Aleksandr grins at her flustered, stumbling. “I can see you that Sunday when I’m back.”
Right. Casual. A matter of schedules, convenience. Nothing more.
Lili nods. “Sunday.”
On the train home—declining his offer to work at the office—she’s rummaging through her tote for her headphones, when a metallic gleam catches her eye.
Black leather key tab, slim silver key.
She frowns.
(10:15 p.m.) are these your keys?
(10:19 p.m.) No, those are for you.
(10:19 p.m.) what?
(10:21 p.m.) You can’t actually be able to get work done at home.
(10:21 p.m.) i told you, i just go to campus
(10:23 p.m.) My apartment is closer.
(10:24 p.m.) this is ridiculous
(10:24 p.m.) you can’t just give me your keys
(10:25 p.m.) Use it, or don’t. I don’t care. I’m gone for two weeks. Finish your thesis.
(10:26 p.m.) whatever
Lili balances the keys in her palm for a moment, then throws them back into her tote. She shoves her earphones in and watches the bright city at night across the water, as the train heads over the Williamsburg Bridge.
Casual. It’s casual.
5
Emerging Markets
It’s absurd.
She’s not going to stay at his place.
She’s not.
Lili’s disciplined about work that week: commuting uptown, staking out the library until closing hours. Kerr’s full edits are constructive but grueling. She has to split open her thesis, draw and quarter her draft to extricate ideas wound together too tightly, elucidate what’s unspoken, but she’s determined to make this good; determined to eventually look at her ideas, her words, and feel something like pride. Maybe then she’ll feel relief; a split second of security—fragile and foreign fuckingpeace—in having accomplished enough, for a moment.
But it’s exhausting. The hour commute uptown, if she’s lucky; the scramble to get showered, dressed, out the door; the strain of her bag heavy with her laptop and annotated books; the dwindling battery on her phone; the tangle of her charger, headphones, pens; the train ride back each evening, crushed against tired commuters. She has to cancel dinner with Jackie and her parents; she can’t help with prep for Amina’s upcoming art show downtown. Her inbox keeps buzzing: emails from the farm, the scramble of other staff trying to figure out the volunteer schedule, planning the upcoming workshop intensive upstate, pulling together the right collateral for forthcoming fundraising rounds. She has toignore it all, along with the sharp spike of anxiety at the thought of the damage her paycheck will suffer from missed shifts.You’re fucking up,she thinks, as she files the emails away along with Kerr’s persistent pings of job postings—CLIMATE POLICY WITH UNDP. IN ADDIS ABABA. YES? NO?—You’re letting them down.
By the time she starts to see new coherence in the blown-apart bits of her argument—finally sinking into that lucid, thoughtful state of mind where good work feels possible—the library staff announce closing hours, it’s dark outside, time to head home.
The glint of his keys, shoved in her desk drawer, becomes appealing then.
No, Lili,she thinks, shoring up her stubbornness.No.
She’s stronger than that. Even if she’s gnawing her cuticles raw with nerves; even if she’s having trouble falling asleep at night, trying to understand what she could possibly say that’s new in this field; even if she keeps glancing at her calendar, wondering how on earth she’ll hit the deadline of next Friday’s meeting with Kerr—Lili sets her shoulders, swipes her MetroCard, and tries to snag the same library table by the window, hidden by the stacks.
It’s Friday night, almost a week out, when she caves. Already home from campus, she’s nowhere near done for the day. It’s late, and she feels like she’s never had an intelligent thought in her life; her friends are drunk, getting ready to head out—what does she expect, it’s the weekend—and Amina zips into Lili’s room to steal her eyeliner, Vince Staples blasts from a speaker, Jackie’s making everyone do shots, vodka sloshing over glasses—Lili willnotbe cleaning that up—and there’s a new bar on Grand where one of Jackie’s modeling friends knows the owner, and then a loud crash, wood splintering, some roared laughter, a groaned curse from James—“Oops!” Jackie giggles—and Lili is fucking fed up.
