Chapter 17
chapter
seventeen
I sit on a concrete ledge outside the milk tea shop—almond matcha tea with taro boba in hand—in morose silence. This has to amount to cruel and unusual punishment: the third live-action video game movie adaption of a red alien armadillo named Blinklebob (unironically).
And, moreover, being forced to spend more time with Eitan. It’s fine. Everything is fine. I just need to avoid touching him, making eye contact while we listen to music, and—while we’re at it—talking altogether. Plenty of friendships have sustained themselves with less.
Calliope sits next to me, looking similarly glum. Because…I’m not sure. Shoot, I should probably ask.
I sigh. “How are you?”
“Eh.” She subtly wipes at her cheek. A silk scarf is wrapped around her thick hair, paired with red lipstick and dark sunglasses.
Very I just got whisked away by a moped to a cliffside road in Sicily.
She takes the shades off and I see why she was wearing them—her eyes are red. “My girlfriend broke up with me.”
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”
“Yeah, it was pretty recent.” She glances at me, her eyeliner looking more wobbly than usual today.
A gust of downtown wind catches her hair, and it whips me in the face.
I bat it away, trying to listen. “Ethically non-monogamous, of course. But today she told me that she just doesn’t think she can have an emotional connection with a woman.
Isn’t that fucked up? Why date me in the first place? ”
I nod and scrunch my nose. “That is both fucked up and extremely illogical.” I nudge her shoulder. “If it makes you feel any better, I can’t even get one person to date me.”
Calliope gives me a questioning glare. “Why would that make me feel better? That’s fucked up too!”
I shrug. “I’m a tough sell.”
Calliope cackles pointedly. “You are not a tough sell. You’re extraordinary. I am too. Fuck Imogen. Doesn’t know what she’s giving up. I am fantastic in bed.”
My next boba pearl almost goes down the wrong pipe.
“Not that anyone can be good or bad at sex. But I am a giver. Bet the next Chad Michael Murray she feels an emotional connection with won’t go down on her for forty-five minutes!”
I wipe at the milk tea dripping down my chin. “I bet he won’t. Chads are notoriously selfish.”
“You know who seems like a giver?” Calliope waggles her eyebrows. “Eitan.”
I immediately shield myself from any thoughts of Eitan giving that. I am planted firmly in friend territory. No more distraction, no more misread signals. “No way. He seems like a two pump chump who leaves you in bed to 3D print something.”
“Hilarious,” Calliope says flatly. “But no, in this case, you’re wrong. I have a nose for these things. And I know—” She pauses, and her eyes catch on something. I follow her gaze. Eitan crosses the street toward us, waving, lopsided smile plastered on his face.
He might be walking in slow motion, and there may be birds erupting from his path.
“That man is a giver,” Calliope murmurs under her breath before leaping off the ledge. “Hello, darling!” she says as she gives Eitan a hug.
I stand up, leaving my empty bubble tea on the ledge, adjusting the hem of my denim miniskirt in an effort to remain calm.
“Hi,” I say to Eitan, cordial. There’s an awkward pause before I feel compelled to give him a hug too, given the precedent Calliope set.
A friendly hug. I reach my arms up to wrap around his neck and his lock around my waist for a moment.
A heady wash of fir hits me when my cheek briefly connects with his neck.
Morse code mating signals pass between our skin.
I tell them to piss off.
“Hey, Calliope.” Steve’s voice gives me the perfect reason to pull back from the hug.
There’s a flicker in Eitan’s blue-green eyes that makes me think he found that hug as jarring and hypnotic as I did. Yesterday, I was in Eitan’s arms. Despite my efforts, the memory coats me like dust, unable to fully wipe off.
My eyes break away from his, looking around the dirty, muggy city street. Trying to appear unaffected.
Steve gets a limp side hug out of Calliope, and I’m obligated to do the same. The momentary brush against Steve’s cotton shirt is nothing like the hug with Eitan, unfortunately.
“Who’s ready to see the most epic film ever to grace the silver screen?” Steve hands out four fancy printed tickets that were designed to look like they came from the Blinkleblob universe.
Calliope squeals. “This is just what I needed today,” she tells us as we get on the theater’s escalator.
Steve cocks his head. “Bad day?”
“Break up.”
“Oh, that’s, um, terrible.” His words and the secret smile tugging at the corners of his mouth beg to differ. “Glad we can cheer you up.”
“Yes, exactly. That is the main order of business today.” Calliope nods and turns on her heel to march toward the movie theater. “I know!” she calls back. “I’ve got just the thing to round out a perfect evening.” She’s too far away for me to stop whatever she’s about to say.
“Let’s all four of us go out to dinner after this.”
Steve lights up. “That’s a great id—”
This is a trainwreck. I need to do anything but spend more time with Eitan. “I don’t know, I have to go home and—”
“What? Organize your tea drawer?” she interrupts.
“Okay, harsh.” I refuse to meet anyone’s—especially Eitan’s—eyes.
“Come on, you have to go out to dinner with me.” Calliope begins walking backwards to face me. Her eyes widen, and she sticks out her bottom lip, looking like an irresistibly cute puppy. “I’ve been dumped, abandoned, by a woman I selflessly sacrificed many hours of my life to—”
“Okay! Okay. I’ll go. But only if you stop talking about how much sex you have on a regular basis.”
At least now Eitan is the one blushing furiously.
The Blinklebob franchise is, I’ve decided, a blight on our society.
You want to talk about suffering? Look no further than the remake of a remake, shot for shot live-action adaptation of a game and plotline that was designed for pre-teens in 1999.
The only light—albeit dim—in the dark haze of the movie is Jack Black as Dr. E.
Ville, of MegaCranium Inc. But it’s snuffed almost immediately by the grotesque special effects.
There’s something about Blinklebob’s computer generated fur that’s unsettling on both a personal and sociological level.
“Bathroom,” I hiss at Calliope during the next outer space car chase scene (Blinklebob is an uber-talented low gravity driver).
I squeeze my way out of the row, avoiding brushing Eitan at all costs, and go to the bathroom.
I do everything as slowly as possible, laying down three layers of toilet paper on the seat and peeing at a trickle.
I sing “Happy Birthday” twice while washing my hands.
Sadly, I find myself outside the entrance to the theater, once again.
I brainstorm other distractions, settling on a quick check of Instagram, and slide to the floor next to the theater door.
Cal Decker, my favorite true crime influencer, pops up first with a viral video about connecting recent abductions and events from the police scanner to a few disappearances in Chicago in the last few years.
He’s gotten pretty famous for talking about the existence of the Chicago Maneater, a serial killer he posits has been hunting young men around the streets of the Loop undetected for a while now.
I let the video play out, Cal putting together a pretty convincing argument that gives me goosebumps.
Probably best to move on, if I want to sleep tonight.
Penelope is in Boston, signing books, taking photos with readers.
I’m happy for her—really, I am—it’s just hard to imagine if it will ever be my turn.
If the work I’ve put into this career will ever amount to something.
Are some people just destined for it? Am I one of them?
It’s painful to think about surviving cancer only to have the world reject your art.
I try to balance this out by doing a survey of other people from our writers group.
Some of them just wrote for fun and had no dreams of ‘making it,’ and others tried just as hard as Penelope and I.
Pen has been the biggest breakout success, but a couple others have made it to midlist author status, career held in place by an anchor made of feathers, income still requiring they keep a day job.
An equally depressing prospect.
I go back to the feed, and my breath catches. It’s Grant and Felicity, drinking cocktails on some rooftop bar. She wears a bustier top, her boobs spilling out of it, her hair long and shiny beneath the flash of the camera.
I hate Felicity with a burning passion, and also I don’t care about her at all. She and Grant are nothing more than a reminder of my life before cancer. Of everything I lost. Like a disintegrated receipt that you can never fully clean out of your pocket.
The ability to look externally exactly how I felt internally is something I took for granted my whole adult life.
I prayed every day of the first two years of high school for my mosquito bite boobs to grow into something voluptuous.
Something that looked like the women in Cosmopolitan.
I grew out my hair, even making peace with its natural texture, an unruly mix of waves and curls.
I learned how to dress in ways that accentuated my figure, and finally, I woke up looking like the woman I knew I was.
I must have prayed a little too hard, because one day my boobs decided to grow a touch out of control, and bam. Tumor. One tiny overstep for breast cells, and the entire body gets punished for years.