Page 6 of The Apparent Trap

Chapter 2

I walk to work this morning in a bad mood.

Normally I relish this part of the day. My walk from my little corner of the Upper East Side on Sixty-Third and Lexington to The Wake Up Show’s studios in Midtown is less than twenty minutes, but it’s a dose of calm before chaos.

For a city that supposedly never sleeps, New York is eerily lovely at 5:30 a.m. And in this crisp mid-October moment before daylight savings, everything is still bathed in dark gray, the dawn not quite having broken through. I get to walk past Bloomingdale’s glowing windows, silently displaying wares when the rest of the building is asleep. I walk past trees on Park Avenue whose leaves are just starting to tint yellow. I admire the gorgeous uplighting of the Gothic pointed spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

But past all the landmarks, I also get to take in the small things—the mural painted on a building’s side, the smell of bread from a bakery, the vendors setting up their carts. I can breathe in my city at the time we’re best for each other, and arrive to work ready to accelerate.

Except today’s walk isn’t an opportunity to gather my thoughts. It’s the inopportune silent march where I can’t avoid the reminder that today is going to be the second time I’ll have to avoid Lee Morgan since he left me stunned in a bar two weeks ago.

The problem isn’t that his presence makes me think about that conversation. On the contrary—that night is basically a running infomercial in my brain, replaying at every middle-of-the-night hour it can track me down.

But for the last two weeks, it’s morphed from me being able to pretend it’s the rejection that’s got me spiraling to having to admit that he planted a seed that’s shot up into a wraparound vine.

“Do you think I sell myself short?” I couldn’t help but ask my dad over the weekend while we were sitting on the couch, eating Chinese food and watching my favorite documentary for the zillionth time (Ghosts of the Abyss is the best James Cameron Titanic film. I’ll fight with anyone about it). The looming specter of knowing I’d have to see Lee again had ballooned until it was taking over my entire apartment.

“I think you’re absolutely perfect,” he replied immediately, grabbing a carton of lo mein.

He’s not exactly a reliable source. Mark Halevi is the kind of dad who cheers when someone parallel parks into a tight space. He’s the dad who came three nights in a row to the high school play I was the “assistant producer” of. He’s a climate scientist who’s an optimist—brilliant while clueless.

“Considering we’re the people who spend the most time with each other, I wouldn’t say we’re unbiased,” I retorted.

“Biased but knowledgeable!”

“Don’t you think this is a sad activity on a Saturday night for two eligible single people?” He snorted, like the thought was absurd. But that got me fired up in a different direction. “Why are you dismissing that? Surely you don’t think you’re not an eligible single person?”

He waved me off. “Come on, Ezzie. I don’t need anything else.”

“Dad!” I paused the movie and moved my whole body to face him. The conversation had started as a spiral for me, but maybe I’d been missing the part I actually needed to focus on.

My mind wandered to memories of him and my mom together, dancing in the kitchen most nights of my childhood, the way his nose crinkled and his eyes lit up when he smiled at her. She was always barefoot in a long skirt. I thought she was the most elegant woman on the planet.

But then I think of how stony and expressionless his face was at her funeral.

I hadn’t let myself wonder for a long time about whether he could ever light up as brightly as he did for the first fourteen years of my life.

“We should aim a little higher,” I finally said, all those ancient thoughts mingling with the sharper memories of Lee in the bar.

But my dad just pulled me into a hug. “Anyone who aims high enough to reach us would be lucky to be smushed onto this couch watching arguably James Cameron’s finest work.”

“You stole my favorite argument.”

“Eh,” he said with a shrug and a smug smile. And he restarted the movie.

I let the topic pass us by.

Georgia has also been useless when it comes to my spiral. Obviously I told her every minute detail, and she pored over all those moments with me like we were amateur true crime podcast sleuths. But her conclusion was to loudly declare Lee Morgan wrong and horrible about everything—most especially for assuming that I didn’t know I was extremely flirtable (I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t know that. I also begged her to stop using his fake word, but apparently “flirtable” is now embedded in our common dictionary, and I hate it).

When I make it into the office this morning, I assume Georgia will be too distracted by, you know, her actual job, to think about something as banal as the resurfacing of Lee. Too bad she holds a grudge on behalf of friends even more fiercely than she’d hold it for herself.

“Thank goodness Darren is leading the cooking segments today, because I still think I’m incapable of not giving him the side-eye,” Georgia says. It’s 6:30 a.m. by now. We still have half an hour until the show, and I’m sitting in her dressing room while Lisa finishes touching up her blonde hair and TV-ready makeup.

The thing to keep in mind about working at a morning show is that it might seem fancy and exciting because of all the lights, cameras, and celebrities. But at its core, outside the shine of the studio, it’s mostly just a regular office—the lighting is terrible, the AC is up too high for women, and all the desks are basic fake-wood styleless boring bulk-purchased furniture. We all have badges around our necks to swipe ourselves into the building like any other corporate lackeys.

And, of course, like every office setting, we have overly involved coworkers. On this point, I’m both grateful for her and stymied by her in equal measure.

“You have to get over it,” I finally say with a sigh, willing her to take the advice I’m unable to follow.