I walked Yahav toward South Bridge—not the most direct route to my guesthouse, but still a way there.
Every time we made eye contact, he’d smile apologetically and then find something over my shoulder to look at. I could drag him around a corner, I could grab him by the belt loops and kiss him, but there was a nonzero chance this would ruin everything. Even if I just took his hand—I didn’t know if he’d grip it for dear life or pull away like it burned.
Don’t start collecting things might be from a song, something they’d done in choir. Half a tune buzzed at the back of my brain.
I told Yahav that right below this bridge was where we’d placed hula hoops for junior year biology, recording every change within that space from February to May. We’d been split into groups of four; mine included Carlotta, Mike Stiles, and Rachel Popa—Rachel flirting constantly with Mike, bending all the way over to regather her ponytail, asking him to pull her up the ravine slope. They never did end up dating, so perhaps he’d been immune to her charms.
“One day,” I told Yahav, “we find a Snickers wrapper inside our circle. The debate is: Do we throw it away, or leave it there and write about the ants that come to explore?”
“And what was your position?”
“I said that humans, and human pollution, were worth observing. My friend Carlotta started naming the ants. She called one of them Chunko.”
I was about to give the end of the story, but Yahav had stopped halfway across South Bridge. He said, “It feels like you’re leading me farther from my car.”
“Did you need to leave already?” It had only been an hour. I’d been hoping he’d spend the day, hoping for sex on my small guesthouse bed. I wanted to massage his temples till he relaxed, make him close his eyes and lean back and sigh. I wanted to bury my face in his hair, which always smelled, inexplicably, like tea.
He put his hands on the rail, and I knew this would be bad. He said, “I need to make sure I tell you something. I was out here on a sort of audition. They’re offering me a very attractive post, and I’m going to stay permanently.”
I said, “Oh, that’s great!” and I meant it, although it didn’t seem like this was all he was telling me. He was quiet, and I thought I should make a joke about an attractive post, ask what material it was made of.
But he said, “I need a fresh start in general.” And then he kept talking.
I could not handle that I was getting dumped on South Bridge. I had just told him how hard I’d worked to avoid letting my heart break on campus. I’d held Granby in my palm like the most fragile egg, avoided risk, kept my crushes theoretical, tried my best to hide in plain sight. I’d worked for four years to keep the same Granby I’d first glimpsed from the Robesons’ car window: mythic, a place I was visiting rather than a place that could ever hurt me.
I hadn’t been feeling the weather, but the air was suddenly both bone-cold and wet.
I went into self-protective mode—not a mode I’m interested in unlearning in therapy. I said I should let him get going. I didn’t respond to his monologue. I started walking him back to his car as if I’d always planned to. I said, “But I never finished my story. This girl Rachel, she just brought her boot down on the wrapper and all the ants. She said, There. You can write that my human boot smashed it all.”
Yahav said, “Children are psychopaths.”
I wanted to protest that we hadn’t been children, we’d been juniors, but that made no sense.
My whole face stung as we said goodbye. I made sure to walk away without glancing back.
At the end of freshman year, I’d drawn an “A” for Ace with purple Sharpie on a smooth rock the size of my fist and dropped it into the ravine from South Bridge, and it landed with the letter up. A good sign, I felt, for my last days of school. I was astonished the next fall to find that the creek hadn’t washed it away, the sun hadn’t bleached it out. It stayed all year. It stayed the next fall, too, but after the snows melted my junior spring, it was either gone or the marker had faded completely. Still, I looked for it every time; the place where it had landed was an anchor for me, a sacred point keeping me safe at Granby. I looked for it now, as I crossed back. I only felt worse, of course, to find the spot empty.
Don’t start collecting things, don’t start collecting things, and then I had the next line: People will say we’re in love. It was from Oklahoma!, from a song about people who were, of course, actually in love.
Fuck.
Well, there it was. I didn’t need agreement from Fran or Carlotta: Thalia was telling me herself.
38
I was still in the middle of the bridge when Lance called. I only answered to stop myself from deciding to chase after Yahav. Lance sounded like he was breathing through sand. He said, “I thought you said you weren’t touching Twitter again.”
“I didn’t!”
“Okay. Okay. Did you know that when you ‘like’ a response on Twitter, people can see?”
“Of course. Why? What?”
“Someone has receipts on you hearting this Elizabeth Warren GIF? It’s—she’s in, like, a feather headdress and she’s—”
“I saw that,” I said, “but I did NOT heart it. Are you out of your mind? Have we met?”
I sat down. The bridge was wet, and the wet soaked through my jeans.
“It’s not just you liking a racist GIF but it’s that you liked it as a response to that thread, like you were agreeing that this woman was only posing.”
“Yes, I can see that, but I did NOT like that post.”
“Go on your Twitter. Go find it.”
I put him on speaker and looked at my recent activity and for fuck’s sake there it was, a red heart. And I saw, to the side, “20+” notifications, which likely meant I had hundreds. I felt a hot panic, a stuck-inside-a-sweater-in-a-dressing-room wave of nausea. I hated everyone and I hated myself and I even hated Lance for calling and most of all I hated being hated.
“Jesus, I was on my phone. You know my thumbs are stupid.”
“Right, sure. I believe you, but the woman who found this, she screenshotted it and posted this thing and she’s got 130 retweets.”
“Literally? On a Saturday? I just unliked it.”
“That might make it worse. Listen, there’s a lot of other stuff, too, people still just flipping out about what you wrote.”
I knew, without looking, what they were saying: I was a hypocrite. I’d spent dozens of episodes digging into the abuse of women in Hollywood, and as soon as my own husband was accused I’d scampered to his defense. It would be one thing if I hosted a knitting podcast, but now I had betrayed the cause, and I was racist, too. Maybe I only believed white women, maybe that was my problem, and also my face looked like a cabbage. Mostly valid points, except that I’d thought Jasmine Wilde was white.
“Should I close my account?”
“Maybe.”
“If I light my computer on fire it deletes Twitter, right?”
He wasn’t in the mood. He told me that we’d lost one of the two podcasts that cross-promoted with ours. We’d lost the hair dye ads. “There’s an email sitting there from Mattress Eden that I don’t want to open.”
I said, “Tell me what to do.” My chest was tightening.
He said, “I haven’t heard from Podtopia. But it’s the weekend.” Lance was the one who handled everything with our production company. Because he was better at it, and because he’d actually started the podcast before I came on board, made ten episodes with a different original cohost.
I said, and heard myself say, “Maybe I should quit the show.” Lance had kids and no other job; Lance’s wife was a first grade teacher.
“Don’t say that.”