At that point Leela hadn’t declared a major yet. She possessed a great fear about it. The decision seemed too big. For at least a year, in a recurring nightmare her father, dressed in battle fatigues, stopped her in a hallway and asked, “So what do you plan to do with your life?” Kids talked about it all the time. If pressed, she made up stuff about how she wanted to help other people; total bullshit. She was considering a double in International Relations and Computer Science. After all, she liked to travel, tech jobs were plentiful, she liked math well enough. Though what would she do then, really? Join the CIA?
Other students around her, kids like Rebecca, talked about their lives so purposefully, she often felt confused and stubbornly negative. She had no idea what the future held. How could they be so sure?
Anyway, she did so little in those years outside her schoolwork, her existence hardly qualified as life. She slept a lot. She went to a protest one time and stood in the back. For a month she’d volunteered at a soup kitchen, then the manager blamed her for someone else’s mistake and she hadn’t returned. Basically, she went to class, did her homework, struggled to go to the gym twice a week. Often she was homesick. She knew the late-night guys at Dunkin’ Donuts, it felt like the one back home. On campus she recognized the creative types, the extroverts; she wasn’t them. In comparison she dressed like a roll of beige carpet. But she badly wanted to be doing something, something with intent and purpose. Something to warrant all the longing to be somebody that she carried around.
So far she’d only known desire as a vacuum, pointless.
Then she got bored. Or more bored than usual. She’d done her homework, gone to the gym, microwaved a plate of frozen mozzarella sticks. Why didn’t anyone text her? Everyone Leela knew was still in the library. The course packet for Rebecca’s English class lay there on her bed.
The first reading was photocopied from a magazine. She went through it in thirty minutes, lips parted as she turned the pages. “The Fourth State of Matter.” She was genuinely stunned. The story was about physics, but also about a massacre. A horror story, then, yet also surprisingly interesting, and totally screwed-up.
She felt seized by the words. She looked up the author’s picture online. She went back and reread the story more slowly, to figure out what she’d just read. It made her cry.
The last time she’d cried while reading had been at the death of Sirius Black.
But she felt something else this time, she felt less dumb. She lay down in bed. Her body was flush with tingling. She stared at the speckled ceiling and closed her eyes. She tried to convince herself that her body wasn’t tingling, but there it was again, a buzz on her skin. As if she had levitated a quarter inch off the mattress.
She opened her eyes.
For the first time in her life, there was a sense that, while she’d read the article—and this had never happened before, not once—she wanted to be the person who’d written it. But what was that bullshit? Was she insane? In high school she worked on the newspaper as part of a computer class. For one assignment she created a blog to review ice-cream shops. Big deal. She’d certainly never thought about writing anything besides papers. It wasn’t like anyone had ever told her she was good at it.
Leela looked up the magazine’s website. She hadn’t heard of it before. There were a thousand links, she couldn’t choose. She clicked a subscription ad, a discount for college students, ten dollars for a year of issues, plus a tote bag. The bag looked cute.
Five minutes later Rebecca texted, inviting her to a party.
The tote arrived two weeks later. She’d forgotten about it. Then the magazine first arrived, rolled up in her mailbox. She took it to a coffee shop, bought an almond croissant, read almost the entire thing in one sitting.
And between the tote bag and the magazine’s arrival, and a couple woozy days afterward, within the span of only a couple weeks Leela Mann had incarnated a quite ridiculous, crazily unlikely ambition that would not be voiced out loud anytime in the near future—from fear of extreme embarrassment—to become a writer. It was insane. So she didn’t do anything about it for a while. Then, fall semester, she took Rebecca’s class for herself. Loved it. It changed her life. Without delay she decided on majors, Computer Science and Journalism, and she really only chose the former to keep her father from implosion.
Her mom didn’t care, but her dad was furious. Journalism? Was Leela crazy and stupid, or just stupid? Why not study telegraph design? At least then she’d please him, show an interest in history for once.
Ultimately, though, he did nothing more than complain. And from that point forward she started to talk about the magazine as if it were something more. It was the Magazine, proper-named, properly capitalized. Something to take to bed at night. As though the two of them were hooking up, Rebecca pointed out one time. So ridiculous, but true, she was in love.
But her love for the Magazine, plus a brief tenure as a reader for the university literary journal, was bigger than a hookup. The Magazine found her friends, through the lit mag and elsewhere, people who knew about and also liked the Magazine, and other magazines, and liked her tote. Kids enrolled in short-fiction workshops that she also took, who drank beer afterward, went into New York City afterward, to seek out readings, bookstores, taco shops that were talked about. And eventually they even worked up the courage to read things out loud to one another that they’d written. Things that they weren’t too crippled by self-loathing to share, or definitely were too crippled, but hey, beer.
By the winter of junior year, she had all new friends. One, Matteo, was editor of the school newspaper. Four inches taller, one and a half times smarter, he carried around the same tote bag, he even convinced her to start pitching him ideas and published some of them, her first legit clips. Furthermore, he introduced her to the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, the nonfiction of Mary Karr, and got rid of her darned virginity—in all three cases, wonderful developments—and somehow, four months later, Matteo was still good for board games night the week after she broke off their relationship.
Because Leela knows from real commitment. She’s never missed an issue of the Magazine, not one. The writers are her faraway gods. At night, all seasons, while New York City was muffled by snow or heavy heat, she’d stalked them through the web, the women, mostly to see how they wore their hair. Chimamanda Adichie. Emily Nussbaum. Larissa MacFarquhar. The one and only Lahiri, of course, her mother’s bedside reading, her copy of The Namesake stained by watermarks.
Even today, Leela prefers to pretend Jhumpa Lahiri does not exist. Hadn’t she moved to Capri by that point, switched to writing only in Italian? (That’s so Jhumpa.) Though why Leela imagines Jhumpa Lahiri to be her competition in any form, she prefers not to contemplate, just merely dislikes her and her writing in a way she does not want analyzed.
She still totes the tote. But is aged enough in her affection, by this point, to keep her fondness to herself. In only her second month in New York, she’d terrorized Zadie Smith on a 6 train. They were sitting across from each other, seven a.m., when Leela, through a tired morning haze, realized who she was sitting across from and involuntarily yelled, “AHH! AHHHH!” As if stabbed twice. Everyone on the train turned to witness her humiliation. Including, of course, Zadie Smith, radiant, petrified Zadie Smith, not even in her customary head scarf but box braids, and pulling them off so well, what with in addition the totally reasonable fear for her life—Zadie who’d looked up from her phone and quickly dropped her eyes, as though this happened to her occasionally, price of fame, being recognized in public by a gibbering wreck.
So what exactly Bryan James meant, from an email address at the Magazine, about a job opening at the Magazine, she had needed to know immediately. She took almost twenty minutes to reply, sitting at a picnic table near her car. Then drove away, toward Claymore, on a total body high, which had dissipated in about five miles, going up the sun-flattened highway, as she’d remembered, once more, that she was unemployed, on her way to New Hamp
shire, away from New York. Stuck for the immediate future in a single, crushing story line, about the pitfalls of available credit, where nothing good would ever come to pass. Least of all her dream employment scenario.
And if only every passing car’s muffler would bellow nicotine.
When she’d finally arrived in Madbury, she found the house, Sandra’s parents’ house, exactly as described, a tiny blue saltbox with a gravel drive and flaking paint, set back from an isolated country road, surrounded by thick forest. Front-door key inside an old metal watering can. Not a neighbor in sight, and no furniture inside. The house was completely empty. It smelled like Pine-Sol.
But at least it was clean. She’d propelled herself into motion, piled all her belongings in the middle of the living room, made a bed from her clothes, then proceeded to get drunk on cheap wine she’d bought at the gas station. And with her mind quickly crimped by headache, all she could think about was Bryan’s email. She refreshed her inbox every fifteen minutes. The job had likely been filled, probably while she was driving through Connecticut, while it had waited in her inbox to be checked. Game over. Life over.
She got up to go to the bathroom and stepped on her goodbye souvenir from The Village Voice, a small box that contained roughly 497 business cards with her name on them. Cards she’d never handed out to anybody.
She kicked the box into a corner.
An hour later, her first evening in the state of her birth, she’d pulled on her leather jacket and gone for a walk to try to wipe away her drunk. About a mile up the road she discovered a convenience store / auto repair / state inspection center. The guy behind the counter gave her a look like she was the first brown person he’d ever seen. She brought a bag of groceries home in the dark. Squatted on the floor next to a pile of books to check her phone: still nothing. So she ate peanut butter with a spoon and posted two hilarious screen grabs on social media that had nothing to do with her actual situation or emotional galaxy—but that’s what social media was for, your ideal self.
Because ideally Leela Mann was a young woman of leisure, wit, and advanced emotions. A young woman of contemplation and dry humor, not dread. A young woman who was sure of what she wanted her life to become, if only it would become.
* * *
And it is not until four days later, muggy Thursday morning, right after a run, right after Leela walks in through the front door of her borrowed home, that Bryan James acknowledges her email, via text, to suggest drinks that evening, in the East Village.
For days she’d waited apprehensively. And worried: What if her message was stuck in a spam filter? What if he’d switched his email system? But she couldn’t write again, she didn’t want to seem desperate. So pretty much all she’d done ever since was some good old freaking out, winging around the house like Spider-Man at the gym. While she got used to the fact that the life she’d known was pretty much done, and she needed to find employment, needed to apply for New Hampshire unemployment. And probably should put her sexual organs up for sale on Craigslist. Though only hands, mouth, and butthole. A baby was the last thing she needed.
But then her phone dings as she claps mud off her running shoes.
Hey I’ve got news how abt 7 TMS
Hey what’s up! Cool. Details? TMS?
The Masticated Stoat. Haven’t been?
Of course
I’ll tell u more tonight. It’s a surprise;)
Mysterious …
And now, in the nuclear fallout of this correspondence, she will shower immediately, dress as fast as possible, and haul her ass back to New York Shitty to whatever bar / coffee shop / restaurant she just lied about.
The drive is normally five hours. Leela gives herself six. It takes nearly seven thanks to traffic, not to mention a wrong turn she makes in an attempt to wedge herself into the FDR’s hell on Earth. What is wrong with her brain? Finally, Manhattan, Lower East Side, golden-green dusk, she finds a spot four blocks from the address. She’d already texted Bryan from a red light, she claimed a subway delay. On an island of phonies: the phoniest. Still, she made it. She locks the car with a serrated sigh and jogs across Houston Street in her worn-down flats.
Her phone vibrates.
Where r u
One sec
She pants as she arrives at the bar. She’d lied about knowing it. Behind the front door is a dark hallway of flocked purple wallpaper, lined by oval portraits of weasels being eaten by other animals. Leela rushes through, she feels her pits begin to stain. The main room, even darker, is morbid, cramped, and cold, like a speakeasy for the unwell. Though depressurized by all the deliberate laid-backness of so many dudes and their cool-girl counterparts scrolling through their phones.
“This place is so pretentious,” Bryan says when she finds him at the bar.
“I’m sorry I’m late. Do you want to leave?”
“I sort of used to like it? Now I’m like, let’s go drink boilermakers, you know?”
“I’m up for that.”
She’s not joking. But he barely hears her, he has his eyes on his phone.
“No, forget it.”
“Bryan, it’s great to see you.”
“You too.”
He finally looks at her and smiles. Her heart beats hard from the run, she tries to hide it. Does she smell? He looks better than she remembered. The stubble is new, even his glasses look fashionable, or maybe he’s just dressing better, all the boys are dressing better.
“Hey, so yo,” he says, and extends a fist. “Congratulations.”
“About what?”
“The Voice. The layoffs?”
“It’s bad, actually.”
“No doubt, no doubt.”
The crowd, beautiful and loud, squeezes them against the railing. Everyone knows she doesn’t belong there. Does she tell him about New Hampshire? It could ruin everything.
Bryan rattles his head and slurps his drink, garnished with the world’s smallest pine tree.
“Look, screw those guys at the Voice. The point is, you should be psyched.”
“Should I? What about?”
He laughs resignedly. As if they’re in the middle of some type of game. “I’m sure I know what you’ve heard, but Condé’s actually pretty sweet.”
Her heart skips a beat.
“Bryan, what are we talking about?”
“Like, brass tacks?”
“Sure?”
He checks his phone again then sighs. “Who knows what HR’s got up their sleeve, they’re in Connecticut. But if it’s Lian’s decision, that’s my boss, as far as I know it’s down to you and some dude. In which case you’re probably the underdog. But that’s a good thing. Seriously, look at what’s on paper. Are you a chick? Yes. Are you a colored chick? Yes.”
“I’ll let that slide.”
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” he says.
Leela stares at the bartender, in his fedora, but he won’t meet her eye.
“Seriously, the only thing lacking, at this point, between you and this guy is longreads. You don’t have a ton of longreads, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“We practically invented the whole thing, obviously, but now it’s everyone’s thing. I’m not saying you should go and, like, file ten thousand words this weekend, but it also wouldn’t be the worst idea.”
“Bryan, I’m not sure I understand,” she says flatly, wiggling on her stool. “Can we just start at the beginning? What are you talking about?”
Because she is seriously confused. And she can picture her stupid forlorn face, she hates the nerves in her voice.
But Bryan’s already back on his phone, not listening. He looks up. Coughs. “So here’s the deal,” he says. “My boss runs the website. She’s one of the original Gawker girls. She was the big digital hire a couple years ago, to overhaul all things digital, get the apps launched, et cetera. I came in to help with podcasts. Anyway, Lian came over, she brought along this database guy. Who was a black belt, for real. But then they go to ou
tsource, and our dude’s shifted into editorial, at which he blows. Anyway, a month ago, he got caught hacking emails. Like, all the way up the business side. Anyway, he’s gone, and now it’s down to you and this other dude, somebody’s old roommate at Wesleyan.”
“And you’re not joking,” Leela says, she sounds truly amazed, she doesn’t care. “You think I have a chance.”
“You’re the underdog, like I said. I think the interview’s a lock. I forwarded your stuff, Lian likes it. She told me she’s going to email you at some point soon. I think she’s going on vacation for a couple weeks. Plus HR has to post the job opening for a while. Normally they handle everything, like, ‘We’ll put your stuff on file, there’s a chance we’ll have an opening at Modern Bride in seven years.’ But if an editor wants to bring in someone specifically? So, yeah, at some point I think you’ll meet Lian. If things go well, she’ll want you to meet a bunch of other people. If that goes well, you’ll meet David.”
“David.”
“I know. Anyway, I’m not clear on how strong our guy’s hookup is, or what Lian thinks of him, so this’ll take some time to play out.”
“That’s amazing. Bryan, thank you.”
“Hey, I owed you one.”
“What?”
He looks at her meaningfully, he cringes slightly.
She clutches her legs with both hands, while her body fills with horror.
“Anyway, the dude,” he says. “I saw his shit. You’re about the same on programming. He coded his own Wordpress plug-in, but who cares. He’s not as experienced as you as an editor, which is good, because they’ll want you assigned to some blogs. The thing is, he’s published a lot.”
“So have I.”
“You know what I mean.”
A thought catches her, not in a good way.
“I don’t, honestly,” she says slowly.
“Don’t make me say it. He’s published more significantly.”
“What does that even mean?”
The cringe is back, but more defensive. He finishes his drink. “Political essays. Stuff in translation. He used to intern at the London Review.”
The Last Kid Left Page 11