I wonder what she looked like naked. If she had better boobs, a flatter stomach. I drink water from the tap, promising myself that next time—which there won’t be a next time—I will stay up the requisite enamel-preserving half hour and remember to brush my teeth before passing out.
I smear on liquid liner in case the hot deli guy’s working the register and dash to the far bodega. There’s one on my corner, but they’re dicks, so I leg it across the street and down the block. But of course it’s not the hot guy but the old one. He adds a convenience fee when you charge your groceries to a credit card, which the hot guy doesn’t. I wish I were the type of person to confront him about it, but I’m not.
I tear down the aisles, say hi to the black-and-white deli cat, grab the medium-size box of Cheerios, a jar of Nutella with a regular label—not the seasonal one—English muffins, which I don’t even like, and a thing of turkey cold cuts. It’s the wrong brand, but it’ll have to do. Honestly, he’s lucky that I’m even making the effort. I also grab a cup of coffee, black.
Back in the apartment, I replace everything in the fridge and cupboards, tipping half the bag of Cheerios into a ziplock baggie so that the level will match up, and shove the surplus cereal into my dirty clothes pile.
Before I leave, I grab the shower cleaner from the back of the cupboard. I keep two back there. Jeremy hates the smell of ylang-ylang. He says the floral citrusiness reminds him of getting carsick in his father’s overly air-freshened Volvo. It’s triggering, he tells me. You’re triggering, I want to say back. And your face is triggering.
I spend precious moments dedicating myself to bombing the ever-living shit out of the bathroom far more diligently than I did last night. I pump ylang-ylang deep into the bathmat, grinding it in with my foot and drenching his towel before closing the door firmly behind me.
My hands still smell of flowers on the train. I wipe them on my jacket and stare out the windows. I like the aboveground part of the commute best. They demolished a building just before I moved here, smashing it into a mountain of rubble that they’ve been removing bit by bit. I try not to think about how quickly things change. Whenever people complain about neighborhood businesses shuttering or how their favorite bakery’s now a Citibank, I feel a tremor of panic. As if the ground beneath my feet isn’t reliable. How can I ever get to know a place that changes so quickly? I’m late enough as it is.
I thumb through Instagram. I almost exclusively follow people who make me feel bad about myself.
Models, photographers, influencers, aspirational fitness entrepreneurs, actors.
My heart stops when I see someone I know. Someone I actually know in life. Not even New York life—my real life.
It’s Patrick.
His tattooed arm is flung around a fashion designer who makes animal-print fleeces that cost six hundred bucks. I’m astonished by the happenstance, but it’s him. He looks almost the same as he did when he was fourteen. Slightly less skinny but not by much. He’s pointing at the sky with his mouth wide. He appears to be singing.
His hair is unimpeachably excellent. Not too coiffed. Not fussy and stiff with product or the calculated androgyny of boy band members. Patrick unfailingly wore hats, until he got this transformative haircut that made him hot overnight. He was utterly forgettable until he absolutely wasn’t. Patrick was partial to bucket hats. I’ve never understood the appeal of looking like a giant toddler.
Back then, I wasn’t ever sure my infatuation with Patrick made sense. School was rife with cues as to who to desire. The jocks were kings. You could see it in how adults behaved. The way teachers nodded along to their jokes, lips drawn back, readied for the laugh. Holland Hint was objectively attractive. The bathroom walls told me so. There was no controversy in gold hair and green eyes at six foot one.
At church, Patrick was a feeling. A giddy, swirly bubbling that flushed my face, but I couldn’t talk to June—or anyone from school—about some boy from church.
I zoom in. Patrick’s cheekbones seem swiped with highlighter. Especially with his mouth hung open. He’s wearing a somewhat clingy Rick Owens shirt. It’s either Rick Owens or very, very old.
I click on his name.
@40_7264N_73_9818W.
We get it—you do art.
The tagged pictures set a different tone from his feed. There’s even a photo of him at Léon. We could have been at the restaurant at the same time, except that the caption reads that he was at an impromptu album release for a reclusive singer-songwriter. A party I would never have gotten into. Jeremy wouldn’t have either for that matter. I take some satisfaction in that.
I feel foolish now that I’d been right all along. About Patrick’s hotness. Less that I’d squandered the chance to stake my claim but more how clear it is that he’d been out of my league then, too.
Patrick’s account has more than fifty-three thousand followers. Way more than anyone I personally know. In fact, Jonah Hill follows him, which seems significant to me. There are only two selfies. One in glorious morning light, where his face is slightly puffy. Another with a black eye.
Most of the images are mood boards. Typefaces. Buildings. Album artwork. Some very thin Asian girls with explosively big lips and freckles dressed in designer goth layers. I wonder if he’s dated any of the women. Probably. He’s either an art director or a photographer.
I had no idea he moved to New York. Not that he’d have told me. His family left Texas forever ago, so the church network wouldn’t have dispatched the all-points bulletin either.
I go to his saved stories. The one called shoots.
I open on a beautiful white loft with a curved wall on one side, which gives a Stanley Kubrick spaceship effect. There are windows all along the back, with fifteen people standing around.
They watch a screen instead of the model in front of them. A model with dark hair in a blue-and-white dress who lifts her arms and waves them, the sleeves billowing dramatically.
She does this over and over and I’m transfixed. The delicate, translucent fabric refracts the light. The dress is familiar to me. The woman laughs, throwing her head back, her wavy hair coiling around her pale cheeks.
I recognize her too. She’s not a model but an actor. Korean, but Korean American. She’d won an award from an indie film about CEOs who moonlit as contract killers. And as she gathers the full skirt around her, lifting its hem, I realize she’s wearing a variation on a hanbok. Almost exactly the gown my mother was married in, the one in her wedding photo. The one that still hangs in her closet. It’s startling to see someone who resembles me, us, in such a setting. Commanding attention without being ninety pounds, without backing from a girl group.
I go to my own grid. See if there’s a photo of me at Léon. There isn’t and I’m disappointed. I start deleting. It’s mostly pictures of magazine covers from the nineties, dressing-room selfies of clothes I can’t afford, and close-ups of my hands and mouth.
I tidy it up. So it’s more aesthetic.
I find that the more I hide, the more presentable I am to the world.
Then I follow him. He probably won’t even notice.
I’m filled with the urge to tell June. But the version of June I want is the one I sat with at church. The one I grew up with. The one from long ago, before all the screaming fights in high school, and not this one at all.