Parker “To the feud,” said Carla, clinking her martini against my second Jack Rose. I tipped my drink back. “Glad it’s entertaining you.” “Not as much as this is. Are you seeing her?” Carla’s eyes, clever and quick, a little mortified and a little smug, strayed to the bar. “Still drinking alone?” I glanced back. “If it were anyone else, I’d feel bad for her.” Emily nibbled her lower lip. “Are we sure she’s that awful? It seems like nobody’s really talked to her. Not to be a hopeless cliché, but she could just be kind of misunderstood.” “No,” I said. “Selina Chan is understood exactly the way she wants people to understand her.” “How do you know?” said Emily. “I just know.” I glanced again at Selina, at the curve of her neck licked by the violet lamp on the bar beside her. Her head had bowed swanlike over her book, a lock of dark hair brushing her cheekbone, her dress’s zipper a dot of steel at her nape. “She doesn’t want people to like her,” I said. “Or, you know, defend her. She wouldn’t care about that.” I took a long swallow of my Jack Rose. “Actually, I’m sure she thinks being liked too much would be a red flag, because it would mean people weren’t taking her seriously.” “How long have you two known each other?” Emily asked. “Known each other?” “I mean when did you meet? Was it after her first review?”
“Oh, no. That night the video went up—that was the first time we met.” Emily looked confused. “Oh.” She measured another sip from her copper mug. “Sorry,” I said, realizing it had been a minute since I’d asked anyone a question. “Um—how are things at Word? Thank you so much for doing my launch, by the way. I can’t wait.” Emily lit up. “Of course! We’re so excited to have you!” We spent an hour discussing the ups and downs of running an ind ependent bookstore, but throughout, my eye k ept straying to Selina, those long fingers delving between pages, her lipsticked mouth leaving pink arcs on the rim of her glass. She looked as unconcerned now as she had onstage, Christian’s insults bouncing off her armor. Nothing like the night we’d fought at the party, when she’d reddened, snapped—engaged. Something in me k ept picking at the idea of that, as though I were picking a scab. She’d looked at Christian like he was nothing, utterly beneath her notice. That wasn’t the way she looked at me. When the bar dimmed its lights, Emily checked her phone and stood. I rose to let her by, and as she slipped past, she said, “It was so great to see you, Parker!” “Yeah, you too. I’ll see you at the store sometime.” “For sure! Or, um...” A flush rose in her cheeks. “I don’t want to make it weird, but maybe we could trade numbers? We could grab a drink in the neighborhood at some point?” I felt a pinch of surprise. My eyes, which had been sliding toward the end of the bar, snapped back onto Emily. “No pressure,” she added quickly. “I understand if it’s, like, a conflict of interest.”
“No, it’s okay.” I was suddenly very aware of the way Emily was winding one of her curls around her fingertip. “Um, yeah. I can—I’ll add myself?” “Okay, cool!” I created my contact in her phone, and she left with a fluttery wave. I settled back into the sofa feeling both flattered and worried that the group would make some innuendo, but they didn’t seem to have noticed. As the open bar wound down, we ordered a last round, and in the corner of my eye, Selina passed the halfway point of her advance copy. The tipsier I became, the more I caught myself ruminating on the panel, and the more outrageous it seemed that Selina Chan loved Asylum Piece. First of all, nobody had read that book. It was my obscure book to recommend to people, and she was encroaching on my territory. Second of all— I stood and headed up to tip the bartender. This time, there was plenty of space, but I stopped at Chan’s side again. “You like Asylum Piece,” I said. “You.” She lifted her dark head from her book. Two de ep furrows had appeared between her brows, pointing toward each other. “What,” she said slowly, “are you saying you’ve read Asylum Piece?” “Yeah. Six, seven times.” She stared at me like she couldn’t believe I was literate. “City reviewed it when I was a freshman in high school.” I set my empty on the bar. “So, was that—I’m guessing you also—” “Yes,” she said. For another long moment, we just looked at each other. I had an uninvited vision of the woman across from me as some gangly teenager, lying in bed under a band poster she’d find humiliating now, poring over the same issues of City that I had, month after month. It was bizarre to think of her ever having been a teenager. I’d sort of assumed she’d sprung out of her father’s head fully formed, like
Athena. “Anyway,” I said. “It just doesn’t make sense that you’d like that book. Because, you know, I read somewhere that a narrator not having agency is such a dealbreaker for you.” Chan recovered, her surprise disappearing with a single slow blink, like an unimpressed housecat’s. “I love a passive narrator. I also love a book that knows its cutoff point should be two hundred pages.” “If I wrote a two-hundred-page book, you’d still find some way to call it bloated and interminable.” “Yes, because if you wrote a two-hundred-page book, it would still somehow feel bloated and interminable.” She drained the last of her gimlet. “Your short story felt interminable, and that was, what, three thousand words?” “I bet you loved reading it.” “Oh?” She looked amused. “Why’s that?” “Because it fulfills the delusion of your life, where you’re the main character.” Chan sighed. “Parker, we both know the main character of that story was you. Everyone who read it was forced to spend time in your company, not mine.” She marked her page—dog-eared, I hated that shit—and let her book flip shut. “Although I meant what I wrote. It was a nice change to see flashes of ... what?” She snapped her fingers a few times, lazily. “Cognition, maybe? Drive?” “You think I don’t have drive? You think anybody writes a nine- hundred-page book without drive?” “Yes.” Her eyes flicked down to my dress shoes, then tracked up to the neck of my sweater. Heat filled my body as though she were pouring boiling liquid into me. “Don’t worry, though. I think if you really put your mind to it, you could write a twelve-hundred-page
book without drive.” The hot itch intensified up my ribs. I leaned over the bar and tucked a tip into the glass jar. My hand came within inches of her bic ep as I withdrew, but she didn’t move away. She stilled in her seat, though, some tension in the clean lines of her forearms. Her gaze lingered at the base of my throat. Christ. Why did she always look at me like she was deciding on the most efficient way to vivisect me? I dropped my eyes to the book in her hands. “How’s your next victim? Are you enjoying reading alone?” “I’m not alone. You’re here, unfortunately.” “God, you’re so pedantic.” “Better than being inaccurate, especially when using accurate language is your job. Anyway...” Chan flipped over the advance readers’ copy and considered its cover art: a bell jar with an albino weasel suspended inside, the title in elaborate capitals, DEUS EX ANIMALIS. It wasn’t one of the buzz books with the twelve-foot posters, nothing by a marquee author. Glancing at the ARC’s spine, I didn’t even recognize the publisher. I felt a pang of sympathy for this Ariana Okoro person, wherever she was, oblivious to her fate. Then Chan said, “Yes, I’m enjoying the book. She’s funny, this author.” I’d been so busy devising righteously angry responses, I found myself with absolutely no r eply to this simple statement of enjoyment. “Oh,” I said. “She gets carried away with her dialogue,” Chan went on, “but she has such an ear for it, I can’t blame her.” Her eyes were intent on the cover, both fixed and distant, as though she were sliding out through a fissure in reality and seeing the world of the book unfold in front of her. This wasn’t the Selina Chan in the cartoon villain’s mansion I’d pictured, holding every novel at arm’s
length with a premeditated expression of distaste, which any author had to clear some impossibly high bar to alter. Chan seemed to remember that I existed. She glanced up at me. I realized with a sharp pang of discomfort how close we were, how I could see the dot of eyeliner caught in her lower lashes and the pink crease at the bow of her lip, the few light freckles laid on the tops of her cheeks. I found myself saying, “That was weird. With Christian, on the panel.” “Very,” she said. A pause. Nearby, the bartender was firing soda water out of a small red gun into a tumbler. Why was I considering telling her that I’d never liked Christian’s books, either? Why was I still standing here, looking at the bright wet sheen on her mouth from her drink? I felt strangely aware of the taste of apple on my tongue, the lingering sweetness, as though in counterpoint to the gleam on her lips, that leftover gloss of gin. “Well,” she said, voice tart, sliding the advance copy into her tote bag, “I’m going back to Brooklyn. I assume I’ll see you online, unfortunately.” I st epped back, my annoyance returning. “Y ep. Bye.” She strode for the door. On the bottom st ep she paused, took her phone from her purse, and studied its screen, unreadable. I thought I saw her shoulders tighten. Then she vanished upstairs into the lowering blue evening.