Page 38 of The Quiet Tenant

After dinner, Cecilia asks if she can watch a movie. He tells her she has to get up for school tomorrow. She begs a bit. She says please, it’s still the weekend, and she’s done with her homework. He sighs.

Does he know how good he has it? A thirteen-year-old, in this century, whose main demand is a Sunday-night movie? At her age, you were bouncing from one sleepover to the next, negotiating trips to malls across the Hudson, forever expanding the perimeter you were allowed to occupy, parents-free, outside the home.

“Fine,” he says. “But be in bed by ten.”

She turns to you. “Wanna watch?”

You hold your breath. Give him a few seconds to interject.Cecilia,he could say,I’m sure Rachel is busy tonight.His pocket buzzes. He takes out his phone, checks the screen, starts typing.

“Sure,” you say.

She helps clean the table. After that, you don’t know what to do with yourself. Usually, her dad sends her upstairs to brush her teeth, has her riffle through the cupboard to replenish the paper-towel dispenser—whatever he can think of to distract her while he brings you back to the bedroom. But tonight, you are staying. Tonight is movie night. A great unknown, a million opportunities to fuck up along the way.

You follow them to the living room. Hide the twitch in your leg, ignore the burn where he kicked you two days ago. He settles in the armchair. While Cecilia looks around for the remote, he gestures for you to sit on the couch. His daughter curls up on the cushion next to yours. She points the remote at the screen, ignores the live-TV option, and selects a streaming service. You barely recognize the interface, but the logo has remained the same. Back when he took you, the platform was expanding, growing its catalog and beginning to produce its own shows. Now, Cecilia flips through an infinity of TV series and movies—some old, some unknown to you, some with an “original” label.

“This okay?”

The cursor hovers on what the platform describes as a teen rom-com, based on the bestselling young-adult novel series of the same name.

“Looks great,” you say.

She leans back with a shy smile. You remember what it was like at her age, being a little ashamed of everything you liked.

You do your best to focus on the screen. It’s been so long. All these sounds and colors and people and names. Your brain struggles to keep up. You jump from one subplot to the other, forget what the screenwriters told you five minutes ago. Your heart beats faster. Your fists clench in frustration, maybe panic.

Blue light glows in the corner of your eye. His phone. He’s ignoring the movie entirely, neck bent over the small screen, thumbhopping from one corner to the other like a water strider on the surface of a lake.

On the big screen, the love interest says something funny. Cecilia giggles. She catches herself, turns to you as if to check that you, too, appreciate the humor in the scene. A girl, desperate for validation. You think back to the pads, to the note she scribbled in purple ink.Hope these help. Let me know if you need more.You do the only human thing. You laugh.

She giggles again and turns her gaze back to the screen. Her position on the couch relaxes, her right side almost leaning into you.

She is here. An ally, a friend. You feel so alone next to her, more than you ever did in the shed.

The love interest makes another wisecrack. Cecilia elbows you. You laugh again. You make yourself. For her.

She has done this to you. Without meaning to, her soft world slipping into yours. Robbing you of the smoothest, toughest parts of you. The ones that helped you survive in the shed. She’s stripping them away, replacing them with shades of your former self. The one who loved. The one who opened herself to others.

The vulnerable one. The one who got hurt.

CHAPTER 25

The woman—before the house, before the shed

You write your way through high school. You edit the student paper. You get into colleges. You choose NYU over Columbia. You were born and raised in the city, and you’re not tired of it. Your friends leave. They cross the country for California summers, for Silicon Valley, for the good Colorado weed. You stay. You are happy where you are. Happy enough.

You start running, even though you know that it will, over time, ruin your body. Split your bones, stiffen your muscles, gnaw on your tendons. You learn to like it, the fire in your rib cage, your lungs a conduit for the storm raging inside of you. You run, because you only know how to destroy yourself in healthy ways.

Around you, women are writing. It’s a time of economic collapse, of odd jobs, of reinvention. The young women write for the best websites and bartend to pay rent. They show up for class tired, their lower backs sore, their eyes dusty with sleep.

Things are happening. There are bylines, summer jobs, internships. Three of your classmates intern at the magazine conglomerate, the one everybody wants to work for. The one that has inspired movies and TV series.

Some place short stories in literary magazines. They win awards and praise from their peers. You try to keep up, but everyone is good. Everyone is better than you. You’re just a kid who grew up in New York reading a lot of books. Your grades are fine. Everything about you is just fine.

On the first day of the second semester of your senior year, the news breaks: your classmate got a book deal. There are whispers. Numbers thrown around, five zeros, maybe six. Some find it in themselves to be happy for the classmate. Others pull at the story like a thread until they find things to unravel: the topic of the book is weak,the deal a curse as much as a blessing. A success so great, so visible, and so soon. It’s all downhill from here. Can you even imagine?

You can’t. From your very fine life, with your very fine grades, your perfectly fine writing. You can’t begin to imagine.

There is a website. An online offshoot of a now-defunct teen magazine. The magazine was revolutionary in its time, because it spoke to girls as though they had brains. You like the website. You read it every day. There is a section in it called “I Lived Through It.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: strangers detailing the crazy things they have lived through. “I Lived Through It: There Was No Pilot on My Plane.” “I Lived Through It: I Woke Up from a Two-Year Coma.” “I Lived Through It: I Started a Cult.”

---