Speaking Terms

Ann Zhang

Maya and I found it easy not to talk about Nate. Each of us had her own clever ways around him, like how I would ask Maya about her parents instead of her family, or how she would omit him from her stories, assigning his lines to different characters and erasing him from the scene. Even when I knew for a fact that he had been there, too.

Besides Nate, I had little in common with Maya, though sharing an apartment programmed us with a mutual interest in Tuesday garbage collection and restocking the spice cabinet. In the mornings, when our schedules overlapped, we traded life updates as Maya made coffee and I boiled hot water for tea. Presently: Maya’s P.I. was introducing her to rat euthanasia, I was writing an essay on Jean Rolin’s Ormuz, we needed black pepper.

Often we would forget the details of these conversations and have to ask the other to remind us. Which grad students were know-it-alls and which ones weren’t? What day had we said we’d miss dinner again? Every query affirmed that neither of us was extremely important to the other, else it would have stuck the first time around.

At some point in February, Maya mentioned that she would be leaving me home alone the next weekend. There was going to be a wedding, she said, emphasis on the last word so that it sounded like a chore. I forgot about the wedding until Maya started training for it. Booking hair and nail appointments, pacing around the apartment to break into a pair of fresh heels, wrapping her feet in anticipation of the blisters that were sure to burgeon.

“Elise, have you seen my chandeliers?” asked Maya. She was talking about her earrings. “I was trying them on yesterday, and then I wore them to pick up the dress….”

A modest assortment of wedding gifts had piled up on the living room table: CBD bath salts and smokeless incense, mostly. By this stage the apartment’s body smelled like an overripe woodland. They must have been bohemian, the bride and groom, whose names I couldn’t recall Maya mentioning.

I pointed to Maya’s pink L’Oréal bag, which had somehow infiltrated the center of the altar, and said, “Oh, there?”

Maya groaned. “Thanks. You’re the best!”

“Seems like a fun wedding so far,” I said. “Very organic.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

I looked at her. “I’m glad we found your chandeliers. I can’t imagine going to a wedding without them. Like, I would just feel naked.”

“So naked,” Maya said, followed by nothing else.

As she scooped up the bag, Maya flashed me a seesaw of a smile. Heat prickled behind my cheeks. Then she disappeared into the bathroom, clicking its lock into place, and I knew – from her failure to pack a suitcase or complain about the price of train tickets or offer to introduce me to the other bridesmaids – that the wedding was Nate’s.

-

Friday mornings, Maya brunched with her family. She wore a mint peacoat that she’d brought from home after Thanksgiving break, one that complimented her pale, elfish features. I remembered Maya saying that her mother liked to buy pastel clothing for her. For some reason that factoid really stuck in my mind. It was a tradition for the Pearlmans, like hunter-gatherers, to bring each other the finely tuned pigments that only their kin could identify.

For the past week, Maya had spent an hour every evening on the phone. “Parents,” she would mumble whenever it rang, slipping into the nearest doorway. Teenage behavior. And that Friday, after the latest family brunch on Newbury Street, Maya came home with a dazed look on her face.

“My brother’s getting married,” Maya said, hanging her peacoat on its hook.

I was squatting in the living room, struggling to parse the final pages of Rolin. I glanced up from my novel to answer, “Yeah, I figured.”

“You did?” Maya frowned. “Today I told him, we should invite Elise. We do live together, you and I, all that stuff. I thought you should be able to come. You know him way better than the lady who babysits my aunt’s stepchildren, and she got an invitation.”

I felt a sudden rush of admiration for Maya, despite all of our rules that she was breaking. I wouldn’t have expected her to choose me over Nate, but here she was, advocating for my legacy. She sounded almost like the person I thought she was when we met.

“It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted to go,” I said. Then I realized I was supposed to thank her for being my advocate, even though I hated to imagine Nate’s crisp reaction to the sound of my name. “Thank you, though.”

Maya seemed pleased. I wondered about the source of her kindness, the mystery of her newborn hunger for my approval, and decided it must be the rats. Learning to care for those creatures could really open your heart.

Since the start of the new year, Maya had been watching sunsets from the lab where she worked. This semester she was appointed to build the animal enclosures. The rats needed a place to rest once the cancer took hold, during the long hours after the grad students injected tumor cells into their legs. To develop ultrasound techniques, Maya explained. She was careful to count out the precise number of cornflower pellets, to stock each container with fuzzy cushions and carpeting that she ordered off a website for dollhouse collectors.

Now Maya was rinsing the bowl that I’d left in the sink. She had the heat turned so high that steam rose between her hands like a ghost, and I was too embarrassed to thank her again, so instead I asked if she wanted to go somewhere nice.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” Maya said, “for the wedding.”

“Another weekend, then.” I figured I might later regret the gesture. In the moment, though, it sounded like a good thing to do.

Maya pursed her lips as she dried the bowl and stacked it gently on top of the others. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I’ve done worse.” This was true. “Let’s go out tonight, baby!”

-

I followed Maya off the Red Line at Harvard Square. The sun had managed to set while we were riding the T, and we rose aboveground to blushing pedestrians and lampposts flickering on. Girls in crop tops and leather skirts roamed the station in clusters, their heels snapping against the crimson tile.

The droves of flat stomachs and bright faces made me consider ditching our night out to order quesadillas, but Maya assured me that she had a plan. The way she looked at these picture-perfect eighteen-year-olds reminded me that unlike me, she used to be one of them. Anyway, the queue outside Felipe’s was turning into a swarm. One man craned his neck to face another, who was shouting over the edge of the rooftop bar, his body crumpled like a marionette.

Maya pulled me toward campus. As we approached the hall, I felt the rhythmic thrum of a bass, and Maya began to sway and nod her head to the music.

“I dated a Harvard guy last spring. He lived there.” Maya pointed to the first floor of the building, a room that glowed with color-changing LED lights. They shifted to purple while Maya shimmied around a bush.

“You think he’s still here?” I asked.

“Probably not.”

Maya knocked against the window of the dorm. Inside, a tall stranger peered into the darkness. Maya waved.

Seconds later, the door opened, and a group of boys greeted us. Maya had insisted on lending me one of her shirts, a sheer tank that was falling off my left shoulder. She’d let me borrow her sparkly eyeshadow and taught me to line my upper lid so that it appeared catlike. But no matter what I wore, Maya remained more beautiful than me – her only flaw a stubborn patch of acne between her eyebrows – and when the boys stepped aside to let us in, their gazes clung to her.

There were a few other girls in the dorm, which made me feel like this wasn’t a horrible choice. The lights turned orange, then yellow. A boy who looked half like Nate and half like Mark Zuckerberg offered me a drink. When I declined, he smiled without his teeth, which made him look more like Zuckerberg.

He collected my name and my age, which was a year older than his, asked if my friend was also a junior, how long we’d known each other, how we’d met the guys in the dorm. I didn’t say much, for fear of sounding too sincere. You can tell a lot about how lonely a person is by what they confide in strangers.

“You’re kind of quiet,” Zuckerberg remarked, “in an intellectual way.”

I said, “I’m writing an essay about French petrofiction.”

Zuckerberg smiled as if I’d mentioned his favorite subject. “Oh, yeah? You’re into Proust and Camus, those guys?”

“Not really,” I told him. “The book I’m writing about is called Ormuz. It’s about this guy who really wants to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. Basically nobody’s read it, but my professor thinks it’s an underrated work of the century.”

I didn’t notice when Maya appeared at my side. She leaned into me, her soft breath tickling my ear. Was I having a good time? I nodded. She handed me the flask we’d passed between us on the subway, and my fingers fumbled for the cap.

-

A quarter past midnight, most of the guests were gone. The guys who lived here stretched their spider limbs across all the couches, exiling me and Maya to the hardwood floor, where we huddled so close that I mistook her leg for mine. When someone offered us five dollars to make out with each other, we laughed. “You don’t understand. That would break the balance of the universe,” Maya said.

By which she meant Nate, the wedding, her good faith and chandeliers. You couldn’t have more than one Pearlman. It wasn’t in their nature to share. I used to call them the Pearlmen, pluralized, I remembered just then. Like: Spiderman, why not Spidermen?

This train of thought led me back to Zuckerberg, who was throwing crushed, empty beer cans at his roommates. A warm drizzle struck my cheek as the next one flew. I squinted so I could only see the top half of Zuckerberg’s face, the part that reminded me of Nate.

“What do you think of him?” I asked Maya, propping my head on her shoulder.

She studied me. “The can slinger?”

A couple of the boys were ordering pizza. Zuckerberg lunged at his roommate’s phone, hollering for artichokes on top, and I squinted harder. “Mm. Think he’s cute?”

“He looks like he’d eat those artichokes off the floor,” Maya said. “No offense. I mean, don’t let me stop you from chasing your dreams.”

Before me, Maya spent her evenings surrounded by fake-blonde field hockey players who gave her the false impression that people were designed, by default, to be lovely and rich. She was as presentable as them but not quite as gifted in field hockey, as Nate put it. I’d met him first. After Maya quit the team, he asked me to get coffee with her, to be kind.

Sometimes I wanted to tell Maya that she could be a real jerk. The type of person who would raincheck my coffee invitations, inventing blatant excuses, until I took the hint and tucked my tail between my legs. Then she’d call me up a year later, asking me to live with her. By that point, both of our circles had shrunk so that whatever languished between us might qualify as friendship. Nate was dating someone else. Maya had trashed her old jersey and become the type of person who could tell the difference between rats and mice on the street.

Instead of snapping at Maya, I rose to my feet, dusted crumbs off the back of my jeans, and trailed Zuckerberg to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He was actually pissing, so I killed a minute in front of the mirror, fixing the corners of my eyes where my mascara had smudged. Zuckerberg flushed. When he emerged, we exchanged heys. He seemed pleased to discover me waiting.

I let him wash his hands before reaching for his wrist, angling for him to press me into the shiny, white tile, already dying to tell Maya how he kissed me: too fast and not enough tongue. He said we could go to his room. Did that sound better? Not so many fluorescents.

When he shut the door, I felt myself transported elsewhere. Maybe the last chapter of Ormuz, in which Rolin’s protagonist, Wax, abandons his lifelong mission to traverse the Strait of Hormuz. Once he realizes that no one is coming to bring him ashore, he stops kicking and surrenders to the waves, extracting cigarettes and a lighter from his waterproof bag.

-

Apparently I’d passed out with Zuckerberg in my mouth. As consolation, his roommates dragged him on a brisk February adventure to pick up their pizza, leaving me alone in his twin-XL bed. Maya was delighted to relay this information after she shook me from sleep. “You should’ve seen him on his way out! Totally pissed.”

Maya was cradling my head in her lap. It took a moment for her to discover that she was wiping away my own snot and tears, a task without a foreseeable end. She flinched, hands fluttering, then recovered, tucking a wet strand of hair behind my ear. “That bad, huh?”

I shook my head like a kid. Too consumed by self-pity to speak, so I would force her to guess. Not sex with Zuckerberg. Not the lone decoration tacked above his desk, a blue and gold flag which I identified as Philadelphia.

Then Maya gave up on my beautification and nudged me to one side of the mattress, curling her body into the other, and I began to sob again, tireless, wounded. I think that reaction was what gave me away.

Maya asked, with the slight tremor of a genuine question, “How am I supposed to care for you when you’re still, like, madly in love with my brother?”

“I hate your brother,” I wept, rolling onto my back.

“Yeah, exactly,” Maya sighed. “You’ve got to stop this, Elise.”

Hadn’t I shown her how hard I was trying? I considered chasing after Zuckerberg, bringing him back to kick Maya out of the room, making plenty of noise. The thought made me taste bile.

I figured it would be best to go home before Maya could fathom the sum of my absurdity – what, two years of mourning for a relationship that lasted half as long? – so I pointed out the hour. There was going to be a wedding today. Nate’s. My stomach was starting to ache. I foraged through the sheets for my missing sock and found it camouflaged in the dull grey of a shadow.

Maya and I fled the dorm and its wavering LED lights, the graveyard of wilted Budweisers. A dim moon illuminated our return to Harvard Square, and we walked clutching our coats to our chests, sobered by the cold, scowling despite the complete absence of wind. At the station, as we followed the stairs underground, Maya spoke in a hollow voice.

“I lost the rats.”

I froze on the platform, holding back a laugh. “What?”

“Not all of them,” Maya said, “just like, three or four. I was changing their pillows while my P.I. was giving the freshmen a tour, and he told them to each grab a practice rat. Euthanasia training. It happens every season, you know.”

I nodded. In the distance, a train thundered along its track.

“This dumb, cheery tour group was heading toward me, and I was panicking about which rats to send to the slaughter, but when I checked the crates… nothing but straw. Normally, they don’t run away while I’m cleaning because they trust me, right? But I like to think that they understood what we were saying. That if they sat there like usual, they were going to die.”

I imagined the rats scrambling into gutters, through subway tunnels, finding new places to inhabit. They must have been conspiring around us.

Maya turned to me, blinking through the headlights of the incoming train. It seemed we were all that we had. Nobody’s intention, really. When the wedding was over, I would ask her about the venue, the roses, the violins: was it grand enough to impress her aunts and uncles? Did the bride appreciate Maya’s gifts, or did her eyes skip over them?

Maya would tell me as much as she wanted, and I would forget as much as I could. We braced ourselves. The train kept screeching, barreling forward. It was slowing down, but I thought that it might never stop until at last it did, and the grimy doors in front of us slid open.

Ann Zhang is a student at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ART | Bryce by Alexander Rubalcava, 2022. Alexander Rubalcava is a student at Yale University.