Page 89 of I Did Something Bad
That night, sandwiched in my giant king-sized bed between my lightly snoring best friends, I stare out the window, watching the clouds move steadily as they play a game of hide-and-seek with the moon, whose light is bouncing off of the sliver of lake in the far distance.
I had once judged Tyler for not knowing what he wanted. But the truth was—is—he found me in the exact same situation. I’m thirty, divorced, and don’t have full-time employment (aka overachieving teenage me’s worst nightmare). I don’t know what I want either. Do I want a full-time job atVogue? Do I want to move to Singapore?
Do I want to be with Tyler?
It feels scary and ridiculous to even allow myself to think that last one because it implies that I might have a reasonable shot, which I don’t. I take my mental eraser and scrub away that last question. The ones before that, though, stay. And no matter how hard I try to come up with answers, I can’t.
I know what Idon’twant, though. I don’t want to be mad at Ben anymore. Because Nay and Thidar were right, and so was he—by the time he asked for a divorce, we had stopped being in love for a very long time; the cracks had already started to show pre-wedding, but I figured that they were surface cracks, and besides, marriage would “solve” all of that; intentionally vowing to spend the rest of our lives together would bridge the increasing gap between us. I’ve been deliberate about never thinking about him, but tonight, I force myself to do just that. I miss him, it occurs to me, like you miss your childhood home. Nostalgia about something that was so familiar and yours for so long. Although, when you look at it objectively, you know that you should move on because you’ve outgrown it. The bed is too small. The color schemes that your parents picked and that you didn’t think twice about when you were a kid aren’t what you want in your own house now that you’re older, different, someone new. It’s not right for you anymore, but that doesn’t erase the fact that it once was. You don’t miss the home, you miss what it used to be.
He wasn’t to blame for what happened.
Neither am I.
And I can’t blame him for my own self-imposed shame either. This anger I’ve been harboring this entire time isn’t because we got divorced, but because the divorce upended everything I’d known up to that point, like a tornado barging in and destroying my color-coordinated wardrobe, leaving behind a mess that I didn’t even know where to begin to sort out. In a matter of months, I went from being someone who had it all figured out to someone who knew… nothing.Thatis the crux of it. I know less now about where my life is headed than I did when I was twenty-three. That’s not how it’s supposed to be.
I’ve always known what I wanted to do next, where I was going next, what the next goal was.Next, next, next.Will I never be able toknow any of those things again? What’snext? I become someone who doesn’t have a daily alarm and “wakes up when she wakes up”?Thisis how society deteriorates into chaos.Theseare the people who die first when the apocalypse comes, or when the ship starts to sink—the ones without a plan.
Just then, Thidar rolls over and slaps me in the face. I gasp and my open mouth is ready to shout at her when I realize she’s still asleep and not telepathically reading my thoughts. Gradually, her hand slides down my face and curls into the crook between my neck and shoulder.
I watch her and Nay continue to sleep, breaths steady, foreheadsnotpeppered with beads of sweat, and it occurs to me that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to at least try things their way for a little while. After all,they’renot desperately fighting off panic attacks in the middle of the night.
Baby steps,I remind myself, and surprisingly, it gets easier to sleep once Istopthinking about sinking ships and the end of the world.
In the morning, as we settle around the table with our own portions of caffeine, Nay snaps her fingers. “Mugs!That’swhat we should’ve gotten you!”
“What?” I ask, blowing on my coffee.
She widens her eyes down at her own. “We were trying to figure out what to get you as a housewarming gift. We should’ve each gotten you a new mug!”
“Yeah,” Thidar says, eyes jumping between the three in our hands, as though noticing them for the first time. “No offense, but these are boring.”
I give a small chuckle. “None taken. New mugs would be great.”
“What should we have for br—”
“I changed my mind,” I cut in. “I want to write this story.”
They both turn to me, their mugs making a near-synchronized mutedthunkas they place them down on the table. “What?” Thidar asks.
“TheVoguestory. I want to write it. I don’t know about the overall job yet, you know, assuming I even get it—” I look back and forth between their faces, and they both give me warm, sleepy smiles that say,That’s okay, keep going.“But I definitely want to write this story. I’ve signed a contract, the photos have been shot, and the rest of the issue is already being planned around this article; if I take myself off of it, then Clarissa will have me blacklisted for the rest of my career, but more than that, she’ll get someone else to do it. Someone who doesn’t know Tyler like I do. Someone who wouldn’t—” I think of May. “Befair. And besides, I also kind of really…wantto.”
“Good,” Nay says, beaming through her bedhead bangs. “Now that we’ve figured that out, let’s tackle the next step. What are you going to give them?” When I look at her quizzically, she shrugs. “Do they get a, you know, scoop?”
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? “This article is going to publish at the same time that the movie comes out. Which was when he was going to announce his retirement himself anyway,” I say, speaking the thought bubbles aloud as they pop up in my head. “I would just… be the first person to have it in print. And this way, he’ll at least get a heads-up about it instead of being blindsided by someone else. I know he hates me, but I’d like to think he’d still rather I break the story than, like, TMZ.”
“That’s a fair point,” Nay says.
“And Clarissa is editing this herself. I file the draft, we work on it for a few months, and then it sits in her inbox until next year. We could easily keep this between the two of us until it publishes. Even for the layout, we could use placeholder text and change it at the last minute. A story this big, she would make sure this never leaked.”
“Right,” Nay says again. “But do youwantto be the first one to print it?”
I open my mouth to say I need some more time to figure that out, but the words don’t come. Because I know the real answer. “No,” I answer truthfully. “I don’t.”
“Even if it means you don’t get theVoguejob?”
I smile up at them, blinking through the wetness. “It was just a job. He’s a person. A person that I…reallycare about. And maybe if I could ask him, he might say that from a purely publicity standpoint, he wants me to be the one to break it, but knowing that I was responsible for him not being able to do it entirely on his terms? I can’t do that to him.”
Thidar reaches over to squeeze my shoulder. “Okay, then.”
