I lean across the table. “Come on, Jules.” I am ready for us to storm out of there in a blaze of fuck-yous.
“Oh, don’t go,” Jules’s sister says with a light laugh. “They’re just kids, they don’t know what they’re saying.”
Jules looks back and forth between Cyrus and his father. He puts his fork down. He mouths something to Cyrus. Cyrus nods to me. I retreat and stuff the last of the French toast into my mouth.
“Pass the butter,” Jules’s mother says brightly.
“Well,” his father bellows, “whatever makes you happy, son. As long as you’re not taking drugs or getting the HIV, right?” He looks around the table, and a few other people laugh.
* * *
We spend the day between the pool and the beach. At the pool we are given towels and more pink lemonade. Someone has taken the trouble of inflating the various plastic items that we drift around on. At the beach there are deck chairs and umbrellas, a wide stretch of sand leading to a cloudy, very cold sea. At four p.m. there are martinis. At five p.m. there are finger sandwiches. Jules tells us there is no dinner, just these sandwiches, and that we are barred from entering the kitchen and foraging for ourselves. I stuff a few extra sandwiches into the pocket of my sweatpants. The children occasionally allow themselves to shriek in delight at, say, the appearance of a hermit crab on the beach, but otherwise the silence is uninterrupted and nearly deafening, and there is the sense that the same routine has gone on in this house since the day it was built, that the rituals were enshrined even before that, brought into being by a tribe of people who say little and eat even less.
Cyrus and I barricade ourselves around Jules and try to distract him with stories of our own unhappy childhoods. I tell Jules that my parents made me eat a disgusting dried-fish dish called shutki every Friday afternoon when I came home from school, that the carpets and the sofas and even my hair took on the stench of the shutki and to this day, if someone even says the word “anchovy,” I want to gag. And Cyrus said his mother had invented a kind of boiled lettuce slurry she called Green Magic, which tasted like pond moss and gave him the shits. But both of these stories revolved around mothers, and it was obvious that Jules’s mother had made no attempt to shove smelly/nutritious/culturally appropriate foods down his throat, that instead, mealtimes had been wordless and cold. Perhaps she had never cooked a meal for him herself in all the summers they had spent in this house. Soon we three lapse into silence, lost in our thoughts. After we finish our sandwiches, Cyrus and Jules decide to go for a swim, and I call my mother.
* * *
“I miss you, Ma.”
I haven’t seen my parents since we moved out, although I call them every Sunday. We talk about ordinary things and they always ask me what I’m eating, but I have avoided getting on the train to go out and see them, even though Mira sends me threatening text messages on a regular basis. I feel like if I slow down, even for a day, everything will fall apart around me. I’m feeling it now, here on the beach, my first non-workday in months. The hours stretch out behind me, and I can’t measure them by lines of code or meetings or bug fixes. The fact that it is impossible to relax in this house really helps, because even though we are taking the weekend off, no one is having a good time. If I were in Merrick right now, my mother would cook my favorite things and insist I join my father in watching reruns of Jeopardy!; they would remind me of a time when there wasn’t a million dollars in a bank account, dwindling to nothing. So I don’t go home.
“Your father is worried.” My mother likes to animate my father with her own opinions.
“Tell Abboo we are fine. Really, just busy with work. I’m sorry we haven’t had time to come out and see you.”
“Don’t worry about that. Just get your proper sleep. At least seven hours a night, that’s what they say. Otherwise your life will be shorter.”
* * *
“You think Jules is okay?” I whisper to Cyrus that night. We’ve opened the windows and there’s a sorbet breeze coming in.
“It’s always like this when he’s with his family.”
“He doesn’t even sing when he’s here.”
“Let’s enjoy the silence for a few days.” Cyrus laughs. He pulls me closer, kisses me lightly on the forehead.
“Are we hangers-on?” Peggy’s slip has been bothering me all day.
“If you count the free rent and meals Jules has given me over the last four years, yes, you could definitely classify me as a hanger-on. But not you.”
“What if WAI crashes and burns?”
“We’ve both read the data. We know that’s more likely than not.”
“I’ve been instructed by my parents to act against type. Succeed where others would fail—it’s the immigrant mantra.”
He turns to me and tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I love this,” he says.
I’m surprised. “Really?”
“Yeah. This is the most fun I’ve had since… since all those projects with my mom before she died.”
It occurs to me that Cyrus is having the best time of all. Jules and Gaby are worrying about things like runway, and I’m building the platform brick by brick, but Cyrus is just being Cyrus—feted by Rupert, making decisions about the color of the banner on our website, interviewing people who will then go on to beg us to hire them. I’m trying to enjoy the fact that Cyrus is having a grand time, that I’ve been able to give him something he might have been looking for without knowing it, but a part of me is also a tiny bit envious, wondering how I’ve managed to set up a situation where I’m doing all the work and he’s having all the fun. Never mind, I tell myself, I’m having fun too. I must have been a Spartan in my previous life, because nothing pleases me more than work.
Seven
THE LAUNCH
In the first twenty-four hours of launch, WAI clocks up 270,322 users. In the days ahead, we’re going to talk endlessly about how this happened: what alchemical mix allowed us to hyper-trend, how our spend multiplied, how the video of Cyrus went viral, how our logo was posted and tweeted and ’grammed to millions, but right now, at the moment when it is happening, we don’t have time to do any of that, because right now we are trying to keep the site from crashing as the users come flooding in like shoppers on Black Friday.
Cyrus doesn’t want a big launch event, so we decide to do a kombucha and gin party at Utopia. It’s four hours before the site goes live, and I’m hunched over my keyboard feeling decidedly unfestive. Ren is beside me, and our fingers are tapping as the voices rise around us. It smells like feet, which is what authentic kombucha is supposed to smell like while it’s brewing. At least that’s what Rory says, and because he wears a lab coat almost all the time, everyone believes him.
Cyrus strolls in with a glass of something pink and frothy. “You gonna come join us?”
“I found a possible bug,” I reply, not looking up from my screen. “A giant pothole in the middle of the road.”
He offers me a sip of his drink, and it’s every bit as rank as I’d imagined. “Is it going to affect the launch?”
Ren gives Cyrus a look that only I can decipher. I explain, “If too many people log the same interest at the same time—say, two thousand people watch an episode of Peaky Blinders and decide that they want to get married running through the streets of Birmingham dressed like Ada and Freddie—the system crashes. It’s not made for high volumes of people wanting to do the same thing, it’s optimized for individual algorithmic outcomes.”
“We didn’t factor in the group mentality,” Ren says.
“The herd will kill us if I don’t fix this.”
Cyrus crouches down beside me. He has started shaving more regularly, and now I can see the lower half of his face darkening with stubble. He puts his hands on my knees, and I have to stop what I’m doing and pay attention to him. “Let’s take a moment,” he says. Cyrus always wants to take a moment.