“You’re such a drama queen.”
“That’s a very gendered insult, Jules. You can do better than that.”
“Just hire whoever the fuck you want, and finish the product.” He stalks away, and I immediately get to work. Now that Ren is here, I have no excuse. Six months is only six months away.
It bothers me that Jules is such a stickler for procedure—I blame Gaby, who seems to be having an undue influence—but we are all starting to feel the high, even Cyrus. I love taking the train to work with him, love seeing him across the room. Sometimes he’ll walk past my desk and brush the back of my neck lightly with his knuckle, and I swear I can feel the blood rushing to the very middle of my body where all the tingle lives. Sometimes we text. Sometimes we sext.
The other high is real estate. Cyrus and I have just signed the lease on a one-bedroom apartment in Gowanus. We are each paid sixty-five thousand dollars a year, which, after taxes, is more money than I have ever had in my bank account at one time. Between coding sprints, I’m Googling sofas on Craigslist and creating spreadsheets for our household expenses. Actually, I’m just repurposing the one I made for WAI before Rupert gave us all that money. New York is expensive and I don’t want to ever be broke again.
* * *
Two weeks later, we move. It is a Sunday in the middle of April. My parents and Mira stand in the driveway as the last snow of the season melts under a glorious midafternoon sun. My mother dabs the end of her sari against the corner of her eye. She has packed two coolers full of meals, each in a blue-lidded Tupperware with a note attached: Chicken Curry （microwave 3 minutes）， Lamb Bhuna （microwave 4 minutes）， Fish Curry （eat first do not freeze）。 She has even packed rice because she knows otherwise we’ll just eat it all on toast.
“We’re just a train ride away,” I say. Ammoo sniffs. My father pulls me toward him and slips a fifty-dollar bill into my hand. Suddenly, I am reluctant to leave. It would be so much easier to stay here, where there is always something to eat and some random chore to do like type up invitations for Auntie Lavinia’s New Year’s Eve party or pick the stones out of the dal someone has brought from my mother’s village. Cyrus thanks my parents in elegant long sentences that they appreciate but are also a little bored by. Finally, we get into our U-Haul and pull out of the driveway, our van full of food and little bits of furniture left over from my childhood, the lamp I read by when I was a kid, a small table that we will put our feet on when we sit on the sofa we’re about to pick up from a couple in Flushing who are redecorating, and a totally clichéd poster of Einstein that I can’t bring myself to abandon.
The apartment is tiny, and the bedroom window looks out onto an airshaft, but after my parents’ basement, it feels like a mansion. We heave our things up four flights of stairs and put the boxes in the vague places the boxes should be—kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom. We do some excellent kissing on the sofa and then we fall asleep, and in the middle of the night Cyrus gets up and rummages around and pulls out a blanket, and that’s how we spend our first night. After that we don’t really unpack, we just take out the things we need and shove them into whatever corners they seem to belong to. And without my parents imposing some sort of order on us, home and work start to blur. Breakfast is a microwaved frozen burrito, lunch is at our desks, and dinner is also at our desks or at the diner across the street if it’s a special occasion. Jules and Gaby are almost always there. Our lives are played out in the presence of these people, but because of the moments when Cyrus leans over my desk and I can smell the inside of his shirt, I don’t care that we are almost never alone and certainly never talking about anything but WAI.
* * *
I decide to take Jules at his word. Hire whoever the fuck you want, he says. So I do. After hiring Ren, which is the best thing I’ve done since coming up with the idea in the first place, I decide to approach Destiny. I know she’s only got a few weeks of money—runway—left, and although she’s putting on a brave face, the sting has gone out of her comments in the cafeteria. She’s alone at her desk these days, she’s lost Maisie, and even the blow-up doll is looking a little sad. On impulse, I take her to the diner and order a stack of silver-dollar pancakes and tell her we’ve been looking for a head of marketing for ages, and I still haven’t been able to find anyone I don’t hate.
“Everyone is twelve years old,” I whine.
“I know,” she says, “it’s like they went straight from diapers to grad school.”