Parker I told myself I was so lucky that this was the worst day of my life. I reminded myself that other people had real problems. I told myself stories about those problems, about death, loss, and physical pain, as I sat there in my apartment with food in the fridge and money in my bank account and my family and friends in good health. I hope this piece of shit never writes another word in his life One-starred before reading because I don’t support people poisoning other people with their internalized racism Arthur made me lunch, which we ate in silence. Bill called me and said, “This is what I meant, before, when I said it could be worse.” Unbelievable that Anna Delaney is platforming this guy No it’s okay I just heard she dropped the book OK good, at least she isn’t a hypocrite Tessa Hargreaves sent word through her agent that she was withdrawing as the conversation partner for my launch. Not even an hour later, Bill received an email from the book festival in Seattle, rescinding my keynote invitation for S eptember. Nobody from Coronation had been in touch with either guidance or reassurance. I felt as though I were hurtling down a long, straight road and watching the asphalt shatter ahead of me, cracking all the way down to the horizon line. I called my parents, who didn’t seem to understand what was going on, but when my mom said, “I love you, Pijay,” I had to choke out “Love you, too” and hang up before she could hear anything else. hey parker navarro how does it feel knowing you’ve set your community back fifty years?
It would be one thing if he was even a good writer lol As somebody suicidal trying to get some shred of reassurance from talking about it online FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU SO HARD This last person. I wanted to message them. I wanted to tell them about myself, about how I’d felt in college, so full of private envy for the people who could talk about their d epression that I’d sublimated the envy into scorn, and I knew it was an imperfect reaction, but it was true. I wanted to tell them it was going to be okay. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Maybe they were right, these people. I’d had my share of self-loathing thoughts. Maybe they’d leaked onto the page, and what I’d enshrined in this book was not anything artistic or beautiful but instead a catalog of every one of my worst instincts, and when I was dead, that would be all that was left behind. I could have written something more positive. I could have written a novel about being Filipino, with a heroic, complicated, vibrant Filipino main character. Maybe this instinct I had to pitch my imagination far into some other space ultimately came down to the idea of wanting to see myself dead. Maybe it came from the knowledge that, at the end of the day, I was a C-tier writer, a bottomless well of unfulfilled potential, an uninteresting person, and apparently also a bad person. I should have realized this before now. I’d never written anything that had been widely loved. The only way in which I was loved was that, in a group of people, I could obligingly make myself absent. Exc ept with Selina. And Selina. I’d gone to her apartment to apologize, desperate to know she still cared about me, and then, somehow, I’d yelled at her in my self- pity. It wasn’t Selina’s fault that people hated me. It was my own. It was my writing they loathed, my choice to participate in that group chat and then, like a coward, to watch silently as they’d called Selina a harpy and a narcissist. Whereas Selina had immediately leaped to my
defense online, knowing that Lola Xu’s 120,000 followers would go for her throat. The contrast sickened me. At the end of that unending day, Arthur came into my room and found me scrolling through my phone. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” “Maybe you shouldn’t be online so much right now.” “You’re probably right,” I said, not looking away from my screen. Arthur walked up with his hand outstretched. “What?” I said. “I think you should give that to me. And your laptop.” “It’s three days before my book launch. I need to be in touch with people.” “I’ll handle it. If they have questions, I can ask you. If your family or friends text, I’ll let you know, and we can figure something out.” “Arthur”—I hunched lower in bed—“can you not do this?” “Not do what? Look out for you?” “You know what I mean.” “No.” He reached his hand farther toward me. “I’m serious, Parker. You don’t need to be seeing this shit.” “It’s still happening, even if I’m not reading it.” “And, what, that makes it your responsibility?” I wavered. My phone dipped in my hand. Arthur sw ept it from my grasp. I watched him unplug my laptop and take it from my desk, and a feeling of powerlessness overwhelmed me. So much for the progress I thought I’d made. “Arthur?” I said hoarsely. “Yeah?” “If I get any texts from ... I mean, if...” “I’ll tell you who tries to get in touch, all right? Get some rest.” As he walked away, everything grew quiet and slow. I looked at my bookshelves, my favorite authors looking back at me, and the hammock in the fall of evening light. I drew the bedcovers up over myself and thought of the hurt in Selina’s face, and the way that, for the first time since we’d met, her words to me
had fragmented. I’d done that. I’d shoved away the only person to look at me and see every part of me, because, as it turned out, I couldn’t stand to be seen. The strange quietness lasted right through Sunday. It hadn’t been this difficult in ten years to get out of bed, get dressed, and walk out the door, but when I did, I found I didn’t want to go home. I sat in the park chewing falafel, tasting nothing, watching dogs skitter by in their harnesses and small boots. The day was near freezing, but I’d layered up and didn’t mind the feeling of my face growing icy. I walked three miles around Brooklyn, four, five, then sat on a bench at a bus stop and watched the J train hurtle along the elevated tracks, then went in to thaw at a little ice cream shop, where the woman behind the counter smiled at me like I looked normal, called me sweetheart. As I walked back to my apartment in the evening I saw silhouettes in our front window. My st eps caught. I didn’t want to bump into Arthur’s friends. I barely wanted to see Arthur, as unfair as that was, considering everything he was doing for me. Maybe I could sidle through with a quick nod, shut myself in my room. Steeling myself, I unlocked our door and slipped inside, only to find that it wasn’t Arthur’s friends who’d come to our apartment. It was my family. Kevin and Elena flanked my dad on the sofa, showing him something on the TV remote. Christi and Justin stood in the kitchen, heads bowed together in a serious way that I hadn’t seen since they were teenagers sneaking away to talk about our parents splitting up. And my mom was there, too, standing at the stove, cooking something that filled the air with the rich tang of soya. Nothing about the sight felt real. I hadn’t seen my parents in the same room since I was twelve years old.
“Hey, there he is,” said Justin. His brash, hard voice felt bracing. “Pijay,” my mom cried, dropping her ladle into the simmering pot on the stove and rushing to enfold me in her arms. I stood motionless, shaken, letting my head drop over her shoulder, as the others approached. “You okay?” Christi said in that brisk older-sister way as she clamped me in a brief hug. “Of course he’s not,” said Kevin. “Parker’s got a lot of feelings.” “Can we not, with the dismissive attitude toward feelings?” said Elena. “Elena,” said Justin, rolling his eyes, “nobody’s dismi—” “Stop,” I said sharply. “Please, stop it.” My whole family looked toward me, wide-eyed. It took everything in me not to apologize immediately. I drew a slow breath. “Thank you for coming,” I said quietly. “I love you guys. I also need you to ... not to start anything. Please. Okay?” Elena’s eyelids flickered quickly over her large, brightening eyes. Kevin’s feet performed a guilty little shuffle. “Of course,” said my dad. I looked his way. Guillermo Navarro was a tall, square-shouldered man with de ep purple circles under his eyes, the ones I was slowly inheriting. “Your mother,” he said, “is making Pancit Canton. Should be done soon.” “Yes.” Mom didn’t look at him, her voice as careful as his. “It’ll be ready in fifteen minutes or so.” “Thanks, Mom.” I set a hand on her shoulder. “Need any help?” “No! No, of course not. Sit, relax. Talk.” And we did. My parents sat diagonally from each other at the dinner table and didn’t carry any conversation, but Arthur helped them loosen up, and eventually they passed dishes to each other without visible signs of dislike. I wouldn’t have wanted this to happen at any other time, but when, near the end of dinner, Christi finally said, “Can you explain, like, what this whole blowup means for the book? And for you?” I couldn’t
have described how much it meant to see everybody’s faces turn toward me with concern and affection. I thought of Selina. Do people know you the right way? And in that moment, it didn’t seem to matter if my family and I understood each other perfectly, because they were here, trying. I explained what it meant that the book club selection had been canceled—the eleven thousand special-edition copies that would be destroyed—and what it might mean if my r eputation tanked so hard that Bill couldn’t sell anything else I’d written. I told them that I might never publish another word, that I might have to sell my apartment and move out of the city, d epending on where I could find work. I began to picture it as I spoke, quiet and monotone, a teaching post in a small town, and maybe that would be okay, to have an unobjectionable life in calm obscurity, writing for nobody but myself again. But as I described these possibilities, I still thought of Selina’s eyes in the dark. And I wished she were here, looking at me the way she had just three days ago, with that unlikely tenderness, that fathomless understanding, as though when I spoke, she could identify every layer of meaning beneath my words, like a geologist tracing the strata of some compressed stone, all the way down to the core. She, more than anyone, would know what it meant for me to lose the life I’d built here. I thought if I’d had her back, if I’d only had her here, I could have withstood all the rest. That night I lay in bed, staring at my bedside table, at the limp end of my phone charger, and I wished I could have that horrible thing back in my hand, full of the world’s hatred for me, full of every reminder of every way I’d fallen short, because at least I could have visited the
City website and read something in her voice. I could have looked her up on Venmo and seen that picture of her smiling on the pier. I could have looked back through the messages we’d sent, brushed hands with the ghost of what she’d felt for me. When I arrived at Word that Tuesday night for my launch, Emily said, “Hey,” with visible strain. I couldn’t interpret the strain as sympathy or dislike, so decided to assume dislike until she gave me another indicator. “Hi,” I said. “Thank you so much for still doing this, even without Tessa. I’m sorry, the past few days must have had some blowback on you guys.” “It’s fine. I’m sure it’s been harder for you.” This gave me nothing. I wondered what Emily wanted to hear. An admission of guilt? Was she being intentionally vague because she worried that I’d stake out some aggressive position on mental illness right in front of her? If I said something wrong, would she post it online and set off another wave of disgust? “It was a weird weekend, yeah,” I said eventually. “My roommate took away my phone and laptop on Saturday, so I haven’t known what’s been going on the past couple of days.” “It’s been okay today.” She offered a sympathetic smile and added, “I think it’s starting to die down.” And the fact that she didn’t hate me filled me with embarrassing relief. As 7 PM drew nearer, my family and friends started to arrive. Tyler and Maricel had bought a cake, and everybody else greeted me with cheery exclamations and said nothing about the internet. Two people trickled in whom I didn’t know: a bearded man in a cardigan and a shy-looking teenage girl, who would never know how much their presence meant to me.
I k ept watching the door, the busy street outside, as the minutes ticked down. Some tiny part of me was clutching to the sliver of a possibility. Every bobbing shape in the night was her dark head bowed against the wind. Every glint of light across the street, her phone screen. At 7:03, Emily said, “Are you ready?” “Could we wait a couple of minutes?” I said. “Just—just in case.” It didn’t matter. She never showed.