Chapter Seven
I scroll through photos of him posing with athletes, attending events, and vacationing on beaches, very suntanned and very topless.
Unlike mine, his profile is impressive, with a follower count in the thousands.
To my knowledge, he has no claim to fame, especially if he didn’t go pro.
Are these numbers typical for someone in marketing?
Who the hell even knows more than a hundred people?
Not I. And his photos . . . dear God. It’s often debated whether real-life hotness translates to photos, but Parker Tran is simply all hot, all the time.
“What are you looking at that requires so much concentration?” Marisa asks from across a quaint wooden table.
After the stunt Charlotte pulled, the allure of Adagio from yesterday has effectively died, and now I’d rather be anywhere but the office.
As soon as I could break for lunch, I called up the ever dependable Marisa Lin, who wasted no time in meeting me at a café in the West Village.
“Did your mother text you in Chinese again?”
“As if Beatrice Chen has time to text me,” I snort, and she chuckles sympathetically.
Marisa knows better than to throw a pity party for me at the mention of my mother.
When we first met at Columbia, I didn’t think it was necessary to share the story of my family with her just because we lived in the same dorm.
Then, sophomore year, when we were roommates by choice, I let it spill during one of those late-night conversations when every secret felt like it belonged in the open.
I told her all about how Mom left Taiwan a teen painting prodigy, only to meet a remarkably ordinary fate as a stay-at-home mom in a small town.
And if there was one thing Beatrice Chen loathed, it was being ordinary.
“I think she’s preparing for a group show at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum,” I elaborate. “Which means she’s as good as MIA.”
“Like you, from this lunch date.”
“Sorry.” I place my phone face down. “I was on Instagram.”
“Oh boy. You going to be okay under that tin foil hat?” Marisa takes a sip of her latte, flips her frazzled ponytail over her shoulder, and brushes a crumb off her jeans.
These days, she wears exhaustion on her face like a battered champion.
Her latest graphic design project is her biggest yet: A household name in kitchen appliances has tasked her with rebranding its entire enterprise.
Everything from its logo to its packaging is now under her jurisdiction.
This means Marisa sleeps four hours a night and spends all her waking hours in Illustrator. Today’s lunch is her only respite.
“How long until you spiral over your digital footprint?”
“Avoiding social media doesn’t make me a conspiracy theorist.”
“Right. Remember when you panicked because your algorithm showed you a croissant?”
“I was literally thinking that I wanted one, and it popped up on my feed.”
“Let me tell you a secret about the Internet: If you’ve ever liked a photo of a croissant, you’re gonna see a croissant again.”
Marisa is just as much of a smartass as I am, and that’s why I like her.
I won the roommate lottery when we moved into the same dorm freshman year.
She’s the one I credit with helping me out of the shell I’d brought with me from high school.
While I’ve always been quiet and jaded, Marisa is outgoing and a little less jaded.
Like Daria and Jane, if Jane actually wanted to go to parties and then crush the patriarchy after.
A cynical part of me wondered if we’d remain friends after we graduated and no longer had cheap beer and midnight snack runs to keep us close.
But Marisa has never let me drift too far from her radar.
Even after she got married last year, and I prepared myself to see less of her, she called me the moment she returned from her Maldives honeymoon, complaining about a pizza craving that suddenly became my problem.
“So, who are you stalking on Instagram?”
“I’m not stalking anyone.”
“Dani, you open the app twice a year. You’re definitely stalking someone.”
I shift in my seat and pull the business card out of my purse, sliding it across the table. “Guess who I ran into yesterday.”
Marisa picks up the card and her jaw goes slack. “Parker Tran? From the Skype calls?”
I nod an affirmative.
“Remind me what happened to you two. Did you guys date and break up?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“Really? But you’d be up at, like, midnight on those video calls.”
“Three-hour difference. We had to work around his practice schedule.”
“Uh-huh, sure. Anyways, if I remember correctly, you two just stopped talking out of nowhere.”
I stir my latte a little with the spoon. “I told you. He stopped talking to me.”
“Well, give me the deets. Did you two finally duke it out?” she gasps. “Is that what happened to your hair?”
“No, this is unrelated.”
I run my fingers through the remaining, slightly crispier strands. I’d managed to minimize the damage by using a heavyduty Japanese hair mask and snipping away some of the more hopeless bits.
“It was actually really strange. He was being so nice last night—as in, bought-me-dinner-and-an-Uber-home nice!”
“Well, it’s been, what? Seven, eight years? The last time you saw him he was still a dumb twenty-year-old.”
“Yeah, but do you think people really change that much after college?”
She folds her arms and looks up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Let’s see, you’re eighteen when it starts, and you’ve got a whole system telling you that you can be whatever you want to be. Then your twenties come around, slap you with debt, and destroy your self-esteem.”
Something tells me Parker’s self-esteem is just fine.
“So, it’s possible that he’s matured.” I stop stirring, letting my spoon fall to the saucer. “He invited me to an event tomorrow night. Something with a bunch of New York hotshots.”
Marisa raises her brows. “You think he’s trying to make amends? Like he feels bad for everything that happened?”
“That’s assuming he has a heart and a conscience.”
I take a sip of my latte. It’s cold now.
“I just can’t figure that guy out. I never could. Whenever I thought about what went wrong with us, I could never pinpoint when things took a turn. Maybe he just got sick of me after spending our whole lives together.”
“I was an unwilling third wheel to those Skype calls. That boy thought the world of you.”
Then why did he leave me behind? With time and distance, it had become easier not to think about that day. I’d taken for granted the luxury of almost forgetting.
As if she can read my thoughts, Marisa reaches out and tousles my hair fondly.
“Stop overthinking it. Go to the event. Have a blast. Show Parker Tran what he missed out on. If you don’t leave with him begging to be in your life again, maybe you’ll bag a New York Ten and get lucky. The sky’s the limit, Dani.”
I cast her a wary look, as if I’m half expecting her to unzip her face and reveal an alien underneath. “You’re a lot less jaded now that you’re married.”
“I know. Blame my ever-doting wife,” she says with a sigh, handing the business card back to me. “Either way, I think you should go. It’ll be good for you. And if it isn’t, at least I get to hear about it.”