Imaginary Lines

by Allison Parr

“I feel like I handled it badly—”

  “Abe! It’s fine. It’s all fine. I was a teenager. You were—you were you. It’s all fine.” I finished off my drink for succor. “I moved on. You moved on. We both literally moved—ironically,” I muttered, “to the same city.”

  The server came with our pizza.

  For a moment, we sat there in charged silence, both pulling slices onto our paper plates. Abe fiddled with his beer for a moment, and then shot me a fast smile. “Is that why you didn’t wear red?”

  I stilled. My hands were slow to follow and my glass banged across the table with an uneven crash. The noise reverberated through my eardrums. “Why did you say that?”

  The color in his cheeks heightened and he looked unsure of what to do with his gaze. “You always used to wear red—I think because I’d said that one time...”

  I picked up my water, taking a long swallow and feeling it travel through my body. I could lie or be honest. “Yes. That’s why I didn’t wear red.”

  A smile lingered on his lips. “I know you too, you know.”

  I frowned in disbelief. “Do you.”

  “You were always the watcher. You were always running around in this great gaggle of girls—which was pretty terrifying, by the way—but out of all of them, you always watched. And you listened. Which is why you’re a reporter now, I suppose.”

  I shrugged. “I guess you can only watch and listen for so long before you need to speak.”

  We ate in silence a minute, but now it was comfortable. Abe polished off his first slice, and then met my eyes. I’d forgotten how good he was at always looking me in the eyes when he spoke. “I’m glad you moved to New York.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “You feel like home.”

  Warmth bloomed in my chest, born of nostalgia and truth and familiarity. “You feel like home, too.”

  “Friends, then?”

  I smiled back. “Yes. Friends.”

  * * *

  By the end of my third week at Sports Today, I realized I was dreaming about my job. About stupid things, like that I actually pressed Reply when I mean to hit Forward, and about getting emails from readers asking why all the articles had gone downhill lately. I resented the imposition on my unconscious; the last time I remembered dreaming about a job was from my stint as a barista in high school. I’d spent a month having nightmares about mile-long lines where every order was a venti-non-fat-triple-shot-raspberry-white-chocolate-mocha-no-whip.

  Which sounded pretty good about now, actually.

  I’d learned other things so far, too. Like that New Yorkers called New York—Manhattan, in particular—the City. I tried telling the editorial guys that we called San Francisco the City back home, and they regarded me with something akin to amused pity.

  New Yorkers spent a lot of time regarding outsiders with amused pity.

  I learned exactly where to stand and board my train at my station in order to be let out directly in front of my exit on 23rd Street. I learned how to sweep my Metrocard without making the stupid reader say Please swipe again.

  I learned that lunch, which I had once believed to be an inalienable right, was eaten at one’s desk. Occasionally people would pop out en masse to frequent fast-casual chains or food trucks, but more often than not meals were assembled from the kitchen’s inexhaustible supplies.

  I learned how to differentiate between the types I saw in the elevator at work. The finance people wore suits, the general news pencil skirts and khakis, the women’s magazine sundresses or jeans. Tanya was right—no one took sports that seriously, and while they’d smile at us in the elevator they didn’t seem to believe we had real news to impart. It was aggravating. I hoped we schooled them all in the company softball league.

  If that was still a thing. Did companies actually have softball leagues?

  But I’d also learned that just as lunches weren’t an inalienable right, neither were weekends off. Which was why it was once more Sunday, and I was seated at a rough wooden table deep in Brooklyn.

  For the sixth game, the Leopards were off playing Cleveland and I joined the guys at a dive bar they’d claimed as their own. Carlos opened his arms as though to embrace the entire bar when I entered. “Welcome to Waxy’s.”

  Waxy’s was a long, narrow dive bar with three TVs, a bartender with a menacing air and a handwritten sign that said CASH ONLY. Pendants celebrating half of New York sports teams hung above the bar.

  “Hey, Ray.” Carlos grinned widely at the barkeep, who did not reciprocate. “Four PBRs.”

  Keeping it classy.

  Carlos brought the drinks over to our table, narrowly avoiding disaster. He pushed them over to me, Jin and Mduduzi.

  The game streamed on all three screens, and everyone inside focused on the game. The guys and I all brought our computers, but Jin and I both took notes by hand. We were the favorites for the evening, but by halftime it was still 17-0, Cleveland in the lead. Carter had recovered from last week, but he threw three interceptions. When the cameras panned over faces, they were set and slightly depressed. Coach Paglio screamed so much we could see the spittle flying from his mouth.

  Mduduzi gloomily drained his pint. “I have the worst luck in the world.”

  I turned to smile slightly without looking away from the screen. “Hm?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t start watching American football until I came to the States for college. My school’s team lost every game. I must be a glutton for punishment.”

  I laughed. “To be fair, they’re usually really on top of it.”

  “It makes it even worse when they lose. I feel like they’re stabbing me in the gut. That’s what my recap’s going to be. ‘Stabbed in Gut. Repeatedly.’”

  “Maybe it will turn around,” I said hopefully. “Remember last year when they played Miami? They were at 22-0 at halftime, and the Leopards still turned it around and won.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed, clearly not holding out much hope. “Maybe.”

  Carlos came back with more beers to assuage the sadness, and apparently decided we might as well talk if we weren’t going to win. “So how’d you get into football, Tamar?”

  I shrugged. “I was in the school newspaper in high school. And in marching band, which meant I went to every single football game. I also paid attention... It seemed pretty natural to write about it.”

  The game did not turn around. Instead it fell apart. Jin didn’t even want to look in the end. I was pretty sure he was one beer away from cowering in the corner with his arms over his head.

  Part of my heart hurt, but the rest of me was having a really good time.

  When the Browns decided to go for it on the fourth down, everyone in the bar went dead silent, except for Jin, who sort of whispered, “No, no, no.”

  They had two running backs and one wide receiver on the field. My brain went into overtime trying to decide how they were going to run it. A sneak? A handoff?

  A handoff. Their quarterback passed it to one of the running backs, but Abe was there. He forced a fumble. When the limbs settled, he had the ball.

  Waxy’s erupted in cheers.

  The Leopards still lost that game, but at least we had something we could be proud of.

  Though it also left Abe with a concussion.

  * * *

  That Monday, at the pitch meeting, I volunteered my first idea. “I was thinking of doing a feature piece on concussions and helmet regulations.”

  Every head at the table turned toward me.

  I’d already felt conspicuous, offering an idea, but now I started to sweat. “What?”

  Tanya pushed her chair away from the table. “I need a drink.” She walked out.

  Carlos smiled uneasily at me. “We don’t really do concussion stories.”

  I blinked. “We don’t?”

  “It’s tricky. We have to maintain a...delicate balance.”

  “It’s not that tricky,” Mduduzi said. “We report on concussions, and the helmet manu
facturers pull their ads from Sports Today. It’s worth mentioning that their parent company would actually pull all their ads from all the Today Media platforms.”

  “Wait, so...” I tried to sort it out. “Tanya said she wanted us to report hard news, not go along with whatever’s best for the team. But doesn’t this fall in that boat?”

  “Yeah,” Carlos said, still clearly uncomfortable, “but there are still some lines we don’t cross.”

  “How is that a line? Concussions seem like a pretty standard topic in the NFL right now. We’re just supposed to...not mention the correlation?”

  “We mention it. We report on it. We sum up other articles and reports. But we don’t do feature pieces specifically targeted at helmet manufacturers until we have cold hard evidence, and we don’t have that yet.”

  I frowned. “Because the stupid manufacturers will pull their ads from Sports Today?”

  Carlos smiled grimly. “Because the stupid manufacturers at Loft Athletics are owned by Kravenberg, Inc., which buys a large percent of the ad revenue in all six of the Today Media’s different platforms.”

  Ah. “That does make it more complicated.”

  “Yeah,” Carlos said. “Which is why Tanya needs a drink.”

  * * *

  I was still a little ticked off when I got home. Journalism wasn’t always as clean-cut as I wanted it to be, and I understood that. And it didn’t make sense to write an article that didn’t have any news or new spin. But given that half our pieces were fluff pieces anyway and that this was a serious issue, I didn’t really understand why I couldn’t write about a practice that hurt someone I cared about.

  I mean, I did. But it still pissed me off.

  I whipped up a batch of salted chocolate shortbread cookies. They could be crumbly and difficult to handle, but I managed to form it into a log. I wrapped it in plastic and stuck it in the fridge. They could be cut in the morning—they’d be much easier to deal with frozen.

  Of course, by the time I finished and calmed myself down, I was in no mood to cook actual food, so I ran out to the corner grocery store and spent a long, long time deliberating over frozen pizza or a salad. I picked up the salad and carried it around for a while feeling morally and nutritionally superior, but then I realized the pizza was half the price, and really, saving money was important. So I bought the pizza.

  When I returned to the apartment, the scent of heady spices wafted out. Someone had been hard at work in the twenty minutes I was gone. I paused outside the kitchen, where Sabeen stirred a large pot. “Hi.”

  She looked up. “Oh, hey.”

  I leaned against the door frame. “What’re you making?”

  “Kibbeh.”

  I peered at it.

  “It’s like a dumpling. Meat and spices and fried.”

  “Huh. Smells good. I have this theory about how every culture has a dumpling comfort food.”

  “Yeah. I think I heard something about that on NPR.” She smiled. “I smelled you melting chocolate so I was inspired to make something.”

  “At least you made something healthy. I’m stockpiling the cookies and having pizza for dinner. Mind if I get by you to the oven?”

  She shifted out of the way so I could turn up the heat. “Hey, I’m going to a party in the East Village this weekend. You should come.”

  I looked up from tearing open the pizza box. “Really? That would be cool. Your friend won’t mind?”

  She shrugged. “It’s her birthday. I’m sure there’ll be tons of people.”

  “Then I’ll be there. I could use a place to let off steam.”

  Chapter Eight

  We broke into a bottle of wine before heading out that Friday, so we were already halfway to happiness by the time we stepped out of the subway. I liked Sabeen; I liked her laissez-faire attitude and her unconditional friendliness. And though she’d only been here four months, she seemed to know plenty of people—friends from her private high school and from college, from her work and those she just picked up in cafés.

  I’d had no idea what people in New York wore when they went out, but I’d assumed black, like they wore everywhere else. I should dye my wardrobe like people in mourning. Maybe they were all in mourning for the temperature. It seemed a strong possibility, especially as October blustered with harsh winds and gray skies.

  Since I owned little black, I’d slung on a gray jersey dress and a clunky tangerine necklace of polished stones in many layers. To combat the humidity, I’d pinned my hair on top of my head with two hair sticks, and deemed myself ready. I was happy to find that I blended well with most of the people walking around the East Village streets.

  I hadn’t been to this part of Manhattan before, and it reminded me more of San Francisco’s Mission District than anything else; shorter buildings, everything below four stories, and lots of slightly dingy but obviously very cool pizza parlors and bodegas and comic stores. A bubble of happiness welled up inside me. This was what I had wanted back home. The chance to go out in the evenings, to be with friends, to have a disposable income that I could waste on getting wasted and to make myself cute enough that I could garner glances from cute boys. I wanted to relish being young and pretty and living in a city, feeling frivolous and light, the personification of champagne.

  The apartment we headed to was on the third floor of a walk-up, and reasonably sized. Sabeen said one of the three roommates ran his own company selling animal mittens or mittens evoking animals or something else alarmingly profitable. The other two, Sabeen’s friend and the friend’s boyfriend, worked on one of the morning shows.

  The friend’s name was Nita, and she cried out as soon as we entered. “Sabeen! You’re here!” She hugged her tightly, and then hugged me for good measure. “I’m Nita!”

  So apparently she didn’t mind me coming.

  She gestured us in. “Drinks are in the kitchen, and people are mostly in the living room. We might have to do a beer run at some point, but so far we’re looking good.”

  For the first hour we drank rum flavored with Coke. Everyone sat around, squished on sofas and curled up on the floor, eating finger food and destroying Nita’s alcohol collection. Eventually, one of the people—there were a lot of people—asked, “Can you get to the rooftop?”

  Nita frowned and peered at her window. “I think so.”

  So then we all grabbed beer and clamored out the kitchen window onto the roof/deck where they kept potted plants and bikes and things. A fire escape crawled up the building’s wall, a rickety, rusting metal structure that looked ready to fall apart any second. We had to walk along a little ledge to get to it, and then we scampered up the skinny steps. I tried not to look down at the slatted planks beneath my feet, but I could feel the nerves gathered in my palms and soles of my feet. With one hand around my drink, I had even less control then I normally would’ve, but I refused to slow down and let anyone see how scared I was.

  Then I was at the top, and the kid in front of me took my drink so I could haul myself onto the roof. White chalk covered my hands and part of my dress, and as I stood upright my legs felt wobbly with relief that the fire escape hadn’t collapsed and plunged us to our deaths.

  I laughed, the endorphins from released fear now pumping through me, and took my drink back from the hipster holding it. Sabeen was already over at the edge of the roof, so I headed toward her, taking in the sight of the roof and the city. Behind me, we could see the Midtown skyline, while before me there wasn’t much, just the other flat roofs of the East Villages with their squat chimneys.

  The roof itself was more interesting; at least three different groups gathered from different apartments. But then it was a nice night, the air cool but the breeze warm, and scented with greenery instead of the general stench of the city.

  One of the guys from another group wandered over and asked if we had a light, which was clearly just an icebreaker, because when we said no, he plopped down next to us anyway. I leaned against Sabeen and laughed. The adrenaline fro
m the climb and height and the fuzziness from the drinks made the night seem endless and filled with possibilities. I could be anything on this roof, because Tamar wouldn’t be up here in the first place. She’d be down on the ground, too scared to climb up.

  I lifted my head and stared at the moon.

  Somehow, by the time I looked down, the topic had wandered to celebrity encounters, as recalled through the humblebrag. “I saw Patrick Stewart at the co-op,” Shari, one of Nita’s friends, announced. “I mean, it wasn’t a big deal or anything.”

  Alli, one of the other girls, jumped in next. “Oh, and they’re always filming Law and Order outside my office building. It’s so annoying, they block off all this space. And the tourists are the worst—they clump around and cause a traffic jam.”

  I didn’t even catch the name of the guy who now piped up, but it didn’t hamper my amusement. “I know, right? The mayor always gets coffee at my café, and while the regulars couldn’t care less, sometimes out-of-towners just overrun the place.” He let out a beleaguered sigh. “Sometimes they don’t even buy anything.”

  I bit back a smile. This sounded remarkably similar to the way friends in L.A. talked about celebrities—like they saw them all the time, but whatever.

  “I haven’t see a single celebrity since I moved here,” Sabeen said grumpily. She flicked some ash past me. “What about you?”

  “Oh.” I shrugged, unable to ignore the cackling imp that danced inside me. “I don’t know. Last week I got drinks with Abraham Krasner. He’s—”

  “The Leopard’s center,” several voices finished.

  “How did that happen?”

  I laughed. “It’s actually not fair for me to use that as a celebrity sighting. We grew up together.”

  That took a moment to sink through the alcoholic fog. “Wait, so—you know each other? You’re friends?”

  I nodded happily. “Uh-huh.”

  And then, before I knew it, my new friends had snatched up my purse and were scrambling through it. I jumped to my feet, throwing a frantic look at Sabeen. She shrugged unrepentantly and finished off her cheap beer.