Parker My life had changed. I was no longer Parker Navarro, the author of the most hated book of the decade. Now I was Parker Navarro, the New York Times–bestselling author of the most hated book of the decade. It was with this news, eight days after High and Dry published, that Arthur returned my phone and laptop to me. “I’m so proud of you, bro,” he said. “You mean for lasting more than a week without a phone?” “Yeah. New York Times who?” I sat at our dining room table, the devices stacked before me. “Thank you,” I said. “Seriously. I’m sorry you had to—” “I didn’t have to do anything.” “Yeah, no, I just”—I let out a breath, angry with myself—“you take on so much already, and I told myself after college and the first book that I’d stop letting things get bad, and you’re still here, like, having to look after me, or whatever.” Arthur shrugged on his coat. “You planned stuff for me when I got dumped. You cooked for us that whole month.” “Well, yeah, but that was a normal—” “This is normal. That’s what I’m saying. Not everything is a brain chemistry problem. Sometimes it’s a ‘life kicks people in the teeth and then they have to wait for their teeth to stop bleeding’ problem.” I watched Arthur do up the buttons of his coat and tried to come up with some counterargument, but nothing came to mind. “If you want to square things off,” he said, “you can buy me one of those stupid twelve-dollar Japanese ice creams.”
“That seems like a false equivalence.” “You’re right. Three fancy ice creams. That’s my price.” He shoved his wallet in his pocket, clapped me on the shoulder, and left me to reenter the internet for the first time in a week. I left my laptop shut and handled the phone gingerly, allowing myself only cursory glances at my email. But reading through my sibling and San Francisco group texts, settling back into the collage of text styles and voices, felt like a kind of homecoming, and soon enough Lauren and Bill called to congratulate me. I deleted the Chan Pan Support Group thread, then blocked all four numbers individually, feeling a de ep satisfaction each time, as though I were turning the world’s heaviest dead bolts with each tap of the thumb. I wondered how Selina felt about the news. I tried to imagine what she would have said if we were speaking, but my imagination was an unacc eptably poor substitute. I’d dreamed of hitting the New York Times bestseller list since I was a teenager. I would have traded it for a lifetime of anonymity if, somehow, it meant I had her back. Hunched over the dining table, I opened social media, steeling myself for the coolly unaffected, consummately professional posts that she would have made in the ten days since I’d seen her. But there was nothing. The last thing she’d said was, Hi Jenny, what do you mean? Below, her defense of me remained undeleted on her profile, although hundreds of r eplies had accumulated beneath it, lambasting her. Of course, no matter how we’d fought, she wouldn’t go back on what she’d said. She’d stood between the world’s anger and me, trying—in a way no one ever had —to protect me. A wave of feeling rolled through my body. It seemed impossible that I’d ever had her, this woman whose brilliance was matched only by
her strength of character, and even more unbelievable that I’d allowed myself to lose her. I knew now that I’d never get her back, but maybe I could move the needle the tiniest bit on how people saw her. I opened up a new post. As I did, I felt a clear, cool anger, the kind of anger Selina had once described, the kind that demonstrates that you know you’re worth something. I didn’t want to talk about any of it, but for her, I would. @Parker Navarro Writes: I know I’m courting disaster by writing this—a response to the criticisms of High and Dry that have been discussed on this platform for the past week and a half—but if these admissions mean any less judgment aimed in the direction of Selina Chan, our generation’s most clear-minded, thoughtful, and devoted critic, about whom I was completely wrong in October and for months afterward, then the disaster will have been worth it. When I was 22 years old, I planned my suicide. I was devoutly preoccupied with how the suicide would look. I didn’t want it to be one of those self-indulgent suicides. I doubt I need to say anything further about how this informs my character, Dave, and his attitude toward his mental health. The passage about the elderly Chinese woman is cobbled together from experiences I’ve had with non-Asians. I find value in r epurposing and exploring experiences I don’t understand, and I find hope in imagining that the people who said these things to me might someday experience a shift in worldview, the way that, as Selina said, Dave eventually does, later in the book. I hit Post, then dropped my phone on my bed, put on my coat, and walked out into the neighborhood. Already clouds of potential responses were forming in my mind, the ways in which my post would be seen as inadequate or disingenuous. The responses
wouldn’t come only from strangers. My siblings would text me soon, asking why I’d never told them. I’d made allusive comments to Elena in reassurance before, when she’d hit her own low points, but even she had never known how far things had gone when I was at school. I imagined she would call with no warning, multiple times; Christi would text hyperarticulate paragraphs; Justin would get angry and defensive in a way that revealed his worry. I pictured Kevin at a loss for words completely. I wondered if any of them would tell our parents, and what my friends from home would say, what they would think of me—but —enough. The truth was out. As I skirted the park, the leafless maples, I turned my thoughts to Selina instead, and the world fell quiet. I wondered if she would even see what I’d written, if the post would mean anything to her. It couldn’t undo what I’d said when we’d fought. The wind through the bare branches seemed to murmur her name. The sun had begun to set, and I wandered westward, down Nassau, to a familiar intersection. I thought of Selina on New Year’s Eve and drew a shaky breath, imagining I caught her perfume on the cold wind. Then I turned onto the quiet residential block and descended the narrow st eps to the Book Bar. The store was dim and near-empty, even shabbier by daylight. The bar at the back apparently made gestures at r epurposing itself as a cafe during daytime. I ordered a decaf and used it to warm my hands, and I tried not to think of Selina’s smile when she’d seen this place, like she’d fallen in love. I moved down the deserted fiction aisle, but as I approached the corner, my st eps slowed. Maybe I didn’t want to see it, well-k ept secret, that mark of the first time I’d looked at her and understood what she might mean to me.
I reached the corner, turned, and froze in place. Selina was sitting a few paces away, curled in an antique armchair in the corner, reading by the light of a stained glass lamp. She looked up and became perfectly still. This corner of the store was warm. Her coat hung over the back of the chair, and she wore a soft gray T-shirt and jeans, and her hair fell over her shoulder. I could have stood there, transfixed by the sight of her, for hours. “Parker,” she said quietly. I opened my mouth and found I couldn’t speak. “I’ll leave,” she said, closing her book. My voice flooded back to me. “No. Please—it’s okay, stay.” Selina rose to her feet anyway and gathered her coat over her arms, lifted her purse onto her shoulder. But she didn’t walk away. “I saw your post,” she said. “You did?” She smoothed her hair back from her forehead and looked away. “It was kind.” “It was the truth.” Her fingers shifted on the strap of her purse, and it seemed like a pr eparatory motion, like she would disappear down the aisle, having, in one minute, wrecked my night, my week, my entire uncertain future. “Wait,” I said, unable to stop myself. She grew still as I reached out and touched our names on the wall. Our truce. I lowered my hand to move toward her, then stopped midst ep, remembering how she’d slapped my hand away that morning in her apartment. Those minutes of rage and hurt seemed to roll in on us like a stinging fog, Selina snarling out that she should have expected nothing better, my accusation that she’d made this happen. But she was here. After that Saturday, I’d been sure that if we ever saw each other again, she would look at me with all the scorn and disgust she’d shown in the Cipriani library in October. Instead, she was regarding me with something bizarrely close to doubt, her lips pulling first to one side and then the other.
Hope laid a fingertip on my heart. “Parker, what I wrote...” she began, and from the softness of her tone I realized that she intended to apologize, and disbelief reared up in me. No, I thought. That was the last thing I wanted from her. “I read what you wrote,” I broke in. “Over Christmas. Last month ... What you wrote to me.” I saw her breath catch. She swallowed hard. “Those messages,” she said, “meant more to me than anything I’ve written in my life.” A gust of impossible hope sw ept through me, and suddenly my heart was beating hard, insistent, like an urgent knock at a door. I st epped closer. “Me too,” I said hoarsely, barely able to work the words free. “If I’ve ever said anything that mattered, I said it to you.” I saw her sway by an inch, steady herself. The silence rang around us, and I couldn’t have looked away from her for anything. “I waited for you,” I said. “The launch. I thought maybe you’d come.” “I did.” I looked at her, uncomprehending. A blush faded in on the curves of her cheeks. “I couldn’t make myself go inside. I thought, I couldn’t ruin your night.” “But that was all I wanted. For you to be there.” I finally closed the distance between us, close enough to take a shaky breath and smell the cream of her lotion and the sultry hint of her perfume, the sweetness of her shampoo. She lifted her chin, searching my expression with a kind of open need that I’d never seen her show. “Did you mean it?” she asked. “What you wrote in my copies of your books.” Haltingly, I lifted my hand to her reddened cheek. “Of course I meant it.” She closed her eyes and moved into my touch. I said, quietly, “I love you.”
She said, “I love you, too,” and my other hand found her waist, the softness of her T-shirt, and I just held on to her, unable to believe the feeling in my chest, like my heart was straining against its confines. She leaned up toward me, and I tilted my head and kissed her, and my thoughts lit up like an electric grid, re volved brilliantly like a time lapse of the night sky. The truth sw ept around us like a cold, clean wind. When I looked back to autumn, all I saw was performance, but in winter, what we’d said in secret, that was the real thing. This was the real thing.