I didn’t hear from Miranda the next day, or the rest of the week. My mother left messages that I deleted without listening to. My shock and regret hardened, like clay, into rage.
The green of the trees browned; the air cooled. The libraries, like cathedrals, took on an eerie quality. I resolved that I wouldn’t need anyone. Not Timothy, not Miranda. Not my mother or my father. If loneliness was in my DNA, as I suspected, maybe it meant I had an adaptation others didn’t, like the first frog that blended in with its environment and avoided being eaten. Except my adaptation was that I needed no one. I wouldn’t need anyone.
In the artificial coolness of the gym, I resolved to have a body without any softness in it. I would be invincible—armored and unbreachable. The repetition and mindlessness reminded me of oyster farming—the satisfaction of those early hours in the water. For months, I exercised and studied. My chest and legs bulked and hardened. My exams and essays were returned to me, always A’s.
Often, Isaiah was in the weight room, too, arms and temples glossy with sweat, like a plastic action figure. I could picture them together—he and Miranda—so easily. I felt sick, physically ill with desire—powerless, unable to exert control over the situation. Knowing that the person I wanted, more than anything, was with someone else and wasn’t thinking of me the way I thought of her.
He gave me a small nod. I didn’t know if he remembered that we had met at the party on Edgewood. But I could tell he didn’t know Miranda and I had kissed. She hadn’t told him.
I wiped down the bench. I checked my phone and saw that I had a missed call from Miranda. I stared at it for a moment, not quite believing. Then I hit the call button.
“Hello?” she said. I was still clutching my sweat-soaked shirt. “Nick? You there?”
“Hey,” I managed.
“What are you up to tonight?” she asked, so coolly and casually she almost convinced me that nothing had ever transpired between us, that we’d recently seen each other, that we were casual friends.
Isaiah walked past me to the showers, just then, towel at his waist. It had been four months since that night on East Rock.
“Nothing?” I’d promised to study that night with a roommate; it didn’t matter.
There was a screening of Only Angels Have Wings at the Whitney, she said. Would I go with her?
“Sure,” I said, in disbelief.
“Cool. It’s at seven. I’ll see you there.”
And that was all. The phone showed how long we’d talked: thirty-five seconds.
She was waiting outside the Whitney when I arrived. Bundled in a huge coat with fur on the hood framing her face, like a lion, looking minuscule inside its mane. And like that, my longing returned—electrifying. I had tried so hard to squash it but was helpless to now. Her lips were shining, glossed, flecks of glitter on them.
“Have you seen this?” she asked as we walked toward the entrance. Her boots made a crunching sound over the gravel. I shook my head.
“It’s the best,” she said, lifting the hood from her head. Could she really have called me after four months just to show me a movie she liked? I wanted badly for her to say more: to tell me she wanted to be together. She was being so nonchalant, as though we’d seen each other yesterday. And yet I couldn’t be frustrated with her. I was only grateful.
We found seats. She leaned to show me the miniature bottles of Maker’s Mark she’d stowed in her gloves.
I stole glances to watch her watching Jean Arthur, whose character was named Bonnie Lee, a showgirl passing through a South American trading port—a “Ms. Lee,” just like Miranda. The Ms. Lee beside me laughed with her eyes closed, with her perfect head thrown back. The Ms. Lee in the movie gets entangled with Cary Grant, an air-freight pilot wearing extremely high-waisted pants.
The pilots make impossible decisions with coin flips, surrendering their lives to chance. In the final scene, Jean Arthur asks Cary Grant if she should stay—in other words, with him, in this trading port—or board the boat that will return her to New York. Cary Grant says he’ll flip a coin; heads means she should stay. He flips; the coin says heads. Ms. Lee protests: She doesn’t want this decided by fate. “All you have to do is ask me,” she says. Then she turns the coin over in her hand and sees that it’s double-sided: heads on both sides. He’s asked her to stay, without saying it.
Afterward, outside, we were pleasantly buzzed from Miranda’s secreted whiskey. She drew her hood back over herself; it was cavernous. She peered at me expectantly—I could see how much she wanted me to love the movie, too.
“You were right,” I said. “The best.”
She’d reapplied her lip gloss in the bathroom, and I wondered if it was for me.
“Miranda,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
It was winter now, unequivocally. Her sorry was visible—an apologetic puff that appeared in the air between us, before disappearing.
Don’t say you’re sorry, I thought. I didn’t want her to have anything to be sorry about. What I wanted was simple: for her to want to be with me.
I touched her cheek, the down of it. She flinched a little. Her eyes, staring up into mine, looked wet. I bent to kiss her, and she let me. She kissed me back. There was a snowflake on her eyelash; snow had started to fall.
Miranda shook her head slightly. She leaned in to whisper into my ear. Her breath had mint and whiskey on it.
“I guess we’re doing this, aren’t we?” she said.
“Yes, please,” I said.
We spent almost every night together. Her window was drafty—the radiator hissed hotly and ineffectually from the other side of the room—so we stayed in bed, under colorful quilts sewed by her mother, thinned from use.
Sex with her was different than it had been with anybody else. I didn’t need to be drunk. I didn’t have to keep myself from having thoughts, as I did with other people. What we were doing made sense to me; we made sense. Afterward, she would turn onto her side, bending her lashes against the pillow. Nothing had ever felt as right as being with her. I was who I was and she loved me.
I loved her without makeup. I loved the way she ate incredibly fast, as though some predator were coming for her food. I loved the nights we lay around in Korean face masks, terrifying ourselves and laughing through the cutouts.
“Earth to Nick,” she sometimes said to me. “You’re not here. You’re in your head.”
“Where should I be?” I’d ask.
And she would take my hand in hers: warm, physical, alive.
“Be here,” she’d say. “With me.”
It was easy to adopt Miranda’s passions as my own. So much was enraging once you bothered to pay attention. On the news it was always hurricanes, earthquakes, heat waves, fires. Everything getting worse: inequality, corruption, racism. White supremacists were feeling threatened, lashing out, believing themselves to be the arbiters of who were and weren’t real Americans, conveniently forgetting that they themselves occupied stolen land.
We went to protests and demonstrations: Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, climate change, prison abolition, reproductive rights. On Saturdays, we took the bus to the correctional facility in Bridgeport, volunteering with an organization teaching incarcerated men how to read. On Sundays, Miranda would begin to make pancakes and abandon them midway. I would finish griddling the batter, ladling it into elaborate shapes. We got into fights and made up in bed. For the first few months, when we went to parties, she introduced me only as Nick, a friend. Maybe I was imagining it, but her friends regarded me with amusement. Like I was a new puppy received at Christmas—a creature that a child might grow tired of. I wondered if it was because I looked white. It was so obvious, to date a white boy. It disappointed me, but no matter: I’d waited so long, and I could wait longer.
At a St. Patrick’s Day–themed party she wore a hunter-green dress that I wanted, only, to take off. Everyone looked foolish wearing green—including me. And yet we did; no one didn’t need luck. The room was festooned in tinfoil shamrocks.
“My boyfriend, Nick,” Miranda introduced me, at last. I loved hearing it from her mouth.
“So your mom raised you,” Miranda said, late one night.
We were in her bed, which had so many more pillows than mine did.
It was during nights, lights off, that I could tell her more about myself than I’d shared with anyone. I told her about my upbringing, the lonely Washington island I grew up on, about having Timothy as my only friend, about my mother’s solitude. How I’d wished, more than anything, to be normal. She listened, kindly and intently. With her I could unburden myself of everything—almost everything.
“Where was your dad?” she asked.
“New York,” I said into Miranda’s neck. We’d gotten back in touch in high school, I said. I didn’t tell her that I’d stopped responding to his calls, that he had a legitimate son who wasn’t me.
“Maybe we could see him? When we go there.”
She’d landed a summer internship in Manhattan. I’d been reading a textbook in her bed, highlighter in hand, when she shrieked at the news—it was the job she’d hoped for—and bounded into bed with me. I’d streaked her arm with neon.
There was more I could tell her. And what a relief it would be, to have someone know me completely. I felt the words form. I hadn’t known my father growing up. My mother had lied about him. I had a half brother. That was my family.
“Yeah, we could,” I agreed.
Miranda found a summer sublet in a shared apartment in Carroll Gardens, above a running shoe store. Our roommates were older than we were—one was even in her thirties—adult women with real jobs. Our room had the only access to the fire escape, so the roommates passed through it, stepping onto our frameless mattress and out the window to smoke. It smelled permanently of cigarettes.
She left me money for groceries, which was sort of humiliating. I cooked dinners that would be waiting for her when she got home from her internship. She fawned appreciatively, even when the recipes weren’t successful.
Some nights she texted to say she wouldn’t be back for dinner. She was getting drinks with her new coworkers and I shouldn’t wait up. On those days I put the meals—quiche, spaghetti, congee—in the roommates’ rinsed-out take-out containers so she could bring them to work for lunch.
It was easier not to spend money when you were alone. I took long walks and returned damp with sweat. At the public library, I read newspapers alongside white-haired men in pilled brown sweaters, who asked if I was finished with each section. My father was nearby, I kept thinking. But he was busy with his real son. He didn’t need to hear from me.
On the Fourth of July Miranda and I sat, legs outstretched, by the East River. We drank bad sake and chased it with potato chips.
“I don’t actually like fireworks,” she said. “So many other things are better.”
“What? That’s crazy. Name one thing.”
“Easy. The moon.” She gestured to it—full and glowing. “The moon is better than fireworks.”
“Our Chinese ancestors are rolling over in their graves.”
“But think of it. A world without fireworks, or gunpowder.”
“Dogs wouldn’t freak out every Fourth of July.”
“We’d spend all night looking at the moon.”
“Do you know about Chang’e?” I asked.
“No. Tell me.”
“She lives on the moon,” I said. It was a bedtime story from my mother. “She was married to Houyi, a skilled archer. There were ten suns in the sky, back then, and Houyi shot down nine of them. She stole the elixir of immortality—in some versions it’s a pill—and flew to the moon to escape being caught.”
“Why did Houyi shoot down the suns?”
“I don’t know that part. He was being thoughtful? It was so hot, in those days. So he’s the reason the planet’s, like, even inhabitable. Either he was super considerate—”
“—or it was toxic masculinity. He shot them down just to prove he could.”
I kissed her. Her mouth was salty and sour from the salt-and-vinegar chips; it almost hurt. She pulled away.
I half listened while she talked about her job. Was my father nearby, looking at the same erupting sky?
“Earth to Nick,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“I said, do you want to get sushi?”
I must have winced at the word sushi because she added, “On me.”
A pause, then: “Maybe you could get a job?” Miranda suggested, very gently.