Page 22 of Bad Words

Parker

9:32 PM

Thanks for letting me know, Dad. I’ll talk to her, we’ll figure it out.

The train shot underwater. Sympathy and affection pressed in on me as though someone were palpating thick pillows against the front and back of my skull. In some ways my feelings toward my parents verged on pity; I couldn’t help it. The divorce had shocked my grandparents and set off waves of discontentment among our extended family in the Philippines, who were all varying degrees of Catholic. Both of my parents had cousins who thought divorce should never be legalized in the Philippines, cousins who hadn’t spoken to them in two decades now.

The conductor blared something indistinguishable as we pulled into the station. I navigated around some jacketed teenagers on the platform, checking the address in the Chan Pan Support Group thread.

Ten minutes later, I was jogging up to the third floor of a limestone building on a quiet one-way street. Laughter and conversation swelled as I pushed through the cracked door. There they were, tucked in by a standing chessboard: Jenny, willowy and auburn-haired, dressed in a long velvet wrap, beside Aiden and Carla, clinking a pair of blue-tinted goblets. Jenny seemed to be the youngest—maybe a few years older than me—while Carla and Aiden appeared to be in their forties.

Carla’s eyes strayed onto mine, and her face split in an open-mouthed smile. “Parker,” Jenny and Aiden exclaimed together as I navigated toward them. “I’m so glad you made it,” Jenny said before giving me a voiced kiss on my cheek: Mwah! “I wish J.J. were here, we’d have everybody!”

“Yeah, I wish! Thank you so much for inviting me,” I said, trying not to ogle the apartment, its extravagant width, the working fireplace and wall of professionally framed prints, whose treated glass didn’t reflect the chandelier. As Jenny poured me a glass of red wine, I imagined spilling its contents onto the coffee table, an avant-garde and porous-looking concrete blob. “Jenny, your place is incredible.”

“Thank you, you’re too sweet!” She craned her neck, sliding a jeweled charm up and down a silver chain at her collarbones. “Christopher’s around here somewhere. My husband. You’ll have to meet him.”

“Is he also a writer?”

“God, no.” Jenny laughed. “He’s in tech. Thus…” She waved around at the apartment.

“Oh, cool! Right. Um—are these people all writers?”

“Mostly, yeah. That group in the kitchen is all Penguin people. Shane, at the table, they’re a poet. A lot of people from my class at Iowa wound up in the city.” Jenny frowned. “Wait, what year did you go to Iowa? Did you go to Iowa? Am I making that up?”

“You are,” I said. “I never got an MFA.”

“Me neither,” said Carla, lifting her wineglass. Her red lips had an impish slant. “I only got into programs without funding, lucky me … Aiden, you went to NYU, didn’t you?”

“Yep. Eighty grand when I went. It’s over a hundred now.” Aiden let out a throaty laugh, flattening his skinny tie against his button-down. “Thank God this city is so affordable, to make up for it.”

We laughed. “Parker,” Carla said, “how have things been with Pannibal Lecter?”

I hesitated, then pulled out my phone to show them the LitHub interview.

“Impressively insufferable,” said Aiden, “even for her.”

Carla let out a sort of snarl. “Tell me why she always sounds like she’s channeling your most out-of-touch modern lit professor who won’t take anything after Nabokov seriously?”

“Well, that’s her whole thing, Carla,” said Jenny. “If she weren’t pretending to be New York’s reigning intellectual monarch, her little empire would collapse.”

I laughed, suddenly glad I hadn’t gone into the industry details with my friends from home. “Yeah. To be honest, I got sort of worried that everything she’s saying about my new book is true.”

“Nope.” Carla leveled a manicured finger at my nose. “Stop right there. After she reviewed me, I started gaslighting myself into thinking I was a bad writer because—why? Because she didn’t like a book that clearly wasn’t even for her? She doesn’t know anything about you, Parker.”

We spent the better part of an hour getting progressively drunker and more outraged. I couldn’t believe how satisfying it felt, the verbal equivalent of shattering a glass against a brick wall. By the time I spilled myself into an Uber, my temples were palpitating.

The driver dropped me outside my building. My street was silent and deserted, but the night felt agitated, loud somehow, the noise of the house party and the tiki bar still ringing in my ears. Speak English. I could feel the subway plunging onward far below, making the ground vibrate.

My phone buzzed as I let myself into the foyer.

Jenny House

11:37 PM

P, you’re a gem. Remember, don’t think about it too hard! She’s just a bad person. It doesn’t have to be interesting or complicated.

I twisted the key in my apartment door. My friends were right: Selina Chan didn’t know me. I was ascribing too much insight to somebody who had written a few thousand cursory words in response to 1,500 pages of my work.