Morgan ended the call and went back to the room, thinking that she had no idea how to make good on her promise; no idea who, in this group of strangers, she could trust with her secret.
The hotel room wasn’t fancy, but it was clean. It had two beds, a flat-screen TV, a bathroom with a toilet and a tub. The sink, with a coffeemaker, and their empty water bottles beside it, was outside the bathroom door. Her mother was standing in front of the sink, wrapped in a towel, blow-drying her hair. She smiled at Morgan in the mirror. “Ready for another day of riding?” she asked, and Morgan felt so wretched, so dishonest and deceitful and low that, for a minute, she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her up. She felt herself wobbling and put one hand on the desk to steady herself.
“Yeah,” she said, and made herself smile. “Can’t wait.”
* * *
Be her friend Lincoln had told him. Sebastian was going to do his best… but it wasn’t easy.
“How can I get her to be my friend when she thinks I slept with every woman in Brooklyn?” he’d asked Lincoln that morning. Lincoln had put down his coffee cup, given Sebastian a long, level look, and said, “Maybe you should have thought about that before you slept with every woman in Brooklyn.”
“Not helping,” Sebastian had muttered.
“Okay,” Lincoln had said. “Ask her about herself. Get to know her. Find out what she likes to do.” He squeezed sunscreen out of a tube and rubbed it onto his cheeks and his forehead. “Lana and I were friends before we started dating. Sometimes, it’s nice to genuinely like someone, and spend time getting to know them before you sleep with them.”
“Point taken,” said Sebastian.
“And stop looking at the Internet,” Lincoln said. “You’re making yourself crazy.”
Sebastian knew his friend was right, that he was just torturing himself. He knew, too, that the story would die down, especially if he didn’t do anything that would add fuel to the fire. But he couldn’t stop poking at the wound, or pressing on the bruise, or pushing his tongue into the place where a tooth had once been. Choose your metaphor. He was no longer trending on Twitter, which was good, but the story had jumped to more of the big gossip websites, which was bad. And also meant that the story might have traveled to a place his sister or his parents could conceivably see it. Ignore it, he told himself. Sure, there were people out there laughing at him, but they weren’t people he’d ever meet, so what did he care? Other people’s opinion of you are none of your business. One of the Scoop’s freelancers had told him that, explaining how she never, ever looked at comments on her stories. His sister was a social-media Luddite, who used Facebook to keep up with her high school friends and never ventured onto other platforms. And as for his parents, they were usually too wrapped up in their own drama to pay attention to his.
That morning, Sebastian rode slowly, letting the rest of the riders pass him, until he spotted Abby’s white helmet, with her ponytail threaded through the back. She wore a pale-blue jersey that left the tops of her arms and her freckled shoulders bare. He felt his pulse speed up, and gave his body a stern scolding, reminding himself of the mission: be her friend.
“Hi, Abby.”
She didn’t meet his eyes as she asked, “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine. I just thought I’d ride with you for a little while. If that’s okay.”
“Sure.” Her tone was not, in Sebastian’s opinion, especially inviting. He decided to behave like he’d been invited anyhow.
“So. Have you lived in Philadelphia all your life?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Again, Sebastian reminded himself not to ask questions that could be answered in a single word.
“What are the best things about it?”
“There are lots of good things.”
“Such as?”
“Good restaurants. Lots of places to ride your bike.”
“What’s your favorite restaurant?”
“Oh, I can’t pick just one favorite. Like, there’s the place with the best sushi, and the place with the best Turkish food, and the best fried chicken, and the best Szechuan and the best Cantonese and the best Vietnamese and the best Thai.”
“Okay. Yum. Point taken.” He took a swig from his water bottle and asked, “Is Doctor Mark a big foodie?”
“He…” Abby appeared to be considering her answer. “He’s more of a ‘food is fuel’ guy.”
“Ah.” Okay, Sebastian thought. A thing she liked that Doctor Mark didn’t. “Is he a big cyclist? Do you guys do trips together?”
Abby paused, then said, her voice tight, “He doesn’t ride a bike.”
“At all?” Sebastian asked.
“He never learned as a kid. There were extenuating circumstances.”
“Was he born without legs?”
Abby didn’t laugh at that, or even smile. “We’ve known each other a long time. We do lots of things together. It’s fine if he doesn’t ride with me.”
Leave it alone, Sebastian told himself. Be her friend. And so, even though he wanted to stay on the topic of Mark, who didn’t like food and didn’t ride a bike, he asked, “Are you a big Eagles fan?”
“Not really. But when you live in Philadelphia, you kind of can’t help being caught up in it, when they’re having a good year. I remember, when they won the Super Bowl in 2018, it felt like the whole city was out in the streets, cheering.” Finally, she smiled a little. “And when they finally called the election for Biden, in 2020, everyone in my neighborhood came outside, and we were all dancing in the streets.”
Sebastian nodded and described the exultation in his own neighborhood… and realized, gratefully, that he hadn’t thought about the whole TikTok mess in at least five minutes.
“How was COVID for you?” he asked. “Did people leave Philadelphia the way they left New York?”
“Some did,” Abby said. “But almost everyone in my neighborhood stuck it out.” She told him about a photographer friend who’d started a project of photographing families from a distance, as they sat on their stoops or waved at her from their front windows, and how she’d worked with a mutual aid organization to deliver lunches to food-insecure families. “It was awful for the kids who’d been getting breakfast and lunch at school. The schools in Philadelphia stayed closed much longer than they did in other cities. And online learning did not go well for a lot of kids.” He heard the click-click-click of Abby’s derailleur as she shifted gears. “There’s a family on my block with three little girls. I taught them all how to ride their bikes in the spring of 2020, just so they’d have something to do outside of the house.”
“That was nice of you,” Sebastian said. Stellar observation, he thought. Really top-notch.
“How about you? Did you run for the hills?”
“I did go home for a little while. You know. Portable job, and all of that.” He didn’t like thinking about the weeks he’d spent back in New Jersey. His mother’s drinking had picked up, because of the stress, or because of the uncertainty, or because it was a day that ended in Y, and his dad had been even more distracted than usual, because he was trying to manage his job and his wife and also take care of his own mother. Grandma Piersall was in an assisted living facility, and the staff had been decimated by the virus. Nurses and aides had gotten sick, or they’d quit before they could get sick. The place hadn’t allowed visitors. Sebastian’s dad had resorted to sitting outside of his mother’s window on a folding chair, talking to her on the phone, so she could see him as well as hear his voice and know that she wasn’t alone. Between his own mother “napping” on the couch most afternoons from two or three o’clock on, and his father spending hours on the phone, trying to get someone at his mom’s facility to talk to him, or someone at the state ombudsman’s office to deal with his complaints, it had been pretty miserable. Sebastian had been happy to get back to Williamsburg, even if the neighborhood felt, he imagined, like London after the blitz—bombed out and empty, eerily quiet.