I save the next half of that text for once I’m safely in my office, the door shut. And locked.
Even then my hands are shaking a little as I turn back to my phone, thumbs hovering over the screen for a long moment before I finally type.
Me:Because I did want to kiss you back there.
Ely replies in an actual second, so fast she must have had the response pretyped in.
Ely:Knew it.
Ely:Don’t you think maybe you should have?
I’m struggling to figure out how to respond to that when another notification pops up at the top of my screen: a message from Marcus.
I can’t decide if his timing is incredible or piss-poor.
Marcus:So I was on the train just now and this one guy was selling prints of his photos car to car. They were pretty good, too. Reminded me of you.
I know Ely’s probably staring at her screen waiting for my response, but I tap one out to Marcus instead.
Me:The good photos, or the selling them on the F line for drug money?
Marcus:I think you’re being a little unfair with the last bit, man. On yourself and on subway guy. He’s just trying to catch his break.
In case I needed reminding that I’m an asshole. Here I am, supposed to be clean but still seeing addicts everywhere I go. Even when I’m not physically there.
Marcus:I bought one of his pieces. I’ll show you next time we hang out. Maybe you’ll like them. Or maybe you’ll tell me they’re derivative pieces of trash, who knows. It’ll be a party!
He’s trying to make me feel better in that weird Marcus way of his, but it doesn’t really help. Today already feels like it’s gotten fucked up in so many ways that I’ll never disentangle myself from all of them. The only way out would be to cut the lights and start over from 12:01.
The one part of this I don’t regret is her. Ely.
No matter how idiotic I might act around her, I never regret a single moment I spend with Ely.
20
ELY
The humiliation of almost being caught kissing Wyatt by Ava Zhu is at war with the elation of realizing thatI almost got caught kissing Wyatt by Ava Zhu. Which would mean that I was almost kissing Wyatt again.
Which wouldmeeeeaaaaaanhe has decided not to be weird about the whole student thing after all.
His texts certainly seem to suggest as much.
I literally have the song “Walking on Sunshine” stuck in my head for the rest of the day as I keep editing the photos. Wyatt’s words echo there too.I think this could be a very powerful body of work.
Like this moment exists in a space between worlds.
I’m light-headed by the time I finish and log out of my account at the end of the day, the kind of dazed feeling you get after staring at a screen for too long. I float out of the computer lab and down the hall, intentionally drifting past Wyatt’s office—but his door is shut, the light dim in the crack against the floor. He already left, I guess.Withoutsaying goodbye.
The dreamlike feeling ends by the time I’m on the subwayheaded back to Astoria, crammed into an orange plastic seat between a cluster of gossiping high school students and a thirty-something-year-old man who still feels the need to play music without headphones. But all that’s an excuse to tip my head back and close my eyes and try not to think of anything at all…at least until the train barrels out of the tunnel beneath the East River and rises to the elevated platform at Queensboro Plaza.
Back home, I’m alone. Diego and Ophelia are still out, although one of them has left a bottle of tequila open on the kitchen counter. I wipe sticky residue off the fake marble and am about to screw the cap on the tequila when instead, on impulse, I tip forward and inhale.
The aroma is just as I remembered—sweet but with a steel wire cutting through the sugar. Like poisoned honey.
That smell is laced through so many of my best memories. And my worst. Drunken nights with Chaya Mushka, the both of us a tangle of limbs on a bed somewhere, giggling over some stupid boy (or girl). Sitting on a stranger’s dirty floor next to a smashed bottle of the stuff, my hands trembling as I slide the needle into my wrist. The acrid way tequila smells when you’ve thrown it up, my sister Dvora scrubbing it off our bedroom floor as I moan and roll uselessly around in my own misery.
I lift the bottle and take a tiny sip. I hold it in my mouth for one second, two. I could spit it out. I should, probably. But two seconds turn into three, then four.
