Yolk(11)

Back then, I wasn’t ever sure my infatuation with Patrick made sense. School was rife with cues as to who to desire. The jocks were kings. You could see it in how adults behaved. The way teachers nodded along to their jokes, lips drawn back, readied for the laugh. Holland Hint was objectively attractive. The bathroom walls told me so. There was no controversy in gold hair and green eyes at six foot one.

At church, Patrick was a feeling. A giddy, swirly bubbling that flushed my face, but I couldn’t talk to June—or anyone from school—about some boy from church.

I zoom in. Patrick’s cheekbones seem swiped with highlighter. Especially with his mouth hung open. He’s wearing a somewhat clingy Rick Owens shirt. It’s either Rick Owens or very, very old.

I click on his name.

@40_7264N_73_9818W.

We get it—you do art.

The tagged pictures set a different tone from his feed. There’s even a photo of him at Léon. We could have been at the restaurant at the same time, except that the caption reads that he was at an impromptu album release for a reclusive singer-songwriter. A party I would never have gotten into. Jeremy wouldn’t have either for that matter. I take some satisfaction in that.

I feel foolish now that I’d been right all along. About Patrick’s hotness. Less that I’d squandered the chance to stake my claim but more how clear it is that he’d been out of my league then, too.

Patrick’s account has more than fifty-three thousand followers. Way more than anyone I personally know. In fact, Jonah Hill follows him, which seems significant to me. There are only two selfies. One in glorious morning light, where his face is slightly puffy. Another with a black eye.

Most of the images are mood boards. Typefaces. Buildings. Album artwork. Some very thin Asian girls with explosively big lips and freckles dressed in designer goth layers. I wonder if he’s dated any of the women. Probably. He’s either an art director or a photographer.

I had no idea he moved to New York. Not that he’d have told me. His family left Texas forever ago, so the church network wouldn’t have dispatched the all-points bulletin either.

I go to his saved stories. The one called shoots.

I open on a beautiful white loft with a curved wall on one side, which gives a Stanley Kubrick spaceship effect. There are windows all along the back, with fifteen people standing around.

They watch a screen instead of the model in front of them. A model with dark hair in a blue-and-white dress who lifts her arms and waves them, the sleeves billowing dramatically.

She does this over and over and I’m transfixed. The delicate, translucent fabric refracts the light. The dress is familiar to me. The woman laughs, throwing her head back, her wavy hair coiling around her pale cheeks.

I recognize her too. She’s not a model but an actor. Korean, but Korean American. She’d won an award from an indie film about CEOs who moonlit as contract killers. And as she gathers the full skirt around her, lifting its hem, I realize she’s wearing a variation on a hanbok. Almost exactly the gown my mother was married in, the one in her wedding photo. The one that still hangs in her closet. It’s startling to see someone who resembles me, us, in such a setting. Commanding attention without being ninety pounds, without backing from a girl group.

I go to my own grid. See if there’s a photo of me at Léon. There isn’t and I’m disappointed. I start deleting. It’s mostly pictures of magazine covers from the nineties, dressing-room selfies of clothes I can’t afford, and close-ups of my hands and mouth.

I tidy it up. So it’s more aesthetic.

I find that the more I hide, the more presentable I am to the world.

Then I follow him. He probably won’t even notice.

I’m filled with the urge to tell June. But the version of June I want is the one I sat with at church. The one I grew up with. The one from long ago, before all the screaming fights in high school, and not this one at all.

June.

I imagine her from last night. I dislike that every unkind thought will now be tempered by this other feeling. Pity. I hate it.

I glance up just as I’m about to miss my stop. It’s by some kind of magic that I always manage to step out at Twenty-Third. My stomach gurgles from the coffee, but I need the caffeine. I promise myself not to eat today.

I hustle into my entrepreneurship lecture. Total adjunct professor struggle. The teacher’s a youngish, sandy-haired dude in glasses and a blue shirt. He seems the type of guy who’d rather host a podcast than have anything to do with us.

Last year, there’s no way I would have made it to class. If I stopped partying even for a moment, I couldn’t get out of bed. It was fascinating that if the feeling of impending doom and dread made my limbs leaden and my head cottony, no one ever found out. You could get away with anything if no one cared enough to check. Far away from my family for the first time, I learned that everything was profoundly optional. So I opted out. I couldn’t not.

Podcast Guy drones on about Recent Business History—youngest self-made billionaires, Harvard grads that go onto entrepreneurial greatness, upwardly mobile white women who seed their businesses from well-connected families, and the industry disruptors and influencers whose parents happen to be celebrities or early employees at tech monoliths. As if any of these lessons apply to me. As if any of these relics aren’t ancient. As if any of it is ever to be repeated in my lifetime.

He insists the lesson is that we’re supposed to be able to isolate unmet needs in the marketplace, but I can tell he doesn’t believe his own bloodless recitation. He may as well be crossing his fingers behind his back. Or have a massive hashtag above his head that reads: ad.