4
“I MUST HAVE FLIPPED OFF AN EVIL EYE IN A PAST LIFE,” I TELL PENELOPE ON THE phone.
She’s too busy laughing to string together an intelligible sentence. She keeps starting, then bursting out into a sound that alternates between drowning on dry land and impersonating a witch, and I stay on the line only because I don’t want to experience this brand of panic alone.
“You—
“He was—
“The same floor —”
When she’s finally settled down, she sighs. “Wow, Elle. Karma is so not your boyfriend.”
“Did you just quote Taylor Swift?”
“Of course I did.” She hums. “So, is he still ridiculously hot?”
Yes. He still looks like a model or professional athlete, not a twenty-nine-year-old tech genius who disrupted an industry and just had a multibillion-dollar exit. It’s no wonder the media is so fascinated with him, from a cover piece in Forbes to a deep dive in Cosmo about why he’s never had a serious relationship.
“Not really,” I say, hoping that maybe the next time I see him karma will have become my boyfriend—nay, my fiancé—and he’ll have aged forty years and lost all his hair.
Penelope tsks. “If I didn’t know you for almost a decade, I might believe you.”
“If I didn’t know you for almost a decade, I would have hung up after thirty seconds of your suffocating witch laughing.”
That makes her laugh even more. And she really does sound like a suffocating witch.
Penelope is the best thing I got from Columbia and likely the only reason I graduated. After taking a semester off for personal reasons, I thought about just . . . not returning to New York. She’s the one who flew across the country to California, packed up my stuff, and forced me to come back with her.
So, I put up with the laugh. No, I love the laugh—though you couldn’t waterboard me into admitting it to her face.
It’s interesting how love colors things I would normally hate into my absolute favorite shade.
“Penelope,” I say evenly. She stops laughing, knowing very well that the use of her full name, all four syllables, means a shift to the serious. “What am I going to do?”
She sighs. “Nothing, babe. You live on the same floor, but we both know you’re a hermit. You’ll only leave to single-handedly keep the nearest coffee shop in business, so you probably won’t interact with him again. And if you do . . . pretend you don’t remember him.” There’s a moment of silence. “Can I be honest?”
“You always are.” Sometimes brutally.
“Elle, he probably doesn’t remember you.”
There it is: a needle puncturing my lungs, making me feel even more ridiculous for harboring this strange hatred for a practical stranger.
If I dig into it—which I have with my therapist, multiple times—I know it’s because he represents everything I hate. He judged me by my appearance, as if I couldn’t possibly be successful on my own. As if I needed to rely on a guy, as if I were some lecherous gold digger.
Did it cross his mind that I could be a successful screenwriter, who, the very night before he met me, signed a deal to write a movie that ended up grossing over half a billion dollars?
No. He saw me and assumed I was after someone else’s money.
Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if my mother hadn’t raised me to be fiercely independent. If she hadn’t worked two jobs while getting her master’s to keep me and my younger sister in a good school after my dad left. If she hadn’t told me, since I was a little girl, to never rely on anyone else or let anyone else control me, especially a man.
We are strong, she used to say. We can get through anything. We don’t need anyone else.
So where does that leave me, now that she’s gone?
Thinking of her makes my throat go tight. I reach up to rub my thumb across my necklace, the charm that used to sit along her pulse, the only thing I have left of her other than her lessons.
Since that day in the stairwell, I pinned all my hatred on him. I would look him up every few weeks, like some sort of addiction. Like we were in some sort of one-sided competition. Seeing his face, being reminded of that night, kept me focused. Inspired me to work harder. To be better. To prove to myself—and him, if I ever saw him again—that I was the woman my mother had raised. Because that kept her alive, in some way.
“You’re right,” I say, and she is. Though I’ve used him as a mental target for two years, he probably doesn’t remember me at all. Our encounter lasted all of five minutes. Most people have lots of memories with lots of strangers. Most people don’t remember strangers.
Penelope shifts the conversation, her voice entirely too casual. “So! In other news, have you . . .”
Written. She abandons her sentence midway through because that word has been banned from our apartment for the last few months while I dealt with . . . whatever this mental block is.
“No. But I’ve only been here a day. I’m sure inspiration will strike soon.”
Penelope agrees. And if I hadn’t known her for almost a decade, I might believe her.
PROCRASTINATING HAS MADE ME SURPRISINGLY PRODUCTIVE. I make every excuse not to sit in front of a blank page—cursor mocking me from the sprawling comfort of its home, blinking as if to say, I’m supposed to move, remember? —and right now, that means unpacking.
The couple I’m house-sitting for has never actually lived in this apartment before. It’s currently in the final stages of renovations—which I’m meant to lightly supervise in exchange for free rent—so most of it is livable. The only unfinished sections include the second powder room—what a thing to have—the master bedroom, and a soon-to-be office bigger than my bedroom at home. My room is the only one currently furnished, and it has a view of a ticking clock tower, the Empire State Building, and about a dozen fire escapes and water towers. The floor is so high up, I see the city through its rooftops, like a giant craning my head down, clouds at my ears, sun on the back of my neck.
When Penelope helped me pack she said, “Elle, you’re going to New York for the summer .”
I said, “Penelope, are you having a stroke?”
She took the sides of my suitcases and shook the contents. “These are all sweaters and sweatpants!” She sighed. “We’ve lived in LA for years and I haven’t seen you wear a dress once, or anything that is remotely flattering on you. Are you allergic to the sun? Are you afraid I’ll hate you for having a daily intake of saltine crackers, ice cream, bagels, and lattes and somehow still having a Pilates body?”
My face scrunched. “Pilates body?”
“You know what I mean!”
I really didn’t, but now I kind of see her point about the clothes. They’re all either faded Columbia merch—because they are soft as pajamas but semi-acceptable to wear outside of my writing cave—or cashmere sweaters that have pilled enough to make an entirely new sweater out of their collective pieces, yoga pants that have never seen a yoga studio, and fuzzy socks. Working at home, on my laptop, for my entire adult life has led me to making clothing choices purely based on comfort and not at all on aesthetics.
There’s only one dress in the pile, and it’s Penelope’s. It’s also so short and tight, it could only ever make sense inside the walls of a nightclub. She must have snuck it in, along with her smallest pair of red bottoms.
I roll my eyes and stick them both in the closet, knowing with complete certainty that they will never see New York beyond this custom California Closets shelving.
I take a shower, using three types of my favorite soaps to scrub away the New York City rain and any remaining recollection of the person living just on the other side of the wall. When I get out, it’s still slightly drizzling, storm clouds peppering the sky. From this high up, they’re waist-level, as if I could open my window and army crawl across them.
Comfort food. That’s what I need. Nothing solves a bad day better than a cookies-and-cream milkshake and fried chicken sandwich for dinner. I eat my feast on the floor, in the exact place a Cloud couch will one day reside, with 90 Day Fiancé set up on my laptop in front of me.
Even I can see it’s a sad picture.
First night back in New York City, and this is how I spend it. If I were Penelope, I would be at the most exclusive club, dancing in shoes suction cupped to the bottoms of my feet. If I were my little sister, I’d be at an art gallery opening, using terms like “postmodernism” and eating small squares of food. If I were the main character of my last screenplay, I would be standing in the middle of a storming Times Square, face up to the sky, smiling, not a care in the world.
But I’m me, and this is what a perfect night has looked like for years.
I go to bed wondering how I let my life get so boring—and when I started noticing.