Page 35 of Guy's Girl
“Into my hole. No service down there.”
Separation. That was all it took for Ginny and Heather to stop fighting. Heather left Michigan for fashion school, and suddenly she was calling her little sister every week to gossip about the girls in her classes, the boys she kissed at parties. Ginny couldn’t believe it. For the first few months, whenever Heather called, Ginny would put the phone on speaker, place it flat in her palm, and just stare. Observe. Wait with breath held, as if her sister’s voice were a bomb that might combust at any moment.
To this day, Ginny doesn’t know what made her sister changeher mind. Maybe it was homesickness. Maybe nostalgia. Maybe, with three thousand miles between them, Heather no longer had to be embarrassed by Ginny’s obvious lack of femininity.
Whatever the case, Heather now FaceTimes her little sister every Saturday, just before her daily run, while drinking coffee in bed with her husband. In Minnesota, Ginny always answered. But, since moving to New York—she doesn’t know. Something has changed.
“How are you liking the new apartment?” Heather asks.
“Love it.” Ginny turns her screen around to show Heather the pint-sized closet, the framed prints that hang over her desk. “My bedroom is tiny, but I wouldn’t expect anything less in New York.”
“And the job?”
“I still have no idea what the hell I’m doing.” Ginny blows a strand of hair off her forehead. “But the free coffee is nice.”
Heather snorts. Sheets rustle in the background, and Ginny knows that her sister is getting out of bed to pick out her outfit for the day. “Things are insane over here.” The camera bobs as Heather pads down the hallway of her Venice condo. “Our collab with that YouTube influencer flew off the shelves. We sold out of everything in, like, five minutes.”
“That’s amazing.”
Heather sets the phone down on her vanity. “How’s your eating?”
Ginny sighs. This question is phrased in the way Heather always asks—as if the act of eating were a creature that belongs to Ginny, a living being that could be well or unwell.
“It’s fine,” she says. And it is fine. She is eating.
She’s just throwing up afterward.
“Good.” Heather runs a brush through her hair. “Want me to send you the samples from our next line?”
Heather is married. Heather runs her own business. Heather eats pizza for dinner and cupcakes for dessert and doesn’t gain a single pound. One day, Heather will have a baby, and she’ll lose the weight in three days flat.
“Always,” says Ginny, who was never meant to be like her sister but has never stopped trying.
The phone interview with Disney goes well. Adrian gets a second round, then a third. The interviews are long, grueling, and sometimes involve supplemental components, like aptitude tests designed to rank cultural fit. He takes them in coffee shops; empty conference rooms; or, even once, a supply closet. His coworkers can’t know what he’s doing; they’ll make his life a living hell.
Ginny is remarkably supportive. She checks in with him often, asking how interviews went or helping supply him with three adjectives to describe himself. He finds himself actually responding to her text messages. It’s nice to feel like she’s in his corner.
The more time he spends with Ginny, the less he understands her. Normally, she’s all bubbles and sunshine, but other times... there’s a certain distance to her eyes, a place she goes. He catches it right after meals, or mid-conversation, or as they lie in bed after sex. She’ll blink, and her eyes will get round and drift away. In those moments, he feels clutched by a dull terror, like she has gone somewhere from which he can never bring her back.
Every time he sleeps with Ginny feels oddly foreign. Like he’s trying to learn the words to a brand-new song. She’s different in the bedroom. In the rest of life, everything about her feels solarge—her smile and her family and her laughter and her stories. It shocks him, then, when he runs his hands along her soft skin and remembers how small she is. How breakable. He never knows when to kiss her or how far she’ll want to go. He doesn’t want to assume that, just because they’ve slept together, she’ll want to do it every time.
This whole relationship—it’s bizarre. Ginny pops into histhoughts all the time now. His mind still races—still leaps from one thought to the next like a faulty CD—but it’s as if Ginny has been added to the song of his life. Every few minutes—there she is. Every time, he has to shake her off and return to whatever it was he was doing before.
Two weeks into interviewing, Chad eyes Adrian as he returns from the supply closet. “You take a long dump or something?”
“Just wanted a change of scenery.”
“Uh-huh.” Chad clicks his pen. “Don’t we all.”
When Adrian sets down his laptop, Chad cranes his neck to get a view of the screen. Adrian shifts over, blocking him out.
Ginny knows she shouldn’t. Really, she does. But she can’t help it.
She chases Adrian.
She doesn’t know what it is about him. Maybe his gentle touch. Maybe the way he flutters his eyelashes—quick, like a hummingbird—when considering his answer to one of her many questions. Whatever the case, when Adrian kisses her, Ginny doesn’t feel empty; she feels, from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, filled with a kind of buzzing warmth.
On their dates, Adrian checks his phone every fifteen minutes. Waiting for an email that will demand he come into the office, stat. He’s tired. Ginny can tell. The bags beneath his eyes are purple cinder blocks; they droop from his face, tug his torso, hunch his shoulders, drag him down like a body underwater. Sometimes, just before their date, Adrian will cancel, saying his associate just asked for a deck or analysis. Anxiety whispers to Ginny that these excuses are fabrications, avoidance, evidence that Adrian doesn’t like her after all. She takes those whispers and tucks them away. Texts him again the next weekend.
