by Adi Alsaid
But on that particular day, Leo had come into homeroom, sat down next to me, offering a school-chaste kiss on the cheek like he usually did, and never brought up my column. After months of it never slipping his mind, months of compliments and intimate, funny conversations—nothing. I’d felt bad that day, a queasy feeling in my stomach like something had changed between us without my knowing why. Then he’d been sweet to me in one way or another after school, and I hadn’t brought it up ever, letting go of this lovely little thing we used to do without questioning why.
When I’d made myself feel sufficiently awful, I finally closed out of Tumblr.
I was screwed. I had nothing. My eyelids were starting to sag with sleep. I bit down on my forearm and yelled into my own skin, trying to unleash all my frustrations while not waking up my mom. Then, accepting my fate, I opened up an email to Hafsah. While I was trying to decide on a strategy (Confident yet humble request for more time? Or pity-inducing groveling to not get fired?), my phone buzzed on the nightstand. I stood from my desk to go check on it, figuring it was Pete asking how the writing was going. Getting up felt good, bringing fresh air to the sweaty creases of skin.
It wasn’t Pete though. It was Iris. She’d messaged me on Facebook asking if I wanted to meet up some time that week and return her shirt. She’d also sent me a friend request. Which, what else, led me down a rabbit hole of trying to find out everything about her and Cal.
I still couldn’t see Cal’s profile, but I could now see every time he’d posted on her wall, I could see their shared pictures, all the times they’d been tagged at the same location. It seemed like Cal had a job at a coffee shop near Washington Square Park, which Iris went to visit all the time, sneaking pictures of Cal in his apron and posting the photos to Facebook. Her captions, which was where so many relationships become unbearable to the outside world, managed to avoid being of the suck-it-I’m-in-love variety, which only made me want to keep diving into their relationship. For example: Cal adorably mock-scowling behind the counter, his glasses slightly crooked. Look at this ugly hipster in his little apron.
Spare the judgments, but I went deep into their online lives that night. I just couldn’t stop. It was like looking at the alternate-reality version of me and Leo. Iris had way better style than me, and both Leo and I were Pinoy and had darker skin, but other than that, we were like the same people. Oh, and the in-a-relationship bit too. Also, Cal wore glasses.
Before I knew it, it was 3:00 a.m. and I hadn’t even emailed Hafsah yet. The time that I could have used to at least force a crappy article about myself and Leo had withered away. I threw my phone across the room onto my bed, chastising it for making me fall into the wormhole that was Cal and Iris’s relationship.
I got up to get a glass of cold water and clear my mind for a bit, but Iris and Cal followed me to the kitchen, whispering sweet nothings to each other. I stood by the sad excuse for an air conditioner and put my forehead against the living room window, looking out at the quiet, tiny portion of the city visible from my apartment. I love New York at night, the thought of so many people simultaneously asleep. One of the greatest cities on earth so calm that you can walk in the middle of the street and nothing will hit you but the glow of a streetlight. I pictured Iris and Cal walking down my street hand in hand, laughing into each other’s necks. A memory of me and Leo doing just that popped up too. How he would kiss my forehead as we walked, reach for my hand, hold me close.
Back at my desk, one leg curled beneath me, my eyes continuously flitted toward the corner of my computer screen, mockingly displaying the time. I clicked over to my disgracefully empty Word document and typed in a title. On (Not) Breaking Up the Summer before College.
“This is fine,” I said to myself. “I’ll just write a general intro to the topic and ask people to write in with their stories. A profile can wait until later. I’ll just type something up and I’ll send it to Hafsah.” I cracked my fingers, set them back in the subtle, familiar grooves they’d formed in my keyboard after all my writing. Because I know how to write. I totally do it all the time. “Hafsah will be cool with it. She won’t tell me that this isn’t the article I pitched her, or that I’m being lazy, or that I will never write for Misnomer again.”
My fingers wouldn’t strike the keys at all. I found myself looking back over my shoulder to my bed, craving to have my phone back in my hands, wanting to delve even deeper into Iris’s and Cal’s lives. “No,” I said again, this time actually out loud, forcing myself to focus. It didn’t have to be good, just a first draft, something that I could present to Hafsah.
The seconds ticked by loudly, as if there was a grandfather clock nearby. Which made no sense because there wasn’t any sort of clock in my room or my apartment or probably even in my building. I feel like I would have known earlier if there was a grandfather clock in my building.
“Ahhhh,” I whisper-yelled, smacking my hands up and down on my laptop because they refused to produce words. Another over-the-shoulder glance at my bed, the comforter wrinkled from my few hours splayed on it, diving into an internet hole. My phone had landed right in the middle of the bed, faceup, the screen reflecting the glow from my computer in a way that made it look like I had a notification. Maybe another one from Iris? Maybe she’d gotten up in the middle of the night, awakened by a premonition that I was suffering. Maybe she’d been stirred by a cosmic sense that she could commit a good deed, with minimal effort.
I shut my computer and slid into bed, grabbing my phone as I slipped between the sheets. They were still warm from my wasted hours curled up in bed, so I kicked them away, muttering a complaint about the lingering heat. Sleep was so desperate to take hold of me, I could feel it coaxing my muscles into inactivity, begging my brain to let it take over. I unlocked my phone anyway, stepping sure-footed back into the wormhole.
9
SOAK UP EVERY OUNCE
I woke up to the sound of my mom knocking on my door. “Lucinda! I’m not letting you leave for work before you have breakfast. Wake up.”
I moaned in response, because it was the only verbalization my brain could handle at the moment. My hand automatically felt around for my phone, which I found tucked under my pillow, battery nearly drained. “Lu! Wake up or I’ll call your boss and tell him the reason you’re late is that you still get treated like a petulant child who won’t eat her breakfast. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?”
“I’m not hungry,” I said, clearly not loudly enough because she kept banging on the door. I unlocked my phone and suddenly all of last night came rushing back to me, as if I’d been drunk or something. The failure to email Hafsah, the borderline obsessive perusal of Iris’s Facebook. Then I saw that I’d responded to Iris’s message. I sent it out at 3:05 a.m., which would either make Iris think I was way cooler than I really am, or give her the exact right idea of what I was like. At least the message itself wasn’t too ridiculous. Sure thang! I get off work at five every day this week. Does tomorrow (er, today, I guess? Monday) work for you?
Iris had responded about an hour ago, blissfully ignoring my use of “thang.” Sure! But can’t come too far downtown. Columbus Circle at 6 okay with you?
My lips spread into a smile, right as my mom pushed the door open. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail, and she had a T-shirt on that looked suspiciously like mine. We’re basically the exact same size, and even though I wouldn’t advertise it too often, she has a pretty spot-on sense of style. Our clothes ended up in each other’s closets all the time. She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows at me.
“Mom, I’m not going to starve to death if I skip one meal.”
“CPS disagrees.” She stood in the doorway, one hand on her hip in that way that meant she wasn’t going to cave. Although she never really caves, so the hand-on–the-hip thing wasn’t necessary at all to drive home the point.
“Look at you, you’re wide-awake. Might as well eat something. Come o
n, I made waffles.”
“I’ll be right out.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Go bug Jase for a while.”
“Don’t be rude, I’m your mother and I get to bug any one of my children that I want. Plus, I don’t need to bug Jase, he eats all the food out of the fridge and then some.” She gave me a wide-eyed look, as if she’d really proved some point. “Get up, or I’m grabbing my phone and putting pictures of you like this up on Facebook. I know how to do that now.”
“Mom...”
“And, Lu, you’re really sweaty. That picture would get so many yeses.”
“They’re called ‘likes,’” I said, throwing my legs over the edge of the bed and sitting up. Waking up was best done in stages. Mom hung around until I stood up. I went to the bathroom we all share and stared in the mirror for a while, not looking at my own reflection or anything, just staring at a spot and waiting for my brain to wake up.
After a few minutes, I went to the living room and sat on the couch eating waffles with Jase, who was shoving them into his mouth two at a time, swallowing like an alligator does, just one or two seconds of chewing before he tilted his head back and let them slide down his throat.
I watched him play video games, trying and failing to follow the action on the screen. I expected to get bored with watching, like I usually do after about six seconds, but instead I noticed how other voices were coming through the TV, other kids talking into headsets in faraway places like Seoul and Long Island. They were all yelling at each other, trading insults, occasionally cracking those dumb thirteen-year-old-boy jokes that no one else in the world thinks are funny. But Jase did, and his laughter made it possible for me to avoid checking my email for a bit. I didn’t want to see Hafsah’s name in my inbox.
“Dad called,” Jase said, after a while. “He’s back from London, so he wants us to come over this weekend.”
“’Kay. We’ll go Friday when I get off work.” God, Friday. By then I might be on my way to losing my scholarship. How the hell would I explain that to my parents?
Maybe I could cash in on divorce fallout? I’d never really lashed out, since my parents splitting up had not been traumatic. Or maybe it had. I wasn’t a psychiatrist, who was I to exculpate my broken home as a reason for my struggles with love, and therefore my writer’s block, and ultimately my loss of scholarship. None of this was my fault.
“Mom,” I said, looking back over the couch at her sitting at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper. “Not bringing this up for any reason in particular, but is there a statute of limitations on how long I can use a traumatic childhood event as an excuse for doing something...um...you wouldn’t approve of?”
“Lu, what did you do?” she asked, not looking up from the newspaper.
“Nice try, but I’m not going to incriminate myself. I just want to establish a standard, in case in some hypothetical future I need to use it in my defense.”
“Then the statute of limitations is thirty-six seconds.” She flipped the page and eyed me for a moment. “What traumatic childhood event are you talking about?”
Now’s your chance, I thought to myself. Claim the divorce was the root cause of everything. The fact that my parents had never established a familial culture of speaking about the hardships of love, and had not provided an example of love upon which I could model my relationships, leading to my loss of scholarship and collegiate career.
“Lu, that look you’re getting is no good. It means you’re scheming.”
“I’m not scheming. I’m rationalizing future scheming.”
Mom turned the page again with dramatic flair. “Eat your waffles, Lulu Bear.”
I looked at the time, wondering if maybe I could still send Hafsah an article by the end of the day. But the hours ticked away without inspiration striking.
Twenty minutes before I clocked out, Pete asked me if I wanted to go watch a movie, since we hadn’t taken advantage of our employee benefits in a while.
“Um,” I said, because admitting that I had done exactly as he’d predicted and become obsessed with Iris and Cal was hard. “I actually have plans.”
“Your body language tells me I’m not going to like it if you elaborate.”
“I’m meeting up with Iris.”
Pete tightened his lips and nodded slowly. Then he reached over and grabbed the closest thing to him, which was a stack of napkins someone had left at the counter by my register. He picked them up, examined them, looked around the empty lobby, then tossed them at my chest. “Why?”
“Dude, what the hell?” I leaned down to pick up the scattered napkins.
“You know why I did that.”
“Your ability to pick up on social cues is really diminishing. Does ‘what the hell’ not enter into your lexicon?” He put his hands on the glass and lowered his head, shaking it from side to side. “Get your greasy fingers off the counter,” I added. “I just cleaned that. You know how Brad gets about smudges.”
Pete pinched the bridge of his nose, which is totally not a thing a normal teenager does, further proving my whole notion that Pete is some wise, old uncle type. Sans facial hair. “Look. I get what’s going on. But I’m worried you don’t.”
“What is the big deal?” I slammed the napkins I’d picked up down in front of him. “I’m giving her back a shirt she lent me. And sure, I’m still hanging on to the hope that I can write about her and Bench Boy. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. My deadline was today and I couldn’t write anything about Diane and Rachel. If Iris changes her mind, I might be able to ask Hafsah for an extension.”
“You don’t understand how your fixation on this couple is a misguided hope that your relationship with Leo can be salvaged. You don’t get that you’re just avoiding writing or even thinking about your own broken heart. Glad to be proven right.” He stood up straight as Brad walked by, and pretended to wipe the counter he’d dirtied. Brad eyed us like he suspected we weren’t fully doing our jobs, then continued to go check on... I don’t actually know all of Brad’s duties, to be honest. Pete smiled, which is his secret weapon. It’s totally disarming. My mom once offered him food and he said no with a smile and she was totally cool with it. It was bizarre.
“I’m gonna go clock out,” I said to Pete. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I wish you a very fulfilling T-shirt returning interview,” Pete said.
Since I had an hour to kill, I walked uptown to Columbus Circle. I texted Jase to make sure he was still alive in the nonvirtual world, then texted my mom that I’d be home late, which turned into a whole thing about how I had to learn to be more appreciative of my family and start making an effort to love her and never grow up, or something along those lines.
When I got to Columbus Circle, I looked around for a while, somewhat tired from the walk, but excited about the meeting. I was even hoping I was early so I could get some eavesdropping in before Iris showed up. It wasn’t a part of the city I went to very often, but the crowd was pretty great. Tourists heading to Central Park, the upper edges of the Midtown office crowd, a group of dudes practicing their juggling routines right by a group of protesters and then the people protesting the protesters. It was prime eavesdropping territory.
But Iris was already there, sitting at the steps of the fountain. She was wearing another sundress, that same bright red pinup-girl lipstick she had on the first time I saw her at The Strand. I walked over to her, ready to cheerfully greet her when I realized she was crying. Bawling, almost. To the point where several people were doing double takes as they walked by. A black woman in a pantsuit stopped for a moment, maybe considering saying something.
It was really tempting to just turn around and escape the whole scene. I could remember the looks people gave me the night Leo dumped me, when I was sitting on the curb in front of that Vietnamese restaurant. The pity and confusion, the occasional smirk a
nd amusement. Yes, sometimes people mired in sorrow and misery want to receive compassion and care. But sometimes public sorrow is still sorrow you don’t want anyone intruding in on.
I thought about just going to the park for a while, people watching, finding shade beneath a tree and reading. I could text Pete to come join me. He was leaving for school in Rhode Island soon, and it’d be nice to squeeze as much enjoyment out of our remaining time together before that happened. Then I shifted and felt the crumple of napkins in my pocket. I’d meant to throw them out at work. The black woman in the pantsuit saw me pull the napkins out of my pocket and she gave me a little head nod, like she was telling me to do the right thing. The universe and its damn signals.
“Hey, you okay?” I asked, approaching with the napkins out. “Sorry, that was a stupid question.”
Iris looked up at me, squinting in the sun, or maybe at my stupidity. Smeared mascara streaked down her cheeks. It seemed to take her a moment to place me. Then she cracked a smile through her tears and grabbed the napkins. “Sorry I’m...” She gestured at her face.
“Oh no, totally okay. Fine. People cry. I cry all the time.” I sat next to her, wondering whether she wanted a hand on her shoulder or me to go away or, like, a cup of tea or something. We sat quietly for a while, Iris dabbing at her cheeks with my wadded-up movie napkins while I fiddled with her T-shirt in my bag.
“I’m sorry in advance if I talk about the weather,” I said.
