You email him again a few weeks later, and when he doesn’t respond, you email again. You email with subject lines like, “remember me?” and no text in the body. Sometimes you email plaintive apologies that you hope come across as self-aware. He rarely responds.
A month later, you’re relaying the saga to a friend. “He never rescheduled drinks. And I keep emailing him and he just stopped responding.”
She’s silent for a few seconds, and then says, in the soft tone usually reserved for children or people deeply involved in a cult: “Maybe you should stop emailing him.”
You sputter. “I mean, he sometimes responds. It’s not like—” But what’s it not like? It is exactly what it’s like. You’re a drive to his house away from being a full-on stalker. Forget about him, try to delete the evidence of your humiliation in your “sent” email folder.
You still haven’t gotten rid of his book on your shelf, but you haven’t read it either.
Turn here.
ARE YOU AN INTROVERT OR JUST A LAZY ASSHOLE?
1. You make plans to go out for drinks with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, but when the day comes, you’re feeling a little tired. What do you do?
A. Go anyway because you’re an adult, and you’re looking forward to chatting with your friend in a relatively quiet, one-on-one setting.
B. Text her two hours before you planned to meet that you’re feeling sick and way behind on work. Spend the night in sweatpants eating an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s because you’re a goddamn cliché.
2. Your friend is throwing a birthday party in Brooklyn. It will take thirty-five minutes to get there, and you’ll need to transfer subways. Do you go?
A. Yes. What else are you doing on a Friday night?
B. No. You order in and spend the night in the same sweatpants binge-watching Penny Dreadful on Netflix.
3. Do you need time alone to “recharge” your batteries?
A. Yes! I am an introvert.
B. I never let my batteries uncharge.
4. What’s your beverage of choice?
A. Tea in an adorable mug
B. The milk you drink straight from the bowl after your eleventh bowl of cereal
5. The friend from the first question rescheduled, and the two of you are getting brunch Sunday morning. But then Sunday comes and you’re very sleepy and do not want to leave your bed. What do you do?
A. Get out of bed and meet your friend because you made plans and you already canceled once.
B. Text “Pleaaaase don’t hate me. I just have the worst headache and I am so behind on work. Raincheck?” and watch another episode of Penny Dreadful.
If you answered mostly As
You are an introvert.
Turn here.
If you answered mostly Bs
You are just a lazy asshole. Be a better person. Jeez. Honor a commitment. Put on a bra some of the time.
Turn here.
You seize onto a friend group in New York City like a parasite one afternoon. An acquaintance invited you to the Brooklyn Book Fair, to meet her and her friends on Saturday. “Meet there at noon?” she said. You wake up at nine and watch the clock until 10:45, when you leave your apartment in Bushwick, take a subway to Manhattan, transfer trains, and then ride the subway back into Brooklyn toward Cobble Hill. You are still a half hour early, and so you walk the stalls by yourself, savoring each one, forcing your eyes to touch every single title. You try making eye contact with boys you find cute, but most of them are either literary douche stereotypes (slouchy beanie, jean jacket heavy with buttons, cross-body bag), married, or obviously gay. A good proportion are all three.
But you’re at the epicenter of the Brooklyn literary scene, and it’s so warm out you find yourself drifting close enough to each tent to steal some of its shade. You buy a hardback copy of a collection from a webcomic you like, and then two paperback books you’ve been meaning to read, receiving a third and a free tote bag to put them all in. You sign up for every single mailing list and take every single free magnet or bookmark or cider doughnut. You are meeting a group of friends; today you have the confidence of a girl being admired. You’re hyperaware of your smile and your sandals and your hair. You feel unstoppable.
“Hmm, so what’s this?” you say at every booth with a flirtatious glance up at whoever’s manning it. You hadn’t quite anticipated spending so much time on your own, but the friends you’re meeting are running late, and so you’re an Independent Girl for a while longer, sashaying amongst the literary magazines and spending money on books as if your internship isn’t minimum wage. And so even though you’d been hoping to save the last row of booths to visit with the group, you head there now, starting with the Lapham’s Quarterly table.
It’s hotter now than it was when you first arrived—you’re keeping your arms at your side and barely concealing the sweat stains blossoming in your armpits. Your group of adoptive friends are fourteen minutes late.
There’s a boy working the Lapham’s Quarterly stand—cute, but a little young. He looks like he could still be in college. You flip through the journal’s latest edition, as if you have any intention of buying it. “Ooh, I’ve been thinking of getting a subscription,” you lie. The boy smiles and stares at your face. You feel a bit disheartened that nobody here has recognized you from the Internet. If you have any audience at all, surely it’s people who work at the Brooklyn Book Fair. You have half a mind to keep flirting with the boy, just to pass the time, but just then you get a text. “We’re here!!! Sorry we’re late, by the Penguin bus.” Penguin Random House had outfitted a van as a mobile library, with their bestsellers displayed on the outside. It’s a perfect landmark to meet at. “Be right there!!!!” you text back. You put away your phone and the boy is still smiling at you when you look up.
You:
A. Smile back and head off to meet your friends amid the crowd of people before they move and they’re lost in the sea of liberal book lovers.
Continue reading.
B. Spend a little more time flirting, for fun. Just to see where it goes.
Turn here.
It’s easy to navigate spending time with a group of established friends when you’re the guest of the week. You join in on their ribbing, don’t laugh too hard at inside jokes, remember their names, and boom—you’re in: a day pass to friendship. The three of you meet up with another pair and eventually there’s half a dozen friends that have been absorbed, amoeba-like into a single group. You end up rewalking all of the stalls you already passed but you don’t mind; you would walk past them a hundred times if it meant having company.
By four o’clock, someone declares that they’re starving, and you all migrate to the Shake Shack across the street and hold down a table in the back corner. More and more people keep coming, but you are part of the original core group that reserved the table in the first place. You hold your seat like you’re next to the queen at court. You are a group of comfortable strangers now, sharing your wares on the table—fries, ketchup packets, literary zines, newly purchased books—talking about ideas and jobs and writers you’ve never heard of.
They are all New Yorkers—either born and bred or adopted by attending college here and instantly absorbing the city into their bones. The girls have pixie cuts and short story collections; the boys have ear piercings and ironic T-shirts. You feel a bit like a distant aunt at a family reunion, slightly out of touch with the kids. But you never once feel excluded.
You won’t hang out with this group again, maybe through your own passiveness, maybe because the friendship didn’t have a natural course to pursue here. You live in different neighborhoods. Even the girl you know the best, the one who invited you here, you’ve only hung out with once. These are people whose names you’ll forget, like the friends you’ll make at countless parties—fun for a few hours and then gone like cigarette smoke into the cold.
Turn here.
There are five of you at drinks that night, girls from assorted Internet pub
lications wearing tight jeans and designated going-out tops, meeting at a table in the back of Art Bar in the Village like representatives from different mobster families. Three of you have slept with Brooklyn Guy and had your heart broken (the damage remaining in various degrees). And then there’s Mariah, holding court as the Queen of Those Who Have Been Screwed Over by Brooklyn Guy, even though she’s the only one of us who is still with him. “Ugh, I know he’s the worst.” (She’s still dating him.) “What did we all see in him?” (She’s still dating him.) “I swear, a guy with a British accent in New York can get away with anything.” (She’s still dating him.)
Three rounds of martinis later, you declare yourself a coven. Despite being a gang of women writers who spend too much time on the Internet always competing for the same accolades and bylines, the coven has evolved past the pettiness of women competing with women. You and Mariah are being radical empowered feminists in your ability to be friends with one another united against a fuckboy who screwed you both over like the Furies of mythology (she’s still dating him).
For the first time in your life, you’re introduced to the political terror that is a group chat. It’s impossible to keep up with each individual thread of conversation as they whip past, notifications dinging and silenced on your phone, alerting you to the fact that other social lives are continuing without you while you’re still in bed, holding your phone.
But the most important thing is that you’re in the group chat. This feels like the alpha group of New York millennial girls, and for the first time in your life, you feel as though you are a qualified member.
You were sixteen when you begged and wheedled your parents into spending an unrepeatable sum of money to send you on a summer program for teenagers to Europe. You ordered a dozen brochures to be sent to your house and spent hours poring over the glossy pictures of happy friends eating gelato and contemplating beneath trip titles like “Fabulous France!” and “Ciao, Bella: The Hidden Wonders of Italy!” Eventually, you settled on a three-week program through Spain. It would be perfect, and you’d come back brilliant and fluent in Spanish, with a camera full of photos with you among your new friends for life, smiling and gleeful and ready for inclusion in next year’s brochure.
Your mother had warned you, before you left, that this program was known for attracting a faster crowd, kids from New York. That’s how she referred to them, “faster,” meaning more grown up, quicker to drink and have sex, to learn the quick dopamine rush of cruelty, to feel confident enough to cast themselves into the struggle for popularity. She bought you a pair of black Nike sneakers to wear, the type she promised they would have, so you would fit in, and you wore them to the airport.
Your mother dropped you off with the group with a hug and a semi-tearful kiss beyond the earshot of the fast kids, reclining against their suitcases, parentless already, gazing over and evaluating you, from your Nike shoes up.
But Nikes or not, you were still the Midwestern bumpkin of the “how’s that canteen treatin’ ya?” variety, the only one from public school, from Chicago, the overanalytical suck-up who wanted to go to museums instead of bars and who clung to the establishing cliques of disaffected New York teenagers like a barnacle.
At every new town, the counselors—early twenties, with sunburnt noses, men and women bare shouldered in college tank tops—asked the group to submit their hotel requests, to inform them of who you wanted to share a room with. The cliques, with their courtly political strategies, had a silent and seamless rotation. You never had a request. In every city, room after room, you ended up sharing with a fellow outcast, a nearly silent girl with butt-length black hair that hung in thin, shedding strings, a girl who no doubt resented you as much as you resented her (even with her terrible hair, she was still a private school girl, from New York).
You affixed yourself desperately to one of the cliques, a trio, that seemed to tolerate your presence—you would be silent and opinionless, trading all personality for the lifeboat of their company during the free hours the program gave the group to shop and eat. Don’t try to understand their jokes; accept that they’d probably just been talking about you while you were in the bathroom, ask them for pictures anyway so you’ll have some to put up on Facebook and pretend like you had an amazing time.
A week before the program was to end, the trio’s de facto leader pulled you aside after lunch. “We were talking, and it feels like you’re just spending too much time with us. Like, just try to branch out maybe?”
You couldn’t stop the tears from coming. “With who?” you managed to gasp out between sobs. She shrugged. The nicest member of the trio gave you a sympathetic glance. The last one avoided eye contact.
It’s been a decade since that trip and you have rebuilt yourself: confident, funny, brash, unapologetic, and most importantly, surrounded by people who enjoy that kind of thing. Boys generally seemed willing to let you slink into their dorm room beds more often than not; you went to Brown, which comes with the cache of Emma Watson (who you never actually saw) and Serena van der Woodsen (who is fictional), and you have a Cool Job in New York City, an internship at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which is the type of job you can drop, subtly, at any party and bask in a tiny moment of recognition and envy. You have enough Twitter followers to exchange them for social currency. You have been told there is a New York Twitter Media Scene, and you are confident you can purchase entry.
But the gatekeeper seems to be this girl Mariah—a pot-smoking, lifelong New Yorker with bad tattoos and clinical depression that she talks about all the time. And whenever she talks, her words peel themselves from the side of her mouth with the up-talking inflection of a whining complaint. Everything she says sounds like it’s behind someone’s back. And Brooklyn Guy chose her over you.
You become a worse version of yourself around her—pettier, more competitive. Everyone becomes a list of their most recent publications’ placements. Everyone is competing against everyone else for the same jobs and pretending like they’re not.
There is only one Bond girl. There is one girl the dozen men bring along on the heist. There is one princess that entrances the male hero beyond all reason. Men can see themselves in Luke Skywalker or Han Solo or Boba Fett or Yoda or Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Women get the snarky princess. Men can see themselves as the Beast or Gaston or Lumiere or Cogsworth or Belle’s oddball father or LeFou. Women get the snarky princess. Men can see themselves in Simba or Mufasa or Timon or Pumbaa or Scar or Rafiki or Zazu. The female option, once again, is snarky princess, only this time she’s a lion. The pattern repeats endlessly. Men get champion and mentor and sidekick and comic relief and villain and advisor. Women get one impossibly gorgeous character some middle-aged man decided would be the only iteration of an empowered female.
There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes a woman will be permitted to be a mother figure—round like a baked loaf of bread, nonthreatening and unsexualized—or a whore, the street-smart girl who sacrifices herself so that the innocent heroine can be happy. But options are severely limited. If a girl wants to be an object of desire and not mockery, she has to be the one who isn’t like other girls. Which is only possible if someone else hasn’t already taken that slot.
Perhaps in another universe, a version of you is benevolent and level-headed. Ah, Brooklyn Guy wasn’t the boy for me! this Bizarro-version of you would think. I hope he and Mariah are happy—they both deserve it.
But hanging out with Mariah is a delicious exercise in pain. She’ll complain about him, how he won’t commit, how he doesn’t return her texts and then glance apologetically in your direction. “Oh, God. Sorry.”
“Oh, not at all,” you’ll say, fantasizing about him breaking up with her and falling back into your arms. “I’m totally over him.”
You’ll see pictures of them in bed together, silly texts that she’ll accidentally scroll through when you’re around that he sent her. You wonder if she’s playing her own game with you. She, the sadist, you th
e masochist, the boy in the center completely unaware.
And then the day comes. Mariah has fallen out of favor like we all fell out of favor; she hates him, she loves him, she talks about him. She still sometimes talks with him, you gather. Maybe he still wants her. Maybe she’s still hooking up with him. Maybe she’s talking about you with him, the two of them on his bed, laughing about how desperate and obvious you had been, scrolling through your tweets and making fun of them one by one. You let her cry on your shoulder. You agree that he is an asshole with greasy hair who doesn’t shower enough, who just used you all.
And then, when Mariah isn’t looking, you text him.
“Heard you broke up,” you write. “How you feeling?”
He doesn’t respond for two hours, and then when you finally see his name on the front of your phone, your heart sputters with electric charge. And then you read his message.
“This is all really fucked up,” he wrote. “You’re going around the city with your little club of girls telling everyone that I’m an asshole.”
He’s not wrong.
“Jesus. Dana. What is wrong with you? Are you trying to ruin my life?” he says. “I don’t want to be a part of this anymore.”
Somehow, there has to be a perfect combination of words that, like a magical spell, will bring him back to your side. There has to be a way out. There has to be something you can say that will make him realize that you only did all of that because you loved him and he didn’t love you and you were just mad and jealous and desperate. Where is the committee of Cool, Popular Secret Agents who have been watching this entire time through tiny surveillance cameras who can tell you exactly what to say and do to straddle through the lasers and make it to the other side?
Choose Your Own Disaster Page 13