It's brutal-and brilliant.' - Zadie Smith 'A taut, sharp, funny book about being young now. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.'A book of pure fineness, exceptional.' - Diana Evans, Guardian I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. How it had only been five months since her death and my father was already seeing someone. How I kept painting this moment and found no format suitable. He told me that he was in debt and that he and his brother were no longer speaking and there was something so easy about his immediate familiarity that I told him how my mother died. The first day we met, he was smoking a cigarette on the DDR machine outside the shuttered movie theater.
Mixed-race, a riotous Punnett square of dominant Korean and Nigerian genes, so ethnically ambiguous that under different kinds of light he appeared to be different men. He was the seventh black person I’d met in Latham. The man who owned the gun shop, Clay, a metalhead who was pathological in the maintenance of his teeth.
So the story of the cell that once divided inside me and its subsequent obliteration is also the story of the first man who saw me. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen. I was not popular and I was not unpopular. During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice. They were good to me, inclined to bring back some creamed spinach and runny macaroni, which I ate by a defunct Key Bank whose ATMs were filled with honeycomb. That I was not invited to these lunches felt more like a kindness than a slight. During lunchtime, I manned the store alone, and the two other associates suspended their concerns about my awkwardness with customers to go have lunch at Boston Market. I was a miserable sales associate, prone to confessional spirals during my attempts to move the store loyalty card, but an asset as long as I did enough work to afford the veteran associates more time to socialize. A CVS that kept the animal crackers next to the douches, a Deb with five-dollar packs of high-waisted panties, a gun shop, and my store, a scrappy little boutique for the professional woman. There were only four stores open in the mall. Eighteen hours a week smoothing chinos and shadowing aggressive Quebecois customers who came to upstate New York to exploit our low-priced bids to stay in business. At the time, I worked retail at a dying mall. There was a brief moment when I considered the pregnancy, when I tried to halve a grain of sand and accommodate its ambition to yield a pair of lungs. I got the abortion in my junior year of high school.
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