Parker I woke up on New Year’s Day at an Arthur kind of time. My upstairs neighbor’s elliptical was transmitting its heavy, rhythmic whir down through the ceiling, and I wasn’t exactly hungover—I’d chugged two glasses of water when I’d arrived home—but I wasn’t exactly normal, either. Something quivered in the center of my skull, and when I pulled myself upright it oscillated like a needle, and the instant I was on my feet, last night poured over me like a cool sea wind. Selina Chan and me, framed in the window of her friends’ apartment. Selina Chan a st ep behind me in the bookstore aisle, the metronome of those insane, brutal-looking heels, click, click, like the ticking alligator always just behind Captain Hook in Neverland. The ice white of her dress, high-necked and thin-strapped, clinging to her waist and hips, and the shine of her hair, loosely curled. The moment she’d looked at me and said, You don’t ever have to apologize to me for your opinion, and I’d realized—feeling like a house whose shutters had all slammed open at once in some gale-force wind, admitting some flood of illumination—that this was why I’d been unable to stop speaking to her this past week, why I’d felt so good the morning after our first confrontation, why I k ept crawling back to her, again and again, for more. This was why our mutual anger, and more recently this sharp-edged, amorphous thing between us, had felt so freeing, even exhilarating: Selina Chan had never wanted me filtered. In fact, the whole basis of her criticism had always been that she wanted me less filtered. And she’d seen me trying to prune back the truth last night, and she hadn’t wanted it, because that was Selina Chan. Someone who wanted the real thing, even when it wasn’t nice.
In that moment, I’d looked at her and tasted such a potent shot of understanding that the bourbon in my hand could have been water. In the bathroom I washed my face and regarded myself in the mirror; I barely saw myself. I saw her on the threshold of the party, still-faced, her somber mouth. Even more inexplicable: I’d had fun with her. I’d liked it, all of it— needling her, waiting for her to smack the tennis ball back, the energetic pleasure of the give-and-take; wandering the bookstore aisles together; saying anything I liked with her, feeling liberated, as though I were unbound from some constraints I unknowingly buckled on around other people. I’d liked the innate weirdness of seeing her at a party with her ordinary-seeming friends—I’d expected them to be tenured professors who thought Franzen was mainstream trash and spent all their time dissecting Ulysses over Armagnac. I came back to myself, standing stock-still in front of my mirror. I gave my head a hard shake, slapped my cheeks with cold water, and went to the front room to visit my laptop. The publication of High and Dry looked a lot closer from this side of New Year’s, and I’d been neglecting my social media. As I wrapped up a breakfast burrito and opened my browser, I wondered—what was I feeling about this book on the horizon? This book that felt utterly unknown to me now that I’d written it? @Parker Navarro Writes: High and Dry publishes in under two months, which means my next seven weeks will consist of trying to peer over the peak of the rollercoaster at rails that haven’t been laid down yet. If you’ve read the book in advance form and left kind words, thank you. Your enthusiasm helps with the nerves! Notifications began to accumulate, a dozen likes, then a hundred. I k ept refreshing the page, unsure what I was waiting for until it appeared in front of me.
@Selina Chan: @Parker Navarro Writes You’re wringing your hands over this? Beneath, she’d posted a screen cap of an orange banner on High and Dry’s Amazon page. Number-one new bestseller in Literary Fiction, apparently. The quivering thing in the center of my skull began to vibrate. I shifted forward in my seat, a strange satisfaction humming over the surface of my skin. @Parker Navarro Writes: @Selina Chan Yes, Selina. Sometimes we human beings experience emotions like “nervousness” when we have incomplete knowledge about something important. Let me know if you need more info! @Selina Chan: @Parker Navarro Writes Despite the book’s many, many flaws, it appears that sales are the last thing you need to worry about. @Parker Navarro Writes: @Selina Chan And it’s all thanks to you. My phone buzzed. I felt a jolt in my fingertips and flipped it face up, already knowing what I was going to see. 1 New Message from Selina Chan I can’t believe that my biggest material contribution to this literary year will be ensuring that High and Dry hits the NYT list. Why was I feeling the urge to laugh at this? A normal person, I said, would add “no offense” to that text message somewhere. But it’s an offensive text message, she said. That’s our entire thing, Parker. Offensive messages. Maybe you drank enough last night to forget. Something pulsated in the sensitive space between my heart and my stomach. I felt the cold glass sweating in my hand, the scrape of the bookstore’s unfinished wood against my temple. My fingers remembered the softness of her hand as I’d brushed it. Of course she
couldn’t really feel like ice or marble or enamel, but that instant of contact had still somehow startled me, the warmth of her skin. Had I imagined the color rising in her cheeks? I set down my phone. I couldn’t actually be thinking about Selina Chan in this way. I couldn’t, at this moment, be imagining what might have happened if I’d pushed a little farther, traced my fingers over her knuckles, run my hand up her arm—if I’d st epped forward into that impenetrable layer that seemed to surround her. My phone dinged again. I sw ept it up, wondering if I’d missed a chance, if I’d let this rhythm between us falter—but the message wasn’t from Selina. New Messages in Chan Pan Support Group Carla Lew Parker I just saw your posts. Wtf. The demon can’t even let you have a nice New Year’s Day?? Aiden Linville pictures please, what did she do Carla Lew [image] J. J. Purnell Does this count as harassment? Jenny House Ugh, I’m so sorry, Parker. Let us know if we can do anything I felt a cold prickle over the back of my neck. Parker Navarro Thanks y’all but it’s not a problem! Those posts felt like more of a joke. Parker Navarro Hope everybody had a fun New Year’s I thought of Selina looking out at the Manhattan skyline, her glass held to her collarbone, weary and half-ironic as she’d said, I came here when I was eighteen and assumed the city would fix all my
problems. My burrito had gone cold. I ate mechanically, telling myself the sour feeling in my gut was from last night’s drinks—wondering, in reality, how Selina would have reacted if she’d seen the things this group chat had said about her. I drained a glass of water and tried to shake the discomfort. Selina wouldn’t have been surprised. She knew the impact her reviews had; she knew the anger wrapped up in that. As I set my glass on the counter, I tried to think of some witty, offhand answer to her texts, but even as I typed in a few aimless letters, another message arrived, this time from Arthur. Bro I just saw Selina Chan being a dick to you online again. If you want to vent, feel free. I’m at my gate for the next 45 minutes so I’ve got time I hesitated, then typed, Thanks He r eplied seconds later: Seriously. For her to have the audacity to BE the reason you’re nervous about the book coming out, and then to act like it’s stupid for you to worry? Fuck that. Fuck her I was rereading the text when he said, But also if you weren’t thinking about it that hard, that’s great! Yeah, sorry, I said. I’m actually borderline hungover Oh for real? What’d you do last night? I thought for a moment, then wrote, My friend Julian had a house party. How about you? Took it easy. I had to get up at 8:00 Nobody’s ever suffered like you’ve suffered, Arthur. So true Fly safe, I said. Then I turned off my screen and hunched over the counter, feeling like the conversation had wiped some fogged-up window clean in my mind, so that I could see clearly again.
Everyone in my life was reading Selina’s posts as mockery. Was I being overgenerous, reading them as something like banter? I tugged my coat from the hook and laced up my boots. On our salted doorst ep, I reread her texts, and this time they didn’t have the laughing, secretive tone I’d lent them the first go around. They sounded arch and scathing. It’s an offensive text message. That’s our entire thing, Parker. Offensive messages. Maybe you drank enough last night to forget. The wind raked across my face. I parted my lips and drank in the cold. Was Selina right, as always? Had I forgotten what this was? It was just that I was trying to remember the version of her I’d met in October, the one who’d induced white-hot loathing from tiny behaviors like the handling of her purse or the turning of her head. I was trying to figure out what it meant that she’d invited me to a New Year’s party, and why I grabbed for my phone immediately whenever I thought she’d texted me. I was trying to figure out the difference between what I was doing now and what I’d been doing in November, when I’d woken up and checked her social media like it was the weather, obsessed by the thought of the next moment we’d interact. My temples had begun to throb. I headed down the block, phone still in hand, and scrolled through the next few days of Google Flights. With New Year’s in the rearview, the prices of a San Francisco round trip had cratered. With two taps, I was booked. I needed to get out of New York. I needed no further evidence that I was going stir-crazy than this: Even as I looked around at my neighborhood billowing with motion, the weaving of cars, the swaying of stoplights smacked by wind, the steaming of the halal stand on the corner—even as I walked faster
and faster into the city that had revved back into life around me—I felt as though some part of me remained absolutely still, frozen opposite her in the darkness of last night. I pushed my phone de ep into my pocket, her texts unanswered.