Page 72 of Bad Words

Sent: Dec 27, 1:20 PM

Re: Kavan Retrospective

Printing this out and annotating it. The perfect basis for my next fanfiction.

I caught the laugh before it left my mouth. Paintbrush in hand, I settled to the floor and glossed long ivory strokes over the baseboards, but as the minutes passed, my eyes continually strayed to the phone balanced on the arm of the sofa.

The emails continued over the next few days. The strangeness of speaking with him didn’t lessen. If anything, the conversation felt stranger and stranger, as I began to see snatches of Parker Navarro’s private life, his daily self-imposed walks and his extended vegetarian grocery trips. The Nouveau Burger is worth the effort of checking four different stores, he insisted.

Some part of me began to imagine we were trapped in an elevator together, halfway up a skyscraper, and that everything we were saying was out of some kind of necessity, but at the same time I knew that wasn’t true at all. We could have stopped. I didn’t know why he wasn’t stopping.

Surely you have friends, I said once, speculating on why he kept emailing me.

I do, he said. Dozens of friends. Possibly even hundreds, you don’t know.

I’d expect nothing better of you.

Better? Selina, it’s good to have friends. Take my word on this one, since I know it’s way outside the scope of your interests.

I have friends.

Prove it, he said.

I sent him a photoshopped picture of myself in a stock photo of Friends Laughing Around a Boardroom Table.

Holy shit, he said. You make jokes?

Dozens, I said. Possibly even hundreds; you don’t know.

Did you just fix my comma splice in your callback? You hopeless nerd?

I’m a journalist, Parker. We don’t get to use comma splices and claim it’s for “sound reasons.”

On the thirtieth, Jacob and Cassie returned to the city, and I waited for myself to stop replying to Parker’s emails. We went out for dinner that evening, Lyra in the high chair beside us, and when my phone buzzed at the table, my hand twitched toward it.

Frowning, I pushed the phone into my purse, but even as Jacob charted Lyra’s rollercoaster of a nap schedule during their trip, part of me was wondering what Parker had written, then feeling irrationally exposed for thinking about our emails in front of Jacob and Cassie, as though they’d be able to read my thoughts from my expression.

“Overall, though,” Jacob was saying, “we’re feeling pretty used to what she’s got to throw at us. So we’re going to take a stab at a real trip in February.”

“You are?” I said, coming back to myself. “Where? That’s exciting.”

“Thailand!” said Cassie. “Well, I’m thinking we start in Thailand. Then down the peninsula?” She glanced at Jacob, who smiled in his noncommittal way.

“Won’t it be a nightmare during the New Year?” I said.

Cassie’s shoulders bobbed. “I assume the intercity travel and stuff will be, yeah. But honestly, the crazier the better. We were just realizing it’s been two years since we were farther out than Vermont.”

We talked through a dozen bullet points on Cassie’s itinerary. I had to be honest and suggest that hiking in Malaysia in the ninety-degree heat might not be received too well by a notoriously fussy twenty-month-old, to which Cassie scoffed and said, “I’m the one who had the C-section. She’s got nothing to complain about.” Then, in a sweet, gooey voice, plastering kisses onto Lyra’s downy head—“You have nothing to complain about, do you? Do you? Despite your literally never-ending complaints?”

“Mama,” said Lyra proudly.

“Exactly.” Cassie gave Lyra a last kiss and turned back to me. “Anyway, what’s going on with you, Lina?”

“Yeah,” said Jacob, “what’d you get up to during the snowstorm?”

I lifted my shoulders. My pulse tapped gently in my wrist. “Nothing much. I finished repainting the molding in my front room.”

“Oh, awesome!” said Cassie. “Do you have pictures?”