Now I scrolled back up to the third photo. The girl was posed on her bed, face blurred, hair tousled like she just woke up (but who woke up on all fours?). It wasn’t the ridiculous pose that kept drawing my attention; it was her bra. I recognized it. It was the same one that Ailey was wearing the day the video came out of me and Mr. E. The one I’d thought seemed exceptionally fancy for no-glitter Ailey.
I swiped off my Doc. The whole point of B&P was to get people to buy things. The fact that Ailey had that bra didn’t make her one of the B&P’s sluts, it only made her impressionable, like the hundreds of other Brooklyn teens who lived and died by B&P. Besides, though she and the model did have similar skin tones, there was no way Ailey’s boobs were that big.
I sent one more message.
moi Hey Jessie, Kyle Cheng here. Can we talk?
I wasn’t expecting much. Maybe just a flat-out no. But my Doc sat unresponsive in my hand, like I hadn’t even txted a real address. The thing of it was, if Jessie was AnyLies, why wasn’t she using that moniker all the time? I mean, it equaled far creepier and untraceable. Why was she posting anything under her own name? Unless it was precisely to throw me off her trail. As I tried to fall asleep, I wished hard that it was Jessie who made the video. Because if it wasn’t her, then I had to admit I still had no idea who had.
Two a.m. My Doc screamed.
You up?
moi Yes. Barely. Insomniac much?
Insomniac always. How’s the cheek?
moi Bruised, like my ego. How’d you know?
How could I not? You can’t stop making popular vids.
moi Unfortunately, this WAS of me. Never been in a fight before.
Doubt that.
moi Not a PHYSICAL one. Is it weird to say that it felt kind of nice?
Yes, it’s weird.
moi I mean, all these other verbal arguments I get into, there just doesn’t seem to be an end. One good pop in the eye, and the issue’s pretty much over and done with.
Who do you fight with so much?
moi My mom. My friends, or at least one of them. I don’t know. I guess it’s just our thing.
My thing with my friends is having fun.
You have friends? I wanted to write. But I guess, of course she did. Only why would someone who was happy and had friends be doing this to me?
You know, for what it’s worth, some friendships are worth fostering and holding on to. Some aren’t. Good indicator is, are they there for you, is it easy to laugh with them, and do they love you no matter what.
moi Wow. Good advice.
Hater, I thought but didn’t write.
moi Going back to sleep now.
Quitter. BTW Merry Christmas.
moi You too.
Then before I knew what I was doing I added
moi xoxoxo
and hit send.
Christmas.
Since I want to go into politics, I’m obligated to say that I am definitely a spiritual person. But religious? N?inai was vaguely Buddhist. Dad and Mom were not so vaguely agnostic. For us, Christmas was about presents. Paid for with money I should have been saving for college. (And since I’d like to go into politics, I shall now redact the previous four sentences.)
Christmas on the second anniversary of your grandma’s death, the day after you didn’t see Mac in any satisfying way and had a huge fight with Audra, and AnyLies is the first person to txt you Merry Christmas? A hundred times more depressing.
Thank goodness for boy-Kyle.
At six a.m., as he’d done since he could walk, he woke me up by bouncing on all fours on my bed.
“What are you?” I asked, pulling my pillow over my head. “Five years old?”
“Kyyyylieee, it’s Christmas.”
Two minutes later he dragged me across the hall and we both bounced on Mom and Dad’s bed. Five minutes later we were all downstairs. Dad made coffee as Mom took our stockings down from the mantel. The whole present affair only took about ten minutes. I mean, it doesn’t take long to open envelopes of store credits and logins. After that it was breakfast, and naps, and me trying on the clothes my parents bought. Since Mom now pulled items directly from my InStitches cart, everything was literally exactly what I wanted. Still my crankiness persisted.
Maybe it was everyone else’s good cheer. Maybe it was that we should have been getting ready to go to my grandma’s. And when we got to her Queens apartment we’d be greeted by a mountain of food she’d spent the last two days cooking. Hugging me around my waist, she’d scold me in Mandarin for being too skinny. Then she’d give me and Kyle our own plates heaped with food—soy-braised pork belly, those thinly sliced potatoes that brought good luck, homemade dumplings, and pieces of a steamed whole fish—and she’d shoo us from the room so she wouldn’t have to hear Dad complain about favoritism and how come he had to wait until dinner?
But on the worst day of my life, exactly two Christmases ago, N?inai had passed away at New York Presbyterian in Queens. Since my mom’s parents had retired to the Languedoc shortly after Mom turned thirty, this effectively robbed us Chengs of all the family we didn’t have to FaceAlert to see and me of the one person in the world who I knew loved me unconditionally. Now, if we were creating new traditions, in a little while Dad would order Chinese takeout and we’d get six orders of shrimp toast instead of four.
Ba. Hum. Bug.
At noon, the doorbell rang. My first thought, unreasonably, was that it was my hater. But there on my stoop, squinting because the sun was right in his eyes, was Mac. He was holding a tiny box wrapped in the same kind of brown paper bag that a bodega sandwich came in.
Just like that, my Christmas felt merry.
Declining my offer to come inside, he said he didn’t want to take up my time, but you know, he knew we’d said no gifts, but it was Christmas and Saturday and he kinda, like, got me something. We sat on the stoop instead. With at least two feet of space between us, Mac inspected the cheek Ellie slapped. Beneath the cover-up I’d used to deflect Mom’s questions, it was slightly blue-greenish and sore.
“Ouch,” he said. “I haven’t even gotten slapped before.”
“Yeah, well, next time you see Ailey, tell her to thank Ellie for me. Yet another thing I can add to my résumé.”
Mac rolled his eyes. “I don’t see Ailey. She had a math question.”
“Macky.”
One side of his mouth rose up. “And I, kinda like, knew it would make you muy jealous if I answered it right then.”
“Thank you! See? I’m not crazy.”
Mac laughed. “I don’t know about that. I mean, says la chica with a black eye.”
I normally would have playfully pushed him, but now I kept my hands in my lap. I imagined an alternate universe where Mac had an arm around me and we were laughing, kissing. I imagined how easy it would be to cross into that universe. And how much I would prefer living in that world compared to this one. At least until Mac got bored.
He cleared his throat. “So I’ve been thinking about the Virus.”