Chapter 9
Nine
If there was one thing I would always thank the universe for, it was Natalie Kim. She was the vivacious and affably flighty
antidote to my groundedness. Where Nat loved real spontaneity, I enjoyed planned, curated adventure. Natalie arrived at NYU
with gobs of money, and I trailed in with the tips I’d earned the last few summers. She introduced me to Korean barbecue,
and I didn’t take offense when she spit out the clam chowder I brought back from Legal Sea Foods.
For most of our first semester, we were polite roommates. Natalie left wet towels on the floor but encouraged me to borrow
her high-end clothing, a net win. She partied with other legacy kids (“every night but Mondays!”) and managed decent-to-great
grades.
I, on the other hand, reserved my nights out for weekends. To keep up the strength in the muscles supporting my rehabbing
knee and mitigate any desire for late nights, I ran on either Saturday or Sunday. Unlike her massive closet, I favored the
capsule wardrobe game; my department store basics were fine for New York layers. When I called home one weekend in October,
Mom said it sounded like we had a perfectly fine living situation.
But I craved someone to fill the gap Caleb had so recently left behind. Someone to whisper secrets with in the dark, to bear
the parts of me that weren’t sad-family-origined.
Then, just before Thanksgiving, Natalie was in and out of bed all night with a UTI, her face pinched and wan.
When I offered to pick up her antibiotics, she’d burst into tears and told me her period was late, so I added a store-brand pregnancy test to the bag of Bactrim at Duane Reade.
I’d spent a full minute debating if I should’ve selected the name-brand pink box, calculating what I had left for the term in my checking account.
Utility won, as it always did with me. Paying twice as much for a plastic stick one peed on wasn’t a great investment.
Nor would it change the outcome. Practical, Natalie had muttered.
Back then, I didn’t think of myself as practical so much as analytical. I assessed the situation and filled the role. I had
tagged after Sabrina with puppylike adoration; I wore silly wigs and told jokes and conversationally tap-danced around my
grieving parents; I explored and ran and shouted with quiet, curious Caleb.
In a tiny voice, Natalie had asked me to take the test for her, using a red Solo cup of pee.
That was how me—new-to-New-York Olivia Adler, with a Chemistry of Life test to study for, with a dead text exchange with Caleb,
with a knee that throbbed and a sister who haunted me, dipped a pregnancy test stick in a cup of pee for the first time. I’d
maybe never been more nervous in my life. Tension had ripped through my fingers as I flipped it over. One line.
“It’s negative,” I’d yelled, and Natalie threw her arms around my neck, and we jumped up and down screaming, then went out
for karaoke, despite Natalie’s UTI.
By the time winter break rolled around, we were equal in one thing: our loyalty to one another. Now, over a decade had gone
by, through more and more negative pregnancy tests, through romances and family troubles and finally, Wells, here was Natalie,
there when I needed her.
Natalie emerged from the shower smelling of her signature lotion. She had once told me it was scented with cherry bark and bergamot, and I had no reason not to believe her, though it wasn’t like I could identify bergamot out of a lineup.
“Tell me about the bachelorette,” I said after I’d recounted everything Wells and Soulmail.
“It was Palm Springs.” Natalie put down her fork. She had ordered a shaved-vegetable pasta dish, a bottle of Sancerre, and
a crisp baguette with butter. “If you’ve been to one there, you’ve been to them all.” Comfortingly dismissive as usual. When
I mulled over wedding details, she had reminded me more than once that if people really cared about how napkins were folded,
then they weren’t worth being around. But she also had this magnetic aura of chaos. Natalie regularly climbed from the sort
of massive credit card debt that would gift me with a permanent furrowed brow. She slept peacefully and yet could pull all-nighters
with finesse; she dated multiple people at once or none at all, and neither had much impact on the barometer of her happiness.
“I haven’t been to one there.”
“Oh, right. You missed Jay’s for Wells’s cousin’s wedding.” Natalie made a face. “What a weasel. I still can’t believe you
didn’t tell me earlier.”
“I wanted to, but everything just happened so fast.”
“My newly illustrious bestie.” She finger-combed my hair, then began to braid it. “You haven’t been single in an eon.” The
stud earrings she’d scored from a boutique near Battery Park were jammed into her lobes.
My stomach flipped at the word single, stricken with a loaded realization. It was possible Natalie and I were soulmates. It would be perfect. Poetic. I couldn’t
bear the amount of hope coursing through me.
“That’s true. But now . . . Natalie, have you opened yours?”
She gently tugged a section of my braid. “Yeah,” she said. “Do you really think they’re real? I saw your video of the makeup artist and the driver, along the rest of the internet.” She paused. “That was . . . honestly, pretty intense.”
“Seeing it unfold in person was wild. It challenged every doubt I had. I couldn’t not believe in Soulmail after that.” I paused.
“Are you willing to share who yours is?”
“Oh. Mine is my mother,” Natalie said, deflating me from inside out. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”
“Aw. Lucky Helena. I was hoping it would be me.” I peered at her. “You okay?”
Natalie flashed a smile, her trademark one, her carefree one. But it didn’t light her eyes. “It’s just . . . weird? Knowing
for sure I don’t have a romantic person. Maybe I should hack my love life, like you did to your phone. Like how I have to
call you three times.”
“Remind me to tell you a story about that another time,” I said. A couple years ago, I read an article about technology and
hacking your own life, and I’d finally gotten around to implementing it after a segment we did where a parent talked about
revolutionizing her mornings by buying two sets of lunch boxes. I love when processes can be streamlined, simplified. “I also
changed the setting on my Gmail to delete instead of archive when I swipe.” I made a chef’s-kiss motion.
“Yeah.” She screwed up her face in thought. “Just have to figure out how to hack it, I guess.”
“Oh, Natalie. Come on. A mother-daughter Soulmail match doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship, right? It just means you
have a relationship of value outside of romance.” My throat tightened.
Nat sucked in her cheeks. “I’m afraid of what Danny’s going to say.”
“I didn’t realize you and Danny were that serious.”
“We’re not, but . . . no one wants to waste time with someone who isn’t meant to be. What if he opens his and learns of a fated romance? We’d be over.”
I waved a hand. “Who’s to say these aren’t just naming one meaningful person in your life?”
“Then why won’t you open yours?”
“I don’t want mine to mess with my head any more than it already is.”
“Huh,” Natalie said.
An ache pulsed through my abdomen at the duality: How lucky this was for Natalie, how I wish I could have that kind of bond
with my own mother. Natalie and Helena had struggled, strengthened, persevered, soared. They’d always had that special single-mom-only-daughter
bond, part of why it was easy to believe in the things we couldn’t see. What made up our feelings was invisible to our eyes,
but the way people live in our minds, the way our bodies crave someone else’s, the way memories light our dreams—that was
as real as that egg on the sidewalk. This was why I wanted to be a mother someday, part of why letting go of Wells would hurt
so badly the moment I let myself think about him for more than five seconds. Changing my expectations, my timeline.
Before long, we turned off the lamps and brushed our teeth with the charcoal toothpaste and bamboo toothbrushes the delivery
service had picked up. The bamboo was strawlike, the charcoal grainy and jarring in my mouth.
“Nat?” I burrowed beneath the covers.
“Mm?”
“I wouldn’t worry about your mom being yours.”
“I’m not worried about it. I’m just acclimating to the past, present, and future absence of my one true love.” Natalie snorted.
“No big deal.”
I rolled onto my back, staring at the soaring ceiling. “Do you know you’re more likely to believe in true love and happily ever afters if you’ve watched a Disney movie?”
Natalie lifted her head. “Really?”
“Really. I have early notes on it for a Valentine’s Day special.”
“You’re something else,” Natalie mumbled, her voice dropping toward sleep.
I willed myself to join her there, but I groaned. No melatonin. The irony. My mind whirred to life in the creaking, painful
way old dial-up internet did. I opened my social media, rewatched the video from this morning. The shock, the awe, the bird’s-eye-fly-on-the-wall.
It was a vantage point, one people were interested in. But it couldn’t distract me from my own reality.
Wells and Cambrey Coyle.
Per Diem and the wedding reality show episode.
The sudden vulnerability of a zeitgeisty awareness of who I was for a portion of the population.
And something else unfinished. Someone else. Caleb.
I rolled over, dimmed my phone screen, and opened the message from my childhood best friend. I read it again, my chest brimming
with something I couldn’t identify, something like hope and sadness entwined and left to marinate in my bones.
He still hadn’t answered. But I couldn’t shake wondering why he had reached out now. Now that I had a vaguely public presence.
I was easily searchable before all this. Why hadn’t he looked for me the way I had looked for him?
Imagine being given the choice to learn who your person was without even trying, a woman might say to her dinner party. Would you do it?
It was a question that belonged in would-you-rathers—in deep talks, friendly debates. In eye rolls and counterpoints traded over corncob carcasses, plates with fork tines trailed through sauce, wooden bowls lined with soft pools of oil and vinegar dressings, wineglasses draped with lip marks.
A fun conversation starter, not a real question. And yet.
Overnight, the most-used emoji became the envelope with the lipstick stamp. A new meme of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan popped up
from the decades-old You’ve Got Mail movie with the caption: I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.
There was rejoicing. There was sadness. In New York, the heat broke, and rain set in.