The Futures(27)

“Appetizer. They were good. We went to Ikea, and I talked them into buying me a nightstand, so success.”

“Had they seen your apartment yet? Did they like it?”

“They did.” Abby paused, her hand full of brightly colored cereal, and tilted her head in contemplation. “They did, except my mom got sort of teary. I don’t know. I think it was too real for her. Seeing me all grown up and everything.”

I threw a pillow at her. “You are not that grown up.”

“Well, my mom cries at everything.” It was true. I’d taken a picture of them at graduation, Abby and her parents, and her mother had been sobbing before I even turned on the camera. She was sentimental. Their other four kids were already grown and scattered, with careers and marriages and children and at least one divorce. But Abby had always been the baby, and suddenly she was gone, too.

After dinner, when we had devoured the sesame beef and kung pao shrimp and cold noodles, I felt myself sliding into a familiar jelly-limbed mellowness. Our thoughts were moving slowly enough for us to observe them, like glassy orbs in the air.

“Do you know that feeling?” Abby said, her voice thin and distant. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and don’t recognize the room you’re in? Like, the shadows on the ceiling are all weird, and you’re like, where the fuck am I?”

“Yeah.”

“I hate it.”

She was lying on her back, arms and legs splayed out, gazing up at the ceiling. She was quieter than usual. I nudged her with my foot.

“You okay?”

She rolled to her side and curled into a fetal ball. “It was sort of weird. When my parents visited. I couldn’t figure it out. And then my mom told me, on their last night, when the two of us went to get ice cream after dinner. It’s my dad’s job.”

When I got high, my emotions always felt slow to catch up, thickened like honey left in the fridge. “What happened?” I said, belatedly registering the heaviness in Abby’s voice.

“Nothing. Nothing yet. But you know, he works at a bank. This year has been brutal. He thinks he’s going to be laid off soon. Which explains—well, like, every time we went out to eat, he’d sigh and roll his eyes at the prices. He and my mom got in a big fight, I guess, and he told her she needs to go back to work. But I mean, who the hell is going to hire her right now?”

“Oh, Abby. That sucks.”

“The whole thing is a disaster.”

A few days earlier, the president had signed a massive bailout into law. A few weeks before that, the Republican nominee had suspended his campaign, announcing that he had to return to Washington to address the crisis. I followed the developments with a shallow curiosity, but lately I’d been caring less about all of it. Maybe this was going to be the headline for the era when the historians had their turn. Maybe the market crash would emerge as the defining moment of the year, of the decade. But I’d been thinking about other things. I’d been thinking about Adam, the sound of his voice, the color of his eyes. Talk of the NASDAQ and the Dow was so abstract. The world still looked the same. The sun still set and rose; the moon still pulled the tides in patterns around the globe. My mind was aloft, scattered among the stars. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to snap out of it. Other people were hurting, even if I wasn’t.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“At least I’m off the dole, right? Last kid. No more tuition.” She tried to smile. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe he won’t even lose his job. Maybe everything will be fine. But it’s so weird. These are my parents. It’s weird to have to worry about them. Aren’t they supposed to worry about me?”

I lowered myself to the floor and curled up behind Abby, a big spoon to her little one. It was rare for me in our friendship, offering comfort to her. To Abby, who always knew what to do. “You want to sleep over?” she said. I had started spending the night occasionally, when the quiet of my apartment was too much. I texted Evan to tell him. We lay in her bed, talking until late, when we finally drifted off.

The next morning, we went to the diner on the corner for breakfast. I emptied the tiny plastic cup of cream into my coffee, watching it swirl into spidery threads. I still felt a little high. Abby scrolled through her phone while eating a piece of buttered toast. She had cheered up considerably.

“Guess who texted me last night,” she said. “Jake Fletcher.”

“You guys know each other?”

“Remember? You introduced us at his party. I’ve bumped into him a few times. He asked for my number last week.”

“Wow. Small world.”

“I think I’m gonna do it. I have gone way too long without any action.”

I laughed weakly, signaling to the waiter for more coffee. Abby looked at me.

“Wait. Wait—what is it? Do you guys have a history?”

“No! God, no. I’ve just known him since forever. I still think of him as, like, the bratty five-year-old he once was. That’s all.”

She raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure whether she bought it. But that was the nice thing about us. Abby knew the difference between big lies and little ones. She might guess at what I was leaving out: a game of spin the bottle in middle school, or maybe a tipsy kiss in the backyard during one of his parents’ big parties in Boston. A stupid kid thing that wasn’t even worth the energy to mention. Something you could skate past because you were so certain it was meaningless, that it had nothing to do with what you were actually talking about.