Page 33 of Bad Words

I didn’t know what I would do if he went for her throat again. Technically, Christian was on my side, yet somehow, he’d put me in the ludicrous position of feeling like I needed to defend Selina Chan. A glorified blogger? You could find about two hundred unflattering adjectives for the woman beside me, but nobody could accuse her of being unserious.

Was that how I seemed to the audience, ready to make any claim about Selina to restore my own reputation? That wasn’t what I’d been doing—was it?

As the minutes ticked by, though, Christian seemed willing to stick to the subject. It was with obvious relief that Tony said, “It looks like we’re nearing our forty-five-minute mark here. Before we move into our Q and A, I want to close by asking you each to name a book you love. Parker, would you like to start?”

“Sure,” I said, then immediately forgot every book I’d read in my life. “Um—I—well, this past week I read Aiden Linville’s Desperations, which was both prescient and terrifying.”

For the second time, I heard a reaction from Chan. This time a brief, irritated exhalation. I didn’t look at her, paranoid that she would somehow read the truth on my face: that in reality, when I’d read her dismissive pan of Desperations, I’d found myself agreeing with her.

But I said, “Yeah. Loved that book.” I lowered my microphone and looked at Chan, defying her to respond.

She looked at me with disgust.

Then she glanced to Tony. “I always like to recommend Asylum Piece, by Anna Kavan. It’s a criminally underread book about a narrator’s institutionalization in a Swiss clinic, shown through a series of fragmentary vignettes.” A red tint touched her cheeks. “The language is so sensuous and startling and, maybe even more rare for something that occasionally toes the line of surrealism, it’s so precise. Every sentence seems to walk down a passageway full of shadows. I really love this book.”

Tessa began to speak, but I kept looking at Chan’s profile, my defiance withering into disbelief. I’d never met anybody else who’d read Asylum Piece, an obscure book I’d been trying to press on my friends since I was fifteen, a book that surprised me every time I opened it.

I didn’t even hear Tessa’s answer. I could have said that, I was thinking. I could have taken a moment to collect my thoughts, to give my actual opinion.

I’d said something nice. She’d said something honest.

As I looked at Selina Chan, my dislike mingled with a strange, sudden envy. There was something pure and distilled about her, as though she had come from no place, influenced by no person, formed like a pearl in the heart of an oyster. I tried to imagine emerging that way from my childhood, from the fights over borrowed clothes and shattered glasses, from the yearslong feuds I’d moderated between my family, from being tugged in six directions every day of my life, trying to see every side, to satisfy every defendant or accuser, until I got out to college. And even now. Even now, when I picked up the phone.

Of course this marble statue of a woman thought I was spineless and noncommittal. When you saw what a life full of objections turned into, you saw what it was worth to make yourself unobjectionable.

But she made it look easy. She was straight-backed and calm, like she could say exactly what she wanted without an ounce of regret.

She seemed so free.

Chapter EightSelina

For the post-festival mixer, the Wiseman Foundation had booked a subterranean cocktail lounge called the Bar Car, located under a warehouse-turned-hotel. Its many spotted mirrors reflected smoky lights, stylish twenty-something waiters, and a long, greenish bar. I liked the place, except for the bookshelves. The books were all turned backward, as though the most interesting thing about books was that they were made out of paper.

After that panel, I’d considered slinking home to Brooklyn, to the Slippery Cork, the neighborhood dive half a block from my apartment. But crucially, the drinks here were free.

I hoped Hayden was happy. “What I want,” she’d told me yesterday, “is a good sound bite.”

Well, she’d gotten her sound bite. And I’d gotten Christian Gatehead telling New York how much the entire publishing industry despised me.

I slipped into a seat at the end of the rapidly filling bar and arranged my bag of advance copies between my feet. Radiohead murmured over the speakers, and groups of lanyard-wearers jogged down the steps, spilling sunset in behind them. I stretched a hand over the gutter, trying to catch the attention of the closest bartender, a man with a red-brown cloud of a beard and two full sleeves of tattoos. He didn’t see me.

Someone leaned over the seat to my right. I caught the scent of cologne, something sharp and smoky—like orange bitters, toasted almond. The man braced his forearms on the back of the seat, two fingers resting on the curve of the bar.

I turned my head halfway before realizing it was Parker Navarro. I had to force myself not to jerk backward.

His chin angled toward me. I could see the dislike on his face. He was readable that way, open.

“Selina,” he said stiffly.

“Parker.”

A muscle moved low in his cheek. He looked down at my watch, at the crook of my elbow. In the half-light of the bar, these slight motions made shadows glide over his eyes.

Saying nothing else, Navarro looked back to the bartender and pushed a hand through his dark hair. It stayed there for a moment, disheveled, before beginning to settle downward.

I wished he’d stood somewhere else. I didn’t need to know he smelled like this, heady, faintly edible. My irritation increased. So easy for a handsome novelist to waltz onto magazine covers and keynote stages, covering up his mediocrity with his articulate hands, his sensitive eyes, the way his soft charcoal sweater stretched at the corners of his shoulders.

Behind us, a hit of laughter. Down the bar, shouts vaulted over the roll and heave of conversation. But the silence between us was as dense as snarled wool.