Page 83 of Bad Words

“Yeah?”

“You don’t ever have to apologize to me for your opinion.”

He studied me, a couple of millimeters left in his drink, the dark liquor thin enough to look blond. He was so still just then, photographic.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I guess that’s not what you want, is it?”

I gave my head the smallest shake and felt a slow, warm clench under my stomach, and on the heels of the feeling, something like alarm, something that made me tilt away from the bookshelf and take a step back.

“I should get home,” I said.

He blinked, the stillness broken. “Right. I’ve got to close out.” He tossed back the last of his drink, and immediately, unwillingly, I looked at his throat, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed, the shadow under the line of his jaw. My neck flushed hot. I took another step backward, turning away, as he said,

“Happy New Year, Selina.”

Chapter SeventeenParker

I woke up on New Year’s Day at an Arthur kind of time. My upstairs neighbor’s elliptical was transmitting its heavy, rhythmic whir down through the ceiling, and I wasn’t exactly hungover—I’d chugged two glasses of water when I’d arrived home—but I wasn’t exactly normal, either. Something quivered in the center of my skull, and when I pulled myself upright it oscillated like a needle, and the instant I was on my feet, last night poured over me like a cool sea wind.

Selina Chan and me, framed in the window of her friends’ apartment. Selina Chan a step behind me in the bookstore aisle, the metronome of those insane, brutal-looking heels, click, click, like the ticking alligator always just behind Captain Hook in Neverland. The ice white of her dress, high-necked and thin-strapped, clinging to her waist and hips, and the shine of her hair, loosely curled.

The moment she’d looked at me and said, You don’t ever have to apologize to me for your opinion, and I’d realized—feeling like a house whose shutters had all slammed open at once in some gale-force wind, admitting some flood of illumination—that this was why I’d been unable to stop speaking to her this past week, why I’d felt so good the morning after our first confrontation, why I kept crawling back to her, again and again, for more. This was why our mutual anger, and more recently this sharp-edged, amorphous thing between us, had felt so freeing, even exhilarating: Selina Chan had never wanted me filtered. In fact, the whole basis of her criticism had always been that she wanted me less filtered.

And she’d seen me trying to prune back the truth last night, and she hadn’t wanted it, because that was Selina Chan. Someone who wanted the real thing, even when it wasn’t nice.

In that moment, I’d looked at her and tasted such a potent shot of understanding that the bourbon in my hand could have been water.

In the bathroom I washed my face and regarded myself in the mirror; I barely saw myself. I saw her on the threshold of the party, still-faced, her somber mouth.

Even more inexplicable: I’d had fun with her. I’d liked it, all of it—needling her, waiting for her to smack the tennis ball back, the energetic pleasure of the give-and-take; wandering the bookstore aisles together; saying anything I liked with her, feeling liberated, as though I were unbound from some constraints I unknowingly buckled on around other people. I’d liked the innate weirdness of seeing her at a party with her ordinary-seeming friends—I’d expected them to be tenured professors who thought Franzen was mainstream trash and spent all their time dissecting Ulysses over Armagnac.

I came back to myself, standing stock-still in front of my mirror. I gave my head a hard shake, slapped my cheeks with cold water, and went to the front room to visit my laptop.

The publication of High and Dry looked a lot closer from this side of New Year’s, and I’d been neglecting my social media. As I wrapped up a breakfast burrito and opened my browser, I wondered—what was I feeling about this book on the horizon? This book that felt utterly unknown to me now that I’d written it?

@ParkerNavarroWrites: High and Dry publishes in under two months, which means my next seven weeks will consist of trying to peer over the peak of the rollercoaster at rails that haven’t been laid down yet. If you’ve read the book in advance form and left kind words, thank you. Your enthusiasm helps with the nerves!

Notifications began to accumulate, a dozen likes, then a hundred. I kept refreshing the page, unsure what I was waiting for until it appeared in front of me.

@SelinaChan: @ParkerNavarroWrites You’re wringing your hands over this?

Beneath, she’d posted a screencap of an orange banner on High and Dry’s Amazon page. Number-one new bestseller in Literary Fiction, apparently.

The quivering thing in the center of my skull began to vibrate. I shifted forward in my seat, a strange satisfaction humming over the surface of my skin.

@ParkerNavarroWrites: @SelinaChan Yes, Selina. Sometimes we human beings experience emotions like “nervousness” when we have incomplete knowledge about something important. Let me know if you need more info!

@SelinaChan: @ParkerNavarroWrites Despite the book’s many, many flaws, it appears that sales are the last thing you need to worry about.

@ParkerNavarroWrites: @SelinaChan And it’s all thanks to you.

My phone buzzed. I felt a jolt in my fingertips and flipped it face up, already knowing what I was going to see.

1 New Message from Selina Chan

I can’t believe that my biggest material contribution to this literary year will be ensuring that High and Dry hits the NYT list.

Why was I feeling the urge to laugh at this?