“Nothing,” I said.
“You’re definitely not asking me to come over to your apartment.”
“Uh, no.”
The skin on his shoulders was freckled and sunburned, stenciled in the shape of his retro yellow tank top that bore Lionel Richie’s face and the word “Hello.” I would have swiped left. And yet, I gave him my number, to enter into an old flip phone. When I got home that night I searched for him online and found his band’s website, but he had no Facebook profile, no Twitter handle, no LinkedIn page. It was like he didn’t exist outside the moments we spent together in the same room.
Adam had a navy Volvo wagon, manual transmission, with a hatchback for hauling band gear, materials, and the custom furniture he built at a workshop in Gowanus. After work and on weekends, Adam gave me something better to do than stare at a screen.
We went for drives. My eyes reacquainted themselves with distance. There was another New York that existed aboveground, at the speed of a car and not a bus, Manhattan’s fairy lights throwing gold against the starless sky. There were pockets of the city you could only get to in a car. On an unusually cold and drizzly summer day, we drove to Fort Tilden with a couple of bodega sandwiches and sweaty bottles of Red Stripe. No one else was at the beach and Adam went skinny-dipping in the ocean, while I stood on the sand, still in shoes and socks, clutching a folded umbrella.
To be with Adam was to be constantly trespassing beyond the borders of what I thought was appropriate. It was wild to watch how much another person could get away with, just because he’d spent his whole life in skin a different color than yours. Adam was five-and-a-half-feet tall, same as me. He wasn’t the first white guy I’d dated, but he was the first one who didn’t automatically abbreviate my name to “K.”
The more time I spent with him, the more—this sounds unbelievable, but it was the summer of 2016 and everything was unbelievable—I felt his magic rubbing off on me. There was the New York you knew from movies and then there was the real New York. Real New York was mysterious wet drips on your head when you walked under scaffolding, the blackened soles of your feet in summer, the gust of wind from the subway tunnel that made the hem of your skirt fly toward your chin, how frequently you passed young women crying into their cell phones, blowing their noses on deli napkins. Adam bridged the gap between the cinematic and the real.
When we were together, nothing bad seemed to happen. Parking spots appeared wherever we went. The subway car arrived just as we got to the platform. At a crowded brunch spot, Adam mentioned to the maître d’ that he was a friend of “Michael’s” and we were seated right away; when I asked who Michael was, he said, “Lucky guess.” Outside the Brooklyn Museum, a little light-skinned girl with braids and pink barrettes ran up to us and handed me a yellow rose before running away, laughing at her own private joke.
All I had to do was take one pink pill at the same time every night, but the sticker with the days of the week fell off and got lost at the bottom of my purse, and instead of looking for it, I told myself this isn’t rocket science, just take one pill and then another.
In September, I had lunch with Maren.
“I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a crazy stalker,” she said, “but I’ve been following you for a long time.” She knew I was vegan and had asked Devin to recommend a restaurant, called XYST.
Maren was wearing a slightly wrinkled black blazer over a white T-shirt. She carried a canvas WNYC tote. She used to work in the nonprofit sector, she said, trying to end gender-based oppression by placing sculptures of vaginas in high-trafficked public areas, but she realized the greater impact she could have with a for-profit venture. Maren had a dark intensity that was compelling, but also a little wack, like Aubrey Plaza’s character on Parks and Rec.
“Every brand tells you they’re changing the world,” she said. “But has anyone thought of changing the world by actually giving women a break?” She handed me her phone and let me experience Richual for myself, scrolling through all the varieties of self-care, stumbling upon nutritionists and sober life coaches and professional cuddlers.
The platform was ready to launch, but she needed someone to be in charge of all the content, both editorial and branded, to keep users signing in on a daily basis. I’d never been an editor before, but she promised me I’d have freelancers and interns at my disposal. I wouldn’t have to write about myself—unless I wanted to. The starting salary was higher than what I was making at BuzzFeed and she was offering one point of equity in the company.
“If we grow to even a fraction of the size of Instagram or Facebook? That equity share could be worth millions someday.”
I was twenty-six years old, eating twenty-two-dollar wild mushrooms with kale polenta, thinking, I bet they don’t even eat like this in the Condé Nast cafeteria, already mentally rehearsing the so much gratitude for my work family post I would write when I gave notice at BuzzFeed.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I told Maren.
At the table next to us, a white woman with dreads was explaining to her bald lunch date why Hillary’s Wall Street connections were a bigger deal than Gary Johnson not knowing what Aleppo was. In the car, I recounted the whole scene for Adam, climaxing in an impression of her speaking to management at Whole Foods, demanding justice for collard greens, marginalized at the expense of kale. That made him laugh hard enough he hit the steering wheel like a drum.
We kept saying “anything could happen,” but secretly we were sure we were right: Hillary would win. We stayed afloat on our stupid hope.
I asked Maren for 5 percent equity. She offered 2.5 and I accepted and celebrated in my cubicle by listening to Drake and watching videos of golden retrievers on skateboards.
I swallowed the white placebos. One, two, three, four. My period usually came on three. Four at the latest. After four, you start a new pack of pink. One, two, three, four.
Still no blood.
Adam drove us across the Brooklyn Bridge and looking up at the arches though the windshield, I started to cry. “It’s so beautiful,” I said. He reached over to squeeze my bare knee.
That was the first night it really felt like fall. Adam hated air-conditioning and liked to sleep with the window open. I said I was too cold and he tucked the sheet around me tight as a straitjacket.
“Still cold.”
He rubbed his hands up and down my arms, kissed my forehead.
“Okay?”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.
“There’s something I have to tell you, too.”
“You first.”
“I said I’d go upstate for a few months,” Adam said, “to help my friend Oscar build his tiny house.”
I didn’t know how afraid I was until he said that. “That’s cool,” I said, and turned my back to him in bed.