Trade Me (8 page)

“Is it okay if I bring my girlfriend?”

He blinks. His eyebrows rise, and then he turns his head back to me. “Really?”

He’s not surprised that I’m seeing someone. I’ve told him about women before. I just haven’t been cruel enough to introduce any of them to Dad since I took Sheila to the prom in high school.

“Really.” I cross the fingers of my other hand behind my back.

“Sure,” he says after a pause that’s far too long to be natural.

“Her name’s Tina.”

I hear him tapping a keyboard on his end.

“Tina Chen,” I tell him.

“Fine. Bring her.” He doesn’t say he’s looking forward to meeting her.

“Dad, don’t be a dick to Tina.”

He looks up and gives me a little smile. “Give me credit, Blake. I’m not always a dick.”

This is not a promise, and we both know it. There’s a reason I’ve never introduced anyone to him since Sheila, and it wasn’t because he was too
nice.

I shake my head. “Fine,” I tell him. “Be that way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You’re actually going to like her.”

Dad snorts in disbelief. “Really.” It’s not a question.

That is the one thing I am sure about. “Really.”

TINA

My shift in the library after my lunch with Blake is something of a disaster. I’m shaky—so shaky that I don’t hear my boss talking to me, so shaky that I run a cart of books into a pillar. It’s so bad that my boss finally asks me what’s wrong.

I can’t tell her. After a moment of fumbling, the best I can come up with is this: “I got an offer for an internship.”

“That’s great!” She smiles at me.

It isn’t. “If I do it,” I tell her, “I have to start immediately. And that means…”

We both know what it means. She looks at me with a much less friendly expression on her face.

I’ve been working in the library since I was a freshman. It’s familiar. It’s
safe.
My boss likes me, and if I leave her in the lurch mid-semester it will mean not only that I have no job, but that I have no
references.

“I see,” she says with a sigh of surrender. “That’s less great for me. Good for you.” She doesn’t quite sound like she means it.

When I get the books back in place, I text Maria.
Will you still be on campus when I’m done or back home? I need to talk.

Her response comes moments later.
I’ll meet you here.

She comes and finds me at five.

Maria and I don’t look anything alike. I’m short, and I only ever wear sneakers. She’s a hair over six feet tall and she wears heels all the time, except when she goes to the gym. She has glistening hair, cinnamon with frosted highlights and a wave. She always looks put together. She never gets carded.

My
mom
still gets carded, and she’s in her forties.

“Hey,” she says as she approaches my desk at work. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything is weird,” I tell her. “Really, really weird.”

“Let’s blow this joint.”

My boss gives me the okay to go, and I grab my bag. There’s a bit of wind blowing inland when we step out into the last remaining sun. I pull my coat around me.

“So,” I finally say. “How would you feel about moving?”

She looks over at me and her face falls. “No,” she says in a flat voice. “No, Tina. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how bad things are back home. But we can’t go much farther down, you know?”

My hands are shaking. She takes one and we start walking aimlessly.

This is the first year that Maria and I have roomed together. Her sophomore roommates were a disaster: the kind of disaster that involved yelling matches, a multitude of undone dishes left in unsanitary places, and an illicit mealworm farm. She agreed to move in with me, because—in her words—a shitty apartment was better than a shitty roommate. Maria has enough screwed-up drama with her family. She doesn’t need it anywhere else in her life.

She’s never said anything about moving out—yet—but it was my budget that determined where we lived, not hers. I’ve always suspected that deep down, she regrets living with me. Now I’m sure of it.

“I know how you feel about taking help,” she says, “but you are
not
going home and you are
not
getting evicted mid-semester. We can make this happen.”

Before I can explain, she turns to me. “Here,” she says. “I got you a present.”

She rummages around in her shoulder bag and takes something out. White flashes at me; thin plastic glints in the dying sunlight. I take it from her.

It’s my favorite sweater. Wrapped up in plastic printed with the name of some local dry cleaner. I turn it over, examining it. The sleeve is pristine, clean and white. Just like new.

It probably cost her five times as much to clean the sweater as it did for me to buy it in the first place.

“I knew it would come out,” she says. “You just needed to bring it to the right place.”

For some reason, that makes what I have to say seem so much worse. She knew what my sweater meant to me, how much hope I let myself invest in it. And… And the gesture is so sweet, but it’s just not the same. It has never been about having a clean sweater. It was about believing that when I wore it, I couldn’t get dirty.

I’m better off without that illusion anyway.

But she doesn’t need to hear that, not when she went to all that trouble. “Thank you,” I tell her, and I give her a hug.

“See?” she says. “Whatever’s happening, whatever is going on—it can’t be that bad. We can make it work. So tell me, Tina. Why do you think we have to move?”

“I didn’t mean that we need to go somewhere worse,” I tell her. “I was thinking somewhere better.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Better in what way?”

I don’t actually know. I have no idea where Blake lives. Even thinking about this, even taking as tiny a step as telling Maria, scares me.

“Somewhere the heat works?” I venture.

She turns to me. And then, very slowly, she smiles. “Oh my God,” she says. “This is not a my-world-is-ending kind of thing, is it? This is a I’m-so-happy-I-can’t-express-myself kind of thing.”

I don’t answer.

“You’re the only person I know where I can’t tell the difference. What happened? Did your dad find a full time job?”

“Not that.”

“Sudden inheritance from an unknown relative?”

“Weirdly,” I tell her, “some random stranger mistook me for one of the other many Tina Chens in the world.”

“
Really?”

“No, not really.” I let out a breath. “In a way, it’s like I got…an internship. An internship that pays really well.”

“That’s awesome! I swear to God, I will break our lease in one hot minute.”

Yep. Definitely not happy with our digs.

“Luckily,” I say, “we don’t even have to do that. This internship comes with a built-in subletter.”

She pauses. “Okay, what kind of internship does
that?”

“The most fucked-up internship in the history of all internships.” I let out a breath and I tell her everything.

In a lot of ways, Maria and I are nothing alike. But we’ve been friends ever since our freshman floor arranged a girls’ night out.

I’d made my excuses because I didn’t have the money or the clothes to come along. No fake ID, no cash for the cover charge, nothing for drinks or a cab after. My roommate used the word
broke
as a synonym for
I have to stop shopping or my dad will get mad at me.
My version of broke meant I hadn’t been able to buy cough syrup two weeks before. I’d used the lingering sniffle as my excuse to stay behind.

I’d waved everyone off, told them to have fun, and expected to be the only girl around that night. But after the floor had grown quiet, I’d run into Maria in the bathroom.

She was dressed in a gold sequin shift dress that ended halfway up her long, toned thighs. Her eyes were smoky-dark, a triumph of makeup artistry that belonged in an ad in some magazine redolent of perfume samples. A black alligator clutch sat on the counter.

She looked ready to take the world by storm. Instead, she was standing in front of the mirror, yanking off false eyelashes.

She froze when I came in, her eyes meeting mine briefly in the mirror.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She looked away. “Fine.”

“Are you sure? You’re not with everyone else for girls’ night out. Are you sick?”

Her lips thinned. “According to Tammy, I can’t come because I’m not a girl.”

She yanked off the other eyelash. She didn’t meet my eyes again, but I could see her shoulder blades tense. The silence lengthened, and finally, I said the first thing that came to mind. Which, thankfully, was: “Fuck that.”

Maria paused. Our reflections locked eyes. Slowly, she smiled. “I know, right? What’s your deal?”

And maybe it’s because I wanted to like her. But for the first time that night, I told someone the truth. By the end of the evening, we’d bonded over the fact that we were the only ones around, over the fact that we were part of the vast sisterhood of women who can’t be googled because we have names so common that even the most dogged searcher would have to sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of results before finding us. We’d made a hundred little connections.

She’s the only person in the world I can imagine walking with, telling this tale to. She listens. She believes me. She doesn’t say that I’m full of shit when I say that Blake says he met me in September, even though I don’t remember him.

“What do you think is going on with him?” she asks when I’ve finished my explanation.

“I don’t know. Honestly, though, have you heard anything about Adam Reynolds that makes you think he’d be a
good
father? Maybe this is Blake’s way of chewing his leg off to escape.”

Maria bites her lip. “I don’t know. Have you seen them together?”

The sun is almost gone and I rub my hands together for warmth. And that’s when I finally admit the truth.

“Can we not talk about that? I don’t want to care.”

“About his reasons?”

“About him.” I swallow. “There’s an attraction.” I don’t look at her. “I can’t ignore that. But no matter what he says, we can’t really trade lives. He can work my hours, pay my rent, and live in our garage. But when my parents need money, he won’t be the one who bleeds. He won’t understand, not ever, and he thinks he can just pay money and make it happen. So I can’t let myself care about him.”

“Oh, honey,” Maria says.

“That’s what I have to remember. No matter how it looks, there’s a wall between us. He won’t remember; he doesn’t even know it’s there. Please. I don’t want to speculate about what makes him tick. I don’t want to find out.”

6.

TINA

I refuse to be nervous as I enter the restaurant with Blake on Saturday.

It doesn’t help that he primed me on the way down with some less-than-reassuring conversation.

“How good an actor are you?” he asked as we crossed the bridge.

“Not very?” I frown. “I mostly just shut up or say what I’m thinking. I’m not really good at anything else.”

“All righty then,” he says. “Then I won’t tell you what’s coming. Just go with the flow, okay?”

My dose of nerves is certainly not helped by the fact that Maria made her own contributions last night. “Oh, watch this,” she told me, and I vanished down the rabbit hole of Adam Reynolds YouTube videos. He may be worth sixty-six billion dollars, according to Forbes, but apparently he is not what one would call a kind, courteous man. Quite the opposite.

And it certainly doesn’t help that Blake takes my hand as he opens the restaurant door. He does it so casually that I can pretend that it doesn’t mean anything, that he’s just a friend who has locked palms with me. I can pretend that I’m not aware of his warmth, that when his fingers intertwine with mine, I don’t feel a rush of heat.

But I do.

The place he’s taken me seems surprisingly low-key for a man as powerful as Adam Reynolds. It’s a hole-in-the-wall Indian place, with little plastic jars of tamarind sauce and mint chutney sitting on white faux-tablecloths. I was expecting something more upscale, but I guess even billionaires like good food. It smells amazing in here.