An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(35)

“Andy. So this was Andy’s idea.” It wasn’t a question.

“Don’t be an idiot, Andy couldn’t make me change a light bulb. It was my idea, front to back.”

“April.” She sat down on my bed, and then stayed quiet for longer than I was comfortable with. “What do you think this is really about?”

She said it like she knew the answer better than I did. Which she did, but that didn’t make me hate it any less.

“No one gets a chance like this, Maya! Yeah, there’s money, but it’s not just that. I think I can do some good here.”

I don’t know why I’ve never felt like a totally worthwhile person. I just haven’t. It’s what drives me. It’s who I am. Maya knew that better than I did. She knew that bringing it up wasn’t going to help, so she didn’t . . . yet.

“And you think you can pull this off alone.” Again, not a question.

So I told her about Putnam and Mr. Skampt and that I had an assistant already who was helping with my emails. I didn’t tell her too much about Robin because, if there was someone who was going to win my pants, it was more likely to be him than Miranda. I had an agent and maybe a book deal coming, and Andy and I had already built a brand and a launch strategy.

“Did you think at all that it would be a good idea to talk to me about this?”

And here’s the moment when a sane person could have healed the situation. It would be very easy to separate all of this. It would probably have been a good idea to put some space between the “We Are Not Alone in the Universe” talk and the “I Want to Grab Power and Do Good with It” talk and the “I Am Terrified of Our Relationship” talk. But I wanted to turn the fight into a breakup—the idea of “us” couldn’t compete with the idea of “April May”—so I burned it all down.

“What does it have to do with you?” I said.

She was legitimately shocked. She stood up and then froze, still in her pajamas, with her jaw literally hanging open for a few seconds before she understood exactly what had happened. “Oh fuck you, April.”

“What? We’re roommates, we’re friends. I texted you that first night because I wanted some advice, but then we were all caught up in it so I figured I’d just tell you when I got back.”

“Roommates. Right.”

“Speaking of”—I meant to say this matter-of-factly, but it came out strained and quavering—“I was thinking, for the sake of the story, it would make sense for me to move to Manhattan. Robin found an apartment that has a window that literally looks directly down on New York Carl.”

“Robin?”

“My assistant.”

“Found you a new place.” It came out like fire. “And I assume it’s one bedroom?”

“We’re just roommates, Maya.”

There was a bit of silence then. Her emotions—oh, they were everywhere. Anger, pain, disappointment. Disappointment in me, specifically, not in the situation. I got the impression that she was unsurprised that I had turned out to be exactly what she expected me to be.

All of those strong emotions dissolved into sadness then. Maya was clearly starting to cry as she turned away from me and walked toward her bedroom door. She got there and looked back, her eyes puffy already, and said, softly, “Oh god, April, you really have no idea, do you? You have no idea what this is really about? You’re just trying to find an audience who will love you and I’m not enough. Well, this isn’t going to be enough either, but I guess you’ll just have to go and find out.” That was the first time she said “I love you” to me. Or, at least, the closest she’d gotten. She’d known that if she said it I’d freak out.

“I weigh a hundred twenty pounds, and I’m the scariest thing you’ve ever seen. Call me when you grow a pair.” She closed the door behind her.

Thinking back, the only emotion I can remember having as that door closed was relief. I reached for my phone and checked Twitter.

God, I was an idiot.





CHAPTER NINE


Most attributes a person has are, at least in some way, defined by them. They are good at soccer, they are funny, they know a lot about the history of Rome, they have blond hair. Some of these things are things that person worked for, some are just things that they just happen to have, but they are all characteristics of the person.

Fame is not this way.

Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you’re a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you.

That’s what fame is like.

You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes say that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don’t get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I’m attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can see my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like.