Page 17 of Bad Words

Aiden Linville

true. about time this happened. according to selina chan, my second book was “unchallenging” but “blessedly slender”

Jenny House

Put that in your dating profile, Aiden

Giving the stock a stir, I wondered whether to riff or commiserate, but before I could choose, Bill called.

I set down the ladle and picked up. “Bill, hey. What’s going on?”

“Parker! I’m getting bombarded with interview requests, that’s what. GQ wants to meet, and The Atlantic asked if you could get on the phone beginning of next week. Good with you?”

“Whoa.” I hesitated. “Yes. Sure.”

“What is it?”

“Sorry. Just—do they want to talk about High and Dry, too? Not just Selina Chan?”

“They didn’t say. Krys Badowski’s doing the GQ piece, and they assigned Ellery Robbins at The Atlantic. Good writers. I trust them to get a big-picture view.”

“Okay.” I turned down the burner. “I just don’t want this fight to be my entire personality, you know?”

I could hear Mahler in the background again, the string section twining through Bill’s office. Then he said, “I’ll level with you, Parker. I have faith in your work to stand the test of time, but the interest this is driving in the new book, that’s not something to ignore. I talked to Lauren. Your team at Coronation is happy right now, very happy.”

“Right,” I said. “Right, of course. I’ll do whatever you send me.”

“Good. Incoming.”

As he hung up, I inhaled the steam from the stockpot and felt my mouth water. For the first time in three years, my publisher had reason not to rue the day they’d learned my name. It was probably too much to hope that if I argued my case strongly enough, These Extraordinary Times would undergo a reappraisal, but High and Dry’s fate wasn’t set in stone. Maybe I wouldn’t need to sell my apartment, flee New York, or get another job, or two, or three. Maybe I just had to hold the line.

I spent the days after the video glued to my phone. Time flowed in a lumpy, unsteady way, like mud-clumped water being pumped through a thin hose. I’d look up from my screen and find that the quality of the light had changed and suddenly I needed to feed myself. I’d look down again and feel myself sliding headlong into the evening, obsessively refreshing my notifications, or cracking jokes with the Chan Pan Support Group, or tending to my siblings’ group text.

The video had shocked my family. My parents responded in identical ways: They each called me up to worry for half an hour about the professional repercussions, then accused each other of embroiling me in this mess.

“It would be just like Moy,” my mom scoffed, “to suggest you bull into this with no forethought.”

“So, let me guess,” my dad grumbled. “Analyn said you should make that woman’s review into a conversation.”

“No,” I said, exhausted, to both. “I did this on my own.” To which they reacted with insulting confusion, as though I had never done anything of my own volition in my thirty-two years upon the earth.

My brothers and sisters shared their own opinions in our group text:

Elena

Parker wtf. I thought you weren’t allowed to talk to critics??

Christi

He isn’t allowed. He was just drunk. How many drinks did you have, anyway, P?

Parker

two

Justin

Hahahhahahahaa