Hold Me

  Besides, she’s as careful as I am, and I respect that. Em is—in her own way—a minor celebrity.

  She has a blog. The basic premise is that her blog is written by someone from the future, someone known only by the initials “MCL.” In MCL’s future, the human race is on the verge of dying due to some catastrophic mistake that our generation is making. As a last-ditch effort, her society invents a way to send instructions back in time about how to prevent that catastrophe.

  Invariably, history is rewritten, disaster is avoided… And MCL comes back the next week, to explain how a different screwup now threatens to wipe out humanity.

  She’s funny and playful, and my email loops amusedly share links when she touches on our subject matter. She protects her identity. I protect my time. It works for both of us.

  So I play into the joke. Everyone forgets Sacramento. Even you would. Even if you were living in it.

  True, she shoots back. There’s also Davis. I could live in Davis. Anywhere there’s a college town, you can find some walkable bits. Okay. Have arrived. Am ordering soup.

  I half-heartedly reopen my laptop. Read through the objectives of my grant proposal. I imagine Em blowing on a spoonful of soup, with steam obscuring her glasses, before I catch myself daydreaming.

  I don’t know why I’m sure that Em wears glasses, but I am.

  After five minutes, I text again. Is it helping?

  Soup *always* helps, comes the reply. My grandmother used to have soup with me when I was in high school and shit sucked.

  I don’t say anything. She’s never mentioned her family before, and I don’t know if I should stop her again. But Em is careful—so careful, that even now, eighteen months after we first started talking, I’m just learning that she was close to her grandmother. That she went to high school. I’m not surprised high school sucked for her.

  Yay, soup, I say instead.

  Yay, soup, she agrees. I feel substantially less embarrassed and substantially more enraged. I have decided I was not wrong. The other guy was at fault.

  I smile. I’m sure he was. What a dick.

  You don’t even know any details. You’re quick to take my side.

  I don’t need to think before I type. I don’t need details. My money is on you in any death match you choose to participate in. Ave Em, morituri te salutant.

  And that’s it for personal exchanges, thankfully. She starts telling me the idea she has for her next blogpost, and I offer my comments and answer a few questions. For the next forty-five minutes, I don’t think about graduate students or my grant proposal or anything except soup and someone who makes me smile. We say our good-byes a few minutes later.

  I finish looking over the final draft of this Chaudhary/Thalang proposal one last time. Vithika signed off on it already, but I can’t let go. It’s twenty pages on quantum entanglement and evaluation. Even after six times through, I still find myself smoothing methodology here, notes about future work there.

  Friendship with Em is like bite-sized smiles I can fit anywhere in my day. I can ignore messages when I need to, and pick them up when I have a few spare moments. It’s the beauty of the internet—she can be anyone, anywhere, and so can I. The fact that I sometimes find myself wondering where she lives, and what she looks like, is proof that I shouldn’t try for any more.

  I already put off my never-ending pile of work for her. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I actually had a picture to obsess over.

  I shake my head, finish my review of the proposal, and hit send.

  3

  MARIA

  The week after that terrible dinner, it feels like I see Jay na Thalang everywhere. In line with me at the coffee shop. Talking to a gray-haired professor as they stroll along the banks of the little redwood-lined stream that runs through campus. He even passes me once as I’m waiting for a bus.

  The first time we see each other, our eyes meet. I feel awkward, trying to figure out if I should wave and nod or pretend I don’t know him.

  I breathe a sigh of relief when he looks away. We’re going to pretend we don’t know each other. Thank god.

  It gets easier to ignore him every time I see him.

  Until the day he runs into me. Literally runs into me. It’s noon, and I’m crossing Sproul Plaza along with a crowd of other students intent on lunch. The trees lining the walkway have started to drop yellow leaves, and the crowd around me presses shoulder to shoulder.

  I’m texting Tina, my best friend and housemate. You done with your project yet?

  Ugh, she types back. One last bug. I think. Can we skip lunch today?

  No, I type severely. If one can type severely. We can skip having lunch together, but you have to eat. I’m bringing you something.

  My housemate has always been a goody two-shoes. OMG Maria, she responds. Can’t eat in computer lab.

  I shake my head. *Shouldn’t* eat in computer lab. Completely possible to do so.

  But I know she won’t. I sigh. I’ll bring you something in an hour and you can eat on your way to class. But you have to eat.

  Her text comes a minute later. Yes, Mom.

  I smile, looking at my phone. That’s when someone rams into my left arm hard, spinning me around. I drop my bag involuntarily and tubes of lipstick spill on the pavement.

  “Shit,” a voice says.

  I turn around, my shoulder still stinging.

  “Sorry.” The man who ran into me leans down to help me get my stuff.

  It’s Jay. He looks at me, blinking, his eyes widening in recognition. The concerned expression on his face fades. He freezes, half-crouching.

  He can’t pretend I’m invisible now. This is the first time I’ve seen him up close in daylight. He’s wearing a blue shirt with lines and arrows on it. Big white letters say: PUMPED, EXCITED, INVERTED, AND STIMULATED.

  Oh look. Dirty jokes about lasers. That seems just like him.

  I don’t want to notice that he has nice arms, but I do. He has biceps. Like, real biceps. And he’s tattooed—his arms are covered with a dark geometric design, starting from his hands and disappearing into his sleeves.

  He reaches for my compact. “Watch where you’re going,” he says. “What were you doing, taking a selfie?”

  Oh, for god’s sake.

  “Taking six,” I snap at him. “Gotta make sure my profile picture is perfect, after all. Do I look okay?”

  I mean it as something of a barbed joke. But he pauses where he is, one knee on the ground before me. His fingers are half-closed around my compact, and he looks up. For a second, his expression goes utterly blank.

  I know the answer to the question I just asked him. I look more than okay. I’m wearing a pink sundress with black patent leather sandals—thick, glossy lines that criss-cross my feet. I’ve added a little silver charm that dangles over my ankle. I can feel his gaze sliding up. He starts from the pale blue of my toenail polish. His gaze slides up the lines of my sandals, up my legs. He eventually gets to my eyes. It’s a long eventually.

  He doesn’t need to answer my question. By his total lack of response, I look more than okay. He blows out a breath and shakes his head, as if the fact that I look more than okay pisses him off.

  He swallows. “Beauty standards are shit, anyway.”

  I lean down and grab the compact from him. Our hands brush.

  Here’s the other thing: He is not ugly. For just one second, our eyes meet again. Even this much proximity makes me uncomfortably aware of him.

  “Beauty standards are shit,” I say in one hundred percent agreement. Then I straighten, compact in hand. “Apparently, so are manners.”

  He looks at me for a second. Slowly, he clambers to his feet.

  “‘Sorry I bumped into you’ would have been another way to respond,” I tell him. “Just FYI.”

  He dusts off his hands. “Happy to oblige. I’m sorry every time I bump into you.” His accent comes through more markedly on those words, posh and British. I think I may hate him.

/>   “Have a nice life,” I say.

  “Have a nice cliché.”

  I roll my eyes and turn away. Because there is absolutely no justice in the world, I think of all the things I could have said instead of that stupid “have a nice life” as soon as he is out of my sight.

  The asshole police aren’t working today. You won’t get a ticket if you exceed the minimum levels of human decency.

  Maybe. Except…

  Would the asshole police ticket people for being an asshole or not being one? I’m not really clear on the job description.

  Not that I need to be. It’s an insult, not an invitation to revisit the system of carceral punishment. This is why I am a better blogger than a public speaker.

  “Maria?”

  I’m overthinking the insult I no longer have the opportunity to deliver so much that at first, I don’t hear my name.

  Then the word sounds again, closer this time. “Maria?”

  I turn twenty degrees and see a figure coming toward me through the crowd. It’s Angela Choi. She’s tall and willow thin, with just a hint of muscle, which I can see because she’s wearing a tank top even though it’s sixty degrees out. She has a flannel shirt tied around her waist, and her hair is glossy black and stick straight. It hits just above her shoulders. She gives me a tentative smile.

  I’m older than the average college senior, and my best friends tend to be people who aren’t typical college students away from home for the first time. Anj is no exception. She’s a biology graduate student. She’s smart, funny, independent, rich, and a complete mess.

  Three years ago, Anj was one of my best friends. We shared an apartment with a third friend for the space of a school year, and it was hell.

  The latter experience is the reason her smile is tentative, and why my answering smile feels just a little forced. I’m not mad at her. It’s not that we actually stopped being friends. But some friends were not made to live together, and that was basically me and Anj.

  It is, to be honest, ninety-eight percent of the world’s population and Anj. She’s funny, hilarious, bubbly, exuberant, outgoing, and over the top. She’s the lynchpin of the trans community here, and everyone loves her, because she hasn’t met a big dream she can’t make enormous.

  Those same things that make her an incredible person—the passion, the focus, the over-the-top desire to change the world—also made her the world’s most terrible housemate. It was a relief when our household broke up because she had to go to Montana for some work she was doing on her thesis.

  We hug despite the awkwardness.

  “We haven’t talked in forever,” she says when we pull away.

  Six months, unless you count a brief exchange on Facebook. It’s been awkward. Everyone loves Anj; they kept asking me when she was coming back.

  “I know. It sucks.”

  She looks over at me, bites her lip, and wrinkles her nose. “I don’t suppose you have time to get lunch?”

  I think about all the reasons I was shamefully relieved she had to go out of town.

  They are myriad. She only eats cereal. When she’s focused on a project—which is all the time—she leaves her cereal bowls, half-full of milk, wherever she finishes eating. She keeps four snakes, seven lizards, and a hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium for her glow-in-the-dark shark, even though our lease specifically said that no pets were allowed. (“They’re not pets,” Anj explained, “they’re projects.”) Also, Anj thinks it is perfectly fine to raise mealworms for said lizards in the living room. She fought incessantly with our third roommate about all of these things, and I hid as much as I could while they argued. Anj is a mess to live with and she knows it.

  There are huge differences between us, and I don’t just mean the cereal bowls and the lizards. When we first agreed to get a place together, I had no idea how rich she was. She doesn’t act like she’s rich. She sure doesn’t dress like she’s rich.

  But Anj just could not understand why the thought of losing my deposit stressed me out. The imminent possibility of eviction hung over my head, and Anj only understood vaguely that I was upset. She’d try to make me feel better with some effusive gesture like taking me out to dinner at an extremely fancy restaurant.

  She would eat nothing, because they didn’t serve cereal. Then we would come home to our seven lizards and our geometrically expanding mealworm population.

  “I’d love to get lunch,” I say. I can get something for Tina to go, and it’ll wash the memory of Jay and his three-sigma asshole police out of my mind.

  We walk down Shattuck and find a crepe place. It’s crowded, and I can barely hear her. We’re shoved together at the end of a bench in the lunch hour crush.

  “Are you still rooming with…” She pauses. “What’s her name, your little friend?”

  “Tina?” I say pointedly.

  “Right. Her.”

  Tina and I studied for organic chemistry together probably fifty times when Anj and I shared an apartment. Anj really should know her name. But Anj isn’t the kind of person who pretends to forget someone’s name to be snooty. Anj’s memory is reserved for the scientific names of thousands of extinct species. “Tina Chen” is not Latin enough for her to recall.

  “Yes,” I say. “We’re sharing a house.” I pause. “With her boyfriend.”

  Anj wrinkles her nose. “Ugh,” she says. “I’m sorry. At least she’s discreet, right? She’s good at making herself invisible.”

  I feel my hackles rise at this, in part because… Well, it’s true. Or at least, it used to be.

  I turn to Anj and lean in. “Okay, look. I live on a totally separate level of the house, right? So…I don’t hear anything, I don’t see anything. But her boyfriend…”

  How to say this.

  Anj shakes her head. “Is he completely disgusting? Because men.” She shakes her head on that last word, as if that phrase—because men—explains everything.

  He doesn’t leave half-empty bowls of congealing cereal on the floor.

  I sigh. “Because men doesn’t even come close to explaining it. He’s Blake Reynolds.”

  I don’t have to say anything more. She knows who Blake is. Even though Anj doesn’t know Tina’s name after having met her repeatedly, Blake Reynolds is essentially Silicon Valley royalty. His father, Adam Reynolds, founded Cyclone Technologies, one of the primary producers of consumer gadgetry in the world.

  Anj knows about Blake because everyone knows him. She also knows him because she’s a form of Silicon Valley royalty herself. Her father runs one of the VC firms that dumps a ridiculous amount of money into startups.

  Anj’s face clears. “Oh, him,” she says casually. “He’s actually not bad for a cis man. But he’s still such a cis dude.”

  From her, this is incredibly high praise.

  I wrinkle my nose. “Do I even want to know?”

  “Yeah, my dad dumped something like fifteen mil into Cyclone before it went public?” She shrugs, as if this is a completely normal thing to happen. And it is, for her. “He was on the Board of Directors for ten years or something, so Blake and I got shoved together a lot when we were kids. We played with dinosaurs.” She glances over at him. “Just ask him about his dimetrodon someday.”

  I look over at her and shake my head. This is the thing about Anj: You would never know what her background was until she’d randomly mention having lunch with some CEO, or complain about one of her own startups, or casually refer to getting into childhood fights with Blake fucking Reynolds while their parents were off deciding the future of the personal computer. She drops the bit about dimetrodons with a waggle of her eyebrows as if it’s really a euphemism. This being Anj, I’m pretty sure she means actual dimetrodons.

  “What about his dimetrodon?”

  “A dimetrodon is not a dinosaur,” Anj explains patiently. “Tell him I’m still waiting for my apology from his mansplaining ass.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Wait.” I pull out my phone and text Blake.

  Ange
la Choi wants me to tell you a dimetrodon is not a dinosaur. She’s waiting for an apology.

  The answer comes back swiftly. NO. *Chip* is a dinosaur. A dinosaur that has not yet been discovered in the fossil record. And happens to look like a dimetrodon. BUT HE IS NOT A DIMETRODON. CHIP IS A DINOSAUR.

  I hold up the phone so Anj can read this. Anj grins broadly. “Go show him, Maria,” she says.

  Anj is right, I type. You’re a mansplainer.

  There’s a long pause. A what?

  A man. Who explains. More specifically, a man who explains things to women that the women know better than the man.

  Another long pause. I am *not*.

  Anj shakes her head beside him. “He so is.”

  I type a response. Are you seriously telling me you know prehistoric biology better than Angela Choi?

  I can almost see him sighing. I feel very strongly about Chip, he writes. VERY STRONGLY. Pass on this heartfelt apology to Anj: FUCK YOU, ANJ. CHIP IS A DINOSAUR.

  She laughs. “As you can see,” she says, “we’re good friends. Actually, we got dumped together so often we’re more like brother and sister. We used to fight a lot.”

  “I have never seen Blake fight with anyone.”

  Her smile weakens. She looks away. “I seem to have that effect on…everyone who gets to know me.”

  There’s some truth to that. For instance, I’ve known Blake Reynolds for a while now, and he’s pretty even-keeled. He has to be; he works with his dad, who is terrible. Blake earned the praise, “not bad for a cis man” from Anj, which is basically her version of nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve never seen him lose his temper. Not until FUCK YOU, ANJ.

  “Hey.” I set my hand on her arm. “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone loves you. Everyone.”

  She looks over at me. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. “Yeah?” she finally says. “Then why are you mad at me?”

  Her eyes are dark and just a little cutting, and I feel myself freeze in place.