Chapter 19
Nineteen
I lay on a yoga mat in my new apartment, my muscles screaming. A thin layer of sweat clung to my face, my chest, the small
of my back. I was out of Pilates practice.
A buzz bleated into the space. I sat up, twisting the bio-tracker ring I wore around my middle finger, then frowned at the
iPad, which was at 2 percent battery. I navigated to Settings, but the sound buzzed again. “The doorbell, you dork,” I said
into the space. They were the first words I’d spoken all day. I wasn’t used to living alone.
I pressed the intercom button.
“I come bearing gifts,” a warm voice announced.
Caleb. I released the lock, then threw on a long-sleeved T-shirt over my workout clothes. As fast as I could, I closed the
swath of open research notebooks and corralled them into a pile on the kitchen island.
At the door, I winced as I caught a glimpse of my hair in the mirror fixed to the wall.
“Warning,” I said when I opened the door. “This apartment is not ready for human consumption.” Neither was my face, but this
was Caleb.
He stepped inside. “It can’t be as bad as your old bedroom.” He rounded the hallway and laughed. “Oh.”
It was sunny and high-ceilinged, the same way many New York apartments were. “It’s atrocious,” I said, stacking a potted plant on a tower of moving boxes to punctuate my point. “But I promise it’s clean. Just messy.”
Caleb toed a box overflowing with kitchenware aside. “It’s refreshing. You’re human. My ex-girlfriend would have had all this
catalogued, unpacked, and sorted out before allowing anyone in.”
I digested this information. I felt irrationally stabby at the word girlfriend, a huge part of his life I’d known nothing about, and also less-than at the thought of someone so capable. “I’ve been busy,”
I settled on. “And, ex? How fresh?”
“Couple months.”
“I’m . . . sorry?”
“Thanks. It sucked,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “So what are these gifts you come bearing?”
“Oh!” He brightened, then pulled a small, wrapped object from his pocket. I tore off the brown paper and held up a wooden
piece shaped like a tall pizza wedge. He reached over to press the area that would be the natural first bite. The object unspooled,
transforming into a circle right in my hand.
“A cheese plate,” he said. “Happy housewarming.”
“My first gift.” I stowed it on one of the open shelves, then stepped back to admire it. “There.” I gave him a quick hug,
my hand brushing the nape of his neck, which was damp from a recent shower. “Sorry. I probably smell. I did a workout before
you got here.”
“I’ve seen you much sweatier than this,” he said, leaning both hands against the top of the kitchen archway doorjamb. He pressed
into the stretch, his shirt riding up in response.
I averted my eyes from the stripe of his stomach skin. Why was I noticing it? “What’s on deck for you today?”
“Spent the morning packing a traveling exhibit for the Smithsonian. I’m wide-open now. You?”
“Painting the dining nook.”
“I thought you said you hired painters?”
“I did. They already came. But I don’t like the color in that room, which isn’t their fault.”
His mouth twitched. “You didn’t tell them you didn’t like it when they started?”
“You should see me at a nail salon,” I said solemnly. “I will wear literally any color the tech tells me to and proclaim it’s
my new favorite. Every time.”
Now he openly laughed. “Want help?”
“You wanna paint with me?”
“What are friends for?” he asked, cracking me up by giving me the Hunger Games salute.
We put on music, started taping, laid out tarps. I took a video of the before. I could use it for content at some point. My
exercise sweat had long cooled in the air-conditioning, but when we broke open the paint, the chemical stench forced us to
open the windows, inviting summer inside.
For a while, we lost ourselves in the heat, in the monotony of painting. Originally, I’d chosen a white that read more aged
yellow; now, I’d flipped the script and gone for a trendy lilac color I knew I’d also regret before long, though that was
the beauty of paint.
I sat on the floor, running a paintbrush along the baseboard; Caleb used the roller to reach more gracefully than I could.
The smell of the paint was inescapable, but I wasn’t sure if it was that or him that made me woozy. “Tell me more about becoming
a museum curator,” I ventured.
“I love it.” He shook droplets of paint into the silver tray. “Really lucked into the job.”
“Yeah. So weird of you to just stumble upon your doctorate one day.”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“Why’d you go for it?”
“Preservation,” he said immediately. “There’s something about upholding the past that I can’t shake.
I’ve begun to think about the fact that people will be studying this wacky time in a way that they haven’t studied anything since maybe the pandemic.
I find the concept of living history to be . . .”
“Terrifying?”
“The opposite,” he said. “Extraordinary.”
I wondered if he was teasing me, but when I checked his face, it was nothing short of rapt. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. There are so many events in life that become a ‘where-were-you-when’ moment. We live them all the time, and we
usually don’t know until they’re over.”
“That doesn’t scare you?”
He put down the paint roller, shook out his hands, stretched his fingers. “It does. But that’s life. My grandpa always talked
about where he was when JFK died. Sometimes it keeps me up at night, wondering what the next event will be. And then that
next thing happens.”
“Like Soulmail.”
“Exactly like Soulmail,” he agreed.
“True. People’s big life moments are usually more personal, but this is like a big umbrella of a shared experience.” They
came in the form of text messages in the middle of the night, of bringing a toothbrush over to a lover’s apartment, of signing
a new lease. Everyone our age remembered the clear blue of September 11. I hadn’t worn that sky color for a full year after,
and I hadn’t told anyone why. “Those moments petrify me, which I think is why I want to do what I do. Learn all I can. Tell
the why behind things that happen.”
“I had no idea you had the goal to work in that field,” Caleb said. “I never pictured you on-screen. Maybe something else,
like a producer, or a writer, or something.”
I dunked a wooden stirrer into the paint. “I certainly never pictured myself where I am now.”
“You always seemed to be the sort of person who liked to control the narrative without taking it over.” He grinned. “Like the school newspaper incident?”
“Hey, that’s a core personality trait of mine.” I had orchestrated every production as a kid, insisting on a pseudonym byline
so no one knew who the anonymous interviewer was in our high school, even though it was essentially an open secret. “I wrote
my college essay on that.”
“I wrote about how controlling my parents were.”
“Wait, really?”
“Sort of. I classified every parent in Shakespeare’s greatest works in six hundred fifty words or less through the lens of
my mother’s parenting.”
“Hope she wasn’t Queen Gertrude.”
“Brutal,” he agreed. “Mostly had to go with the father figures since there were so few moms in his plays.”
“God.” I shook my head. “Imagine if Shakespeare created a play about Soulmail?”
“New plot point in Romeo and Juliet.” Caleb rubbed at a spot of paint on his skin. “You think there will be another release of Soulmails next month?”
“Hard to say. The powers that be at the studio are guessing so.”
“I almost opened mine last night,” he said after a beat.
I dropped my paintbrush. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Side effect of being human.” He smoothed another stroke over the wall. “Hearing about that whole slew of people getting
theirs made me curious all over again. Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course I am.”
“But you aren’t tempted to open it? I am a little.”
“Not one bit. You can’t undo something that’s been done. What if I open it and I’m disappointed? What if it’s someone I didn’t
want it to be? Once you know . . .”
His face changed. “You can’t un-ring the bell,” he said. “Right.”
“It’s so strange that this will be just part of life for kids,” I said. “If this continues, they’re going to grow up so differently than we did.”
He gave a vigorous nod. “God, yeah. Imagine?”
“In my psych class in college, my professor made us debate over what was better—being a child or an adult. A huge part of
the argument was about how much you understood those huge world moments.” Back then, I had obsessed with that age debate,
pushing my tray through the dining hall line toward food that was rumored to be laced with laxatives (“so if it’s rotten,
at least it punches through you fast”), trudging through the city streets in my knockoff Uggs.
“I’m sure lots of kids mature too fast during them.”
I sighed, trailed a line of paint against the corner. “Being an adult sucks.”
He shook his head. “Nah. It’s perspective. Nothing better than deep conversations. And endorphins. And laughing until your
face falls off at three in the morning. And having the sex we want, with ourselves or with others.”
“Right,” I said. “And deciding whether we should open our Soulmails. Not at all heavy.” A drop of paint plopped on my forehead,
and I rubbed it with my wrist. “Who am I kidding? I’m still not going to open mine.”
“How about this,” he said. “I won’t if you don’t?”
“It’s a promise.”
Hours later, our delivery person sported a T-shirt emblazoned with I’M A SOUL MAN. We devoured pastrami sandwiches seated
cross-legged on my floor. The sunset bled through the windows, lighting my apartment with a copper glow. “Okay,” he said,
wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Definitely could’ve used sub delivery for Oregon Trail.”
He wasn’t referring to the computer game.
It was our imaginary one we’d played that involved hiding in the shade of trees, drinking from hoses, and riding bikes from one hiding place to another.
I had quit playing after I read Bridge to Terabithia, worried one of us would accidentally die.
“Like that afternoon where your mother gave us a baggie of almonds and two bottles
of Dasani to make it all the way through our adventure,” I said, stretching my legs. One ached painfully, the other pleasantly:
Evidence of my body at work.
Caleb leaned over and traced the scar on my knee. An unexpected jolt zipped along my nerve endings when his hand met my skin.
“How did this turn so light?” he asked. “I remember it being so angry-looking.”
I inhaled against my quickening pulse. Inexplicably, I found myself trying not to think about the spot I missed shaving, even
though I used to rub my leg against him in a pool so my spiky stubble would scratch him. “It was.”
“Yet another side effect of time?”
I swallowed. “One of my old roommates became an aesthetician. I let her practice doing this laser thing on the scar.” I ran
my fingertip along it now, a hard, thin, two-inch line below my knee. “It worked better than I thought it would.”
“Some things do,” he said, his voice gruff. He sat upright, his hand hesitant, heavy against my shinbone. Then he slowly retreated.
He cleared his throat. “All set for our trip home?”
“Can’t wait,” I said. It was so strange to have him here. In my space. I jumped up. “Water,” I said. “Need some?”
“Sure.”
I retrieved two glasses from the open shelf and poured from the fridge pitcher. “I looked for you,” I blurted. “Online. Before
all this.”
He nodded. “I looked for you before this, too.”
I frowned. “I was searchable.”
He rubbed his scruff. It made a scritchy sound in my apartment. “You were.”
“Then why didn’t you reach out?” My pours were shaky, uneven.
I slipped water from my glass to his, staring at the curved lip of liquid against the glass’s side.
The meniscus, that fluid ring was called, the surface tension of water against its container.
It was also the name of the cartilage in my knee I’d torn beside my ACL so long ago. I handed him his glass. Be cool, Adler.
He trailed his glance down, then back at me. “Sad people do sad things,” he said finally.