Chapter 7 – Aurora #2
My phone buzzes. I don’t need to look to know it’s him because we have that kind of bad timing.
I glance anyway. It’s from Jonah: Back in town.
Stole a wall last night. Show me your new faces?
He’s a talented muralist with a signature line you can spot from two blocks.
He is good at being kind. We dated for three months two years ago and then stopped because timing is a machine that doesn’t know you exist. We stayed friends in the way that keeps your rib cage from bracing when the name shows up on your screen.
Lila watches my face. “You don’t have to say yes to him either,” she says.
“I know.”
“He’s good for you in small doses,” she says, and then laughs at her own condescension. “Okay, that sounded like I think he’s made of sugar. He is… complicated. But he’s not creep energy. He is… solve it with a sloppy mural energy. That I can live with.”
“He’ll register as a problem to Ward’s eyes,” I say before I can stop myself.
“Ward’s eyes can go read a book,” she says. “Also, use English. Say cameras if you mean cameras. Don’t make him into a man’s metaphor.”
I chew the inside of my cheek and choose not to argue with her over semantics when the semantics matter. “I haven’t told Jonah anything,” I say.
“Good. Don’t. The fewer people who know about the card, the better. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I haven’t, including my mother, which is a miracle because she is nosy and loves a secret like it’s free cake.”
My phone buzzes again. Jonah: Coffee/paint shop? I’ll bring the good markers. No questions. He means it. He thinks texts are contracts. He shows up when he says he will and leaves when you ask. I don’t hate those qualities.
I type: Busy morning. Maybe studio tomorrow. I leave it with no punctuation on purpose, so it doesn’t read like a yes with a heart or a no with a knife.
He replies with a thumbs-up and a spray can emoji because he is a cartoon. Lila watches me without commenting. She pulls the pastry back and picks flakes off the plate.
The booth behind Lila erupts with a laugh.
A phone rings. Someone at the register asks for an extra pump of vanilla.
I open the sketchbook to distract my hands.
Without thinking, I draw a diagonal and then another, then the rise where the angle changes near a landing.
It’s the kind of staircase you only draw if you’ve stood on it enough times that your feet learned the turn before your eyes did.
Lila leans over to look. I put my hand on the page before she can see the bottom of the line.
“That’s a nice shape,” she says lightly.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and close the sketchbook with a clap that makes a flake of croissant jump. “Doodle.”
“Mm-hmm.” She reads my face and leaves it alone.
“I told the gallery we’d confirm the walk-through with Mirrow by noon,” she says.
“They want to bring two education people and one person from security. You can say no to security, but I think we should let them come. Hearing you say ‘consent’ in a sentence makes bad men weaker. I like making bad men weak.”
“Noted,” I say. I flip the envelope over.
The return address is a fancy building in lower Manhattan with a slate lobby and a guard who knows my face now because he’s watched me follow Lila into the elevator twice in the past six months to drop off a press packet.
The Ward Foundation. The seal embossed on the flap is raised enough that my thumbnail catches it.
I run my nail along the edge, and it leaves a thin white line.
“Jonah will be at the gala,” Lila says casually like she’s talking about the weather, then watches me, not casual at all.
“How do you know that?”
“Because the street art crowd is doing a big ‘community outreach’ install in the side hall and they got like twenty muralists to contribute pieces to be auctioned for charity,” she says.
“It’s tacky but it’s fine and it will raise money and let rich people feel like they touched a wall.
Jonah’s on the list. He likes checks; he likes causes; he likes free bars. ”
“It’s a gala,” I say. “Not a free bar. It’s an auction disguised as a party.”
“Don’t ruin my punchlines,” she says. “Point being, you won’t be alone if you go. I will be there. Jonah will be there. Half the city will be there. And—yes—Ward will be there with a name tag that probably says Ward because he thinks that’s how people work.”
“Don’t,” I say, and it comes out faster than I meant. Lila lifts her hands. “I know,” she says, softer. “I know. It’s just that I don’t like the way he slid into your life like famous men do with their hands already out.”
“He doesn’t care about being famous,” I say, because I believe that. “He cares about closing doors and then telling himself he’s not holding the key.”
“Same difference when you’re on the wrong side of the door,” she says.
We let that sit. I concentrate on the coffee.
She concentrates on the croissant. My phone buzzes again; this time it’s the gallery: Press preview tomorrow—final headcount 17.
Museum confirmed 2 staff. Mirrow security requests five minutes w/ you and me pre-doors.
Okay to send yes? I type back: Yes—five minutes.
No filming. No direct questions to people.
I don’t write participants even though the email uses it.
I’ve started making that correction in my sleep.
“You know he’ll have people there,” Lila says, as if to herself. “At the preview. At the gala. He has people everywhere. They’re like tasteful ghosts.”
“I know,” I say.
“You also know,” she says, “that you can text me if you look up and see something you don’t like, and I will start a fire under the bar, so everyone has to leave, and we get to be on the news.”
“I don’t want to be on the news,” I say.
“I don’t want him to get to look at you and call it charity,” she says. “We both don’t get what we want.”
A toddler passes our booth holding a half-eaten banana and a parent’s hand, eyes wide like the world is a museum she didn’t get tickets for. Her mouth is open in astonishment at the pastry case. Lila watches her and softens. “I’m going to be that mom who bribes her kid with quiche,” she says.
“You hate quiche,” I say.
“It’s the principle. Eggs are good for brains.” She licks her thumb where jam stuck and then makes a face at herself, because she hates sticky hands. She digs in her bag and tosses me a travel pack of wipes without looking. “For the nail,” she says. “You’ve been picking at it. It’s going to bleed.”
She’s right. The blue stain left a hard line under the nail that I keep worrying like it’s a problem I can solve by making it worse.
I take a wipe and run it under the nail, then fold it and do it again.
It smells like artificial lemon. Behind Lila, the door chimes.
The drizzle lets two men in with suits the cost of my rent and smiles that look like meeting invitations.
They look around the room the way men do when they assume rooms belong to them.
They are no one I know. My shoulders still drop a fraction when they choose a table near the door instead of the back.
“Hey,” Lila says softly. “I see it. It’s fine.”
“I know,” I say. “I just—”
“You don’t have to justify the part of you that reads exits like verses,” she says. “You earned that.”
I’m saved from having to nod by my phone buzzing again.
Unknown number: We confirmed your request with the museum.
The wording is foundation-clean. The tone is one I could write in my sleep now.
The number is the same one that caught in my brain the night I pressed the card corner into my palm.
He doesn’t put his name on the text. He doesn’t need to.
I stare at it for three seconds longer than necessary and slide the phone face down on the table like it tried to bite me.
“From him?” Lila asks.
“Yes.”
“What does he want to confirm?”
“That Mirrow will be under gallery terms tomorrow,” I say. “That no one films without approval. That there will be no direct questions to people. He used your request.”
“No,” she says. “He used we. As in we confirmed. As in daddy knows best.”
“I think he means it as logistics,” I say.
“Men always mean it as logistics,” she says. “That’s how they get away with it.”
“Should I tell him to stop texting?”
“Do you want him to stop texting?” she fires back.
I don’t answer right away. The question is an elbow to the ribs. Do I want the quiet help? Do I want the net that I didn’t ask for? Do I want the presence that I can’t see and can’t stop thinking about? I hate all the ways the answer is not clean.
“I want the bad men to fail,” I say.
“Then use the good men and the systems they built and make them do the labor while you keep your rules,” she says. “It’s not the same as giving him your throat.”
“I’m not giving anyone my throat,” I say, maybe sharper than I intend.
She smiles, satisfied. “Good.”
She pushes the glossy envelope at me again and I know she won’t stop until I put it in my bag.
“Take it,” she says. “I can RSVP for you in the gallery system and keep your details off their spreadsheet if you want. We can dodge the ‘partners’ language. We can insist on the right line on the wall. We can specify no photos. We will make them work for every inch.”
“I will be walking into his house,” I say.
“You’ll be walking into a ballroom with rented chairs and too much ice,” she says. “The house is a metaphor he wants you to believe in. It’s a ballroom. Take his air and make it yours.”
“Do you practice these speeches in the shower?” I ask.