Page 4 of Hold Me (Cyclone 2)

Besides, she’s as careful as I am, and I respect that. Em is—in her own way—a minor celebrity.

She has a blog. The basic premise is that her blog is written by someone from the future, someone known only by the initials “MCL.” In MCL’s future, the human race is on the verge of dying due to some catastrophic mistake that our generation is making. As a last-ditch effort, her society invents a way to send instructions back in time about how to prevent that catastrophe.

Invariably, history is rewritten, disaster is avoided… And MCL comes back the next week, to explain how a different screwup now threatens to wipe out humanity.

She’s funny and playful, and my email loops amusedly share links when she touches on our subject matter. She protects her identity. I protect my time. It works for both of us.

So I play into the joke. Everyone forgets Sacramento. Even you would. Even if you were living in it.

True, she shoots back. There’s also Davis. I could live in Davis. Anywhere there’s a college town, you can find some walkable bits. Okay. Have arrived. Am ordering soup.

I half-heartedly reopen my laptop. Read through the objectives of my grant proposal. I imagine Em blowing on a spoonful of soup, with steam obscuring her glasses, before I catch myself daydreaming.

I don’t know why I’m sure that Em wears glasses, but I am.

After five minutes, I text again. Is it helping?

Soup *always* helps, comes the reply. My grandmother used to have soup with me when I was in high school and shit sucked.

I don’t say anything. She’s never mentioned her family before, and I don’t know if I should stop her again. But Em is careful—so careful, that even now, eighteen months after we first started talking, I’m just learning that she was close to her grandmother. That she went to high school. I’m not surprised high school sucked for her.

Yay, soup, I say instead.

Yay, soup, she agrees. I feel substantially less embarrassed and substantially more enraged. I have decided I was not wrong. The other guy was at fault.

I smile. I’m sure he was. What a dick.

You don’t even know any details. You’re quick to take my side.

I don’t need to think before I type. I don’t need details. My money is on you in any death match you choose to participate in. Ave Em, morituri te salutant.

And that’s it for personal exchanges, thankfully. She starts telling me the idea she has for her next blogpost, and I offer my comments and answer a few questions. For the next forty-five minutes, I don’t think about graduate students or my grant proposal or anything except soup and someone who makes me smile. We say our good-byes a few minutes later.

I finish looking over the final draft of this Chaudhary/Thalang proposal one last time. Vithika signed off on it already, but I can’t let go. It’s twenty pages on quantum entanglement and evaluation. Even after six times through, I still find myself smoothing methodology here, notes about future work there.

Friendship with Em is like bite-sized smiles I can fit anywhere in my day. I can ignore messages when I need to, and pick them up when I have a few spare moments. It’s the beauty of the internet—she can be anyone, anywhere, and so can I. The fact that I sometimes find myself wondering where she lives, and what she looks like, is proof that I shouldn’t try for any more.

I already put off my never-ending pile of work for her. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I actually had a picture to obsess over.

I shake my head, finish my review of the proposal, and hit send.

3

MARIA

The week after that terrible dinner, it feels like I see Jay na Thalang everywhere. In line with me at the coffee shop. Talking to a gray-haired professor as they stroll along the banks of the little redwood-lined stream that runs through campus. He even passes me once as I’m waiting for a bus.

The first time we see each other, our eyes meet. I feel awkward, trying to figure out if I should wave and nod or pretend I don’t know him.

I breathe a sigh of relief when he looks away. We’re going to pretend we don’t know each other. Thank god.

It gets easier to ignore him every time I see him.

Until the day he runs into me. Literally runs into me. It’s noon, and I’m crossing Sproul Plaza along with a crowd of other students intent on lunch. The trees lining the walkway have started to drop yellow leaves, and the crowd around me presses shoulder to shoulder.

I’m texting Tina, my best friend and housemate. You done with your project yet?

Ugh, she types back. One last bug. I think. Can we skip lunch today?

No, I type severely. If one can type severely. We can skip having lunch together, but you have to eat. I’m bringing you something.

My housemate has always been a goody two-shoes. OMG Maria, she responds. Can’t eat in computer lab.

I shake my head. *Shouldn’t* eat in computer lab. Completely possible to do so.

But I know she won’t. I sigh. I’ll bring you something in an hour and you can eat on your way to class. But you have to eat.

Her text comes a minute later. Yes, Mom.

I smile, looking at my phone. That’s when someone rams into my left arm hard, spinning me around. I drop my bag involuntarily and tubes of lipstick spill on the pavement.

“Shit,” a voice says.

I turn around, my shoulder still stinging.

“Sorry.” The man who ran into me leans down to help me get my stuff.

It’s Jay. He looks at me, blinking, his eyes widening in recognition. The concerned expression on his face fades. He freezes, half-crouching.

He can’t pretend I’m invisible now. This is the first time I’ve seen him up close in daylight. He’s wearing a blue shirt with lines and arrows on it. Big white letters say: PUMPED, EXCITED, INVERTED, AND STIMULATED.

Oh look. Dirty jokes about lasers. That seems just like him.

I don’t want to notice that he has nice arms, but I do. He has biceps. Like, real biceps. And he’s tattooed—his arms are covered with a dark geometric design, starting from his hands and disappearing into his sleeves.

He reaches for my compact. “Watch where you’re going,” he says. “What were you doing, taking a selfie?”

Oh, for god’s sake.

“Taking six,” I snap at him. “Gotta make sure my profile picture is perfect, after all. Do I look okay?”

I mean it as something of a barbed joke. But he pauses where he is, one knee on the ground before me. His fingers are half-closed around my compact, and he looks up. For a second, his expression goes utterly blank.

I know the answer to the question I just asked him. I look more than okay. I’m wearing a pink sundress with black patent leather sandals—thick, glossy lines that criss-cross my feet. I’ve added a little silver charm that dangles over my ankle. I can feel his gaze sliding up. He starts from the pale blue of my toenail polish. His gaze slides up the lines of my sandals, up my legs. He eventually gets to my eyes. It’s a long eventually.

He doesn’t need to answer my question. By his total lack of response, I look more than okay. He blows out a breath and shakes his head, as if the fact that I look more than okay pisses him off.

He swallows. “Beauty standards are shit, anyway.”

I lean down and grab the compact from him. Our hands brush.

Here’s the other thing: He is not ugly. For just one second, our eyes meet again. Even this much proximity makes me uncomfortably aware of him.

“Beauty standards are shit,” I say in one hundred percent agreement. Then I straighten, compact in hand. “Apparently, so are manners.”

He looks at me for a second. Slowly, he clambers to his feet.

“‘Sorry I bumped into you’ would have been another way to respond,” I tell him. “Just FYI.”

He dusts off his hands. “Happy to oblige. I’m sorry every time I bump into you.” His accent comes through more markedly on those words, posh and British. I think I may hate him.

/> “Have a nice life,” I say.

“Have a nice cliché.”

I roll my eyes and turn away. Because there is absolutely no justice in the world, I think of all the things I could have said instead of that stupid “have a nice life” as soon as he is out of my sight.

The asshole police aren’t working today. You won’t get a ticket if you exceed the minimum levels of human decency.

Maybe. Except…

Would the asshole police ticket people for being an asshole or not being one? I’m not really clear on the job description.

Not that I need to be. It’s an insult, not an invitation to revisit the system of carceral punishment. This is why I am a better blogger than a public speaker.

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