Trade Me

by Courtney Milan

  He appears on the screen: messy pepper-gray hair and beard scruff in need of a shave. His gaze fixes on mine.

  “Tina.” His voice is just a little hoarse. He clears his throat and sniffs. “Is Blake there?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He frowns. “Look. Blake’s a little distant right now. Is something going on with him?”

  Something is obviously going on between them, but even I can’t tell what it is, and I suspect I know about as much as anyone on the planet except these two.

  I shake my head. “I’m not talking to you about Blake.”

  “Yeah.” He blows out a breath. “Probably just as well that you’re loyal to him. I just…” He pauses, tapping his fingers against his cheek.

  “It’s not that,” I interject. “It’s just that you’re an…” I choke back the word I’d been planning to put in that blank. Last time was bad enough. “You’re a little intense,” I finish.

  For a moment, he stares at me. Then, ever so slowly, he smiles. “Don’t start holding out on me now. I’m an asshole.” My surprise must show, because he shrugs a shoulder. “I’ve never claimed otherwise.”

  I suspect this is as close as Adam Reynolds will ever come to apologizing for his behavior in that restaurant.

  “Blake thinks you’re not an asshole.”

  “Blake,” Mr. Reynolds says with a roll of his eyes, “is a ridiculously good kid. There’s a reason I’m a little protective of him. I’m always afraid people will take advantage.”

  I don’t say anything. A little protective is what he is?

  Despite my silence, he sighs and waves his hand. “Good point,” he mutters in response to the thing I didn’t say. “It hasn’t happened yet, and God knows if he were as naïve as I really feared, it would have by now. Of all the women he could have had, he did choose you.”

  I think this is intended as a compliment.

  “Still,” his dad continues. “I worry. Is everything okay with him?”

  I have the distinct impression that even though Blake has never said so, most of his problems lie with this man. Somehow. Some way.

  “This is a conversation you should have with Blake.”

  He puts his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Fuck.” He doesn’t move for a few moments. And then—of all things—he sniffles. Unconvincingly.

  “Mr. Reynolds, are you fake crying to try to get my sympathy?”

  The hand lowers. He glowers at me—obviously dry-eyed. “Fuck me,” he says. “First, call me Adam. Mr. Reynolds makes me sound like some bullshit old fart. Second, I don’t fucking cry. I especially don’t fake cry. Emotional manipulation is for morons who don’t have the strength of will to get people on their side with reason. I have a cold.”

  “Aw. Poor baby. You should get some rest.” I incline my head toward him, and then widen my eyes. “Oh, wait. I forgot. You can’t.”

  He shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “Yeah, yeah. My kid has good taste. I’m fucking things up for you. I hope it won’t be too much of a disturbance.”

  “You know.” I swallow. “I think Blake gave you the wrong impression about us.”

  “What, that he’s into you more than you’re into him? I got that from him.”

  I swallow.

  “That you need to be convinced? That he’s going to end up convincing you, no matter what you’re telling yourself right now?

  I let out a breath.

  “Exactly.” Adam points a finger at me. “That’s what I thought. My money’s on my boy. But hey, don’t tell me what’s going on. Who needs details? Surely not his own father. I’m not invasive.”

  “Right. Calling me in the middle of the night when Blake’s not around isn’t invasive at all.”

  He just snorts. “If I were really invasive, I would check the fucking logs. You and Blake are both wearing GPS-enabled devices equipped with 3-axis accelerometers and heart rate monitors. The whole fucking point is that we’re supposed to be able to detect exactly what you’re doing with every minute of your day. Every ounce of data you generate is getting dumped to Cyclone servers every midnight.” He rubs his forehead. “Sometimes I fucking hate myself for believing in privacy.”

  “But you do,” I say to reassure myself.

  For a long moment, he looks at me. Then he sighs. “Yeah.” He swallows. “Peter Georgiacodis—I don’t know if Blake’s told you about Peter. But Peter felt very strongly about it. And there was a point, when we first started data collection a few years ago, when Peter told me if I ever used any logs we collected to satisfy my own curiosity, he’d make Blake hack into the server and post my logs for the public, just so I could see how it felt. Peter’s…not here anymore, but I think Blake would do it. Just on principle.”

  “And that’s enough to scare you? What would your logs tell us about you?” I ask.

  He fixes me with a steely stare. “They’d tell you I have a fucking cold,” he says. And then he cuts the connection.

  13.

  TINA

  “I need another word for devour.” Maria is sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, chewing her lip and staring at her laptop.

  “Eat?” I suggest.

  She waves her hand. “Used it already.”

  “Bolt? Chew?”

  “Something that suggests more carnage.”

  “Swallow whole?”

  She looks up at me. “These are zombies,” she says with a toss of her hair. “They don’t swallow whole. They tear. They rend—oh, hey, that’s it. Rending. Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome,” I say in amusement. “But I thought you were trying to avoid zombies.”

  She adjusts the glasses that she only uses for reading. “I’ve given in. I couldn’t resist. The math is strained, but at least it’s funny. Asteroids next week.”

  My roommate—housemate, I suppose I should say now that we’re no longer sharing rooms—has a secret blog. I have a secret life. Funny how that works out.

  “Adam Reynolds called me last night,” I say.

  She looks up. “Seriously?”

  “He thinks I’m dating his son.”

  “Whoop-te-doo.” She rolls her eyes. “I think you’re dating his son.”

  I point a finger at her. “Et tu, Maria?”

  “I’m just saying. If you’re trying not to get hurt, you’re doing it wrong. You’re still friends. You still care about him. You still do things for each other, and you’re still going to hurt when you walk away. It’s just that the way you’re doing it, you have fewer orgasms.”

  She raises an eyebrow at me. I have to admit that she has something like a point. Blake isn’t less under my skin right now because I’ve managed to keep from kissing him.

  “He wanted to know what was going on with Blake.”

  “Did you tell him to join the club?”

  I don’t answer this. I keep trying not to wonder. The thing is, I know everything’s not right. I mean, I’m here, in this house, and he is, at the present moment, washing dishes. He hasn’t told me what he’s looking for, and I suspect he hasn’t found it.

  But this is ending. At this point, I’ve written the script for how our relationship will come to an end—literally. I know that a little bit less than three weeks from now, there will no longer be early afternoons spent together going over launch details. There will be no hours where I talk to my mother and try not to worry, no time when he listens to me fret and takes care of things.

  “I don’t want to talk about Blake,” I say. “And you’re one to talk about orgasms anyway. You didn’t give Hot Tattoo Guy your number.”

  “Irrelevant.” Maria absently types in a sentence. “That has not made him any less instrumental a figure in my orgasms.”

  There is that. I could respond in kind. I could tell her that I’ve thought of Blake a little too often, a little too much. But my own fantasies are not ones I want to examine. I imagine myself touching him. Taking off his clothing. I imagine myself going down on him, feeling the hard length
of him in my mouth.

  It’s easier to imagine myself giving than receiving. If I’m giving, I’m still in charge. I’m not vulnerable. If I’m giving, he won’t have the chance to break me down the way I know he could. I can’t let him in that much, not even in my fantasies.

  I shake my head. “I’m going down to see my parents this weekend. I’m going to be leaving Thursday afternoon.”

  She looks over at me and raises an eyebrow. “Wow. You might not see Blake for three whole days. How will you manage?”

  My cheeks flush. She lets out a guffaw.

  “He’s coming?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Well. That will convince everyone he’s not your boyfriend.”

  “I… It’s…” I shake my head. “It will help, actually. You know what my parents are like. They could drive anyone away. It’s all complicated now. I just need to remember…”

  Maria is watching me with a flat expression on her face. And that’s when I realize what I said.

  My parents could drive anyone away.

  “No,” Maria says quietly. “Not anyone.”

  I exhale and wish I could take my foot from my mouth. But those words are out there now, no matter what I say. My parents are difficult, embarrassing, impossible even. But they are also my parents, and they’ve never wanted me to be anything other than myself. By contrast, when Maria told her parents that she was a girl, they kicked her out of the house.

  She was twelve.

  If her grandmother hadn’t taken her in…

  If I had been trans instead of Maria, I can imagine how my come-out would have gone. My mother would have been confused as hell. She would have asked me to explain it three or four times, and I’m not sure she would have gotten it even then. But I am sure of one thing: she would still love me. There is one person in this room who knows what it’s like to have parents who literally drive others away. It’s not me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “That was dumb of me.”

  She shrugs, but her expression is flat. “It’s just a figure of speech. I’m not going to break. I know what you meant.”

  But the fun has fled the room. We’re not talking to each other about boys or making jokes about orgasms any longer. She bends over her laptop and once again, applies herself to her blog.

  And me?

  I have a product launch to work on for a man I shouldn’t care about, who isn’t here, and who isn’t ever going to be my boyfriend. I shake my head and look down at my screen myself.

  It turns out that getting to my parents’ house is surprisingly easy.

  Blake comes up with a great story—we’re borrowing a friend’s car for the drive. And because it would be completely unbelievable that a friend would let us borrow a brand-new fully tricked-out Tesla, Blake calls his lawyer and arranges for us to pick up a fifteen-year-old Toyota ten miles from my parents’ house. This, I point out, is cheating on the trade—but at this point, with the end in sight, neither of us have the heart to care.

  I tell my mother when we talk on the phone that he’s coming, and no, he’s not my boyfriend.

  “Looking forward to meeting your boyfriend,” she says as she hangs up. I can’t tell if she doesn’t believe me or if she’s just teasing.

  But all these things feel like details, and distant details at that, as we get in the car and start down.

  It’s true that Blake has come along to drive. This is necessary because I still can’t make myself drive his car at anything other than a crawl.

  “Music preferences?” Blake inclines his head to me as we coast out.

  “Whatever.”

  He punches up something on the screen.

  “Satellite radio?” I glance over at him. “In this car? Isn’t that for peons?”

  He smiles. “What am I supposed to listen to instead?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have that long left to put myself in your shoes. I’m trying to think like a billionaire. I guess I just imagined that you’d hire a team of musical experts to study your tastes, and they would create a never-ending stream of perfect music for you.”

  “Nah.” He shifts his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s not how a billionaire thinks. A billionaire hires a team of engineers to interface with a team of musical experts. We study everyone’s taste and create a service that automatically creates a never-ending stream of music that automatically tailors itself in response to feedback. Then we sell that service to someone else for a few million bucks. Or we grow it ourselves and get a hundred million people to pay us five dollars a month.”

  “Oh.”

  He glances at me. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone about your secret music business. I signed an NDA, remember?”

  “No point pursuing it. Someone else already did it.” He grins. “But you know, hiring a team of musical experts to do my bidding…trust me, it wouldn’t work like that. People aren’t robots, however much money you have. Whoever I hired would have their own favorite songs, which they would foist on me. When I complained that I hated Rush, or whatever it is that one of them adored, they would get mad. The anger would fester, and then one day, when I was stuck in a car for a six-hour drive, they would send in their resignation and put the Macarena on continuous repeat the entire time. Believe it or not, even billionaires find it easier to treat the people who inhabit their lives like they’re actually people instead of machines.”

  It would be easier if he were an asshole like his dad. This would all be easier. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I asked him to come down with me: because I know that I like him too much. I know I don’t want to let him go. And I need to remind myself of the many, many reasons this needs to end when he goes back to Cyclone.

  I’m going to get what I need this weekend. I let a few miles slip by.

  Finally, I speak again. “Look. I just want to make one thing clear. My parents can be…”

  Embarrassing, I think. Difficult. But I refuse to be ashamed of them.

  “They come from a different culture,” I finally say. “There are things Chinese people think are private that Americans don’t. And there are things that Americans think are taboo that Chinese people talk about freely. It can be a little jarring.”

  He’s only listened to them on the phone. He has no real idea what’s coming. He’s driving—a smooth eighty miles an hour, I note with jealousy—but he still glances in my direction.

  “Okay,” he says. That’s it.

  “I mean it.” I watch the road slip past. “My mom is going to say something that will strike you as off. Don’t look at me. Don’t act like I should join you in making fun of them later. I’m not going to be embarrassed by my parents. I’m proud of them.”

  “Of course you are,” he says.

  I try—very hard—not to think of the fact that my mom still refers to Bethany from high school as my fat friend. Even when Bethany is around. No matter what I say to her, I cannot convince her that this is not appropriate. My mom is embarrassing.

  But she’s my mom.

  And I know that when Blake tells me afterward that she’s a little too much… I will be able to hold on to that memory. I’ll use it to remind myself.

  See? We would never have worked.

  “Just so we’re clear on that.” I give him a tight smile.

  “Hey.” He smiles. “I am one hundred percent onboard for a no-parent-shaming compact. Do you know how embarrassing my dad is?”

  “Nice try. I’m sure your parent who features regularly on the news is completely comparable to my outspoken activist Chinese mother.”

  “Ha. You didn’t see him when I was a kid. When I was twelve, my teacher asked my dad to come and talk about what it was like to run a major corporation.”

  “Just to set the stage, I’m guessing this wasn’t a public school?”

  “Nope. But my dad being my dad, it took him about thirty seconds to drop an f-bomb. The teacher, of course, in
terrupted him. And explained that she didn’t allow those words in her classroom.”

  “I can imagine that went over really well.”

  “Your imagination is precisely on point. Dad said, ‘Why the fuck not?’ And when she tried to explain that the kids had to learn professionalism for their future careers, he came back with, ‘Why are you lying to them? Businessmen swear all the fucking time.’”

  I can’t help but smile at this.

  “Of course she got mad. And she told him that swearing was indicative of a lack of creativity. She said that anyone could swear, but it took real imagination to come up with a good insult.”

  I don’t know Adam Reynolds well. But I understand him well enough to know that he’s deeply competitive. I wince.

  “Naturally,” Blake continues, “Dad took this as a personal challenge. And so he asked her for a demonstration. So my poor hapless teacher said, quite primly, ‘Well, you could call someone a spitting goat, or say they have a mouth filled with putrescent filth.’ Dad nodded along like he was agreeing with her. And he said, ‘You mean I could refer to someone who told me not to swear as a wizened fruit or as having the intellectual capacity of a desiccated rabbit corpse.’ And of course everyone knew he was talking about her and she got even madder.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Oh, nothing. Because then Dad turned to the class and said, ‘Here’s the thing. If spitting goat is a good insult, isn’t spitting goat fucker better? And if you’re going refer to putrescent filth, shouldn’t you take the time to call it putrescent ass-filth?”

  I can just see Blake’s dad doing that—looking over the class and growling profanities at twelve-year-old kids with no compunction. I bite back laughter.

  Blake sighs. “So imagine how that went over with the other parents. Their kids came home calling each other ‘wizened cock-fruit suckers’ and ‘bastard sons of a desiccated rabbit corpse.’”

  I can’t help myself. I’m laughing.

  “And that is how you came to be looking at the only kid who ever got expelled from Middle Prep because of his dad.”

  “Seriously? He didn’t just pay them off or something?”