Jared was cool. He just was. What’s worse, he plugged into some residual teenage part of me that wanted to be cool, too. At first I dismissed him as “high school cool.” Naturally other teenagers laughed at his lewd jokes—their bars were just as low. But signs of Jared’s enduring cool were emerging. For starters, the kid had great taste in music. You know what they say: If I can Shazam you, you’re too close. Yet even as I wanted to destroy him, I would nonchalantly reach my phone into the air. The Velvet Underground. Nina Simone. The Black Angels. Townes van Zandt. Charlotte Gainsbourg (who lived across the street). He had access to every hot spot in the city and would make plans to patronize places I had only seen in passing. Meanwhile, he started to diversify his friends. The milquetoast-looking blonds in Irish fisherman sweaters still appeared, but so did black guys with white sneakers, Hispanic girls with red sneakers, and one guy with a Mohawk. They were like the American dream come to life, friends united by a force stronger than acceptance—money. And their banter improved. They had heated political debates. The girls doted on the younger sister, offering to stylize her. They teased a friend who had been in a commercial about his “bullshit acting career.”
Who would they listen to now? Who could reason with them? I’d fantasize about morphing into Chris Rock or Karlie Kloss. I’ll tell you what: If Karlie Kloss lifted my window wearing boy shorts and a tank top, and asked them to be quiet, they’d shut up right quick. Once, and this was a real low point, I dressed up to tell them to be quiet. I let my hair down and put on bright lipstick and a V-neck top, markers of authoritative attractiveness meant to be seen from a distance, pathetic signals that I knew from chill, that my threshold for fun was high. But by the time I opened the window, they had vanished. I leaned out into the open air. Had my dreams of their alien abduction come true? I raised my head to see the whole group had migrated to the kitchen, at least seven of them. Silhouettes of branches framed the picture. They were dancing, arms up, hips pinballing back and forth, hair swaying. Jared entered with a bag of ice, put the ice on the kitchen island, and spun one of the girls, dipping her below my sight line. She came up, laughing. And for a full minute, I was so in love with all of them, I almost couldn’t stand it.
* * *
Around this time, I began dating a younger and emotionally unavailable man who was completely wrong for me in every way but anatomically. So I fell for him. This fellow had been smacked in the face by the lucky stick, whereas I was pretty sure I felt it go whizzing past my ear once. Like Jared, he had grown up in Manhattan, though the upper part. He had Jared’s surface-level deference that passed for manners, the sort of verbal salve that kept you from ever calling him an asshole because he did things like pick you up at your door. Like Jared, he was raised in a bubble of privilege. There’s a bench in Central Park with his name on it, a baby gift. But unlike Jared, he had the years and the sense to try to pop the bubble with duct-tape-repaired furniture and self-funded travel to war zones. He winced at the suggestion that the universe had conspired to make his life easier, which was a huge tell—people less privileged are comfortable with acknowledging when they’ve had luck, because of all the times they haven’t.
One evening, after I failed to properly close my bedroom blinds, Jared and his friends caught a glimpse of us naked.
“What’s the relationship?” he shouted up, making a megaphone of his hands.
“You have to admit,” said the emotionally unavailable man, “that’s some sophisticated heckling.”
Staying low, I opened the window further.
“Shut up, Jared!” I snapped.
Jared’s friends snorted and slapped the table.
“Oh shit, man,” said one of them, “she knows your name!”
It was the first time I’d used his name, a treat I had been saving for myself. I lay on my back and grinned at the ceiling. The emotionally unavailable man had already gotten dressed. He was paparazzi sensitive, having twice caught ex-girlfriends taking pictures of his aggressively pretty face when they thought he was asleep.
“Jared thinks the streets of London are paved with Harry Potter jizz,” he said.
“What?” I asked, propping myself up on my elbows.
He had my notebook in his hands. I dismissed it as “notes” and he shrugged, incurious. If he had flipped the page he would have seen, written redrum-style: “Jared: why won’t you graduate?” I had begun monitoring Jared’s conversation for words like application and early decision. Clearly, he was old enough to have friends who had graduated. Recently, a girl had come over for dinner and Jared’s mother asked how she was liking college.
“It’s okay,” said the girl, “I just haven’t found my friend group yet.”
Good, I thought. You’re learning. You are not prepared for a world beyond Jared’s backyard. You will inevitably seek shelter in others who are exactly like you, who know everything you know and nothing you don’t, but I pray, for your sake, you never find them.
“Welp,” the mother assured her. “Keep at it. You guys are our future.”
That night, she hosted a birthday party for her assistant. Adult voices flooded the yard. Motown bumped against my walls. At
