This Is My Brain in Love

by I. W. Gregorio

  I finally give my brain a good shake. Will and I work together. I cannot ignore him, even if talking to him (worse, looking him in the eyes) makes me feel faintly sick to my stomach. So I close my laptop, grab my legal pad, and look at him head-on.

  “Want to brainstorm outreach to the colleges? Not just MVCC, but University of Utica. I’m thinking it might be good to have a ‘Study Group Special’—something like a fifteen-dollar meal for four. It can be high-yield dishes like pork fried rice, egg rolls, and chicken vegetable delight.”

  “One of my dad’s friends is a professor at Utica,” Will says. “He can give me some advice on the best way to reach students. I think they have an activities fair every year. Maybe we could leave some coupons there.”

  I open up a new file and design a flyer for our new Study Group Special. As I draft some copy, Will pauses from the e-mail he’s composing to send to the college.

  “By the way, it’s called ‘the anxiety of influence,’” Will says.

  “Huh?”

  “What we were talking about before, the fear that whatever you create is going to be crap, or just derivative of everything that’s come before it. When I was writing my first feature for the Spartan, I kept on worrying that my angle wasn’t unique. So our adviser told me about this Yale professor, Harold Bloom, who essentially said outright that there’s no such thing as an original poem. That you can’t escape the influence from all the art that’s come before you.”

  “That’s… depressing.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think Mr. Evans meant that you have to give up. He was just saying that it’s okay to be anxious, it’s okay to be worried, but that there are a million ways you can be influenced by a past work, yet still make it your own. What do they say, there are only five basic stories in the world? Just because what you write is influenced by something that came before doesn’t mean it’s not still notable.”

  I make a face. “Are you saying that I’m a special snowflake?”

  Will’s laugh makes a little thrill of happiness run down my neck. “You are totally a special snowflake.”

  Somehow, this is not reassuring. “Just because something’s unique doesn’t mean that it’s good.” Art is not like toddler soccer, where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up.

  “Of course not. I think what Mr. Evans was trying to say was that something’s uniqueness has nothing to do with its quality. So we don’t need to stress. We just need to worry about it being good.”

  “But what makes something good?”

  Will thinks for a second. “Well, I’m not sure about other things, but for journalism, it’s not just facts that make an article stand out. It’s the truth of a story.”

  Slowly, I nod, thinking of the movies that have made my own personal top one hundred: Amadeus. The Big Sick. Black Panther. When Harry Met Sally.… Toy Story. Comedy or drama, fantasy or thriller, Will’s hypothesis hits the nail on the head.

  I think out loud, “So many truths to tell.”

  “We’ve got time,” Will says hopefully. And something about the way he says it, like a question, in a voice that somehow gets across all his doubt and anxiety and need to tell these stories, makes the air thicken between us. I want to hug Will again, and somehow communicate with touch what I can’t with words—that I believe in him. That right now, he is one of the truest things in my life. But then our kitchen door swings open and Jin-Jin comes in bearing the first load of takeout for the afternoon.

  I put the finishing touches on my handout and go to print out a copy upstairs. As I’m getting up, though, Will asks in a small voice (is there a little bit of a shake in it?):

  “You know, if you want to watch Broadcast News, are you free Wednesday night?”

  This Is My Brain on “Friendship”

  WILL

  Waiting for Jocelyn to answer is the most excruciating thing I’ve endured in years, and that includes the hour of mental gyrations it took me to get up the nerve to ask her in the first place. It’s been obvious how important movies are to Jocelyn ever since my interview, when she jokingly offered her friend’s Netflix log-in to me. And isn’t that the classic first date? Dinner and a movie?

  Not that this is officially a date or anything. It’s just two friendly colleagues getting together after work.… Right?

  God, I hope Jocelyn thinks this is a date. But am I supposed to clarify, or ask if she expects it to be one? What if she doesn’t?

  Suddenly I feel feverish. I can feel the sweat rising on my forehead as the seconds tick by without Jocelyn answering. She’s stood up to go print a flyer, so we’re almost at eye level, and she doesn’t have any of the expressions on her face that I initially feared (shock, pity, disgust). She just looks… thoughtful, and perhaps, a really optimistic part of me thinks, a little pleased.

  “Wednesday nights are pretty slow, so it’s as good a day as any, I guess. I can ask my dad if I can have it off,” Jocelyn finally says. She cradles her laptop in her arms and runs her fingers along the seam a couple of times. “Did you… I mean, where should we meet?”

  I suddenly realize how little I thought this through, and my throat starts closing up. It seems too forward to invite her over to our house, but it’s not appropriate to ask if I could come to hers, either. Am I supposed to suggest a neutral location? “Uh, would you want to come over to my house? Or I could just come here, or we could meet at the library or a café or something.”

  Jocelyn’s eyes widen, and that’s definitely pleasure. “You’d invite me over to your house?”

  “Of course,” I blurt out. “You’re my friend.” The minute the words leave my mouth and I realize that I’ve implied that it’s just going to be a friendly get-together, I close my eyes and let out a silent, internal scream. I almost don’t want to see the expression on Jocelyn’s face (Disappointment? Confusion? Relief?).

  But when I open them again, she’s smiling at me. “That’d be really cool. I’ll tell my dad that I’m at Priya’s—she’ll cover for me. She loves that movie. You will, too.”

  Then she turns and runs upstairs, leaving me with a whole new experience to stress over.

  JOCELYN

  When I finally get up the nerve to ask my dad for the night off, he’s in a super-good mood because on Sunday and Monday alone, ten new customers came to the restaurant bearing coupons from the Boilermaker Expo. They all ordered pot stickers, and he was fairly giddy with glee.

  “Aiyo, Xiao Jia, you see? Ten customer ordering twenty, forty bucks each, that almost make up that fee you pay,” he says, as though it was all his idea.

  “That’s great, Dad! Since things are going so well, can I have Wednesday night off? Priya and I are going to work on our movie.”

  “Sure, sure,” my dad says, still smiling, waving me off. I wonder if he’s actually delirious. “I get Alan to help. He can study in restaurant.”

  Tuesday night, Priya comes over to help me choose what to wear to Will’s house.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t ask him if this was a date,” Priya moans after complaining for the third time that giving me advice would be so much easier if she knew the terms of my “engagement.” It’s kind of embarrassing—I’ve totally fallen into the “Not a Date” trope.

  “And I told you, he looked like someone who was about to walk the plank, Pri. He was so nervous he would’ve passed out if I had given him the third degree.” He wouldn’t be that stressed out over something friendly, would he?

  “Okay, so you don’t want to wear this, then?” Rummaging through my closet, she pulls out a yellow knit cardigan set that Amah gave me for Christmas last year. “It’ll be perfect for bingo night in another seventy years, though.”

  “I should choose something nice. I think his family’s kind of well-off,” I say. “He lives in that development off Oxford Road with all those big McMansions.”

  “Do you want to do a dress?”

  “Nah, trying too hard.” I only have three dresses, anyway: two from Goodwill and a
hand-me-down from my mother, which she gave me after my father told her she looked “too young” in it. “I feel like the Constance Wu character in Crazy Rich Asians, when she’s trying on formal wear for the Khoo wedding? Except that my entire wardrobe is probably worth less than the strap of one of those gowns.”

  “That’s us,” Priya chirps. “Crazy Poor Asians!”

  “It’s funny because it’s true.” I sigh.

  Ultimately we decide on jean shorts and a peasant-style blouse that I bought at T.J.Maxx with the hong bao money I got from my relatives this Chinese New Year.

  “It’s perfect,” Priya declares. “You look nice but not too formal, and the shorts plus the neckline of that shirt give him enough skin to be intrigued, if that’s where his mind is going.”

  I look at myself in the slightly distorted full-length mirror on my closet door. “You really think his mind will be going there?” I stare at my boobs (too small), my knees (too knobby), and my waist (too close to a muffin top for my liking). Maybe Will didn’t want to watch the movie on the clock because he felt uncomfortable about me paying him. Maybe he ended up offering his own house because he didn’t want to spend an extra minute in our crappy restaurant.

  “What if he’s not straight?” I ask.

  Priya nods. “That’s always a consideration. But if he’s straight, or bi? Trust me, I have two brothers. I’m pretty sure his mind is going to be going there.”

  WILL

  Wednesday night, I pick Jocelyn up at the library. It’s the cover story she gave her dad, and she wants her bike to be there in case he passes by during a delivery.

  The entire ride to the library, my body felt itchy with nerves. But as Jos gets into my car, I realize that the most amazing thing about her—better than how competent she is, how bitingly funny, how cute—is how it quiets my brain just to be around her. I don’t know what kind of alchemy it is, whether the smell of her pheromones somehow triggers a receptor in my nervous system, but having her sit in the passenger seat hits the reset button on my mind.

  I feel like a blinking cursor on a screen. Full of potential. Anything could happen.

  JOCELYN

  When I get into Will’s car, I have to bite back a laugh, because Will looks as nervous as I feel: eyes just a little too wide, shoulders practically at the level of his ears.

  “Hey,” I say. And as he looks at me—as he really sees me—I watch the little crease on his forehead disappear. His shoulders relax, and he smiles back at me.

  “Hey,” he says.

  It’s a quick ride to the Domenicis’ development. I’ve been here before for deliveries, but this is the first time I’ve been here as a guest. I let myself ogle the ginormous houses and the occasional glimpses of fenced-in pools and huge, tree house–like play structures.

  Walking into Will’s house is a bit like walking onto an HGTV set. Everything is immaculate, from the cream-colored sofas with artfully casual pillows to the sparkling kitchen with stainless steel appliances. There’s a curio cabinet in the dining room with some sculptures that look like they’re from Africa, and framed family photos on the wall of the massive stairway leading up to the second floor. I wonder where all the stuff of living that seems to proliferate in our house is. Maybe his family carries a gene that makes them immune to clutter.

  Despite how perfect everything is, Will looks just a little anxious as I peek around, like he’s worried that it won’t be up to snuff. He has a glass of water ready for me, and some popcorn that I stuff into my mouth so I won’t say anything inappropriate like, “OMG, you guys have a concert grand piano?” or, “Holy shit, is that an eighty-eight-inch QLED TV?”

  None of it really surprises me. The fact that Will hardly batted an eye at the four-hundred-dollar Expo fee kind of tipped his hand. Will pulls up his family’s iTunes and rents the movie. “I hope you like it,” I say. I’m pretty sure he will. Recommending movies is my superpower.

  I’ve watched enough teen movies to anticipate what comes up next: couch sitting awkwardness. Will seems to be waiting for me to sit down, so I take the recliner on the left side. The only problem with this arrangement is that the Domenicis’ sectional is huge—pretty much the opposite of intimate, and there’s an entire stationary seat in between the two sections that recline. Will doesn’t even blink and chooses the seat without a recliner. I do a mental fist pump.

  Will’s laughing from the first scene, when Holly Hunter’s asshole boss snarks, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” and she replies, “No, it’s awful.”

  He looks over at me, still smiling. “I’m glad this is about network news, because it’s so much easier to make fun of. That other reporter guy”—he means Albert Brooks’s character—“has the soul of a print journalist.”

  It’s my second time watching the movie, so I watch it for technique and structure instead of just plot. I take note of the framing devices in the beginning and how they establish the main characters’ personalities so quickly.

  I’d forgotten how the movie ends—with none of the people in the love triangle ending up with each other. The lack of a typical happy Hollywood ending makes it feel kind of old-fashioned, and for a minute I worry that I’ve made a bad call for a first non-date.

  Here’s my dirty secret: When it comes to movies, I’m not an auteur like Priya is. I like good stories, but I don’t go into raptures over a film’s cinematography. I watch movies to be manipulated. I watch them to cry, to laugh at inappropriate jokes, to get indignant over injustices, to experience romance that bubbles through my skin and makes me hopeful that one day I’ll find someone to make me feel that way for real.

  I love that movies can take a burned-out, cynical person like me and make them believe for just a short while that romance can happen to them. I love that movies keep my dreams alive.

  This is, of course, the exact reason my parents hate movies. My dad thinks they’re a waste of time, pure escapism. “So unrealistic, they fill your head with such fluffy nonsense,” he says. My mom is more neutral about them, which is almost more upsetting to me. How can she just not care? Are my parents really that dead inside?

  Inviting Will to watch a movie with me was, I admit, kind of a test. I wanted to see whether he could fall under a cinematic spell the way I do. Because there’s a reason movies are such classic dates—they’re an instant shared experience. They give you something to talk about.

  But Broadcast News isn’t your typical romantic comedy. It wasn’t designed to make two people believe in the power of true love, or to be the entry point for a good make-out session. It was meant to make you laugh and be pissed off about people manipulating the truth. It was meant to show you how sometimes you can be attracted to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. So… maybe not an auspicious movie for a non-date?

  WILL

  Broadcast News is a good flick. Scratch that, it’s kind of an amazing flick. Funny but bittersweet, and totally spot-on in the way it captures the drama of being on deadline and the drive to tell a story the right way. It was kind of amazing, too, that in the end Holly Hunter’s character didn’t end up with either William Hurt or Albert Brooks. I can’t think of a single movie that I’ve watched where a romance ended up this way. It’s brave, and probably it’s true.

  “Did you like it?” Jocelyn asks carefully as the credits roll.

  “Yeah, it was terrific.” I talk about all the little things it got right, and a smile lights up her face. “They really don’t make movies like that anymore, do they? With endings that don’t tie up in a nice bow?”

  “Not the major studios, really.” She shrugs. “I don’t blame them. People like to leave a movie theater believing in happy endings. Why not, when the world seems like it’s such a shitshow?” She pulls one of my grandma Domenici’s afghans over her knees. “Sometimes you just want to laugh.”

  Idly, Jocelyn leafs through the coffee-table photobooks my mother made after our family tri
p to Nigeria a few years ago. She stops at a picture of us on safari at Yankari Game Reserve. “Does your family go to Nigeria often?”

  “Not really,” I say. “It’s too hard for my mother to schedule enough time off, and most of my extended family is here in the States now. That trip was my first visit there since I was a baby.” After I came back, it was the first time that I started thinking of myself not only as “black” or “mixed race,” but also as Nigerian American.

  “Why did your mom come to the US?”

  “For graduate school, like a lot of other Nigerians. When my mother was a teenager there were years of military rule and attacks on the press, and most people who had the means to—even a lot of people who really didn’t—sent their kids abroad to study. It’s easier for Nigerians to do that than people from other African countries, because the official language is English.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Not many Americans do. It’s one of my mother’s pet peeves, when people tell her that she ‘speaks English very well.’ English is her first language, and she went to boarding school in the UK. Her ‘English’ is better than ninety percent of Americans’.”

  “Oh, I get that at least once a month at the restaurant,” Jos says. “I enjoy that almost as much as when customers say that I’m a credit to my people.”

  “Do you have that thing happen where people confuse you with another POC in your school? Because that happens to me about once a week.” I’ve gotten so used to people mistaking me for Andre Jones that I automatically respond to his name.

  “Oh my God!” Jocelyn simpers. “I love it so much when that happens! Microaggressions are the best.”

  I laugh, feeling giddy at how natural it feels to have Jos in my home, sitting next to me, shooting the breeze. I fiddle with the TV remote, flicking it with my finger as I rack my brain for something else to do so we can hang out longer. The idea, when it comes to me, is a no-brainer. “Do you want to watch any of the extra features?”