Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jo
When Ezra returned to college the semester after his monthlong stint in rehab, all of Elion University blew up with speculation.
Some people thought he’d flunked out, citing his tendency to party hard. Others thought this impossible— He’s actually really smart, someone commented in my dorm’s group chat, in response to another person’s declaration that His daddy would never allow this place to kick him out .
Ezra could’ve cared less. With his new lease on life, he narrowed his focus to three things: his studies, his dreams, and
me. We did everything together: went to the concerts on campus, stood for long hours to snag tickets for our favorite up-and-coming
comedians. Ezra liked to try out new restaurants, and so dragged me to different spots around the city after class. I couldn’t
afford anything outside of my cafeteria meal plan, and so, as a rule, he always paid. But without fail, every time we asked
for the check, our waiter would come back with two.
Eventually, Ezra got fed up.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said, glaring up at the pretty brunette who had just handed us separate receipts.
Our waitress chuckled nervously, blinking down at me in a way that communicated that beautiful was a stretch. Ezra didn’t smile back.
“Yes?” she said, like it was a trick question.
“Is that why you don’t think we’re together? Because you don’t think I’m good enough for her?” Ezra said, reaching across
the table to grab my hand to drive home his point. When the waitress gaped back at him, he turned away from her, running his
thumb lovingly across my knuckles. “I’m paying. One check.”
Ezra had held my hand many times before. But this time felt different, the swatch of skin he brushed turning hypersensitive,
burning like he’d set it aflame. His stare was piercing, unrelenting, and for the first time I wondered if I was missing something.
Boys don’t look at girls they don’t have feelings for like that, right? I thought. They don’t plead with their eyes; they don’t tremble when they touch you. But then the next week Ezra hooked up with the hot goth girl in his Improvisation and Performance class, and I was reminded,
once more, of my place.
“Stop it,” I said now to an Ezra several years older, several years wiser, an Ezra who, after our conversation yesterday,
definitely should have known better. “I told you how I felt about you, Ez, so why are you still messing with me?”
“Because I’m not messing with you,” he said. “Because I’ve been so scared of losing you that I was in denial about how I feel
about you. Because you keep using past tense, and I wish you’d use present.”
My mind was whirring. I wanted to clap my hands over Ezra’s mouth, stop him from saying what I feared was coming next. What I had wanted to hear him say for most of my adult life. I could feel his hands settle on the sides of my face, guiding me to look at him, but I resisted, too frustrated and sad and confused to meet his eyes. Ashley had tried to tell me, drunk, at the bar, and I’d refused to take her seriously. His most precious person.
“Jo, please. Look at me,” Ezra said, and, unbidden, my gaze finally dragged to his. “I love you. I’ve probably always loved
you. Maybe since the day you gave me that pen. Or when you threw that pillow at my head. I don’t know exactly. But I do know
that the moment you came into my life, it became beautiful again. I didn’t want to screw things up. I couldn’t stand the thought
of losing you. So I looked elsewhere. Convinced myself I could feel the same way about someone else. It never worked out,
of course, because they were never you.” He laughed, a soft huff of sound. “I knew you were bound to find someone else someday.
I mean. Look at you. And I want to be happy for you. But after today? Having you back again? Remembering that life is too
fucking short for regrets? I’m sorry. I can’t let you go. So tell me you forgive me, and that I still have a shot. That you
can love me too, again.”
“You won’t have to let me go,” I said, and he lowered his forehead against mine, his hold becoming desperate. “I’ll always
be your friend, Ez.”
Ezra’s nose brushed against mine, his breath wafting against my lips. If I gave him even the slightest inclination that I
might want him to kiss me, I knew that he would. I could tell how badly he wanted to.
“I don’t want to be your friend,” he whispered.
And I didn’t want Ezra to kiss me, which was strange, considering how badly I’d wanted it once. I shook my head, fighting
back against the new crop of tears that threatened to spill down my cheeks.
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Why not?” Ezra said. His voice was ragged now, and the sound of it, choked, stung. “Because of the writer? I can wait. He’ll mess up eventually, or you’ll get tired of him, but the two of us, we’re different. We’ll—”
“I don’t want him to mess up, and I don’t want to get tired of him,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. Why did he have to tell
me this now? Why did he have to wait until I was falling for someone else? “Ezra, I’m so sorry. You’re too late.”
Ezra exhaled in a slow rattle. Then, abruptly, he pushed me into his chest with a hand against the back of my head, wrapping
his arms around me like he would like nothing more than to wedge us together. In the darkness of his embrace, I could feel
his heart thundering, pounding with a pain that I’d felt a hundred times but was more potent now that he was feeling it too.
“Don’t say that,” he whispered. “Don’t—”
A camera shutter went off.
“Oh shit,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Oh hey, you’re Ezra Adelman, right? From One True Kiss ?”
Ezra cursed under his breath, then, without looking at me, released me. I’d forgotten that we were outside, in a public place,
that nurses and doctors and techs and patients were walking around us to get inside. That Ezra was no longer just the good-looking
son of Renata Kovalenko and Paul Adelman, but famous in his own right.
“Give me your phone,” he snarled, stalking the reedy young man who was stuffing his phone into his pocket and rapidly plotting
his escape. “What the hell’s wrong with you, taking pictures of people without their consent—”
“Ez,” I said, alarmed, but other phones were coming out now, onlookers who, recognizing that something monumental might be happening in front of them even if they didn’t understand what, were now snapping and recording. If they caught Ezra accosting this kid, they could spin it however they wanted. I could see the headlines now: One True Kiss Actor Ezra Adelman Assaults Honors Student Over Photographs. “Ez, no! Let’s go!”
As if on cue, Harold pulled up in a black Lincoln Town Car. Before he could make a scene, I grabbed Ezra by the elbow and
dragged him backward, practically shoving him inside the car before throwing myself in next to him. It wasn’t until I’d yanked
the door shut and Harold had sped out onto the highway that the enormity of what had just happened fell fully onto my shoulders.
Ezra loved me, and I no longer loved him. My mission to get over him had been a riotous success.
So why did I feel like absolute shit?
Harold dropped me off at home first. I would have considered this a blessing, except it meant that I was the one who had to
say goodbye.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I tried.
Ezra didn’t respond. He’d spent the entire car ride hunched toward the window, sleeping or more likely stewing, and I stepped
out of the car, my stomach twisting with unease. The air felt dense, like the sky before a storm.
It didn’t take long for the clouds to burst.
I jolted awake from a four-hour deep sleep to my phone pulsing on my nightstand. My first thought: Mal’s here. My second: Ezra got some sleep in and wants to hash things out.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. What I had instead were forty-three new emails.
This was odd. My Dr. Jojo email wasn’t public; and most inquiries had to go through an intense Denise filter before landing in my inbox. I tapped the first one, with the subject line: Dear Dr.Jojo , from a [email protected], then reared back.
You dumb black bitch. To think that such a good man loved you and you spat in his face. How dare you, you ungrateful whore.
The words hit me like a kick to the chest. I sat up, scrolling through emails and finding litanies of How dare you, you evil cunt and racial slurs, rape threats, death threats, and combinations of the three.
Two thoughts occurred to me suddenly: (1) The kid who’d recorded us at the hospital might not have been just a fan, but bona fide paparazzi ; and (2) Holy shit, I’ve been doxxed.
Hands shaking, I checked my Instagram. My follower count had exploded—five hundred and forty-five thousand from four hundred
and twenty thousand—my notifications a mess. My Instagram was drowned in messages not unlike the ones in my email box. The
photo Dahlia and I had taken before Mal’s book event the launching pad: See, it’s definitely her.
“What the hell is going on?” I said out loud. I called out Dahlia’s name to no response, and then sent her a text: When will you be home? Shit is going down and I need you.
Dahlia texted back immediately. Oh my god, oh no. Are you okay? Sorry I didn’t tell you. Picked up an overnight shift in the burbs, are you good?
I was not good; in fact, I was quite certain that I was one more death threat away from a panic attack. But there was no time
to communicate that because my phone was ringing again.
It was Denise. Just the person I needed to talk to. I picked up immediately.
“Hello, Dr.Miracle,” she said, sounding pleased as punch. “Just what have you gotten yourself into?”
“I don’t know,” I said around a closing throat. She’s not even that cute, a commenter said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Check your texts,” Denise said.
I did. Denise had sent me a post from Goss, the premier website for all things celebrity drama. The videos were blurry, presented
side by side: Me, not even six hours before, wrapped in Ezra’s embrace—from an outside perspective, we looked a lot more intimate
than I remembered, my hands clutching his suit jacket from behind, his tucked under my jaw, our faces so close that we could
have been kissing. After that, Mal’s signing just days before, me snatching his microphone and declaring him mine. Finally,
a video of Mal, with a woman who looked alarmingly like the Lana Porter, smiling shyly and admitting that he was in love.
The title, She Takes Two: Rising Star of ONE TRUE KISS and Knydus Heir Left Heartbroken by Two-Timing Self-Proclaimed Sex Doc, only further outlined how deeply fucked I was.
“For what it’s worth, I think this is great,” Denise said. “It was time we broke you out to a wider audience. Don’t get me
wrong, I think the health care community is great, but if we’re thinking big, scandals are sometimes nice. Yesterday, most
everyone in Hollywood had no idea who Josephine Boateng was. By the end of this next twenty-four hours, a lot of them will.”
“Me being labeled a harlot who is cheating on their Golden Boy is a good thing?” I said in disbelief. Another email.
You weren’t good enough for him anyway, you ugly slut.
“Not to downplay how you must be feeling right now,” Denise said, meaning she intended to do just that, “but all press is
good press.”
“Only if you’re a Kardashian,” I said. My head was spinning. If this had dropped even a day ago, I would have called Ezra.
Demanded he clear up the misunderstanding. Make him do what he’d always done: call me his closest friend in the whole world,
his sister, go on and on about the importance of platonic love. But what could I tell him now, now that I knew he felt differently?
Now that he was hurting?
“Honestly, I think this is a great opportunity,” Denise said. “You’ve been hinting in your more recent posts that you’re open
to dating. And now that you are, you’re only going for the crème de la crème. And even then, you still have standards. You
aren’t a woman who is easily impressed by money and good looks, and definitely not by a man who’s openly friend-zoned you
for the last decade. You want to sample the field, and you’re starting off with this handsome author guy. It’s consistent
with the brand, and—”
I felt sick. How long had I been doing this, strategizing ways to turn my most personal thoughts and experiences into content, mining bastardized versions of my trauma for likes and brand deals? Ezra had told me he loved me, and now Denise was telling me I should throw that in his face to rescue myself, and, for a split second, I’d imagined the post. It would be a carousel of photos, the first of me artfully splayed on my couch with my phone tucked between my shoulder and ear, laughing at no one in particular, looking joyful and unbothered in a gifted Ankara lounge set. The next few photos would be screenshots of the hate mail I’d received, blurring only the vowels in the slurs. My caption would allude to the gossip without referencing it directly, instead choosing to focus on the difficulties of being a visibly Black woman in a public arena, of having my personal life out there for others to pick apart as if I hadn’t spent years offering it up on a platter.
It would be perfect. It would invite what Denise would probably call the “best kind of trouble.”
It exhausted me, just thinking of it.
“No,” I said.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Denise said with a soft chuckle. “I know I’m getting ahead of myself. We don’t have to bring up your dating
history at all, if you’d prefer not to. We can also use this as a way to bring in Ezra’s fanbase, describe yourself unequivocally
as his friend. You were at the hospital, right? Did you go see your mother? If you don’t mind discussing that, it would be
a beautiful way to celebrate your friendship. It helps rehab his whole playboy image too, a win-win—”
My hands trembled on my lap, my vision blurring and coalescing. I could feel my heart thundering in my temples, a steady,
rapid throbbing. I slapped a hand over my chest, counting the beats— One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven, over six seconds. Eleven times ten is one ten, regular, probably
sinus tach, physiologic. —until the thundering in my ears quieted and my racing heart slowed.
This was too much. All of this. Seeing Ezra, going back to a hospital, seeing my mother, breaking Ezra’s heart. And now, this.
The deluge of comments, reminding me that after all I’d done to justify myself, my existence was still a blight.
“You’re not listening to me,” I said.
Denise sucked in a soft breath. I could almost hear the wheels screeching to a halt in her mind.
“Okay. I’m listening,” she said after a moment, in the calm, doting voice she might use for a class of kindergartners. “You don’t want to go through with this. You need a break. I get that.”
“I don’t think you do,” I said. I inhaled. “I’m quitting, Denise. I quit. I’m not doing this anymore.”
“Okay, now, let’s not get dramatic,” Denise said hurriedly. “I know this is bad right now. Just give it a few days to blow
over. You’ll be fine—”
If Denise had more to say, I didn’t hear it. My thumb moved to hang up before I could think of the consequences, and I tucked
myself under my covers. My eyelids felt heavy, swollen, and I closed them, a small, familiar part of me wishing I would never
have to open them again.