Page 125 of Bad Words

“That’s the world we live in! You knew that when you wrote what you wrote about my books!”

“And I already said I was sorry for that!”

“No, you didn’t.” His voice rose. “You apologized for taking an assignment. You didn’t apologize for writing that I was painful to read, or what was it the first go-around? That the book I put my whole heart into was a cruelty? Maybe if you hadn’t written something so self-satisfied, Lola Xu wouldn’t even know my name, and people wouldn’t be sending me messages saying if I think suicide is so funny, maybe I should fucking try it! This is all happening because of you!”

My breathing sped. My eyes burned.

In that moment of ringing silence, I knew we’d both said too much, too many things that couldn’t be unsaid.

“Thank you,” I said, quiet, my voice shaking, “for your honesty, Parker.”

I opened the door. He stared at me, blinking hard, as though he’d just awoken from a nightmare.

Then he looked through into the hallway. He drifted out like he didn’t know which way he was going. Glanced back at me.

“I did come here,” he said hoarsely, “to say I was sorry.”

He waited for me to take the last word. I didn’t want it.

I stood there in the open door and watched Parker step into the elevator and out of my life, and then the mirrored doors closed, showing me myself, and I couldn’t stand the sight. I had to turn away.

Chapter Twenty-FiveParker

I told myself I was so lucky that this was the worst day of my life.

I reminded myself that other people had real problems. I told myself stories about those problems, about death, loss, and physical pain, as I sat there in my apartment with food in the fridge and money in my bank account and my family and friends in good health.

I hope this piece of shit never writes another word in his life

One-starred before reading because I don’t support people poisoning other people with their internalized racism

Arthur made me lunch, which we ate in silence.

Bill called me and said, “This is what I meant, before, when I said it could be worse.”

Unbelievable that Anna Delaney is platforming this guy

No it’s okay I just heard she dropped the book

OK good, at least she isn’t a hypocrite

Tessa Hargreaves sent word through her agent that she was withdrawing as the conversation partner for my launch. Not even an hour later, Bill received an email from the book festival in Seattle, rescinding my keynote invitation for September. Nobody from Coronation had been in touch with either guidance or reassurance. I felt as though I were hurtling down a long, straight road and watching the asphalt shatter ahead of me, cracking all the way down to the horizon line.

I called my parents, who didn’t seem to understand what was going on, but when my mom said, “I love you, Pijay,” I had to choke out “Love you, too” and hang up before she could hear anything else.

hey parker navarro how does it feel knowing you’ve set your community back fifty years?

It would be one thing if he was even a good writer lol

As somebody suicidal trying to get some shred of reassurance from talking about it online FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU SO HARD

This last person. I wanted to message them. I wanted to tell them about myself, about how I’d felt in college, so full of private envy for the people who could talk about their depression that I’d sublimated the envy into scorn, and I knew it was an imperfect reaction, but it was true. I wanted to tell them it was going to be okay. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

Maybe they were right, these people. I’d had my share of self-loathing thoughts. Maybe they’d leaked onto the page, and what I’d enshrined in this book was not anything artistic or beautiful but instead a catalog of every one of my worst instincts, and when I was dead, that would be all that was left behind. I could have written something more positive. I could have written a novel about being Filipino, with a heroic, complicated, vibrant Filipino main character. Maybe this instinct I had to pitch my imagination far into some other space ultimately came down to the idea of wanting to see myself dead. Maybe it came from the knowledge that, at the end of the day, I was a C-tier writer, a bottomless well of unfulfilled potential, an uninteresting person, and apparently also a bad person.

I should have realized this before now. I’d never written anything that had been widely loved. The only way in which I was loved was that, in a group of people, I could obligingly make myself absent.

Except with Selina.