Page 123 of Bad Words

@65tunes: @SelinaChan After that article, I was so prepared to take your side, but wow, everybody here sucks. Yet another milquetoast liberal who thinks their respectable intellectual bona fides matter more than AAPI readers getting to read one book in their lives that isn’t teeming with dehumanization. Fuck you.

@bunnbunn: @SelinaChan newsflash: racists aren’t going to love you no matter how much you hate yourself

@JennyHouseBooks: @SelinaChan Selina, I’ve had my gripes with your criticism in the past, but that article went way over the line. Trust me when I say that you, of all people, shouldn’t be defending this man.

I looked at the last message for a little while. Jenny House.

@SelinaChan: @JennyHouseBooks Hi Jenny, why do you say that?

Five seconds passed, and then two screenshots of a group chat appeared. The title of the chat was Chan Pan Support Group. I read the two messages in gray once. Then twice. Trying to understand.

Parker Navarro

I don’t know why I let Selina Chan, of all people, get in my head

Parker Navarro

I guess I’ve just got to remind myself: I might have bad reviews, but at least I don’t have to wake up in the morning knowing my broken personality will alienate everyone in my life

And the second:

Jenny House

Parker, you just got back from California, right? How was that?

Parker Navarro

Good! I did an interview with a writer back home. I think it’s probably my last word on this feud. Feel like there’s not much more to say.

I felt a slow, gentle pain, as though someone were taking my heart in their hands and pushing it apart, the way you’d break bread. The week that I’d been thinking day and night about New Year’s Eve, imagining inviting Parker to City’s anniversary, checking my phone compulsively in hopes that he’d text me—this was what he’d felt, even then.

None of it was real. I had invented the person I’d been falling for.

And everything we’d been doing the past few weeks—what was that, for him? A joke? Some kind of sick physical gratification?

My eyes began to burn. I breathed fast, looking upward, trying to compose myself. The text he’d sent to his friends was true, anyway. I had alienated everybody but Jacob and Cassie, and someday they would be gone, too, when they were tired of putting up with me. And I would be here. The only person in the room.

For a while I could do nothing but sit there and reread Falwell’s article, and as I did, my attention zeroed in on a line I’d skimmed over on that first read. According to one source, Chan hasn’t left her perch in New York City to spend holiday seasons with her family for years.

Who else but Parker could have given Falwell that information? Who else was now equipped with the tools to humiliate me so completely?

My phone buzzed. Parker was calling me.

I hit Decline.

He texted me. I watched the message previews show up on screen and didn’t touch my phone.

Selina, please pick up.

I have to talk to you. Please let me expla …

He called again. I let the phone ring, feeling as though I were being tugged backward by a rope down a long tunnel, watching his silhouette shrink in front of me, encircled by a mouth of light.

Twenty minutes later, my buzzer sounded. I didn’t buzz him up, just looked over at the speaker from my seat at the window, but he must have rung the rest of the building, and someone must have taken pity on him, because two minutes later an urgent knock was sounding on my door. “Selina? Are you there, are you home?”

I rose slowly from my chair. The burn in my eyes faded, and as I moved toward the closed door, my anger unfurled, cold and enormous.

I pulled the door open. Parker stood in the hall, panting, looking like he’d run through hell to get here. “Can I come in?” he said.