She’s unbelievable. She’s literally unbelievable.
So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them. It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose. Athena—a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color—has been chosen by the Powers That Be. Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—and no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.
I’d expected her to skyrocket out of my orbit by now. But the friendly texts keep coming—how’s writing going today? hitting that word count target? good luck with your deadline!—as do the invitations: happy hour margaritas at El Centro, brunch at Zaytinya, a poetry slam on U Street. We have one of those skin-deep friendships where you manage to spend a lot of time together without really getting to know the other person. I still don’t know if she has any siblings. She’s never asked me about my boyfriends. But we keep hanging out, because it’s so convenient that we’re both in DC, and because it’s hard to make new friends the older you get.
I’m honestly not sure why Athena likes me. She always hugs me when she sees me. She likes my social media posts at least twice a week. We get drinks at least every other month, and most of the time it’s by her invitation. But I’ve no clue what I have to offer her—I don’t possess anywhere near the clout, the popularity, or the connections to make the time she spends with me worthwhile.
Deep down, I’ve always suspected Athena likes my company precisely because I can’t rival her. I understand her world, but I’m not a threat, and her achievements are so far out of my reach that she doesn’t feel bad squealing to my face about her wins. Don’t we all want a friend who won’t ever challenge our superiority, because they already know it’s a lost cause? Don’t we all need someone we can treat as a punching bag?
“IT CAN’T BE ALL THAT BAD,” SAYS ATHENA. “I’M SURE THEY JUST mean they’re pushing the paperback off a few months.”
“It’s not delayed,” I say. “It’s canceled. Brett told me they just . . . couldn’t see a place for it in their printing schedule.”
She pats my shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry. You get more royalties off hardcovers anyways! Silver linings, right?”
Bold of you to assume I’m getting royalties at all. I don’t say that out loud. If you tell Athena off for being tactless, she gets overly, exaggeratedly apologetic, and that’s harder to put up with than just swallowing my irritation.
We’re at the Graham’s rooftop bar, sitting on a loveseat facing the sunset. Athena is guzzling her second whisky sour, and I’m on my third glass of pinot noir. We’ve wandered onto the tired subject of my troubles with my publisher, which I deeply regret, because everything Athena thinks is comfort or advice always only comes off as rubbing it in.
“I don’t want to piss Garrett off,” I say. “Well, honestly, I think he’s just looking forward to rejecting the option so they can be done with me.”
“Oh, don’t sell yourself short,” says Athena. “He acquired your debut, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t, though,” I say. I have to remind Athena this every single time. She has a goldfish’s memory when it comes to my problems—it takes two or three repetitions for anything to stick. “The editor who did got fired, and the buck passed to him, and every time we talk about it, it feels like he’s just going through the motions.”
“Well, then fuck him,” Athena says cheerfully. “Another round?”
The drinks are stupidly expensive at this place, but it’s okay because Athena’s buying. Athena always buys; at this point, I’ve stopped offering. I don’t think Athena’s ever really grasped the concepts of “expensive” and “inexpensive.” She went from Yale to a fully funded master’s degree to hundreds of thousands of dollars in her bank account. Once, when I told her that entry-level publishing jobs in New York only make about thirty-five thousand dollars a year, she blinked at me and asked, “Is that a lot?”
“I’d love a malbec,” I say. It’s nineteen dollars a glass.
“Got it, babe.” Athena gets up and saunters toward the bar. The bartender smiles at her and she exclaims in surprise, hands flying to mouth like she’s Shirley Temple. It seems that one of the gentlemen at the counter has sent her a glass of champagne. “Yes, we are celebrating.” Her dainty, delighted laughter floats over the music. “But can I get one for my friend as well? On me?”
No one’s out here sending me champagne. But this is typical. Athena gets showered by attention every time we go out—if not by eager readers who want a selfie and an autograph, then by men and women alike who find her ravishing. Me, I’m invisible.
“So.” Athena settles back down beside me and hands me my glass. “Do you want to hear about the Netflix meeting? Oh my God, Junie, it was insane. I met the guy who produced Tiger King. Tiger King!”
Be happy for her, I tell myself. Just be happy for her, and let her have this night.
People always describe jealousy as this sharp, green, venomous thing. Unfounded, vinegary, mean-spirited. But I’ve found that jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear. Jealousy is the spike in my heart rate when I glimpse news of Athena’s success on Twitter—another book contract, awards nominations, special editions, foreign rights deals. Jealousy is constantly comparing myself to her and coming up short; is panicking that I’m not writing well enough or fast enough, that I am not, and never will be, enough. Jealousy means that even just learning that Athena’s signing a six-figure option deal with Netflix means that I’ll be derailed for days, unable to focus on my own work, mired by shame and self-disgust every time I see one of her books in a bookstore display.
Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.
Though I feel the vicious kind of jealousy, too, watching Athena talk about how much she adores her editor, a literary powerhouse named Marlena Ng who “plucked me from obscurity” and who “just really understands what I’m trying to do on a craft level, you know?” I stare at Athena’s brown eyes, framed by those ridiculously large lashes that make her resemble a Disney forest animal, and I wonder, What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world? And maybe it’s the cocktails, or my overactive writer’s imagination, but I feel this hot coiling in my stomach, a bizarre urge to stick my fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatly peel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.
“And it’s like, she just gets me, like she’s having sex with my words. Like, mind sex.” Athena giggles, then scrunches her nose up adorably. I suppress the impulse to poke it. “You ever think of the revision process as like, having sex with your editor? Like you’re making a great big literary baby?”