Big Summer(92)

“Those people didn’t know your mother,” I said. “You know that, right? They weren’t going after her. And I’m sure they weren’t thinking about her child ever seeing what they said. They were going after the idea of her, or whatever that meant to them. Single mothers, or their ex-wives, or some girl who turned them down when they asked her out.”

“I know,” he said, still looking glum.

“And it’s not all bad.” I tried to remember my talking points, the ones I’d used on my own skeptical parents. “Social media means we’re listening to different voices. It’s not just the same old powerful white men who all went to the same places for college. It means everyone gets a soapbox. And if you’ve got something important to say, you can get people to listen.”

He didn’t look at me. “How does it feel,” he asked, ”when people go after you?”

For a minute, I didn’t speak as I wondered how deep of a dive into my social media he might have done over the last few days, how much he’d seen. “Honestly, I try not to look.” I gave what I hoped was a casual shrug. “I tell myself that a click is a click is a click, and even the people showing up to be horrible are engaging with my content.”

“Tough way to live.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But it’s not all bad—”

“I know it’s not.”

“I have a community.”

“I understand.” He looked sincere, but he sounded the tiniest bit patronizing. “It’s just—in my opinion—the Internet is a place where people end up making themselves feel awful, or hurting other people. And everyone pretends.” His throat jerked as he swallowed. “Everyone tries to put the best versions of themselves across. To fake it. And when they’re not doing that, they’re sitting behind their screens, passing judgment and feeling superior to whoever they think’s being sexist or racist that day.”

I swallowed, wondering about Nick’s politics. If he was online, would he be one of those guys with an American flag in his profile and an insistence that there were only two genders underneath it? “You’re not entirely wrong. Yes, people pretend, and yes, they dogpile, and they edit the bad parts out of their lives. But that isn’t the only thing that happens. Young people—young women—get to tell their stories and find an audience.” Even as I spoke, I was thinking about the girl who’d asked, How can I be brave like you?, and how, so far, the best answer I’d come up with was telling her to fake it; how I’d told Ian Snitzer that social media was a place where everyone could pretend. I squeezed my hands together, thinking that if Nick and I somehow ended up together, I’d need to find a new line of work.

“I looked at your Instagram, on the bus ride down,” he said.

This did not fill my heart with joy. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “You did?”

I braced myself for a discussion of my bar-fight video, or a critique of the posts that were basically ads—my spon-con—but Nick surprised me.

“I liked what you wrote about going out to eat with your dad. What’d you call it? Dinner on Sundays?”

“Sunday suppers!” I said, feeling marginally less miserable. For the past year, every Sunday, I’d posted about a place my father and I had visited together, either in the past or that very day. I’d write about what we’d eaten, or the route we’d taken, or some bit of history or current event from the region that had provided the meal.

“Did you and your dad really go out every Sunday?”

“We did, when I was a kid. Now it’s more like once or twice a month.” I thought about our meals: the fragrant exhalation of steam from a soft-bodied pork bun; the way my lips had tingled from the bird’s-eye chilis in the Thai dishes that had left my father and I both gasping. The sweet crunch of sugar on my favorite brioche, the subtle heat of Jamaican patties with their flaky bright-gold pastry crusts.

“Do you like to cook?”

“I do. Some people in New York don’t. They say it’s a waste, when you can just order any food you can ever dream of, and it’s probably better than what you could make at home, but I like cooking. My father loves to cook. He’s got a huge cookbook collection. You’ll see.”

Nick was easy to talk to. Easy to be with. The attraction that I’d felt on the Cape was still there. Of course, now it was tempered by the knowledge that he despised what I did online, mixed with a hint of terror that he might have killed my friend. I wondered why he was really here, in New York City, how much of it had to do with the father he couldn’t remember meeting and the half sister he’d never known at all, and how much had to do with me.

“What are your aunt and uncle like?” I asked him.

“They’re fine,” he said with his eyes on the ground.

“Fine?” I teased. “That’s all I get?”

He tugged at the knot of his tie. “Let’s see. My uncle owned an auto-body shop. My aunt was a claims adjustor at an insurance company. They’re both retired now. And they are fine. You know. Good people.” He was quiet again. Then he asked, “How well do you know him? Robert Cavanaugh,” he added, in case I was confused about the “him” in question.

“Hardly at all,” I said. “When I was in high school I spent a lot of time at Drue’s house. But he was never there. He traveled.”