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“Maria?”
I’m overthinking the insult I no longer have the opportunity to deliver so much that at first, I don’t hear my name.
Then the word sounds again, closer this time. “Maria?”
I turn twenty degrees and see a figure coming toward me through the crowd. It’s Angela Choi. She’s tall and willow thin, with just a hint of muscle, which I can see because she’s wearing a tank top even though it’s sixty degrees out. She has a flannel shirt tied around her waist, and her hair is glossy black and stick straight. It hits just above her shoulders. She gives me a tentative smile.
I’m older than the average college senior, and my best friends tend to be people who aren’t typical college students away from home for the first time. Anj is no exception. She’s a biology graduate student. She’s smart, funny, independent, rich, and a complete mess.
Three years ago, Anj was one of my best friends. We shared an apartment with a third friend for the space of a school year, and it was hell.
The latter experience is the reason her smile is tentative, and why my answering smile feels just a little forced. I’m not mad at her. It’s not that we actually stopped being friends. But some friends were not made to live together, and that was basically me and Anj.
It is, to be honest, ninety-eight percent of the world’s population and Anj. She’s funny, hilarious, bubbly, exuberant, outgoing, and over the top. She’s the lynchpin of the trans community here, and everyone loves her, because she hasn’t met a big dream she can’t make enormous.
Those same things that make her an incredible person—the passion, the focus, the over-the-top desire to change the world—also made her the world’s most terrible housemate. It was a relief when our household broke up because she had to go to Montana for some work she was doing on her thesis.
We hug despite the awkwardness.
“We haven’t talked in forever,” she says when we pull away.
Six months, unless you count a brief exchange on Facebook. It’s been awkward. Everyone loves Anj; they kept asking me when she was coming back.
“I know. It sucks.”
She looks over at me, bites her lip, and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t suppose you have time to get lunch?”
I think about all the reasons I was shamefully relieved she had to go out of town.
They are myriad. She only eats cereal. When she’s focused on a project—which is all the time—she leaves her cereal bowls, half-full of milk, wherever she finishes eating. She keeps four snakes, seven lizards, and a hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium for her glow-in-the-dark shark, even though our lease specifically said that no pets were allowed. (“They’re not pets,” Anj explained, “they’re projects.”) Also, Anj thinks it is perfectly fine to raise mealworms for said lizards in the living room. She fought incessantly with our third roommate about all of these things, and I hid as much as I could while they argued. Anj is a mess to live with and she knows it.
There are huge differences between us, and I don’t just mean the cereal bowls and the lizards. When we first agreed to get a place together, I had no idea how rich she was. She doesn’t act like she’s rich. She sure doesn’t dress like she’s rich.
But Anj just could not understand why the thought of losing my deposit stressed me out. The imminent possibility of eviction hung over my head, and Anj only understood vaguely that I was upset. She’d try to make me feel better with some effusive gesture like taking me out to dinner at an extremely fancy restaurant.
She would eat nothing, because they didn’t serve cereal. Then we would come home to our seven lizards and our geometrically expanding mealworm population.
“I’d love to get lunch,” I say. I can get something for Tina to go, and it’ll wash the memory of Jay and his three-sigma asshole police out of my mind.
We walk down Shattuck and find a crepe place. It’s crowded, and I can barely hear her. We’re shoved together at the end of a bench in the lunch hour crush.
“Are you still rooming with…” She pauses. “What’s her name, your little friend?”
“Tina?” I say pointedly.
“Right. Her.”
Tina and I studied for organic chemistry together probably fifty times when Anj and I shared an apartment. Anj really should know her name. But Anj isn’t the kind of person who pretends to forget someone’s name to be snooty. Anj’s memory is reserved for the scientific names of thousands of extinct species. “Tina Chen” is not Latin enough for her to recall.
“Yes,” I say. “We’re sharing a house.” I pause. “With her boyfriend.”
Anj wrinkles her nose. “Ugh,” she says. “I’m sorry. At least she’s discreet, right? She’s good at making herself invisible.”
I feel my hackles rise at this, in part because… Well, it’s true. Or at least, it used to be.
I turn to Anj and lean in. “Okay, look. I live on a totally separate level of the house, right? So…I don’t hear anything, I don’t see anything. But her boyfriend…”
How to say this.
Anj shakes her head. “Is he completely disgusting? Because men.” She shakes her head on that last word, as if that phrase—because men—explains everything.
He doesn’t leave half-empty bowls of congealing cereal on the floor.
I sigh. “Because men doesn’t even come close to explaining it. He’s Blake Reynolds.”
I don’t have to say anything more. She knows who Blake is. Even though Anj doesn’t know Tina’s name after having met her repeatedly, Blake Reynolds is essentially Silicon Valley royalty. His father, Adam Reynolds, founded Cyclone Technologies, one of the primary producers of consumer gadgetry in the world.
Anj knows about Blake because everyone knows him. She also knows him because she’s a form of Silicon Valley royalty herself. Her father runs one of the VC firms that dumps a ridiculous amount of money into startups.
Anj’s face clears. “Oh, him,” she says casually. “He’s actually not bad for a cis man. But he’s still such a cis dude.”
From her, this is incredibly high praise.
I wrinkle my nose. “Do I even want to know?”
“Yeah, my dad dumped something like fifteen mil into Cyclone before it went public?” She shrugs, as if this is a completely normal thing to happen. And it is, for her. “He was on the Board of Directors for ten years or something, so Blake and I got shoved together a lot when we were kids. We played with dinosaurs.” She glances over at him. “Just ask him about his dimetrodon someday.”
I look over at her and shake my head. This is the thing about Anj: You would never know what her background was until she’d randomly mention having lunch with some CEO, or complain about one of her own startups, or casually refer to getting into childhood fights with Blake fucking Reynolds while their parents were off deciding the future of the personal computer. She drops the bit about dimetrodons with a waggle of her eyebrows as if it’s really a euphemism. This being Anj, I’m pretty sure she means actual dimetrodons.
“What about his dimetrodon?”
“A dimetrodon is not a dinosaur,” Anj explains patiently. “Tell him I’m still waiting for my apology from his mansplaining ass.”
“Okay,” I say. “Wait.” I pull out my phone and text Blake.
Ange
la Choi wants me to tell you a dimetrodon is not a dinosaur. She’s waiting for an apology.
The answer comes back swiftly. NO. *Chip* is a dinosaur. A dinosaur that has not yet been discovered in the fossil record. And happens to look like a dimetrodon. BUT HE IS NOT A DIMETRODON. CHIP IS A DINOSAUR.
I hold up the phone so Anj can read this. Anj grins broadly. “Go show him, Maria,” she says.
Anj is right, I type. You’re a mansplainer.
There’s a long pause. A what?
A man. Who explains. More specifically, a man who explains things to women that the women know better than the man.
Another long pause. I am *not*.
Anj shakes her head beside him. “He so is.”
I type a response. Are you seriously telling me you know prehistoric biology better than Angela Choi?
I can almost see him sighing. I feel very strongly about Chip, he writes. VERY STRONGLY. Pass on this heartfelt apology to Anj: FUCK YOU, ANJ. CHIP IS A DINOSAUR.
She laughs. “As you can see,” she says, “we’re good friends. Actually, we got dumped together so often we’re more like brother and sister. We used to fight a lot.”
“I have never seen Blake fight with anyone.”
Her smile weakens. She looks away. “I seem to have that effect on…everyone who gets to know me.”
There’s some truth to that. For instance, I’ve known Blake Reynolds for a while now, and he’s pretty even-keeled. He has to be; he works with his dad, who is terrible. Blake earned the praise, “not bad for a cis man” from Anj, which is basically her version of nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve never seen him lose his temper. Not until FUCK YOU, ANJ.
“Hey.” I set my hand on her arm. “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone loves you. Everyone.”
She looks over at me. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. “Yeah?” she finally says. “Then why are you mad at me?”
Her eyes are dark and just a little cutting, and I feel myself freeze in place.
