Parker Like every other house on our block, my mother’s place was a small, neat cube. The Walker house to our left was robin’s-egg blue, and the Vargas house to the right was the pale yellow of vanilla ice cream; ours was mint green. Side by side they looked like complementary paint chips. Duffel bag on my shoulder, I climbed our front st eps from street level to the second floor, where our door was set back from the road, in the shadow of a terrace dripping with wisteria. I hesitated on the square of concrete porch, looking at my phone. When I’d landed at SFO, my screen had lit up with delayed texts from the flight. A dozen had arrived from the Bay Area group chat, several from my siblings, forty from the Chan Pan Support Group, four from Arthur, and one—my eyes had fixed on it immediately, as though everything else were noise— from Selina. Would it break our truce, said the message preview, if I came to your book launch? What did this mean? We hadn’t spoken in over a week. I’d spent the time trying to parse my feelings about New Year’s, getting nowhere. Why was she asking about breaking the truce? Was this some threat for vicious articles to come? Did negative reviews of book launches exist? Or was she—ridiculous, I thought, completely stupid—was she asking me to invite her? I slipped my phone into my pocket and rang the bell. The sunset turned the roofs to black paper cutouts, and down the hall, the kitchen lights
glowed. The faint strains of folk music probed through the door, joined by hurried footst eps, then the flip of the lock. My mom threw open the door and exclaimed, “Pijay!” The rush of air, and her full-body tackle of an embrace, smelled so distinctly like my childhood—toasted bread, frying garlic, my mom’s lavender lotion, the air freshener with the blue bottle—that suddenly I was remembering the rest, too. The scuffed Adidas I’d worn to pieces through high school, and the family desktop computer in our living room where I’d worked on my unreadable preteen writing projects, but secretly, in the middle of the night, because during the daytime Christi and Justin monopolized it to use My Space. When I opened my eyes and drew back from my mother, looking down at the de ep wrinkles in her beaming face, it was like being struck in the face with my adulthood. “Come in, come in!” she said. “Thanks.” I toed off my shoes in the hall. “Wow, it’s so clean.” “Had to get ready for your visit! How was the flight?” “Pretty good. I wrote for a while.” I followed my mother into the kitchen, set my duffel bag against the wall, and sat down at the narrow table across from the oven. “Feels sort of liberating to get out of New York.” “Is it the book release? Or what’s been happening online?” “Not the book. The book’s okay.” I watched her unload the last few wineglasses from the dishwasher. “Have you been following the stuff online?” “Well, not all the time. Puts my blood pressure up. I just want to sit some of these people down and set them straight. And that woman, egging them all on.” She kneed the dishwasher shut, looking much more like an MMA fighter finishing off an opponent than you’d really expect from a woman who was sixty-six years old and five foot zero. “I don’t know how you stand it.”
“Yeah, I—I don’t know. I was in a weird spot over the holidays.” “Well, you’re here, now. You don’t have to think about any of that. Here, you must be hungry.” My mom opened a cabinet, climbed onto her st epstool, and took down enough of my favorite snacks to last a year, Oreos and polvorón and dried mango strips and tortilla chips with a jar of green salsa. I laughed. “Mom, I’m only here for three days.” “You can take it back with you!” She spread the bounty on the table. “Here, eat, eat.” “Thanks. You’re the best. How’s the hotel been?” She sat opposite me. “Oh, you know the holidays. Booked solid. Third- party reservation problems, guests destroying the place...” As she described a couple who’d wrecked their room and blamed it on the staff of the Harbor Inn, I watched her silver-lacquered nails drum against the plastic tablecloth and felt my contentment fade. Four years ago, I’d assumed that if I paid off this house, she’d retire early and never waste another second of her life worrying about hotel guests who vomited on their bathroom floors. But my mother sent part of every paycheck back to the Philippines for my grandfather, to the care facility where Lolo had lived since a pair of minor strokes, and as a fixture at the local Catholic church, she was generous to a fault, always contributing to funds for new immigrant families or buying baby clothes for single mothers. Trying to find a more cheerful subject, I asked, “Have you seen Kevin since he got back?” She sighed. “I haven’t. Didn’t he tell you? He lost his job.” “No. Seriously? Is he okay?” “I don’t think so. Hard to tell. You know Kevy. He mopes, he lashes out.” “That’s awful,” I muttered. “I really thought this one would work out.” After San Francisco State, Kevin had spent most of his twenties
in sales positions, getting bumped from company to company around the city. Two years ago, he’d sunk his meager savings into a data science boot camp, and a few months ago he’d finally gotten his first job as an analyst at a security firm. “He’ll find something else,” my mom said. “Everyone wants a data person.” “Hope so.” I didn’t realize I was massaging the spot between my eyebrows until my mom clasped my shoulder. “Pijay, you look tired. Go lie down, I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.” “Okay. Yeah. Thank you.” I shouldered my bag, avoiding her eyes. I’d spent the past few days imagining the comfort of being back here, especially without the family to juggle. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. In my old bedroom, I set the duffel on the dresser and lay down, feeling claustrophobic. The double bed, pushed under the window, took up the room’s entire width. The only other furnishings that fit were a bedside table and dresser, so my mother and I had installed shelves up to the ceiling, which still overflowed with the detritus of my teenage years, clear bins filled with socks and miscellaneous pens and scratched DVDs in busted cases, the skateboard I’d tried to adopt as my identity when I was fifteen, about two hundred books. I’d moved into this room, originally a storage closet, at fourteen. That was the year Justin had moved to L. A. for college, igniting a debate over which of us would inherit his room—Christi and Elena had shared at the time, and so had Kevin and I. Christi, at fifteen, was the obvious choice, but Kevin had made some incoherent argument about girls not needing privacy. When the argument veered into the personal, I’d insisted on moving in here. Kevin could ke ep our old room, Christi could inherit Justin’s, and Elena could spread out.
Everyone else was happy, and I was happy enough. I didn’t know why I was imagining Selina propped in the doorway, studying me. My phone found its way into my hand, and her message preview reappeared onscreen. Would it break our truce ... I let out a short sigh and switched to my thread with Kevin. I was supposed to be here to clear my head, not to circle the same questions that had made Brooklyn feel like it was folding in on me. Hey, I texted Kevin, I heard about your job. I’m so sorry. I’m in town for a few days—we could get Chibog or something? Let me know if you want to talk. A minute later, he r eplied. Yeah thanks it sucks. My ex boss was such an asshole. Happy new year youre fired I’m sure you’ll find something else soon. You’re extremely employable. Lol what? he said. You have no idea. Data sounds good but a lot of these jobs are getting automated and the market blows. Yeah probably if I went to Yale or Amherst I could just pick up the phone but some of us can’t. One scan of this text and a rapid, nervy pulse began to beat in my stomach. I reread it a few times. Why was he angry at me? What had I said wrong? I get the sentiment, I said, but I never got a job through Yale, and as far as I know, Elena hasn’t gotten one through Amherst. Check again shes only working at her startup thing because she went to school with someone’s rich ass cousin. And you probably could have done the same thing exc ept you chose to be an English major lol
My grip was constricting on my phone. I typed a few letters, not knowing what to say. It seemed enormously selfish to get frustrated with Kevin when I’d texted with the express purpose of consoling him. I was beginning to type Yeah when the ellipsis appeared on his end again. He typed for longer than Kevin was generally known to type. Down the hall my mother’s knife beat a rhythm on one of her ancient cutting boards. An enormous bubble appeared, kicking the rest of the conversation out of sight. The Elena thing is just insane bc she was a sociology major. Ik she got grants but she spent 60 k of our parents money and took 80 k of debt to get a soc degree which is FOR REAL a dead end degree unless youre doing academia. and now she has this great job and mom and dad are all “baby is such a grown up businesswoman, so driven and responsible” give me a fucking break. I actually WAS responsible and made sacrifices and didnt go to Northwestern because I KNEW we couldnt afford it and now im fucking unemployed and ofc thanks to you Elena doesnt even have to deal with the debt she signed up for. Shit is driving me crazy. I could feel my pulse throughout my body now, in my palms, in my throat. The walls seemed closer, the room darker. I pushed myself off the bed and strode back to the kitchen. My mother, aproned at the counter, was swaddling a glistening brick of tofu in paper towels with neat, practiced motions. “Mom,” I said, “I—I’m going to take a walk. Stretch my legs from the flight.” “Okay, sure! Dinner at six or so.” She let a series of heavy cookbooks thud down on the wrapped package, beginning to press out the moisture. Outside the sky was black, although it was barely 5 PM. A single car a couple of blocks away drifted through an intersection, and I caught
snatches of faraway ocean as I walked, faint as the sound of cloth rubbing against itself. It wasn’t until I turned out of the residential side roads onto the wide, flat pathway of Mission Street that I realized where I was going. I checked my watch. 5:18. Poppy Street Books was usually open until six. I’d wind between the shelves, the page-scented air stirring around me, until I reached the back corner by the biographies, where I’d sink into that enormous leather armchair and feel the weight of reality slip from my back, the way it had hundreds of times before. I imagined that if I r eplaced myself in that spot, I could access some feeling of refuge that had tided me through eighteen years here. I passed a gas station and a pond of white light, then crossed over a median whose runty, leafless trees shuddered in the evening wind. There, half a block ahead, the awning at the intersection of Mission and Poppy fluttered. But as I approached, my st eps slowed. The bookstore’s front window was dark. I stopped at the door. A sheet of paper taped inside the glass said, We are closing our doors after forty-two amazing years!! Thank you Daly City!! Little by little, the fast shallow heartbeat in my ears faded to something slow and dull, like the tap of one knuckle against a slab of wood. I touched the ridged metal bar on the door and let my fingers rest there until they turned cold. I made an aimless turn. The wind was sliding up the sleeves of my jacket. San Francisco wouldn’t freeze you like New York, but January wasn’t exactly balmy or forgiving. Ahead, light flowed down from the streetlamps like sheets hanging from clothespins. In a daze I wandered back up Mission Street and into the Quick Stop. More flickering fragments of memory here. Maricel and Tyler and I
had roamed these gleaming aisles every other Friday evening at seventeen, pissing off the unlucky cashiers with hissed jokes and explosions of laughter. I passed shelves of chip bags, the same four logos in eight colors apiece, and came to a standstill in an aisle of gummy sour and caramel packages jam-packed on their white hooks. Finally, with no other recourse, I took out my phone and reread the wall of text from Kevin. How long had he been harboring this resentment? When had he even found out about the loan payment? Had Elena told Christi, too? Justin? Our parents? Did anyone else in our family feel this way, and if they did, what was I supposed to say? Heart pattering, I force-closed Kevin’s thread and waded into the rest of the internet, looking for anything else to latch on to, cycling through tagged posts on social media, pressing likes and reactions, scanning my group chats but absorbing only the basic strokes. Three aisles over, some automatic scanner’s voice was telling someone over and over to please remove the unrecognized item from the bagging area. The LEDs beat down on my hands, rendering them colorless. I realized that I wanted desperately to talk to someone, but every text entry field on my screen looked like the response line on some unending exam, a test to find the perfect thing to say about Aiden’s health insurance or Xiangyu’s job applications, chance after chance to fall short, to knock cracks into my friendships and relationships, to let someone down. My heart had begun to sound in my ears again when I reached the last of my notifications, Selina’s unread text, a small blue dot beside her name. I wavered, then broke. I opened the message. Would it break our truce if I came to your book launch?
The whole system of traffic that was my thoughts seemed to draw to a halt. Here, at least, I could write whatever I wanted. All the acrimonious things Selina and I had hurled at each other, and she was still sending me text messages, as though I could say anything and it wouldn’t matter. Why, I typed, are you planning some elaborate sabotage I should know about? I hit Send. Moments later, her ellipsis appeared. She said, I’m sure I could come up with something, if that’s what you really want. I don’t think it counts as sabotage if we plan it together, Selina. A moment passed. Then: Selina Chan laughed at your message The muscles in my shoulders loosened. I settled back against the shelving as her next message arrived: That’s a shame. I need help assembling this Trojan horse I bought from IKEA. They sent me two hundred pounds of raw pinewood and a hex wrench the size of a toothpick. I began to smile. That’s what you get for ordering the Ödeshög, instead of the famously more streamlined Grönsved model. Ah, right, my mistake, she said. I’d help you get through the 92-st ep assembly pamphlet, but I’m actually in California. There was a pause, then, Visiting home? Yeah. My dad’s still in Manila, but I’m staying with my mom for a bit. Might see my brother. How has it been? she asked. It’s been great! I typed, but as the words appeared, I remembered her eyes on New Year’s, and that she didn’t want my apologies, my elisions. I felt, somehow, that this was the one line I didn’t want to cross with her. I didn’t want to lie. I deleted the text and started over. I’ve only been here for a few hours, I wrote, over the course of several effortful minutes, but they haven’t been ideal.
What made them less than ideal? she asked. Some holiday horror stories from my mom’s hotel job. She’s not as close to retirement as I’d like. Also, my favorite bookstore here closed down, and my brother is apparently frustrated that I helped our sister with her student loans. I stared at this draft text, feeling as though I’d slid sideways into a vivid dream. How had I arrived at these topics so quickly, topics I’d barely even broached with Arthur? I hesitated, pressed Send—and then felt an immediate stab of disbelief. What had I just done? Of course she’d only asked to be polite. Even as I batted around erratic thoughts about editing the message, her response appeared. I suppose with seven of you in that part of California, the financial pressure must have been pretty immense, especially around the time you went to college. And I remembered who I was talking to. My thoughts slowed. Selina Chan wouldn’t ask a question to be polite. She said what she meant, always. I was able to type, Yeah. The money situation was worse after the divorce, worse during college. A little better after my book deal. I didn’t know Kevin was bottling this up about Elena’s loans, though. I’m still trying to figure out how to answer. Are you and Kevin close? I’d say so, I said. I’ve never had big fights with any of my family. She typed for a while. So long that I imagined her standing in line at a coffee shop, frowning at her phone, wondering why exactly I was telling her my life story. I was taking up so much air in this conversation. Before she could send her r eply, I said, I’ll figure out what to say to him. Anyway, how’s New York? City must be getting ready for the anniversary party, right?
Her ellipsis disappeared, then reappeared. New York is cold, she said, and City has lots on its mind, yes. But I wanted to ask about the bookstore that closed. I shifted my shoulder blades against the metal shelves. Yeah. Poppy Street Books, I said eventually. I went there a lot as a kid. Did it shut recently? I’m not sure. I just walked there from my house and the place is empty. They’ve taken out the shelves. It looks like a cavity. She typed. I closed my eyes. She would say she was sorry, and I would have to either say the dignified lie, that I was fine, or debase myself by trying to articulate any of the immature ways in which I didn’t feel fine. My phone buzzed. I opened my eyes. She’d said, What are you doing now? Puzzled, I blinked a few times as the dialogues I’d been imagining faded away. I’m standing in a gas station convenience store across from the sour gummies. Do you think you’ll buy any sour gummies? Oddly, a smile pulled at my lips. I don’t know, lol. Why? It seems like you should do something nice for yourself. I’m not a big sour gummy person, I said. But I appreciate the idea. A notification dropped down from the top of the screen. Selina Chan paid you $5.00. “Sour gummy equivalent.” Excuse me, I texted her. Are you being thoughtful? What is this??? Elaborate act of sabotage, she said. I hit the laugh react on her text, then said, I do want to know what the extremely euphemistic “City has lots on its mind” means. She typed for a while. What arrived was, City is OK, really. Good luck with your brother.
My smile faded. The sign-off seemed so abrupt, even cold. I said Thanks and tucked my phone away, feeling off-kilter. She didn’t want to admit anything to me, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but still somehow felt like an unpleasant reminder. Before I left, I did buy a box of M&M’s, which I held on to in my jacket pocket as I walked home, feeling the contents shift and slide inside. Over dinner, I said to my mom, “Poppy Street Books closed.” “Oh, that’s right,” she said, giving my forearm a little squeeze. “I’m so sorry, Pijay. I meant to text you. You loved that place.” “Yeah.” I k ept my face serene. Why I’d brought it up, I didn’t know. I’d come all this way to see her, and she’d taken all this cleaning and cooking upon herself to make my visit a happy one. She’d made tofu sisig for dinner, my lifelong favorite. “I don’t know what you do to this,” I said, pointing my fork at my bowl. “I can never get it to taste this good.” After dinner, I took a long shower and slid into bed, staring up at the shelves, at my high school diploma, cobwebbed in the far corner. I found myself thinking of the journalist from Daly City who’d emailed me. I’m sure you have lots of demands on your time, but it’d be an honor to have you in our pages! I turned over in bed, the little guilts of the afternoon knitting into a hard lump in my stomach. It was hard not to see Poppy Street’s closure as symbolic. During my longest stretch away from California, the period of my life that I’d been most self-obsessed, when I hadn’t even joined my family for the holidays, Poppy Street had closed. Some ungrateful part of me was still trying to es cape the place and the people that had raised me, treating them like a burden instead of
trying to give back. I fished out my phone and found the email. Hey Brian, I wrote, so sorry for the late r eply. I’ve been struggling to ke ep on top of my emails, but I’m actually in Daly City the next few days! If you still want to do an interview, I’d be happy to grab coffee? Thanks for reaching out. Then I opened up my text with Kevin. I’m sorry, I wrote. I didn’t know you felt that way about Elena’s loans, but I get why it must have been frustrating. I wish you’d gone to Northwestern too. You know I would have done the same thing for you. After about fifteen minutes, Kevin said, Yeah I know. I’m not mad at you, ik it was cool of you to do that for her. the whole thing just sucks. Lunch at Chibog tomorrow? You have to pay though lol I got you, I said. I always did. I walked the San Bruno Mountain trail the next day with nothing but my water bottle and a copy of Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency. My lunch with Kevin had been mostly commiseration. I worried my way up the trail, but by the time I stood up from my reading spot an hour later, my thoughts had calmed. I spent the way home wondering if, when I got to my phone, I’d find that Selina had texted me again, reopening the door she’d shut yesterday. She hadn’t sent anything. What had arrived was an email from Brian Falwell: Hey, thank you so much for getting back to me! This is great timing. Your new book is out soon, right? I can time the profile to publish right around then! I drove down 280 the next morning to meet Brian at 85 C, an Asian bakery where I maxed out my daily sugar intake with a brilliantly marbled Thai tea. Brian drank drip coffee. He looked almost identical
to the way I remembered him from high school, tanned and round-faced and dressed in casual wear: Stanford hoodie, joggers clinging to his knobby ankles, neon sneakers. He had not one but two bouncing knees and an eager, wide-eyed expression that made me feel like we were on the brink of some incredible discovery together. Off the record, we talked high school for a while, the r eputations of clubs that would probably be unrecognizable to us now, friends and acquaintances. “Wait, wait,” he said, snapping his fingers, “you’re not still dating Cecilia, are you? Cecilia—what was her name? Mc—something?” “Mc Crory,” I said with a laugh. “Yeah, no, we broke up in college. She went to Bryn Mawr, and—” “Oh, long distance sucks.” “A lot, yeah. I spent half my sophomore year on trains to Philly.” Brian looked wistful. “Man, she was beautiful, though.” Cecilia had been beautiful, and flighty, and the first girl in my life to show interest in me. I’d spent my second year of college terrified of losing her, even as I grew more confused and upset that I was the only one traveling to maintain our relationship. Another half hour passed before we arrived at the topic of writing. I’d scanned a couple of Brian’s pieces, and he seemed like a good profiler, not too interested in poetic flourishes or creating grand narratives about his subjects’ lives. As he asked me about Yale, a continuous stream of shorthand appeared on the notebook in front of him. “Okay,” he said, once I’d described the five years it had taken to get These Extraordinary Times down on paper. “I don’t want to jump ahead, I mean, I want to get the context and everything, but...” He shook his head. “Hearing it took that long, and knowing what happened with Selina Chan? That’s brutal.”
I sipped five grams of sugar through my straw. I’d known we’d get to the feud eventually. Last night I’d found myself dismantling and reassembling sentences in my mind, ideas of how to describe the fight, now that Selina and I had a truce. But somehow I still didn’t feel pr epared to talk about her. “Yeah,” I said, setting down my drink. “Yeah, it definitely felt brutal.” “I’ve read a lot of your press to get a sense of the timeline, but that day the first City review came out ... can you describe what went through your head?” I hesitated. “So, um—I want to preface this by saying that I’ve actually been talking to Selina a little more in the past few weeks.” “Whoa. For real?” He jotted a note. “Yeah. We have a truce going.” Brian laughed. “Wow, okay, I did not expect that.” He set down his pen. “If you don’t want me to mention a truce, I won’t, but can I ask how it happened?” “No, yeah, maybe better not to mention it—I don’t know how she’d feel about it. But we were both stuck in the city over the holidays.” “Right. There was that storm.” “Exactly. And she ... I don’t know. She’s a complicated person. Apparently she stays there every year, you know, on her own, and she doesn’t seem to have any problems with that. I guess part of me is kind of impressed by her.” “Begrudgingly?” said Brian. I laughed. “Yeah, less begrudgingly now. Anyway, that’s the context. As for the review...” Brian picked his pen back up and waited. I winced, rubbing one hand through my hair. “I’m still of two minds about everything that’s ... I mean, I remember that day clearer than any single other day, I think, from my twenties. My college graduation, the day Bill flew out here, the actual book sale—I don’t remember any of those as clearly as the day of the review. Maybe some of that is the drastic before and after, right? Like, when I woke up that morning, my whole future seemed
rock-solid, guaranteed, written in permanent ink, and by the time I went to sle ep that night, it was all gone. “At the same time, I mean ... it is Selina’s job, and all she cares about is doing it with integrity. And obviously that has to mean being honest, even if...” “If it feels like...” Brian said, nodding, jotting notes. “Yeah, even if on my end, it feels like this is the worst possible thing that could happen to you as a writer. So, I had this knee-jerk response. Like, you just think, ‘What are this person’s qualifications,’ ‘What kind of a person does she have to be to ... to do this to people.’ But she’s not trying to speak for everybody. She’s just a person with an opinion. Which is something that I’ve told myself so many times in so many contexts now, and some days it makes everything feel more manageable, and other days it makes everything worse.” Brian’s eyebrows had risen, but he k ept writing. “Wow. Yeah. Okay.” “Sorry.” I laughed. The back of my neck felt hot. “I guess I’ve been trying to process a lot of this.” “No, no worries, man.” He set down his pen and took another sip of his coffee. “Are you trying to decide whether to let things go?” “I don’t know.” I hesitated. “Maybe it’s the opposite. Like I’m trying to figure out what to hold on to.” The rest of the day was a blur of fog. In late afternoon, my mother and I walked westward toward the sea, and she asked, unprompted, “Pijay, have you been seeing anyone?” “Not really.” “Not really. What does that mean?” I curled my hands in my jacket pockets, glancing up the street at the headlamps, diffuse ovals through the fog. “Nothing. Yeah. It means no.” “You know I liked Kate.”
I laughed. “That was five years ago, Mom.” “Still! You took such good care of each other.” I didn’t answer. My relationship with Kate had been defined by her life in residency, urgent, rigid, and scheduled. I’d dropped everything to see her when she was available. I’d molded my life around the shape of hers like wet clay pushed against a hard object. It bothered me, sometimes, that nobody in my family had seemed to recognize this, the way I’d started to slip-slide so completely into her life. “What about you?” I asked. “Are you dating?” “Me?” My mom laughed. “Of course not.” “Wait, why of course not? I thought you met someone at that book club.” “Oh, Alan. Pff. Wrong for both of us.” The wind lifted my mother’s hair, blowing a few strands across her face. She caught it back and bundled it up at the crown of her head with one of her plastic clasps. “To tell you the truth, I find it a lot easier, being alone. There’s no trouble, no dramatics. After your father, everything was such a relief ... the relaxation of it, you know. My systems had been in overdrive for so long.” I’d heard some variation of this from my mother since I was twelve years old. I didn’t know why, now, the words disturbed me. “Um, that overdrive feeling,” I said. “How do you know whether that’s a positive or a negative?” I paused. “Because it’s not like being interested in somebody is a quiet feeling, either, right? So, I mean, how do you know if you’re feeling agitation or excitation or whatever it is for the right or wrong reasons?” My mom looked up at me, a sad tilt to the creases around her eyes. “Well, I don’t know, Pijay. I never knew.” She laughed. “That’s why everything happened this way, isn’t it?” And she slipped her arm through mine and walked me to the sea, where we watched the waves turn over and over.
I flew back to New York the next day. I’d imagined California would open my head up and scrub my skull cavity clean somehow, but as the plane hit the tarmac at JFK, I felt no measurable difference in my thoughts, in my level of contentment, clarity, anything. I opened my phone. The notifications began to roll in. Chan Pan Support Group, Sibling Megatext, The Obviously Evil Bird Archive, Arthur, Bill, Dad, some unsaved number that was probably spam, nothing from Selina. She wasn’t obliged to text me, of course. She’d started our previous conversation, so maybe the onus was on me to reach out, if I wanted to speak with her again. And I did. I could admit that much to myself: I wanted to speak with her, the way I’d want to scratch an itch, the way I’d want to satisfy hunger, but I didn’t know where that instinct came from, or whether it was the type of instinct that led anywhere good. Unthinking, I opened the spam text, only to realize that it wasn’t spam. Hi Parker! Sorry this text is so late. Bookstores get crazy around the holidays. But it’s Emily from Word I wondered would you want to have dinner sometime? Again, no pressure if you think it’ll make anything weird for the launch! We can also ke ep it totally professional! I was still deciding how to respond when I unlocked our apartment door an hour later. “Hey, he’s back,” said Arthur as I unlaced my sneakers. He lay on the sofa in a half-open bathrobe, his work laptop balanced on his stomach. “I’m back,” I said. “Listen—are you busy?” “Nah. Why?” “This woman who works at the bookstore asked me out.” “Oh, for real?” Arthur levered himself up on the sofa. “The one with the curly hair, or the one who’s like fifty years old?”
“Arthur. What do you think?” “Right. The fifty-year-old.” “I hate you.” “Same. So, what’d you say?” “Nothing yet.” I dropped my duffel and settled into a chair. “I don’t know. I’m ... she’s running my book launch, for one thing.” “Good point. Don’t shit where you eat.” “Bro. Could you not describe my love life as taking a shit?” “Do mine ears deceive me? Does the renowned author not know what a metaphor is?” I rolled my eyes, smiling. “Anyway, even without the launch, I’m ... I don’t know.” “Why don’t you know? She’s hot and likes books. Isn’t that, like, all two of your boxes checked?” For the first time, I considered trying to explain to Arthur what had happened with Selina over the holidays, but I could predict his reaction down to the beat. He’d howl me out of the room, urge me to say yes to Emily purely because she wasn’t Selina Chan. “I guess I’ve been thinking I ... I might be interested in something else,” I said, looking down at Emily’s text. “But you don’t even know this woman. How do you know you want something different?” “Yeah. That’s true, you’re right.” I hesitated, then stood. “I’m going to unpack.” As I headed down the hall, Arthur called, “You should do it, Park. You’re the one who’s always talking about how apps are a textureless way to meet somebody.” “And they are,” I called back before shutting myself away in my sanctuary.
Having settled into my hammock, I reread Monday’s conversation with Selina, trying to decipher her intentions, which seemed slippery and changeable. It felt like trying to interpret the shift in a summer wind. I watched the ceiling sway with the movement of my hammock. That night, discovering the empty space where something I’d loved had been, I hadn’t turned to my family or friends but, inexplicably, to her. Stranger was the fact that she’d made me feel better, her small, calm texts puncturing my feelings of distance and self-pity. Yet I couldn’t even admit to Arthur or my mother that I was talking with her. The agitation I felt whenever she spoke to me—was that the overdrive my mom had described? My body seeking out a high-conflict situation because it couldn’t distinguish between an adrenaline rush and desire? I felt suddenly desperate for clarity, any hard answer, any obvious truth. I found myself closing our texts and navigating to the City website and, out of four years’ habit, reopening her review of These Extraordinary Times. As I reread, the hum in me quieted, then died out. At three hundred pages, the book might have been a disappointment. At nine hundred, it feels like a cruelty. The words hurt as much now as they had four years ago. In fact, they found new places to hurt, because now I imagined her looking me in the eye and speaking them. Selina had once told me she didn’t do retractions. I knew she chose every word with care. She could easily have written a pan without punchlines, without a drop of ridicule, but this was what she’d always maintained: That I was an insult to literary culture, not just talentless but beneath contempt. That I’d failed at the one thing I’d ever loved.
I stood up so quickly that my vision swam. No, a few polite questions on Monday didn’t make Selina Chan a kind person, no matter what her friends said. Had I brainwashed myself into thinking she was anything other than disdainful and unsympathetic, just because—why? Because she was beautiful? Because she could be funny? Because she had a bad relationship with her parents? A truce was one thing, but was my self-worth really so low that I’d feel interested in somebody who’d written about me like this? That seemed like the mindset of a desperate person, but I didn’t have to be desperate. I had a career that impressed ninety-nine percent of people. I’d had enough girlfriends and second dates to know that, despite the way I’d felt growing up, I actually wasn’t bad-looking, and since signing up for my overpriced gym, I knew I was in the best shape of my life. Didn’t I think I was good enough for somebody like—like Emily, somebody who smiled when she saw me? I reopened Emily’s text. Hey, Happy New Year! I wrote. It’s great to hear from you. Dinner sounds fun. Oh I’m so glad! she said. What’s your schedule like? We set a date for the following weekend, and I set my phone face down on my bedside table and began to unpack my bag. I felt clearheaded, unconfused, undisturbed. I felt ready for the st eps ahead, and I could anticipate how it would feel to take them. This was how it was all supposed to be.