Page 6 of Bad Words

“Scott would set fire to our office before touching AI.”

“Good. I need to know that your pans are made from all-natural, homegrown loathing.”

I managed to smile. “So, you saw the High and Dry review.”

“Yep.” Jacob laughed. “It, uh, didn’t sound like a very good book.”

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“My lips are sealed,” he said. We clinked and drank.

Jacob and I had met on our first day at Columbia orientation through alphabetical fate: Selina Chan, Jacob Chau. Even then, he’d been handsome in a professorial way. Thick wavy hair, relaxed blazer, stubble. He’d been the sort of person you’d expect to adjust his glasses while reciting facts about Sartre. Which he’d frequently done.

Everybody thought something sordid was going on between us, despite Jacob’s five years of blissful marriage. True, we’d dated for about a month in our senior year, but it was hard to express the lack of romantic feeling I’d had for him since then. His passive, go-with-the-flow style of partnership had felt like some torturous psychological test—how could someone have so few opinions on how we spent our days?—and the sex had appalled me, a kind of limp-touched, romantic-whisper lovemaking that had made me want to go to a boxing class.

I’d known the fling was doomed forever when he’d asked me, with genuine curiosity, why I cared so much about the other students’ comments in a seminar I’d been taking.

“Because they haven’t done the readings, Jacob,” I’d said. “I can look at their faces and see they didn’t read the book.”

“So?” he’d said with a good-natured laugh. “Does that hurt your understanding of the book in some way?”

I hadn’t even known where to start with that. Jacob, Upper East Side–born and bred, might not have related, but I’d moved halfway across the country and taken on eighty thousand dollars of debt for that degree. It was fucking Columbia. I was supposed to be sitting in a room full of exceptional people who would try, who would care, in exceptional ways, not legacy admits who started every sentence with “Um, going off what Addison said.” But I could have tried for hours to explain my frustration, and it still wouldn’t have registered with Jacob in any personal way.

I loved him, of course. He was my best friend, and every day I admired his kindness and humility. I adored his wife, Cassie, a molecular biologist and rock climber who, with her mile-long list of travel plans and her desire to micromanage every detail, had always been a self-evidently perfect match for Jacob. And I loved walking into their apartment to see their one-year-old daughter, Lyra, finding new and creative ways to destroy their imported furniture.

“How’s Cassie?” I asked. “Wait—did she like the Isa Serrano book?”

“Not really her thing. She said it was ‘too crime-y.’”

“Too crime-y?”

Jacob made a calming motion. “Easy, easy. It’s the thought that counts.”

He was baiting me. I gave him an unimpressed look and sipped my wine.

“What, you’re not going to say it?” He sat up out of his usual slump to imitate my posture. “‘It’s not the thought that counts, it’s the execution!’”

“It is the execution that counts,” I muttered.

Jacob laughed. “Got her.”

I broke into a smile. “What about the gremlin? Has she developed ethics yet?”

“No. I think she might actually be getting more evil.” Jacob covered a massive yawn with the back of his hand.

“You two still aren’t sleeping?”

“Nope,” he said dully. “She’s been having nightmares again.”

“I’m so sorry. Can I do anything? Edit anything?” I asked. Jacob was a grant writer for a global health nonprofit. Whenever he sent me a proposal for a final polish, I was acutely reminded that there could, in fact, be more urgent aspects to writing than beauty of language. “Or—let me know if I can babysit. Buy you and Cassie some time to nap.”

“Thanks, Lina.” Jacob rubbed at one eye with his knuckle. “I miss sleeping, but I miss doing things more. We spend half our lives, like, mumbling about when we used to go on dates. Let alone ride horses in Croatia.”

“That’s what you get for bringing the miracle of new life into the world.”

“Yeah, our bad.”

Once we’d finished our wine, we gathered our coats and edged down the restaurant’s slender artery. “Which way are you headed?” Jacob asked.