Page 93 of Bad Words

After dinner, I took a long shower and slid into bed, staring up at the shelves, at my high school diploma, cobwebbed in the far corner.

I found myself thinking of the journalist from Daly City who’d emailed me. I’m sure you have lots of demands on your time, but it’d be an honor to have you in our pages!

I turned over in bed, the little guilts of the afternoon knitting into a hard lump in my stomach. It was hard not to see Poppy Street’s closure as symbolic. During my longest stretch away from California, the period of my life that I’d been most self-obsessed, when I hadn’t even joined my family for the holidays, Poppy Street had closed. Some ungrateful part of me was still trying to escape the place and the people that had raised me, treating them like a burden instead of trying to give back.

I fished out my phone and found the email.

Hey Brian, I wrote, so sorry for the late reply. I’ve been struggling to keep on top of my emails, but I’m actually in Daly City the next few days! If you still want to do an interview, I’d be happy to grab coffee? Thanks for reaching out.

Then I opened up my text with Kevin. I’m sorry, I wrote. I didn’t know you felt that way about Elena’s loans, but I get why it must have been frustrating. I wish you’d gone to Northwestern too. You know I would have done the same thing for you.

After about fifteen minutes, Kevin said, Yeah I know. I’m not mad at you, ik it was cool of you to do that for her. the whole thing just sucks. Lunch at Chibog tomorrow? You have to pay though lol

I got you, I said. I always did.

I walked the San Bruno Mountain trail the next day with nothing but my water bottle and a copy of Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency. My lunch with Kevin had been mostly commiseration. I worried my way up the trail, but by the time I stood up from my reading spot an hour later, my thoughts had calmed. I spent the way home wondering if, when I got to my phone, I’d find that Selina had texted me again, reopening the door she’d shut yesterday.

She hadn’t sent anything. What had arrived was an email from Brian Falwell: Hey, thank you so much for getting back to me! This is great timing. Your new book is out soon, right? I can time the profile to publish right around then!

I drove down 280 the next morning to meet Brian at 85C, an Asian bakery where I maxed out my daily sugar intake with a brilliantly marbled Thai tea. Brian drank drip coffee. He looked almost identical to the way I remembered him from high school, tanned and round-faced and dressed in casual wear: Stanford hoodie, joggers clinging to his knobby ankles, neon sneakers. He had not one but two bouncing knees and an eager, wide-eyed expression that made me feel like we were on the brink of some incredible discovery together. Off the record, we talked high school for a while, the reputations of clubs that would probably be unrecognizable to us now, friends and acquaintances.

“Wait, wait,” he said, snapping his fingers, “you’re not still dating Cecilia, are you? Cecilia—what was her name? Mc—something?”

“McCrory,” I said with a laugh. “Yeah, no, we broke up in college. She went to Bryn Mawr, and—”

“Oh, long distance sucks.”

“A lot, yeah. I spent half my sophomore year on trains to Philly.”

Brian looked wistful. “Man, she was beautiful, though.”

Cecilia had been beautiful, and flighty, and the first girl in my life to show interest in me. I’d spent my second year of college terrified of losing her, even as I grew more confused and upset that I was the only one traveling to maintain our relationship.

Another half hour passed before we arrived at the topic of writing. I’d scanned a couple of Brian’s pieces, and he seemed like a good profiler, not too interested in poetic flourishes or creating grand narratives about his subjects’ lives. As he asked me about Yale, a continuous stream of shorthand appeared on the notebook in front of him.

“Okay,” he said, once I’d described the five years it had taken to get These Extraordinary Times down on paper. “I don’t want to jump ahead, I mean, I want to get the context and everything, but…” He shook his head. “Hearing it took that long, and knowing what happened with Selina Chan? That’s brutal.”

I sipped five grams of sugar through my straw. I’d known we’d get to the feud eventually. Last night I’d found myself dismantling and reassembling sentences in my mind, ideas of how to describe the fight, now that Selina and I had a truce. But somehow I still didn’t feel prepared to talk about her.

“Yeah,” I said, setting down my drink. “Yeah, it definitely felt brutal.”

“I’ve read a lot of your press to get a sense of the timeline, but that day the first City review came out … can you describe what went through your head?”

I hesitated. “So, um—I want to preface this by saying that I’ve actually been talking to Selina a little more in the past few weeks.”

“Whoa. For real?” He jotted a note.

“Yeah. We have a truce going.”

Brian laughed. “Wow, okay, I did not expect that.” He set down his pen. “If you don’t want me to mention a truce, I won’t, but can I ask how it happened?”

“No, yeah, maybe better not to mention it—I don’t know how she’d feel about it. But we were both stuck in the city over the holidays.”

“Right. There was that storm.”

“Exactly. And she … I don’t know. She’s a complicated person. Apparently she stays there every year, you know, on her own, and she doesn’t seem to have any problems with that. I guess part of me is kind of impressed by her.”

“Begrudgingly?” said Brian.