remembered something funnier than what was being said. I kept her in sight. That was the deal.
Around midnight, she disappeared into the back room with a girl named Mia or Nia or something else vowel-heavy. I didn’t follow. I transitioned from the couch to the windowsill and watched the party swell around a playlist that kept mistaking volume for taste.
An hour later, I went looking for her, but she was gone. So was Mia-or-Nia. I asked around, and a guy wearing a fedora said he saw her take off on her own. Weird. I went outside and for some reason expected a trail of breadcrumbs. Instead, I heard a loud crash inside of a house about two doors down. I went to investigate, barely breathing with every step.
The next time I saw Luz, it wasn’t Luz. It was a pair of boots sticking out of a bathroom. It was her hair, haloed around the tile when I flipped her over. It was the hiss of me saying, “Oh my god,” too softly to matter.
I called the cops. When they arrived, the remaining partygoers had caught on to what happened and were freaking out. Someone opened the window. Someone else started crying. Still no sign of Mia-or-Nia.
I stayed. Long enough to lie. I said I didn’t know her. I said I’d just met her. I said I thought she was asleep. I gave a name that wasn't mine. I walked out the back before they could keep questioning me.
On the walk home, I didn’t cry or stop or call anyone. I got in the shower and let the water hit me as cold and harsh as possible. I thought if I shivered long enough, I could shake her name out of my mouth. But it stained me all the way down to my chest.
And look, I am in no way a reliable narrator. But I am the only one left who hasn’t made money off her. So if you want the story, this is it. Luz died wearing a silver dress she couldn’t afford. In a house that belonged to her professor. A professor with a seemingly airtight alibi.
I met Hailey again two weeks later at Prospect, which funny enough they renamed to The Grind. Only other change was that they now sold paperback reissues of Anaïs Nin. Anyway, Hailey ordered a matcha with oat milk, no ice. I remember because I was staring right at it as she told me that her company had a streaming partner lined up and they’d found a director who “really gets Luz’s trauma.”
Also, no more voiceover from me. Luz would open the pilot with a monologue “generated” by an AI version of her voice.
She asked if I had thoughts. I laughed, wondering how to communicate how evil my thoughts truly were. I decided to hold back my own murderous intent as I told her Luz never monologued. Luz was the type to get other people talking. To make you feel like a goddamn cathedral. And the idea of a f***ing robot talking in some bullshit version of her voice would make her want to come back to life just so she could die all over again.
“So, then, that makes it even more poetic!” Hailey countered.
“No,” I bit back. I told Hailey the story didn’t need a rewrite. It needed an ending or something close to it. Apparently, my usual cynicism had taken the day off. Or maybe I’d used it all up with that AI comment.
“And what kind of ending do you think Luz would want?” she asked, folding her hands. As if I was suddenly the screenwriter and she needed me to turn in my pages.
I obliged. I slid a USB drive across the table. On it: the Dropbox. The passport photos. The mp3. The note.
I said, “Play the audio.”
Her face became Christmas morning. She immediately plugged it into her laptop and hit play. Luz’s voice came through: humming off-key, a little breathy, like she was singing just for me, or maybe for herself.
Hailey looked up. Confused. “That’s…it?”
“No,” I said. “That’s just part of it.”
She didn’t get it. Of course she didn’t. So I stood, zipped my coat, and left her with the only thing Luz ever actually wanted. Not the myth. Not the martyrdom. Just the sound of a girl who never got the ending she deserved.
“Luz Ferrera wasn’t a saint,” I offer as my final words on the matter. “And no one will ever know the real her.”
Not even me.
Author’s Notes
This story actually got away from me, and I’m pretty glad it did. After all, I didn’t even set out to write about grief or media with this. But when a girl dies and someone with connections wants to sell her life, these subjects tend to intertwine.
This piece began, as many things do now, with a pitch deck I didn’t ask to see. It was lavender, Helvetica-heavy, and deeply concerned with what made a tragedy “compelling.” I couldn’t stop thinking about that word. How often it serves as shorthand for “palatable enough to sell.”
I started writing this as a kind of personal rebellion when it comes to mourning “correctly.” Or politely, I suppose. I thought a lot about the people who watch people they love turn into plot points after death. Luz, like too many others, becomes an aesthetic literally during eulogy. And Renata—if you insist that’s her real name—stayed behind to sort through what was salvageable.
To be clear, this is fiction. I don’t want anyone to take it too literally or assume I’ve lived this experience. I’m merely a passive observer of what I think is a truth (to softly quote a certain Rian Johnson movie). And to me, such truth can be found in someone humming a song off-key. That tells me more about a person than whatever gets filtered through the 2025 content machine.