Page 44 of Bad Words

As for the feud, I was still staying in my lane, Parker Navarro was staying in his, Lola Xu’s petition had stopped circulating—and Hayden had vanished from City meetings. This seemed ominous.

“Scott,” said Kellie one morning, jerking a thumb toward the corner of the library. “Am I allowed to ask where she went?”

“Her most recent email was fairly positive,” said Scott. “Readers seem to like the tip jar. Between that, our … busy autumn”—his eyes flitted to me—“and the holiday subscription sales, we may have some breathing room.”

“Does this mean they won’t cancel the anniversary party?” asked Brandon, one of our junior book critics.

“Cancel it?” said Scott. “They love the anniversary party. They’re doubling the ticket prices.”

After that, the atmosphere around the office became downright festive. I’d been worried about the anniversary party, too, always a bright spot in the dark gray flatness that was January and an obvious candidate for the chopping block if we were cutting expenses. For Nextward to give us the go-ahead was more than a relief. It suggested that everything I’d done this fall might really have loosened the noose around our neck.

“Quit while you’re ahead,” Cassie said one afternoon. “Go on social media and tag Parker Navarro and say the feud’s over.”

“What?” I said. “Are you serious? And let him win?”

“Told you,” Jacob said to Cassie over his shoulder, halfway through changing Lyra’s diaper.

“Dude, come on,” Cassie said to him. “We shouldn’t be enabling this.”

“It’s her life,” said Jacob.

Cassie looked back to me with a fond roll of her eyes. “Classic.”

“Classic,” I agreed. Jacob had always taken pride in having very little sense of judgment. You’d hear him saying sentences like “It’s all the same to me” or “Oh, I don’t know anything about that” with a broad, easy smile. Profoundly unrelatable, but in times like this, he did remind me that some people were blessed with the enviable ability to relax.

The nights grew longer, eating away at the back ends of afternoons, so that by the time the City staff left the Baumgartner, dusk was already nestling among the tops of buildings. Everyone seemed to agree that this was depressing, but I didn’t mind. New York’s winters had nothing on Minnesota’s. Decembers here were many-colored and loud; they had the decency to fill the gaps. When I detoured to crowded bookshops and grocery stores, I heard people on the phone asking each other about seasonal recipes and how to surprise their friends. Then I’d return to my little apartment and put something quiet on the speakers. Apron up, crack open a grease-stained cookbook. I’d hand-cut ravioli square by carefully pressed square. I had lists of movies from the year I wanted to catch up on; there was always something to do. I climbed a ladder in my front room with my hand sander. I’d almost finished with the crown molding, which meant it would soon be time to paint.

And like I always did at this time of year, I texted Auntie Sylvia and my cousins, feeling the cautious limits of their messages. They never asked what sort of footing my parents and I were on, but when Auntie Sylvia said, What are your plans for Christmas this year, the larger question curled around the smaller.

Around Thanksgiving, I’d spent some time with my parents’ email and drafted—then deleted—several responses. As Christmas crept nearer, the idea of replying returned, knocking against some edge in my mind like a piece of driftwood that had bobbed back to the docks.

A week before the City offices were due to close for the holidays, I cozied up in bed with a mug of spiced cider and reopened my father’s message.

We are sorry to hear about the fight. We want to know how you are handling it. If you call we will talk again.

I turned the phone off and let it sit on my chest, warm and sleek and heavy, rising and falling with my breath.

I didn’t think I blamed my parents anymore for the distance between us. At twenty, of course I’d blamed them. During winter break of my junior year, when I’d outlined my career intentions, I’d fantasized about enthusiasm or warmth or, God forbid, some level of belief in my abilities. Instead, my parents had stared at me from across the living room, appalled, as though my decision to major in English literature was equivalent to desecrating somebody’s grave.

“You’re going to leave Columbia,” said my father, “with a degree that you could get from any old school?”

“No,” I’d said, “I’m going to leave with a Columbia diploma.”

“Selina,” my mother said with a frantic edge to her voice. “What are you thinking? Where is this coming from? I can’t watch you throw away such a bright future.”

My father had looked to my mother, hollow-eyed. “We should have stopped this in high school.”

“I’m sorry. Stopped me reading?”

“Stopped you from putting this hobby over everything else!” said my mother. “Make new friends? No, too busy with books. Going and having good experiences outside the house? Too busy alone with your books. What did we move to this country for?”

As if I hadn’t tried to make friends. But I had no interest in defending myself to my parents, which would have required admitting what high school had been like for me socially. The small, boring humiliations of going to a football game, a party, a dance, only to stand several feet too far from any given group, holding my elbows in the palms of my hands, trying on jerky little smiles whenever somebody looked my way. The bigger humiliation of discovering that the people I’d considered friends did not consider me a friend. Alternating between too-long silences and terrible honesty that I immediately regretted, between classes, in the gym changing room, with people I barely knew. My shameful arrogance at fifteen, because I could get a good grade; those poor people who had to put up with me, both students and teachers; the ways in which I had still, somehow, felt injured by other people’s dislike, despite often agreeing with them about the faults in my character.

Against all this, books were a refuge. I could not interact wrongly with a book except by failing to give it my attention.

“So,” I’d said to my parents, “the fact that studying literature is fulfilling to me means nothing to you? The fact that all my professors and teachers think this is the right decision—that means nothing?”

“We aren’t paying two hundred thousand dollars for you to read books!” my father said.