Chapter 9

chapter 9

After therapy,in the hour before work, I meet up with Ivy at the Chinese bakery on West Fourth. She kisses the air near my ear and her hair’s wet. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she says as if she’s ever on time. “I’m coming from SoulCycle.” We went once, together, ages ago and I almost passed out in the dark, throbbing room. Everything about it felt like an exorcism.

When the class let out, all the hardbodies shiny and triumphant, I watched Ivy slip the borrowed cycling shoes into her bag instead of tossing them in the return chute. She just kept right on talking to me as if it wasn’t happening.

For a second, I’m tempted to look into her gym bag, but it’s not my business or my problem.

“I’m so glad you picked this place.” She nods to the bakery display cases behind us. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday.” She grabs a pair of orange-handled metal tongs and begins to pile tarts and sweet buns on her plastic tray.

This was a mistake. Seeing Ivy after therapy is like slamming mezcal after a juice fast.

When I join the line behind her empty-handed, she cocks her head. “Really? Nothing?” The dark-haired woman behind the counter slides the pastries into individual wax paper sleeves. “Hold on,” says Ivy to the cashier, turning to me. “Go get something right now. My treat.”

I shake my head. “I’m okay.” There are at least four people behind us in the line, but that’s not the kind of thing that trips Ivy up. She rolls her eyes. “You know, you’re kinda being a wack friend.”

I order a milk tea, and when I ask for it without sugar, Ivy grimaces.

“Now you’re just making me feel bad,” she says, angrily stuffing her bakery bag into her tote when we walk outside. We cross the street to watch the basketball players. There isn’t a game on, but there’s a few dudes shooting around and there’s a larger crowd gathered at the handball courts beyond it. I love the way the small, hard ball sounds when it hits the wall. I sip my tea.

“You want to go the diner instead?” Ivy rummages in her pocket and pulls out a vape and offers it to me.

“I have work,” I remind her. Her shoulders slump dramatically as she takes a long drag. Her gel nails are painted like pineapples.

Smoke curls out of her nostrils. We both pretend to watch the game even though we can’t see shit for all the backs turned toward us. “How’s the apartment?”

“Fine.”

“I still can’t believe those cunts kicked you out.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s the boyfriend?” I can tell she thinks Jeremy’s the reason why we’re not close.

“He’s not my boyfriend.” With my free hand I cling onto the cold wire of the chain-link fence, watching through the diamonds as a taller guy dressed in all black shoots a three.

“Are we not friends anymore?” she asks in a small voice after a while.

It’s the unexpected vulnerability that silences me. Makes me want to turn around and disappear into the subway station behind us. I pretend to be mesmerized by a guy strapping on a bright blue knee brace. His broad face is slick with sweat and his chest is heaving, but he’s grinning and talking shit the entire time.

“Whatever,” says Ivy coldly. I don’t dare look at her. “You’re no fun anymore.”

I can’t say what I’d expected. I’d entertained the thought of telling Ivy about June, forgetting for a moment who Ivy was. Who I was to her.

“Where’s that vape?” I ask her instead.

She hands it to me. It’s white with a gold ring around the middle. “It’s a really nice Indica forward hybrid,” she says. “You’ll like it.”

I take a deep drag and hand it back. “Thanks.” When I hug her to leave, she smells like singed vanilla. “I’ll text you.”

---

I turn up Erik Satie on my headphones as I walk to work. When I approach Union Square, I notice how weird it is that I was just at a park by a movie theater and now I’m by another movie theater nearing an entirely different park. I realize I’m high, but I love the way the piano music turns the plaza into a movie. On the steps, there’s a protest, making the foot traffic that much slower. Little kids are holding signs. It’s about Medicare. I’m watchful for police presence and unmarked fed vans, keeping my head down.

My posture gets shittier the colder it gets. Growing up in Texas means that you only ever need denim jackets and hoodies and maybe a peacoat if you want to be pumpkin spice latte about it. But New York is no joke. I have a bone-deep fear of cold weather, but at least this time of year, there’s a festive energy in the air. The Halloween decorations are up. Blink and it’ll be New Year’s Eve.

I duck into the store where I work, Fishs Eddy. I was enticed over the summer by the busyness of it. The resplendent displays, the strings of lights, the barrels of raffia-bundled coasters, and so many candles. They have a chandelier made out of antique eggbeaters. It’s the land of milk and honey. The abundance is ridiculous.

I have twenty minutes before my shift, so I wander down the aisles with everyone else, playing house. Checking out the new merch. Someday, when I have the kind of furniture where the sales associate orders fabric swatches, I’ll own all this shit and more. I scan the faces around me resentfully. All the customers feel rich. So many excellent jackets. Colorful scarves in complicated Parisian-seeming knots.

I finger a smooth porcelain butter dish with a lid. I love the romance of it. The decadence. Not only a dedicated place for butter but a roof over its head for protection. Who thinks of such things?

Even with a 30 percent employee discount, I’d never be able to buy everything I need. I want egg cups and cake stands and cookie jars and café au lait bowls. Antique milk jugs for succulents and the wooden, weather-beaten shelf to go with it.

When guests come over, to my home, the place that will one day exist and be mine, I want to convince them that I grew up being this person. That I’ve always had so much crap. Superfluent in the superfluous. That I’d been allowed as a kid to pick a bedroom wall color other than white for self-expression.

I’d roast chickens and mix pitchers of drinks, smiling, always smiling, appearing as though I were the type whose parents knocked—knocked!—before entering her room. Because sleepovers were things that I was allowed to host and attend and privacy was honored. I want to appear as though I’d had a family who knew how to celebrate Christmas. Real Christmas. With a tree and presents that are gift wrapped and asked for. Not stacks of SAT workbooks and a twenty-dollar bill folded around gas station candy.

“Ay,” says Mari, looping her arm into the crook of mine and steering me toward the glassware. “I have tea to spill.” Mari started the same week I did but immediately started dog-sitting for people and going to Wednesday karaoke nights with everyone. She always has gum and tampons. I think she thinks we’re friends.

Mari widens her eyes at Chinara and Trev at the registers. “He lost his virginity to her,” she whispers gleefully. I look over and try to imagine them having sex. It’s not altogether unpleasant. Trev’s short but lean, Latino, and sometimes brings a skateboard with him, and she’s Nigerian with a pixie cut and a nose piercing.

“Recently?” They’ve got to be in their late twenties at least.

“No.” Mari shakes her head sharply and rolls her eyes. “When they were in high school.”

“Oh.” I smile, unsure about the appropriate reaction. “That’s cool.”

“But don’t you think that’s so New York?” She gestures hugely, platter-eyed and expectant. “They hadn’t seen each other in ten years before they both got jobs here. Plus, she married someone else!”

“Random.” I nod carefully. I know I’m disappointing her. I’m dying to know the right words to say, but I’m still a little stoned and failing. She probably thinks I’m a freak.

“See.” She sticks her tongue out and grins. “See, that right there. That’s why you’re hard to be friends with.”

As I go stow my stuff, I’m reminded of something I overheard a few weeks before I was kicked out of my old apartment. We all had shitty drywall bedroom walls, and mine had a six-inch gap where it didn’t meet the ceiling. I heard my roommates talk about how I was selfish because I was an only child. I remember thinking how absurd that was. Everything about me is a little sister.

As I’m restocking displays in the four-thousand-square-foot store, I can’t stop thinking about June. How we used to play restaurant with real cups and dishes from the kitchen because we didn’t have toys. The way she brushed my hair. How she’d make me eat things like whole garlic cloves and once her toenail clipping, laughing when I would.

In a slatted wooden fruit crate beside a stack of trays that read YOU’RE A MESS, there’s a burlap-lined tangle of bright-orange bottle openers. The chalkboard sign reads $12. I flip the corkscrew part out like a switchblade. It snaps out beautifully, and snaps back in. It’s perfect.

As I walk it up to Mari at the register so I can buy it on break, my heart rate quickens with how easy it would be to put it in my pocket. The only reason I don’t is because it’s for June and that feels unlucky. If I wind up karma-killing my sister because of a stupid $12 wine opener, I’d feel like a real dumbass.

After work, when I get back to my block, I’m gripped by a cold wave of nausea. I take a deep breath, press my ear to the apartment door. I haven’t responded to Jeremy about his stupid portrait. He hit me up a few times but thankfully he’s not home. I kick off my shoes, shuck off my clothes, and toss myself onto the bed in my underwear. My face mashes against a pillow. I’m so exhausted I could sleep for days. I miss this bed. My bed. But now the sheets smell of him. Not unpleasant but just the way his skin smells. It’s incredible how attraction works. I used to love the familiar scent of him. The plane of his chest. His hair. And now it’s othered. Dank. Musky. Foreign.

I get up, pulling the elastic straps of my cotton Calvin Klein sports bra down and leaving it looped around my waist. I’m too lazy to take it all the way off. I throw on my Jonas Brothers sleeping sweatshirt. I’m happy that Nick came back. He’s always seemed like the smart one. I can’t help but wonder how the other two managed to bully him into returning. What exactly they had over him.

I investigate the fridge and the cupboards and then I ransack both.

I fill up a jar at the faucet. They call New York tap water the champagne of water. They say bagels and pizza taste different because of it. I’ve never told anyone, but sometimes when I’m drinking it, I wonder if it’ll imbue me with an essential New York something.

Even if it’s trace amounts of lead.

I chug it in great tidal gulps, spilling it down my chin, feeling like a snake eating an egg, the fluid sluicing through my throat with such force that I almost choke.

I raise one hand above my head and heroically burp into the living room as I lower it.

I put the kettle on for tea and make myself a mug of rooibos, immediately burning my tongue. Fuck. This always happens. For twenty years of life you’d think I’d have a cup of tea that was the exact right temperature at least once. I fling open the freezer door. Of course he’s finished the vodka. Or maybe that was me.

Honestly, fuck Jeremy. I’m glad I never sent him the photo he needed. Fuck all these awful Jeremy feelings. My fuck-it switch is flipped as I shake off the shame and dread and heartache.

I pull out my phone, scrolling and chewing. I’ve been checking Patrick’s feed obsessively without liking any of the photos. He doesn’t post often, but he’s tagged on random images. But this time, feeling nostalgic and lonely, I DM him. Hey. Nice photos. Like some kind of poet laureate.

I cringily jump up and down a few times to get the douchechills out of my spine.

When I go for my tea, it’s ice cold.

I drink it, looking over the rim of the mug at the wreckage. The emptied tub of ice cream, the crinkly bag of Life cinnamon crumbs, scattered Cheerios, and the square crusts of Jeremy’s oat bread where I’ve bitten out the pillowy centers.

There are seven of them. I arrange them into diamonds.