Eight a.m. Thursday morning and I’ve got a pillow over my face. On the other side of my bedroom wall, my roommate is into day two of her post-breakup hibernation: the anger phase in which a constant soundtrack of man-hating anthems bellows through our apartment on a loop. Kumi was up at seven to treat herself to her ritual Breakfast Milkshake of Mourning—the piercing whir of the blender snapping me awake—to the tune of Taylor Swift.
It’s been three days since my interview. I said I would give Ed and Cara my answer by Monday. For whatever reason, Ethan has taken a personal interest. I would be an idiot to pass this up. If I refuse and nothing better comes along, I might spend the rest of my life reading his bylines and thinking about the biggest mistake of my career. Or I take the job and manage to embarrass myself and sabotage any glimmer of journalistic aspirations by falling into the essay abyss. Thus far I’ve yet to find an off-ramp from this cycle of possibility and doubt. Despite my reservations, I admit there are more items in the Yes column than not.
Either way, Kumi and I are moving to Manhattan tomorrow. Her wealthy but absentee father has recently decided he wants to be back in her life, so his bribery mission begins with paying for an apartment in the city while Kumi attends law school at NYU and I start applying for jobs. She was hesitant to accept until we started looking at rent prices and realized all we could afford was a storage unit in the Bronx or maybe an abandoned car by the river. So she agreed, on the stipulation that I get to come, too. Her dad wasn’t in a position to put limitations on his apology for being a catastrophic jackass for the last six years. Having deficient father figures is sort of the basis for everything Kumi and I have in common.
Just as Carrie Underwood launches into the chorus of her revenge fantasy, my phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I haven’t spoken to my mom since the essay went up last week—I gave her an advance copy and received her blessing before publishing it—but her name flashing on the screen sends a jolt of apprehension through my chest.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, answering the call. I pull the duvet over my head to replace the pillow while Kumi belts over the vocals of Katy Perry.
“Did I wake you up?”
Her voice is bright, airy. Birds chirp in the background and her rocking chair creaks on the front porch. I picture her in jeans stained from her garden, drinking tea while she watches the squirrels run across the yard. The image comes from a photograph, I think. One of her I must have seen years ago. She was younger, barely in her twenties. Hair like a brushfire and eyes green as spring grass, smiling into the camera. People used to tell me we look alike. But she barely resembles that person anymore. I prefer to think of her happy.
“Sorta. No. I’m awake.”
“Are you still in bed? Echo, it’s such a blissful day. You should be outside getting some sunshine. Come out for a few days. We’ll go canoeing at the springs.”
“We’re moving tomorrow.” She knows this, but my mom doesn’t adapt well to change. Selective memory is her defense mechanism. “And I have to work.” A decision on Riot Street aside, I still have looming deadlines for freelance clients. “Besides, the springs are closed. Another bacterial flare-up.”
“What, really? Where’d you hear that?”
“Saw an article online.”
“Hmm. I must have missed it,” she says in a dour tone.
My mother doesn’t watch the news. Or read it. Or otherwise acknowledge the crimes and tragedies of humanity. She says it distracts from the “pursuit of wholeness.” So I have listened to no small amount of browbeating concerning my chosen vocation.
“You’re depriving yourself of felicity with all that calamity and woe,” she is fond of saying. And that chronicling society’s failures—her concise view of the work of the news media at large—is a distraction from the “human imperative of spiritual awareness.”
She didn’t always talk like that.
Simply put, I am a disappointment who is wasting the best years of my life. And I need to find Jesus. Or Allah. Or Buddha. Anyone will do, as long as I find an idol to guide me toward enlightenment. That kind of thing is important to my mother. It gives her purpose and provides meaning and order in a chaotic world. A plan for everyone. A purpose for it all. I don’t begrudge her these things. I only wish she’d recognize that our shared history had the opposite effect on me. When you grow up secluded from society, under the autocratic regime of a self-appointed guru—and it all ends in mass casualties—you develop a healthy skepticism about deities and dogma.
“Anyway, honey, the reason I called…” Her rocking chair creaks through the phone and the screen door claps shut. “I went online and looked at your essay.”
I close my eyes and hold my breath, bracing for impact. “Yeah?”
“Have you seen these comments?”
A gust of air leaves my lungs and my muscles relax. “Don’t read the comments. Ever. People are awful.”
“Some of these…” Her voice trails off, in a tone that makes me throw off my duvet and sit up in bed. “The things people are saying…”
“Mom, I knew this would be part of it, okay? I don’t look at them and you shouldn’t either.” Can’t put a spent bullet back in the chamber. There’s no use flogging myself with the witless snark of internet trolls.
“About me,” she says.
“What?” Her muttered statement sideswipes me. “What about you?”
“‘This woman should be in prison.’ ‘How is this not child abuse?’ ‘Her mother should have done this girl a favor and blown her own brains out.’” Her voice cracks. “‘She should—’”
“Mom, stop. Close the page. Just walk away from it, okay? I’m serious.”
She breathes heavily through the phone. Stuttering gasps. My mother and I aren’t close—she pretends we are and I let her—but I never intended to cast her as the villain. For as fucked up as my childhood was, her experience was far more difficult. And while there’s plenty of blame to lay at her feet, it wasn’t like her actions were malicious. She was a naïve woman deceived and manipulated by a sociopath. A young mother with no money and nowhere else to go.
“Echo…” A long, pained sigh trickles from her lips, and it cracks my chest open. “Why would you want to do this?”
“Mom, I swear, I—”
“Why would you want to make a life at this? This, letting people peck over your private sorrows, it’s noxious. I don’t want that for you. I want you to find your joy and be at peace and fulfilled. How can this make you happy?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I don’t have a better answer and it pains me that she takes the brunt of the attacks and feels sympathy for me. “I didn’t mean for—”
“They haven’t said anything I haven’t thought myself. Don’t worry about me, honey. I’m happy you were able to express these thoughts and relieve yourself of the burden. It’s healthy to confront our emotions and take control of the shadows. But I worry what effect this negative energy will have on you. So much hatred and bile—you can ignore it, but it’s there, festering, eating away whether you notice it or not.”
I apologize again, and again, and keep apologizing until she’s said her piece. I owe her that much. And I understand that when she tears at the shreds of my dreams like she’s ripping off wallpaper, it is only because she sees my career path as detrimental to my well-being. At the moment, I can’t argue otherwise. So check one more item in the No column.
The difference, however, between my mother and me is that I don’t need to be happy to be happy. I can settle for being free.
“Come up to the house sometime,” she says, knowing that on this point we are at an impasse. “I’ll make you dinner.”
“Talk to you soon, Mom. Bye.”
* * *
For the last five years, since about the time I started college, my mother has lived inside a rural Pennsylvania commune. The town of Aster is infamous as a curiosity that attracts tourists and devotees alike. It is known as a psychic haven for its dense population of mediums, fortune tellers, palm readers, and the like. They are the New Agers, if you will, who set up shop in the “haunted” hotel and entertain visitors with mystic insights. But across the street is the more orthodox clan. The Aster Spiritualist Camp, where true believers have gone since 1884 to engage in a “personal experience with God.” In whatever form He/She/They/It might take. So now my mom “talks” to dead people. In one form or another, she’s been born again and again and again, and she’ll keep trying until she gets it right.
I won’t set foot within the camp boundaries.
Not because I take issue with their faith or the form in which they practice it. Not because I suspect some sort of nefarious activities are being carried out within the decaying buildings that sit beneath sagging bows clothed in moss. I won’t go in there because, for all its friendly trappings and honest convictions, I can’t help but see it as just another incarnation of the place where I was born and raised. A place from which my mother and I escaped the night my father murdered eleven people before attempting to take his own life. Too bad he missed, the bullet went through his cheek.
Anyway, the place gives me the creeps. And I have work to do. So I pull out my laptop, put on my headphones to drown out Kumi’s screeching Alanis Morissette at the top of her lungs, and dive into a blog post on the value of saltwater pools over chlorinated. Add one more to the Yes column.
* * *
By afternoon, I’ve moved on to writing a white paper explaining the benefits and drawbacks to homeowners’ associations. Right about the time I decide owning a home is way too much hassle, I get a text message from a number I don’t recognize.
Unknown
12:17 PM
It occurred to me that I might have been a bit abrupt with you the other day. Don’t let my bad manners scare you off.
E.A.
I suppose that is something like an apology, though no apology is necessary. Abrupt is just another word for honest, and honesty goes a long way with me. I could tell him that; assure him my decision on this job is solely about me and not a reaction to anyone else…But his book is lying on the floor next to my desk. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it. Leaving it on the train seemed wrong somehow. Like throwing it away. A book in a garbage can is a damn tragedy. Besides, Trilby had spent his hard-foraged dollars on it and gifted it to me in what he must have felt was an act of compassion. Perhaps he believed he’d sniped that copy from me at the counter. That I’d pined over it during our train ride home. Throw the girl a bone, you know?
Unknown
12:20 PM
For what it’s worth, today’s Thai Thursday.
If you worked here, you’d be eating spring rolls right now.
Yes column.
* * *
A few hours later, I am wrapping up a chat session with a client, sending them revised drafts for approval, when it occurs to me that I haven’t heard much sound coming from Kumi’s room for the last hour. While the silence is appreciated, I’m somewhat concerned that stillness is a warning sign. It’s after five, I haven’t eaten yet, and after two days I think it’s about time for Kumi to get out of her pajamas and take a shower. So I knock on her bedroom door to invite her out to dinner. We could both use a distraction.
“Kumi?” I say through the door when she doesn’t answer. “Want to get something to eat?” Nothing. No movement on the other side. “My treat. You can get loaded on cocktails and—”
The door whips open. Kumi is holding a pair of eight-inch scissors in one hand, the fingers of her other hand combing through what’s left of her hair.
“What do you think?” she asks. Her eyes are bright and expectant, a smile on her face that is a little excited and a lot terrified. It’s a look that means if I’m not careful, she might stab me or herself. Either way, someone goes to the hospital if I screw this up.
But for fuck’s sake, she’s left six inches of black hair on the carpet. Kumi has the face for a severe bob, just not the skill to cut in a straight line.
“How about I order delivery and help you even out the back?”
“Oh, please, yes,” she says, and yanks me to the bathroom.
By the time I’ve got her head sorted and she’s moved on to the bargaining phase of her post-breakup grief—I threatened to throw her phone in the toilet if I saw her texting her ex—I notice I have a missed text from Ethan.
Ethan Ash
5:27 PM
Do you like karaoke?
This is important.
I sweep up the clippings from the bathroom floor while Kumi searches Netflix for a proper Girls’ Night selection. And I smile, because I can’t take that message seriously.
Avery Avalon
5:44 PM
I’m judging you right now.
Ethan Ash
5:44 PM
Answer the question.
This is IMPORTANT.
Avery Avalon
5:45 PM
No one likes karaoke.
Ethan Ash
5:45 PM
Blasphemy.
This was a test. You failed.
Avery Avalon
5:45 PM
Oh well. If you change your mind…
I’ll be at the cool kids’ table.
Ethan Ash
5:46 PM
Do they have spring rolls?
My table has spring rolls.
“Avery, food’s here,” Kumi calls from the kitchen.
I dump the clippings in the trash can and put Ethan in a drawer.
Avery Avalon
5:48 PM
I’ll take that into consideration.
In the kitchen, Kumi is unpacking our orange chicken and fried rice. I still don’t quite recognize her, but the new look does make her appear taller, thinner. It didn’t turn out half-bad for a sudden, scorched-earth approach to hair styling. Sometimes a girl just needs a change and the immediate gratification that hacking off a few inches can provide.
“What are you smiling at?” she asks, turning to hand me a paper plate.
“Nothing. What?”
Her eyes narrow and I have that run-or-be-stabbed feeling again. “You were talking to a boy.”
“No,” I say, and take my plate to the living room.
“Boys are shits, Avery. Horrible little shits.”
* * *
After dinner we finally tackle the last of the packing we’ve been avoiding. The movers her dad hired are showing up at eight in the morning, and I’ve warned Kumi that anything not packed by then is getting left behind. Rushing around and last-minute chaos always give me anxiety.
In the living room, we box up her DVD collection, vinyl records from my short-lived vintage phase, and the shelving unit overflowing with books two rows deep. Kumi must have forgotten it was there, The Cult of Silence slotted spine-in next to the old textbooks we couldn’t sell back to the campus bookstore. When I pull it off the shelf to stack in a box, she turns that nervous shade of red like a kid whose parents found her box of secrets under the bed.
“Busted,” I say, tossing it in her lap.
She sits on the carpet, elbow-deep in her collection of true-crime novels. Almost afraid to touch it, as if doing so would claim it and thus admit guilt, she pushes it away.
“Must have picked it up by accident,” she says. “One of those bargain-bin buys. I probably didn’t recognize it at the time.”
So I snatch it back and flip open the cover. Scrawled across the title page in black marker is Ethan’s signature.
“You went to his book signing?”
But I can’t keep a straight face, and my repressed laughter assures Kumi she doesn’t need to find a new roommate.
“I couldn’t help myself,” she says, all desperate puppy eyes full of regret. “It really isn’t as bad as you think.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Kumi tops off the box she’s working on and tapes it shut. I feel her staring at me.
“You should give it a chance,” she says. “It might help you make up your mind about him.”
“Pass. Thanks.” I get up to pull another armful of books from the shelf. She’s still staring. “What?”
“What’s he like?”
“You met him.” When I glance over, Kumi’s giving me her exasperated face. Fine. “He’s pushy.”
She rolls her eyes. “That all?”
“He’s taller in person.”
“Oh, well...” Her hands dance between us in a sort of magician’s reveal. A very sarcastic magician. “Say no more.”
“I don’t know. He’s…”
She picks up her phone off the coffee table and starts playing with it. “What?”
“Noticeable.”
“How so?”
“It’s hard to explain.” My attention drifts to a scuff on the wall from the day we first moved into this apartment. “Like when he walks into a room, it shrinks. Everything feels smaller around him.”
There are those people, the ones born separate from the rest of us. Gifted with an ineffable quality as easily recognized as it is difficult to explain. Some become rock stars or go into politics. Maybe start a cult in the mountains. Most, though, they’re the unicorn next door. The charismatic mechanic. The charming shop clerk. Singular personalities who bend the world around them and pervade through the clutter of time and memory.
Kumi stares at me with one raised eyebrow. “You’ve given this some thought.”
“No.”
“You know…” There is a perceptible shift in her demeanor. Something almost predatory emerges from behind her eyes. She holds out her phone to show me the photo of him from his Riot Street profile. “He’s not hard to look at, huh?”
Like I haven’t noticed.
“I see what you’re doing.”
“What?” Kumi applies her contrite face with an octave jump in her voice.
“I know how your mind works.”
Feigning wounded by my accusation, she looks away. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Uh-huh.” I get up to hunt for ice cream in the freezer. Because there’s always room for ice cream. And because Kumi is a ruthless interrogator when she brings her considerable coercive talents to bear. “You’re trying to make this a thing. It isn’t a thing.”
“Sure, okay.”
We still have some chocolate and coffee ice cream left. It shows restraint she didn’t clean us out during her hibernation.
“I mean it.”
“Yeah.” An annoyed clip to her voice. “I heard you.”
I pull out two paper bowls and peel open the carton lids. “Okay. Just so we’re clear.”
Since we met junior year of college, Kumi has had these wild sexual aspirations for me. In her eyes, I’m some stricken, oppressed woman liberated from a convent and in desperate need of fornication. But I think she longs for the days when sex was still exciting and everything was a first time for something. I’m merely an avatar for her vicarious fantasies.
“I’m just saying…” She pauses, and I decide three scoops of each flavor is not unreasonable. Because I’m an adult. “You should totally hit that.”
“And now you’re not getting any ice cream.”