Page 24 of Isn't It Obvious?
You have no idea.
Ravi looks up at the open After Effects project on his computer. Still rendering. He itches to write back and say he wants to know whatever she’s willing to tell him, but that’s a little much for two o’clock on a Friday. Better reserved for the Not Work Thread, andthat’sreserved for after hours.
Maybe it’s a little much even for the Not Work Thread. It’s true, though. He wants to know everything about her. Last week, at his suggestion, she’d set up an Instagram account for the podcast. So far, she’s posted his new cover art with the captionBETTER PRODUCTION VALUE COMING SOONand a well-staged shot of a beat-up copy ofFahrenheit 451surrounded by matchbooks that look like they’ve been nicked from bars, captionedNEXT. Disappointingly, her profile picture is also the cover art. Disappointinglyandembarrassingly for him, none of the thirty-two accounts that @sophomoreenglishagenda follows seem to be Elle’s personal Instagram, and searches through the already over two thousand followers for “Elle” and “Rex” turn up nothing.
Ravi’s probably being shallow, trying to find out what she looks like. At one point, he even considered texting Sanaa about it, but they had more of a get-lunch-and-complain-about-our-coworkers relationship than an ask-if-your-best-friend-is-as-attractive-in-person-as-I-find-her-over-email relationship.
In Ravi’s defense, though, at this point it wouldn’t really matter what Elle looked like. A thrill runs through him every time he gets a new message in the Not Work Thread; he gets a fizzy feeling in his stomach whenever a joke lands. He convinced himself it was a one-off at first, but there are only so many days you can say that in a row before you start to accept that maybe it isn’t.
He’s due to pick Mia up from preschool in—he glances at the clock in the top right corner of his screen—less than an hour. The thin blue bar in the After Effects pop-up reaches one hundred percent, and he forces himself to get back to work.
“WHO ARE WEmessaging?” Gina says. Yael looks up from her phone, quickly glancing around the library. There are three kids here, each buried in a binder or a book. Friday afternoons are always empty like this—nobody’s rushing to get homework done for the next period, and there’s a distinct absence of rowdy “study” groups or people trying to eat their lunches in here despite the many signs warning them not to.
“I don’t thinkweare messaging anybody,” Yael replies.
Gina huffs, perching on the checkout counter. “I just got told off by a student for giving them a failing grade on the charcoal drawing they turned in. The assignment was watercolor. My gray hairs are multiplying as we speak.Entertainme, Yael,” she says.
Yael hesitates, not sure how much she can say without giving herself away. She finds herself looking around the library once again.
“Jesus, Yael, why are you acting like you’re being followed?”
“I have a pen pal, kind of,” she says.
Gina peers at her out of the corner of her eye. “And you need to make sure nobody is listening to tell me that?”
“It’s related to something I feel like I shouldn’t be saying at work,” Yael clarifies.
“Okay,thatis the perfect way to get me interested,” Gina says.
Yael looks her up and down, weighing the risks. She could get in a lot of trouble if anyone on the school board found out, and Lauren Harrison, the principal, is obsessed with image. But also, while Yael has to hide the grudge she still holds for the way she was tokenized as a student here (they had the second-worst Black graduation rate in the district at the time, and Yael was a convenient picture to plaster), Gina is in no way shy about hating Lauren, and only gets away with it because she has an MFA and a Midas touch for letters of recommendation. And she’s kind of a black hole for gossip: swallows every bit she can reach, never reemitting it. Maybe she’s the perfect person to talk to about this. “I have a podcast,” Yael whispers.
“¡Ay, dios mío!” Gina says. “Someone call the feds.”
“I heavily critique books from high school reading lists,” Yael says, still whispering. “It’s funny, I hope, kind of profane, and definitely not PPS–approved.”
Gina cocks her head. “Damn, thatissomething to whisper about,” she says.
“You can’t tell anybody.”
“I wouldn’t—you couldactuallyget in trouble for this,” Gina says.
“It’s all legal!” Yael squeaks. “I checked. And I use a pseudonym.”
“Good.” Gina drums her press-on nails on the counter. “So, the pen pal that has you blushing…”
“I wasn’t blushing,” Yael protests. Gina gives her that look again. “Whatever. The podcast has been doing well—like, a lot better than I expected. And I don’t really have time for the amount of work it’s become, and I also don’t really have the artistic inclination for the website and stuff, so I hired someone to be my editor. Honestly, I think he’s just doing it for fun; I’m not really paying him much. But I don’t know.… We talk.”
“You talk,” Gina repeats, one brow raised.
“About… stuff.”
“You’re really bad at this,” Gina says.
“Fine! About our lives, our feelings, whatever. He likes my jokes, and I like his. I’ve already told him things that only Sanaa and Charlie know, and he’s told me stuff he doesn’t tell anybody. Or at least he says he doesn’t tell anybody.”
“Okay, getting better,” Gina says. “Is it flirty?”
“Yes? I think. I don’t know.” Yael sighs. “None of it really matters. He lives in New York.” And Yael can’t be in a relationship right now; she knows that. She thought she’d been doing well—some low-level depression here and there, but she hadn’t had a brush with mania yet this calendar year. Except, clearly, based on the very circumstances that led her to hire Kevin, she’s not doing okay, and she promised herself years ago that until she gets herself under control, she’s not bringing anybody else into her mess.
