“I just think it’s best,” Alana said, convincingly, “if all companies retired their consumption of single-use plastics.”

Damn. She got to that one first. She gesticulated as she said it, phone in her left hand, even made a show of swiveling her head to command the attention of the room. It was a savvy move, going climate change, and one I hadn’t anticipated right from the jump.

“Thanks for that insight, Alana, and we’re so excited to have you join us for the summer,” said the founder. His name was Ethan—clean-cut auburn hair, the perfect length of stubble, a mole placed so artfully on his right cheek that it was friendly instead of off-putting. He grinned at Alana.

“And next, we’ll hear from our second APM intern of the summer, Salman!”

I flashed a sweaty smile as heads turned to me. Alana’s was the slowest.

“Hi—so, name, where I’m from, where I go to school…?” I fumbled the intro. “What else?”

“Something you’re passionate about!” someone yelled out.

“Oh, yes!” I said. “So, hi everyone, I’m Salman, I’m from Fremont—just across the Bay—and I go to Duke. Studying PPE.”

I winced as I said Duke, probably visibly. I caught Alana looking down at her phone; she went to Penn.

“And a cause I’m passionate about is, yes—climate change, too, obviously—but I do a lot of work at school with refugee resettlement. And so that is a big issue for me that I care a lot about.”

People nodded along, a few murmurs of consent. It was mostly a lie—I was a member of the Duke Refugee Assistance Program, but I hadn’t been to a meeting since the fall—and either way, refugee resettlement wasn’t sexy anymore, didn’t carry the same weight it did a few years ago.

“Thanks, Salman,” Ethan said. He went for the obvious choice, like the fish and author, even though I had pronounced it correctly. “We’re so excited to have both you and Alana here at Pyp this summer. It’s going to be an amazing experience. Trust me.”

I trusted him, provided I did what I needed to do. The intro wasn’t my greatest showing, but it wasn’t fatal. The only person who probably took note was Alana, and she would be taking note of everything, of course. I just had to get used to it.

The All-Hands proceeded as what I assumed was usual. Rosy financial projections, an update on coming funding rounds, a project presentation from the UX team, an announcement about a new market Pyp had opened in (Estonia)—it all tracked. After that we were allowed to line up for our catered lunch. On any other day, Pyp served breakfast and lunch from its cafeteria on the second floor, but on All-Hands days, the company’s Office & Culture Manager corralled a massive, catered spread from a local restaurant. Today’s was Cuban fast-casual.

Although I was hungry, I wanted to not seem too eager to eat, so I hung back and leaned against a kitchen sink near the food. The floor everyone walked on was polished concrete, the ceilings all fitted with warm, unobtrusive lighting; purple plush couches with no armrests, abundant yet tastefully positioned around the office; plants adorned doorways and windows, their vines twisting and cascading down like oxygen masks in a low-pressure air cabin; employees in Uniqlo basic tees and New Balance 990s sat in front of wide, curving LG monitors. Each of the seven floors had a different theme (the seven continents), and each room on each floor had a related, quirky name (not, as I would have guessed logically, countries of the world, but instead the names of various world leaders, which honestly got into dicey territory when you walked past names like Narendra Modi and Naftali Bennett). Pyp’s office was mid-market, beneath their reputation as a hot startup, but everyone was aware of this. Once it became definitively clear (though it was already, in my opinion) that we were all on a rocketship to a trillion-dollar valuation somewhere down the line, then the investors would break ground on some lot that once housed a silicon chip giant, maybe somewhere in Santa Clara. Any earlier and it was premature.

An Asian guy in a hoodie walked out of his office. He wore clear frames, his head was shaved down to a buzzcut, and his forearms, visible from rolled-up sleeves, were frighteningly toned.

“You in line?”

“Uh, yes,” I said. “I’m Salman. Nice to meet you.”

“Gene,” he said, craning his head to see what food was on offer. “You an APM intern?”

“Yup.”

“Good luck, man,” he said. “Where’s the other one?”

I pointed out Alana across the room. She, too, had made the smart decision to not line up to eat immediately, but seemed to be in an engaged, apparently hilarious conversation with a product manager I knew to be one of her “Pyp Professors.”

Gene raised his eyebrows. “All I can say is good luck, dude.”

I eventually picked up a plate of rice, a portion of ropa vieja, plantains, and a hefty amount of side salad to appear concerned about my health. I noticed no one was really eating in the cafeteria, so I took it back to my desk, which was across from Alana, who furiously clicked through intro decks while picking through a plate of salad, plantains, and tofu. Of course—no beef. She had a consistent narrative.

*

That night the company was hosting a happy hour at an outdoor bar in the Marina. The San Francisco winds were calmer than usual, and my Hayes Valley apartment was an easy enough stroll down Webster from there.

I was subletting from two older friends of mine from high school, both software engineers at FAANG companies. Nothing revolutionary: we were Indian kids, from Fremont, who moved to San Francisco, to work in tech. The only thing more staid we could have done was move to Seattle. But when that summer began, I felt a sense of profound relief. Not at having achieved anything substantial—my work was cut out for me—but at knowing my work was, finally, cut out for me. Whatever path I had shakily set out on, I was now on solid ground, and the goalposts would not move as long as I kept marching down the field.

Pyp was a fintech startup that was, by all accounts, the hottest name in the industry. Prognosticators had deemed it the future of POS transactions as well as payment software for e-commerce, and I generally agreed. All my life, I had dreamed of getting my hands on some POS transactions. All this bluster meant for me was that a full-time job here out of college could make me rich whenever Pyp exited, possibly by the time I was 25, 26. I had no illusions about making the world a better place one transaction at a time. What I wanted was a flashy job at a sexy name. All that was standing in the way was Alana.

The company’s APM (Associate Product Manager) Intern program was already legendary in the smarmy, VC-fueled circles I trafficked in. Each year, they accepted two interns for the summer, and each year, only one was awarded a full-time return offer after graduation.

Alana and I were, ostensibly, starting on the same page. I was a POC (plus)—subcategory: Indian (minus)—Muslim (plus), straight (minus), upper middle class (minus). Alana was white (neutral), straight (minus), Jewish (plus), and seemingly rich (minus). She was casually pretty, in a preternaturally inviting way, with a sense of style that connoted a familiarity with the startup space; she wore simple white sweaters and roomy black pants, adorned herself with gold bracelets, rings, and small hoops, faintly applied lip gloss that highlighted her dimples.

I was not as fortunate. My skin was clear enough for a South Asian man, but my hairline had recently begun to alarm me. I had tried to grow it out to present the appearance of a larger quantity of hair than was necessarily still there, but the end result was just a floppy mess with a poor attempt at a fade on the sides. It was a losing battle anyway, the Brown Man’s Curse. I wore clothes you would expect someone like me to wear: slim henleys, gray straight-leg jeans that broke at the ankle, white Stan Smiths. Even if I had wanted to improve my appearance, it had been too low on my list of priorities for too long, subsumed by getting the right test scores and networking with the correct people. Only on my first day at Pyp did I realize I hadn’t invested enough time into it. I was not hot, and Alana was, and that would eventually fuck me over.

The bar was in fact a microbrewery, and the Pyp employees gathered on a reserved portion of the patio on the upper floor, underneath the shadow of the bridge. They were all more garrulous than I had imagined, even posing for photos as the sunset turned to a quick golden hour window. After being carefully carded at the bar, I ordered a double IPA and spotted Gene scrolling through his phone at a small, circular high-top.

“What are you drinking there?”

“Just a whiskey,” Gene replied. “Salman, right?”

I smiled. He looked uninterested, but I could tell he didn’t have many other options. He was an engineer; I could corner him into a conversation.

“So what are these things like?”

“Happy hours? Pretty…normal? Are you 21?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just want to figure out what the vibe is,” I said. “Like, should I be getting fucked up?”

“Definitely not,” said Gene. “You’ll see people do it. They’ll get wasted and stuff, but it’s mostly non-tech. And Ethan hates seeing it. So, if I were you, I’d sip on that beer pretty slowly.” 

“I mean, I go to Duke,” I said. “I should be OK with two or three beers.”

“Do you want the APM job?” Gene looked up from his phone, directly into my eyes. I could see the reflection of the large Ghirardelli sign behind me in his glasses. 

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Then don’t. But you’re doing the right thing for now.”

“Which is?”

“Talking to technical people.”

I took a sip and felt comforted. The fresh smell of the water finally registered, and I could appreciate where I was. Behind Gene, I spotted Alana in a group of three women, nursing a Guinness.

“Who’s she talking to?”

“Uh, Catherine,” Gene said, barely checking over his shoulder. “But it doesn’t matter who she’s talking to, who she’s schmoozing with.”

“You just said it matters.”

“I’m saying it matters who you talk to,” Gene said.

Gene’s face brightened a tad as another man placed his beer down and joined our table. I recognized him from my initial LinkedIn stalking: Karan, a young but accomplished software engineer who had left Airbnb to join Pyp. His breath already smelled fermented. He slapped me on the shoulder.

“Ah, the new APM bitch?”

“Don’t,” Gene muttered.

“I’m just kidding, man,” he said. “Plus, he gets me! We’re brown, dude! Right?”

I laughed and dapped him up. It felt like the wrong thing to do, side with this guy, but I had no choice. I was likely already tagged and sold as one of his kind by everyone else—might as well take what allies I could get on the cheap.

“Who’s the other one?” Karan said. “I missed the All-Hands.”

Gene pointed to Alana behind him.

“Her name’s Alana,” I said. “Goes to Penn. She seems nice.”

Something in Gene’s icy stare seemed to cork whatever was about to spill out of Karan’s mouth, so Karan took a sip instead. We could all imagine what he wanted to say, something about how she was cute and I needed to watch out, etc., but had all silently agreed to redirect the conversation.

“You guys think I got a shot?” I said.

“With her?” asked Karan.

“No, no,” I said. I could see through Karan’s cocksure facade immediately. He embodied the id of every Indian man, too hamstrung by social mores to be overtly horny for white girls but itching to prove his sexuality to make sure he wasn’t thought of as Asian.

“Oh, for the APM job,” Karan said. “Sure, why not? Are you any good?”

“Yeah, I’d say so,” I said, trying to sound confident.

“Well, let’s see,” Karan said. He turned his head and yelled. “Alana! Alana, right?”

He waved her over, and my heart sank. This man was a menace—why wasn’t Gene doing anything? I had implicitly put my faith in the two of them, and now they were testing me. Alana glided over and introduced herself.

“Hey guys!” she said. “This is such a fun spot. What are you all drinking?”

We answered accordingly, and it dawned on me, up close, that she simply possessed a social facility I did not.

“Salman,” she said, raising her glass to me. “Aren’t we so lucky?”

“Yeah, welcome to Pyp,” Gene said.

“Yes, exactly!” Karan exclaimed. He became animated. “We’re all so fucking lucky, right? We’re at an eventual unicorn, shares in our pocket, Ethan Kreuzberg a few tables over from us. The fucking Golden Gate Bridge. Pyp, man!”

He was picking us up like action figures and smashing his toys against each other. Alana and I exchanged glances.

“What do you guys think so far? Is this guy the worst, or what?” Gene said.

“What do you mean?” Karan laughed. “They’re ahead of the pack already. If someone came to you in, like, 2010 and said, ‘Hey, do you want an internship at Uber?’ You would have taken that shit on sight. No stipulations.”

“Uber was first to market though,” Alana replied calmly. “There’s a payments processing company on every block here.”

Gene smirked. I couldn’t figure out this move, but it seemed to grab their attention. “Whoa,” I said. “Do I need to call over Ethan?”

No one laughed. Fair.

“I’m from the Midwest, guys,” she said with a sickly sweet smile. “I haven’t drank the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid yet. I can see things with a clearer eye. Anyone want a drink?”

And with that, she fluttered away, not to the bar, but to another table. I wasn’t sure the Midwest granted anyone prophetic vision, but none of us could deny the conviction with which she claimed it.

Later that night, after the happy hour subsided without any Karan-led drunken altercations and the fog finally crept into our eco-tech fleeces, I arrived at home a little tipsy. Without thinking, I flipped open my laptop. I had my LinkedIn Premium account set to Private Viewing Mode, so I never felt any hesitation looking people up. I had trawled through her profile already, but I wanted to see if she had posted anything to inaugurate her victorious first day—and she had:

*taps mic* Is this thing on? Is anyone listening?

It’s been so long since I’ve posted anything on here, but here goes…I’m thrilled to announce today was my first day as an APM Intern at Pyp! Pyp is on the leading edge of fintech; ever since their initial debut at TechCrunch, I have dreamed of one day joining the team. I cannot express how overjoyed I am at the opportunity to take part in this prestigious program, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude for everyone who got me to this step in my career. #pyp #PypAPM #career #intern

I hadn’t particularly clocked her overjoyedness—or her overwhelmedness, for that matter—at the happy hour. But now I felt spurred to action. What was I doing here? Some second child who hadn’t even posted about how grateful he was for the opportunity to fight to the death for his future? Mouth dry, the electric surge of three double IPAs still charging my fingertips at a low voltage, I clicked ‘Share’ on her post, and added:

What she said.

But no—for real. I’m also excited to announce that, like Alana, I started today at Pyp as an APM Intern, and I could not be more excited. Humbled to join such a rocketship of a company, and can’t wait to show off all that I’m going to learn this summer.

I fell asleep in my rumpled, direct-to-consumer linens and dreamt of gold hoop earrings and Irish breweries.

*

The next day, as I sat down at my new desk with Alana nowhere to be found, I opened my laptop to a couple new Slack messages. One: Karan had started a private channel with me and Greg called #getsalmanlaid. Two: Alana propositioning me for a cordial meal.

hey! hope your first day was as great as mine 🙂 we haven’t really gotten the chance to talk yet. want to grab lunch today? no worries if not!

hey alana! yes, for sure—was meaning to ask you the same thing! poke spot around the corner at noon?

awesome! and yes 🙂 love poké

I left an emoji reaction to Karan’s introductory message in his experimental channel, and Gene supplanted the discourse with an eyeroll emoji.

After Alana and I finished an introductory session with the engineers, we walked down together to the Poké Spot, which was in fact the name of the restaurant. We supplied each other with the usual non-talk: where we were living in the city, if we had roommates, what we “got up to” on the weekends. She held her phone constantly, in her left hand, but never once looked at it for a notification. It gave the impression that she had somewhere to be yet still made you feel like she was giving you her full attention.

“I’ve always thought poké would be a good profile food,” she said. “Like, if WIRED did a profile of me, they’d say, ‘Ms. van Allsburg picked at her bowl of spicy tuna and edamame.’ You know?”

“Yeah, definitely,” I said. “You’d have to get profiled first. Cart before the horse.” She squinted her eyes at me before smiling.

“Should we get into it?” she said, cushioning the bluntness with an exaggerated laugh.

“Might as well hash it out now.”

“Maybe this will be the—”

“…the year they pick two, yeah,” she said. “Good one.”

“They never have, right?” I said. I knew this to be true, but I felt, for some reason, that I needed to come off as naive.

“I wouldn’t bank on it,” she said, picking at her bowl of spicy tuna and edamame. Her fingers were long and striking, and two of them wrapped around the fork nonchalantly. “Have you gamed it all out yet?”

“What do you mean?” I almost choked.

“Just kidding. Unless you are some kind of crazy schemer.”

I could feel her charm offensive slithering up my legs like the vines in the office. I didn’t want to bear down too hard, return the favor by participating in the bit, but now that she had broached the subject, I felt I had no choice.

“I haven’t really gotten to know Ellen or any of the other PMs yet,” I said. “Have you?”

“OK, I actually was just kidding,” she said. “I was serious about kidding. Let’s not talk about our manager. Let’s not talk about work. I feel like the inevitable pill will be easier for one of us to swallow if we’re actually friends.”

“Wouldn’t it be the opposite?” I said. “I’d rather not know how cool you are if you beat me out for the job. Then I’d have to feel like you deserve it.”

Alana laughed and placed her phone down on the table. I didn’t know how I had been roped into flirting with her, but it was probably going to happen at some point or another. The odds were against me; by a pure numbers game, I likely would not have many other one-on-one meals with an attractive white girl in my life. I could feel my initial iciness melting away. Whatever defensiveness I had put up assuming she would be fucking with me had given way to an unscrupulous abandon. I liked the idea of a human connection.

*

Back at the office, I felt full when we sat back down opposite each other (not how they say you’ll feel after a supposedly “ideal work lunch” like poké). I pretended to do work for a bit (I hadn’t been assigned any yet), before seeing a notification from Karan. I took a breath—it wasn’t my best look to be friends with the lecherous Indian guy so immediately. But it was better than nothing. He had sent a message in #getsalmanlaid.

yo @SalmanR…you guys get lunch?

yeah, we did! just at this place around the corner, it was nice.

tell me why she kind of looks like Lily James tho…

who’s lily james? I had no idea.

look her up bitch

I quickly searched up ‘lily james.’ She was hot, too, but I didn’t fully agree. I copied and pasted the first link I could find.

you’re telling me she looks like this girl? https://www.wikifeet.com/Lily_James

I smirked for a second, appreciating my quick ingratiation into Slack banter, before I realized what link I had sent. And it was only after I realized what link I had sent, because the image had previewed in Slack, that I realized I had sent it in the company’s #general channel.

I scrambled to click delete, but in my fervor I accidentally unplugged my laptop from the HDMI adapter that was connecting it to the external monitor. The screen flashed black for a second, and then when it reappeared, it was open to a different desktop. Then I had to swipe a few swipes left to get back to Slack. I clicked the three dots next to the message, hoping to find a “Delete Slack” cue, but there wasn’t—the company was devoted to radical transparency, and so instead of deleting a Slack, you could only edit it. So then I clicked “Edit Slack,” and as I began to select the full text of the message to delete it, I accidentally clicked the link. The homepage of Lily James’s WikiFeet profile popped up, which I furiously closed—I didn’t want that to exist in my browser history on my work laptop, though, in hindsight, that was the least of my problems at that specific moment. I finally selected the text, and as is custom when you need to delete a Slack but can only edit it, I pressed backspace and typed in a period. Before I could click “Complete,” I heard Alana’s voice. It sounded far away, yet the distance between the two sides of our desk had never seemed so intimate.

“Dude,” she said, slightly laughing, slightly incredulous, “what did you just send in Slack?”

“Sorry,” I stuttered. “Just—I just, it was something for a friend. An inside joke for a friend. I meant to text it.”

“Who looks like Lily James?” she said, looking up at me. She began to laugh, genuinely, and then her face hardened. The truth set in, into her eyebrows mainly, and the kicker was when she clicked the link and I saw her eyes dart to an open window, presumably the page for Lily James’s WikiFeet.

Alana closed her laptop, her face rendering more mild disgust than hurt, and looked away. Then she walked away, and we never spoke again. I edited the Slack message to a period, and scrubbed my browser history of my most recently visited site, which was Lily James’s WikiFeet page.

*

I wasn’t fired or anything, but the three of us—me, Karan, and Gene—had to speak to HR later that day. We were reprimanded, asked to apologize (Alana never responded to my email), and then I finished out the internship on a different floor (South America) at a different desk (outside of “Pedro Castillo”). I didn’t hear back about a return offer, but I never even attempted. The news of my embarrassment did not spread very far, at least not to a reputationally damaging level, and so I was able to secure a safe, well-paying job at Lyft out of college, where I stayed for three years, and then eventually moved to a higher-paying job at Uber and a more expensive one-bedroom in the Lower Haight, where I stayed for much longer. I went on dates here and there, then entertained a serious eight-month relationship with a Pakistani girl from Duke named Zainab I had reconnected with, but that sputtered out. She suffered from panic attacks, and I discovered my supposed progressive bona fides dried up once I reached the point of “dating someone with severe anxiety,” much less being around them. Her panic attacks, she told me, were infrequent at first, but became more frequent as we kept dating. We ossified into something like a routine: she would get on her hands and knees on the bed and as she tried to unlabor her breathing, I would rub her back with one hand and DoorDash pad see ew for us with my other. Eventually, my forearms hurt, so the sputtering out took the form of an unceremonious, boring breakup. But a few months later, I had struck out on multiple Bumble dates—which I attributed to the overpopulation of Indian men in San Francisco who looked, spoke, and dressed like me—so I asked Zainab to become my girlfriend, officially, and maybe move in with me? I calculated that decent, repeated trips to third base—a half-hearted blowjob here, a roll-up-my-sleeves-and-just–get-in-there session of eating her out there—were better than my other options (none), and if I had to block out time to deal with the panic attacks, then so be it. I convinced my parents that dating a Muslim girl was enough of a trade-off that I could move in with her, pre-marriage, because what their eventual acquittal boiled down to was an acceptance that my job carried enough cultural cachet. They didn’t know that my promotion path was more or less topped out at both companies, that I was, in the end, a spectacularly disposable employee, and that while my salary was more than most four-person families made in five years in the rural South, it would never be more than that. But that was the beauty of the cultural barrier—the stalled engine of my career was lost in translation. All they saw was consistency and success.

One day, Zainab, who still harbored gilded dreams of becoming a high-powered female C-Suite executive, said she had gotten us tickets to a talk at a networking event nearby. My social life had long since cratered, so I obliged and met her at the venue after work. I no longer had the muscle to engage in conversation about emerging leaders in various hot spaces, partly because I didn’t have the muscle any more, and mostly because it had been made clear to me, repeatedly, that I was not good at it. Instead, I found that the open bar in the reception hall had draft beers, so I downed as many free pints of Guinness as I could stomach.

The large auditorium was only half-filled (it was a Wednesday at 6 p.m.), but Zainab had mentioned that the keynote speaker was actually someone she wanted to see; I was surprised at the turnout. I glanced at the pamphlet they had left on each of our seats. On the cover, the featured guest was Alana van Allsburg.

I had kept up with Alana’s life, of course. She eventually deleted LinkedIn (after I checked and saw that, yes, she had secured the full-time offer), but it didn’t make a difference: her career had taken off so fast that I could follow her trajectory in news articles and press releases instead. She had been promoted, repeatedly, until her title began with Chief, and Pyp was now public, its shares trading at $250. The rumors were swirling that the Instacart CEO was stepping down and Alana was being courted as the potential successor; if the gossip had trickled this low, down to me in this sticky auditorium, that meant it might as well be fact.

It had been a while since she had last careened across my mind, but I did think about her. From time to time, I fell into a familiar spiral: had what I’d accidentally done really been so bad? But then, isn’t the mere fact of my continued employment proof in itself that it wasn’t? In that case, why did it weigh so heavily? Could I apologize to her—and more importantly, did I need to? What would my life have been like had I not sent out a link to Lily James’ WikiFeet profile, thus (wrongfully!) implicating myself as 1) a foot fetish guy who had no qualms about being horny at work and 2) what everyone assumed I was, a Karan, an Indian guy so sure of his intelligence that he had no care for his moral scruples? Would I have gotten the job, eventually gotten her job, become the CEO of Instacart? Would Alana and I have gotten together?

But at the moment, I felt empathetic—remorseful, even, now that I had seen her in person after all these years, and I could appreciate that maybe she, too, was a victim in all of this. Perhaps I would find her after the talk, and I would safely touch her shoulder and reintroduce myself, apologize for whoever she thought I was.

Eventually, she graced the stage. She wore a long brown coat, a white turtleneck sweater underneath, Rachel Comey pants. Her hair had become straighter, her face more angular, her eyebrows more severe. I laughed to myself as she sat down and soft smiled to the crowd, phone in hand.

“What?” Zainab whispered.

“Nothing,” I said.

The moderator introduced Alana and thanked everyone for attending. She blazed through a few introductory bullet points, then began the questioning in earnest.

“You know, these days, I think it’s commonplace to jump from company to company and move up the ladder that way. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started here? I think it’s a pretty rare and fascinating journey.”

“Yes, of course,” Alana said. “I actually, before my senior year at Penn, did the infamous Pyp APM program. Which we’ve now shuttered, of course. But back then I was just psyched to even be there.”

I didn’t know they had shuttered the internship—likely the result of becoming more “worker-friendly” post-IPO—but in my recollection she was overjoyed and overwhelmed.

“Did you beat out another intern for the job? That’s what the whole thing was, right?”

Alana took a beat, looked up into the air. “Actually, I remember my year, I think I was the only intern. I got lucky.”

I dropped the pamphlet, which slid down into the seat in front of me. I stuck my face down and reached underneath, my right cheek squished against the back of the chair. I eventually located it with my fingers and came back up huffing. Zainab shot me a look.

“You know, I went on a date with her once,” I whispered.

“What?” Zainab said. “The moderator?”

“No, Alana van Allsburg. Right after college. It was on Tinder.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope. We got poké. She was fine, just didn’t work out.”

Zainab studied me. “You’ve never told me that. That can’t be true.”

“Believe what you want.”

Zainab got up and walked down the aisle, presumably to the bathroom. I sunk back into my chair and pulled out a piece of gum and chewed on it.

After ten inane Q’s and ten insufferable A’s, there was, as predicted, a milling about. I stepped out into the light and found Zainab waiting for me by a table. She looked fine, and I motioned that we should get out of here.

“What’d you think?” I asked.

“Very funny,” she said. “Let’s wait until she comes out. I want to say hi.”

“Wait,” I stopped her. “What?”

Zainab stalked across the room to where Alana emerged from a side door. She beckoned for me to follow.

“Zainab, wait, no—I don’t—”

“Come on!”

I steeled myself and slowly followed her over. I surveyed the room to see if the open bar was still on offer, to no avail.

Zainab was already two or three introductory lines deep with Alana by the time I sulked over. She was breathlessly falling over herself, telling her she was an inspiration. I felt a visceral disgust, an embarrassment on behalf of our people.

“And I think you might know my boyfriend?” Zainab grabbed my arm.

Alana looked at me. It was the first time I had seen her face up close since my fingers were fumbling to type a period on my keyboard. She could not place me for what felt like an eternity, and then it sunk in. She raised her phone hand to her head, scratched an itch, and laughed. I could not smile or make a single movement, could only clench my jaw. The gold hoops dangled, point-of-sale transactions, Lily James’ feet, fog creeping under the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, a single-use plastic bottle of soap. Her laugh was nice, at first, and then it turned sour. She laughed for longer than I expected her to, longer than I wanted her to, and then she turned away. She greeted the next person in line.

When we got home, Zainab had a panic attack. I rubbed her back with a limp wrist. I wasn’t even listening to her breaths. I could only hear a cruel laugh from beyond. On my phone, after I had placed an order for food, I pulled up my Gmail account and opened a new draft. I typed in ‘karan1226@gmail.com.’ In the subject line,

Guess who I just ran into lol