“What do you mean? Who did what?”
She took him by the hand and led him outside. Despite his fading high, this arrangement felt familiar. Back when the world was Kodachrome, she had led him and Senderovsky by the hand to all the places in the city where a velvet rope needed to be lifted, places where they felt like impostors in Teva sandals and puka shells. “Look,” he said, “in the meadow, fireflies. I think they’re finally here!”
“No, honey,” she said. “It’s still too early. It has to be June.”
“It’s almost June.”
“Late June.”
“Just pretend they’re here and kiss me.”
“Where everyone can see us?”
“Where everyone can see us.”
From the darkened porch Ed and Senderovsky watched the kiss unfold in real time, each leaning forward as if they were observing from a theater balcony. （“Oh, God,” Ed said. “What the fuck is happening now?”） She took him to her bungalow. The light flipped halogen against the dark. A blind was drawn so that the landowner and the gentleman could see nothing further.
Karen bent down and reached under the bed, feeling the nylon coarseness of the BTS Love Yourself sheets against her forehead. He stood behind her, ramrod straight, as if the role of lover required army precision. She noticed that and found it sweet. Would it be right to do this to him now, right after their first kiss? When they were stoned?
She stood up, kicked the Teva box farther under the bed, turned around, and placed her palms around his stubby cheeks. “Let me guess,” she said, “you shaved just this morning?” It was something from the past, her making fun of his hirsuteness.
He noticed just how thoroughly she had swept the floors—she couldn’t help herself, even in the country. “Remember,” he said, “back in Queens, how we used to watch The Simpsons together and talk on the phone? We’d talk about the show while we were watching it. My parents still had a rotary phone.”
She put her hands on his buttocks and squeezed. “You were in Elmhurst and I was in Jackson Heights,” he said, bathed in memory, unable to stop talking, even as he brought his hands up to her chest, passing through some mental tollbooth, into a world where he was finally allowed to touch her like that. He pictured her coming out of Senderovsky’s pool as he watched the fullness of her body. When they would go to bed together, he would still be able to smell the chlorine on her neck, like an olfactory afterimage.
“I was just a Metallica song away,” she said.
“That’s right, that’s right,” he said. “You were into metal for some reason. I’m so glad that only lasted through sophomore year.”
She let herself fall backward on the bed, bringing him down with her. He weighed so little （too little, the old version of her said）。 The erection she felt against her thigh was no longer sacrilegious. They were not family, no matter what she had told herself, no matter how much she had needed a family.
A shot rang out in the distance. Karen wondered briefly if it was hunting season as Vinod pulled the bateau T-shirt off, grasping like a schoolboy at the clasp of her bra.
Senderovsky and Ed heard the shot three meadows over. The stove had gone cold for the season and only a solitary candle still cast the two friends in funereal shadows. Senderovsky listened to the retort echo against the far hills to the east where the whiteness of the partial moon slumbered amid a sky of black and blue, forming the flag of a small Baltic country. Hunting season was not until the fall. What did it mean that they were shooting guns already? And here they were, showcased within the cedar jewel box of the porch above the meadows, two talkative targets bathed in candlelight.
“It was because she was half Indonesian,” Ed was saying. Finally, he had found the proper use for his pocket square, blowing his nose with abandon, the sound of it dull and elephantine. He was shocked by his own tears, though it felt surprisingly fine to cry in front of the emotional Russian. “The fans posted racist stuff all the time. They called her a monkey.”
His favorite housemate on the Japanese reality show, a twenty-two-year-old budding female wrestler, had killed herself after being taunted online. The show had stopped filming because of the virus, and now there was a chance it would never return. “She was the nicest of all of them,” Ed said, wiping his eyes. “When she fell in love with the basketball player, she was so shy and so honest about it. And when he turned her down, it’s not like the hope went out of her. She just wanted someone to love her. And because she was a wrestler, and a hāfu, and because she was both girlie and a tomboy, because she didn’t tick all the boxes they need her to tick in a conformist society, they bullied her to death.”