Chapter 2
I go straight to the bathroom, lie on the cool tile floor, and proceed to hyperventilate.
After a couple of minutes, Chris comes in, pajama bottoms back on but sans sexy tent, and holds up my phone. Even from down here on the floor, his eyes are inflamed and puffy and terrible. He looks
like a hungover possum.
“Kendra just sent you a text. You’re, um, fired.”
An involuntary wail, reminiscent of a car horn, comes out of me. This is bad. This is very bad. The walls close in, my chest
tightens . . .
“Honestly, you can’t be too surprised,” Chris says diplomatically. “What with all the nudity.”
“I’m having a heart attack,” I mumble.
“I don’t think you are,” he says.
“This is definitely a heart attack.”
“Speaking of,” he says, squatting next to me like a coach, “I’ve been thinking about hearts lately. As a doctor, we deal with them a lot. Really resilient organs. Can take tons of bad stuff and still be totally fine.”
“What are you talking about?” I groan.
“Do you want a paper bag to breathe into?” he asks helpfully.
This is his answer for everything. A pep talk and a paper bag. It’s adorable, but it does sometimes make me worry about his
future in the medical field. “Yes.”
He starts to leave.
“Wait.” I stop him. “Hand me my phone. I can fix this. It’s not too late.”
Chris hesitates. “Are you sure you don’t want to give it a minute?”
“It’s my dying wish.”
“You’re not dy—”
“Hand me the phone.”
From the bathroom floor, I text a truly heartfelt apology to Kendra—one of my best—adding that I’ve been struggling a bit
with this whole birthday thing, but I can be back in the office in fifteen minutes, and I hope we can all ultimately agree
that this was hilarious.
When I don’t get a reply, I try Chris’s approach.
Me: Or why don’t I just take some time off? Let things cool down before I come back?
This time, she responds immediately.
Kendra: Are you kidding me? You are fired. So fired. So permanently fired. There do not exist enough words for me to describe how
fired you are. You’re lucky Midwest Tool Warehouse is run by old guys who are too embarrassed to admit they saw naked people
they weren’t married to.
Me: So it’s a no
Kendra: It is a no
By the time Chris comes back, I’ve flopped over and mushed my face on the tile. This is why you keep your bathroom floor clean.
For these moments.
“I’m still fired,” I mumble.
“Well, yeah,” says Chris, holding out the paper lunch bag. “That makes sense. But if there’s one thing I know about you, Mo,
you’re strong. When bad things happen, you dust yourself off—”
A sudden thought occurs to me, and I sit up. “We’ve never had sex outside the bedroom, right?”
“Not even once.” Chris shakes his head. “And you must be really disappointed about that. Which I can totally understand. I mean, that’s not the life you want, is it? Like, I’m so boring and you’re so adventurous—”
“Am I?” That distracts me for a second. It’s not how I would describe myself.
“Of course you are!”
I guess I am now? I snap my fingers. Bingo. “Chris, what if I have one of those tumors that makes you do things that are out
of character? Kendra couldn’t fire me then, right? That’s illegal.”
Chris scrunches his face up, like he’s being very delicate about his answer. “I think you were just horny.”
“Well, I should probably get an MRI anyway, just to be sure. Plus one of those heart attack tests,” I say, standing up and immediately going weak-kneed as the realization hits. “Chris, I just got fired. I won’t have insurance to pay for all this!”
“Mo.” He pulls me into a hug. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How can you be so sure?” I ask pathetically.
“Listen, I can’t always be here to make you feel better when you freak out about nothing.”
Okay, that is not fair.
Chris and I have an agreement. And the agreement is that I get to freak out about all my weird health fears whenever I want,
and he gets to make me feel better. That is our deal.
He holds up the paper bag again. “This is my last lunch bag. Out of like a hundred. And I haven’t been using them for lunch.”
“I’m stressed out,” I say. “I’m about to turn thirty.”
“Next year!”
“I got fired. And so on.”
“You had a nice birthday lunch, right?” he says.
“Other than the fact that you’re the only one who ate—heeeeeyo!”
I’m pretty impressed with myself for coming up with a joke mid–heart attack/tumor.
“Mo—”
The tone of his voice is clear: not the time for jokes, got it. This is supposed to be one of those heart-to-heart relationship
moments.
“Seriously, you did great,” I say. “I’m not sure I needed a heart resilience lecture, but otherwise this was a terrific birthday
lunch. And you take amazing care of me. I really appreciate all the lunch bags. Like my mom says—if you move in with a doctor,
nothing that bad can happen to you.”
Chris blinks in surprise.
“I mean, that’s not why I moved in . . .”
“That’s what you just said.”
“No, that’s what my mom said. I moved in because we’ve been together for ten years.”
“That’s . . . not a great reason either.”
I can’t put my finger on why, but he seems almost . . . happy when he says that?
I pause. “Are we fighting? Are you mad because I showed everybody your penis?”
“This is not about my penis,” Chris says firmly. After a second, during which I suspect we are both thinking about his penis,
he sighs and is quiet for a really long time.
He isn’t looking at me.
Wait, what is this?
Oh shit, I know this Chris. This is the Chris who hates confrontation. He literally freezes and cannot speak.
Don’t help him don’t help him don’t help—
“What are you trying to say?” I ask quietly.
Dammit, Mo.
“I just—” He freezes again. He takes a deep breath, and then he fucking says it. “I just wonder if we’re together for the
right reasons.”
What do you say to that? “But we’ve always been together.”
He runs a hand through his really nice hair and shrugs. “I hope we can be friends.”
Friends?
My ribs start to close in on me again. I snatch the paper bag from him, but we’re both holding on too tight, and it rips before
I can hyperventilate into it. I half-heartedly crumple my piece up and feel it drop from my hand. This cannot be happening.
“Can’t we be together and be friends? Like at the same time?” My voice is going up into the stratosphere, like I’ve sucked on helium, like I’m the balloon
that can pull us out of this mess.
He doesn’t answer.
“Did you coffee table me out of pity?” My voice echoes off the expensive tile.
And he can’t look me in the eye. He’s staring intently at the sink, then at the daddy longlegs in the corner, then in the
mirror for moral support. “Breakup sex is totally normal,” he says in an infuriating doctor voice, as if a doctor would ever
say that.
“That was not breakup sex, Chris. It’s only breakup sex if both people know it’s breakup sex. Otherwise it’s just sex with
really shitty timing!”
“I’m sorry, Mo,” he says, and I want to shove the entire roll of toilet paper in his mouth before he can finish the sentence.
But I don’t.
And he does.
“I think we should . . . take a time-out.”
Chris can’t bring himself to kick me out of what is now very clearly HIS condo. He shrugs sheepishly in the direction of the
nice microsuede couch we’ve never had sex on, as though I should consider sleeping on it, and I almost throw up.
In approximately thirty-seven seconds, I throw some clean underwear and a couple of T-shirts in a duffel bag, all while blowing
through an entire box of tissues.
Chris went out so I could do this part by myself.
Before I go, I take a handful of tissues and one more look around the sleek condo his parents bought.
I notice for the first time that there’s hardly any trace of me here.
The bathroom with classy aquamarine tiles and hip-kitsch tropical bird wallpaper.
The bedroom with the memory foam king mattress I’ve slept on every night—the mattress that conveniently springs right back, as though I was never on it.
The kitchen with every cool gadget I could possibly want, if I knew how to cook.
The living room with the floor-to-ceiling windows and the tasteful, faux-industrial light fixtures that I would never have chosen.
Chris is out there somewhere, waiting for me to leave. He doesn’t want me here anymore. He doesn’t want me anywhere anymore.
I glare at the coffee table with its streak where my butt used to be. Traitor.
I’ve never felt so alone.
I grab the one piece of evidence that I lived here—the photo of Chris and me from graduation ten years ago. The two of us
smile for the camera, and for the first time, the thing I notice isn’t how happy we look; it’s that I haven’t changed at all.
I look exactly the same. I could still be that eighteen-year-old kid, and not in a cute way.
My straight, boring brown hair hangs to my shoulders, which always seemed like the responsible choice for a person who isn’t
particularly tall or short. My eyes are blue, but not the exciting, piercing variety. My boobs are shrug-worthy. My smile
is crooked, in a way that says my childhood dentist was more into golf than teeth. Next to me, Chris looks goofy—a little
skinny, a little scraggly, a little too earnest.
The two of us used to match, but I stayed the same while he went and got muscles and Invisalign. Now he binges YouTube videos
about clothes so he knows what to wear for his body type and also I think he plucks his unibrow.
He’s the main character.
I’m a flyover girlfriend.
No wonder he wants to move on.
Okay, he didn’t say that exactly, he said a bunch of stuff about how the only constant is change but the heart is resilient (Ugh), how people sometimes drift
apart, how we both need to spread our wings and fly, how we’re like muscles and gas transfer.
The metaphors were, frankly, relentless and sometimes confusing.
But the overall message was clear.
I stay an extra moment to run an antibacterial wipe over the coffee table. I have the sudden desire to erase every last trace
of myself from this condo. That, plus it just doesn’t seem sanitary to have a butt streak where you put your pizza. Not that
Chris eats pizza anymore.
And doing something—doing anything, really—will keep me from spiraling about how quickly my whole life has collapsed into
disaster.
Just three hours ago, I couldn’t get the copier to work. Right now, I would give anything to go back in time and swear at
that copier. But I don’t get to have nice things anymore. Not copiers. Not Chris.
I’m losing everything, I want to howl, but it’s not true; I still have Hannah, who was already my best friend before Chris and I even met. Han
is my ride-or-die. And yeah, she’s fancy now, an up-and-coming influencer with a whole wellness brand that actually helps
people, but we’ve held each other’s hair while puking, and nothing will ever change that.
Down on the street, I gaze up at my fancy condo life one last time. I can almost see myself waving at me from the seventh-floor
window-with-skyline-view. Then my Uber driver honks, tapping his wrist, and the fantasy shatters for good.
Leaving the ashes of my former life behind, I head to Hannah’s two-flat in Loganville. She bought it with her boyfriend and
her other boyfriend and his girlfriend who is also her first boyfriend’s girlfriend when the neighborhood was up-and-coming
and something something low interest rates. The four of them are living their dreams.
When I first told my parents Hannah was in a polycule, they thought I was talking about a geometrically unusual building, and I didn’t have the heart to explain that it was how some people dated these days.
And honestly, it seems like a whole second job just keeping track of everyone’s feelings, not to mention all the associated terminology, but it works for them and they’re all awesome people and always seem happy and in love.
I can’t even hold on to one boyfriend, and here’s Hannah with a small city of lovers happily taking care of one another in an amazing piece of real estate in a great neighborhood.
I tamp down my jealousy as I ring their doorbell. They all live in the upper apartment and rent the downstairs one to help
with the mortgage, and I know for a fact that it’s currently vacant.
When Hannah opens the door, she looks exhausted, like she’s been up all night. Even worse, she kind of wedges herself in the
doorway, blocking me from getting in.
“I thought we weren’t meeting up till later?” she says. “I didn’t lose track of time, did I?”
I actually completely forgot Hannah was taking me out for fancy cocktails for my birthday.
“Chris and I broke up,” I blurt, my eyeballs smarting with tears. “And I got fired.”
“Oh, babe, not on your birthday,” she says, enveloping me in a big hug, while still, incidentally, not letting me inside. “I’m so sorry, he doesn’t deserve
you, never has. And we already hated Kendra, right? So we just hate them both?”
“I’m not ready to be mad yet,” I say, wiping my eyes with my sleeve. “I need some time to wallow in self-pity mode. In nobody-wants-me-and-I’m-going-to-be-broke-soon
mode. Speaking of being broke—do you think we could talk inside for a sec?”
Hannah glances over her shoulder and grimaces. “It’s sort of a tricky moment. We’re, um . . . negotiating boundaries. It’s
a tough state of the union, hardest one this year so far.”
State of the union. They literally have names for their arguments. I feel like such a teenager next to them.
She squeezes my hand and says, “I know this is the worst timing, but could it wait till cocktails tonight?”
“Totally.” I try to sound upbeat. “It’s fine. Could you just let me into the apartment downstairs, then? I only need a place
to stay for like a week. No more than a month or two. Probably.”
Hannah looks at her feet and sighs, which is not exactly a good sign. “We’re kind of working through some new rules around
that space, Mo,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” I say, stung. “Okay. Can I just sleep on your couch then?”
She gives me a look.
“I’ll do your dishes?” I plead.
“If it was up to me, you know I’d say yes,” she says, her face full of regret. “I’m really sorry. I have to get back to the house meeting, but I’ll text
you soon, okay? We’re still going out tonight, promise.”
“Han—” I say, stunned. “Where am I supposed to go? I don’t have any other options!”
“Of course you do,” she says, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek before she disappears back into the house. “You’re like
the most resilient person I know.”
Ugh. If I never hear that word again, it’ll be too soon.
And even worse, she’s right.
I do have another option.