Page 96 of Bad Words

Oh I’m so glad! she said. What’s your schedule like?

We set a date for the following weekend, and I set my phone face down on my bedside table and began to unpack my bag. I felt clearheaded, unconfused, undisturbed. I felt ready for the steps ahead, and I could anticipate how it would feel to take them. This was how it was all supposed to be.

Chapter TwentySelina

The articles had begun to appear late last week, mixed in at the bottom of our front page, like arsenic in the sugar bowl. A scan over our titles went like this:

“Borges Spoke to Me in Winter—Essay”

“The Plow and the Mountain: Jennifer Croft on Translating Nobel Winner Olga Tokarczuk”

“Ranking Kendall Jenner’s Beach Reads”

“Scenes from 1810s Munich in Newly Unearthed Lithographs”

In the days since, Hayden’s requested articles had crept higher and multiplied. By January 21—the day of City’s anniversary party—the piece just below the masthead was “10 Bookish Gadgets Under $15 on Amazon That You Have to Try!”

I found myself wondering what Parker might think. I had to wonder. Since last Monday, we hadn’t spoken.

That night, I’d considered telling him about Hayden’s new directive, but he’d been shouldering so much in California. I hadn’t wanted to pile my own issues onto him, too.

I couldn’t understand what had happened. He’d seemed strangely intent on turning the conversation to me, as though his problems and feelings were barely worth the few sentences that he’d taken to describe them. I’d thought he might text me the next day to restart the conversation. Instead, silence.

“Why didn’t you invite him to this?” Jacob asked while he, Cassie, and I walked toward the City anniversary venue. The magazine had booked our usual event space in Greenpoint, a five-hundred-person hall not far from Jacob and Cassie’s apartment.

“Because,” I said, “I only get two comp tickets, and I invited you.”

“One of us could have stayed home,” Cassie said. “Could’ve saved on the babysitter.”

“I don’t even know if Parker’s back from California.”

“You could have—”

“Jacob, I wasn’t going to uninvite one of you just for an excuse to text a man who doesn’t want to talk to me.”

Cassie straightened her sequined suit jacket with a convulsive shiver. Jacob settled his arm over her shoulder. “Well,” said Cassie, “his loss.”

I laughed.

“What?” said Cassie.

“Nothing,” I said, but I was thinking about all the people Parker had described to me over the last few weeks, the dozen childhood friends who now lived in the city, his siblings and parents and roommate, the authors he’d befriended recently, a constellation of people loved by him. The idea that I could somehow represent a loss in his life was laughable.

“Is everything booked for February?” I asked. “Did you decide where to stop in Thailand?”

“We are booked and ready,” said Jacob. “The hotels are so cheap it feels criminal.”

They outlined their plans as we walked through a melting world. The past few days had seen temperatures in the forties, and the last of the Christmas snowstorm was finally trickling from roofs, dripping down stairways, sliding off banisters, rolling down the gutters in long glittering snakes. We passed by the glowing window of a laundromat, its white-blue interior deserted except for one woman hauling armloads of linens out of a dryer.

The venue stood on the next block, an artful spike of gray stone with a line of rideshares standing out front. A measly little red carpet spanned the six feet of sidewalk between the road and the heavy driftwood door.

Just inside, a table was laden with extravagant party favors. City-branded tote bags had been stuffed with signed copies of Pathogenius—Joyce had pulled a few strings—as well as City-branded pens, notepads, and postcard books featuring vintage City covers.

“Are we allowed to take these?” said Cassie. “Or are they for the people who paid for tickets?”

“Don’t be so loud about it,” said Jacob, helping himself to a bag. “People will hate us.”

As we moved into the venue, past flower beds that had been raised out of the concrete floor, into a sea of bare twinkling bulbs, I spotted Scott in a tuxedo, Kellie in a cream linen dress, Hayden wearing crimson.