Page 49 of Bad Words

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine. Why?”

“Because you look like you’re passing a kidney stone.”

“Have you seen a lot of people pass kidney stones?”

“Just you, right now.”

I tried to smile. “Sibling group text about Christmas planning.”

“What’s happening, someone cancel Christmas?”

“You’d think. I’m getting in a few days late.”

“Huh. And how is that a problem?”

I shrugged and glanced at my phone screen. The group chat was still lighting up with furious messages, and Elena and Kevin had each texted me separately to complain about the other.

“Maybe I should just turn down the event,” I muttered. “It feels sort of selfish not to be there for the holidays.”

“What? Come on,” said Arthur. “It’s not like you’re missing Christmas. You’re allowed to have a life. You need to let your siblings be adults for once and sort out their own shit.”

I didn’t answer. Arthur took this tone sometimes, a kind of urgent supportiveness, but rather than reassuring me, his suggestions invariably left me even more stressed out, as though I were not only failing at the problem at hand but also acting in a way that Arthur thought was childish or unreasonable. He was looking for his bookmark now, and then he’d mark his page in the Etruscans and make this into something it wasn’t, the first step into an imagined downward spiral, like I was another cause he had to advocate for.

“No, you’re right,” I said, forcing a sigh. “Yeah. They’ll figure it out.”

Mollified, Arthur returned to his book, and I returned to playing referee, this time with my face purposefully blank.

As the twenty-third crept closer, the cold snap deepened, and I spent hours planning my questions for Juliette. I wanted to spark a real conversation, not just a courteously embellished yes or no. I wanted to show her the ways I’d loved her work. I wanted so badly for her to like me that it was pathetic.

The week of the event arrived, and my friends bled out of the city. By Tuesday, everyone from the Bay Area had flown back west, and on Wednesday, Arthur wheeled his suitcase to the door and pushed a wrapped rectangular prism into my hand.

“Book?” I said.

“Book,” he said.

“Book.” I handed over his gift, too, then slid a nail under Arthur’s messily folded wrapping paper to cut through the tape. A hand-drawn cover came into view. He’d given me a copy of ChiArts Young Voices: A Poetry Collection. “Wait, incredible,” I said, flipping to the title page, which wore the shaky, unpracticed signatures of all twelve contributors. “Oh, I can’t wait to read this. Any recommendations?”

“I don’t play favorites,” he said, ripping through the wrapping of his own present to reveal a copy of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything.

“Bring it to L.A.,” I said. “You can test the recipes out on your parents.”

“Trying to escape being the guinea pig?”

“No,” I lied.

Arthur laughed and obligingly stuffed the cookbook into his suitcase. “Thanks, man,” he said as he cracked the door. “And good luck at the event tomorrow. I hope people show up. We’re supposed to get flurries.”

Thursday dawned gray and freezing. Still huddled bleary-eyed in my flannel sheets, I tugged my phone under the covers to check the weather. Arthur’s flurries were nowhere in sight. Instead, a winter storm warning was splashed across my weather app.

I sat up in bed. “No,” I said, throwing the covers off myself. Cool air cut through my T-shirt. I tapped into the forecast, groping my way through the apartment, muttering, “No, no, no, no.”

The snow would start this afternoon and wasn’t projected to end until tomorrow night. I was supposed to fly out of LaGuardia first thing in the morning. JetBlue hadn’t emailed yet, but it was only a matter of time.

I tried to rope in the panic, opening the notebook on my kitchen table to review my questions for Juliette. I’d deal with the blizzard tomorrow. One storm at a time.

By the time I made my way to the Upper West Side that evening, buffeted by horizontal wind, three inches of snow had carpeted the sidewalks, and the air had taken on that muffled quality, like we’d all been transported to a New York City hidden beneath a thick comforter. I arrived with half an hour to spare at the store, a new indie called the Dog’s Ear. Overlapping rugs and trailing plants gave the shop the air of a maximalist’s living room, and a rheumy-eyed Labrador was melting off a chair in the nonfiction section.

The manager, Chester, an older man with orange-rimmed glasses, stood chatting near the shuttered café area with a woman whose back was turned. She was small and heavyset, wearing a collection of fraying, grayish clothes that made her look draped in centuries of dust. Her shoes were wildly impractical quilted slippers, and she held an enormous green woolen coat in the crook of her arm.