Chapter 1 chapter 1
Depending on where I focus and how much pressure I apply to the back of my throat, I can just about blot him out. Him being Jeremy. Him who never shuts up. Him being my ex. He whose arm is clamped around the back of the café chair that belongs to another girl. She's startlingly pretty, this one. Translucent and thin. Achingly so. She has shimmering lavender hair and wide-set, vacant eyes. Her name is Rae and when she offers her cold, large hand, I instinctively search her face for any hint of cosmetic surgery. Her lids, her lips, the tip of her nose. Her boots are Ann Demeulemeester, the ones with hundreds of yards of lace, and her ragged men's jacket, Comme.

"I like your boots," I tell her, needing her to know that I know, and immediately hating myself for it. I'm so intimidated I could choke. She smiles with such indulgent kindness I feel worse. She's not at all threatened by me.

"I got them here," she tells me in faultless English. I don't ask her where there might be.

Jeremy says I'm obsessed with other women. He might be right. Then again, someone once described Jeremy's energy to me as human cocaine, and they were definitely right.

"Mortifying." He shudders, blotting his slick mouth with a black cloth napkin. Jeremy's the only one eating a full-on meal here at Léon. A lunch of coq au vin. I draw in a deep breath of caramelized onion. All earthy, singed sugar.

"Can you imagine failing at New York so publicly that you have to 'move home'?" He does twitchy little scare quotes around the last bit. He does this without acknowledging that for him, moving home would be a few stops upstate on Metro-North, to a town called Tuxedo. A fact he glosses over when he calls himself a native New Yorker.

I watch Rae, with a small scowl nestled above her nose, purposely apply a filter on her Instagram Story. It's her empty espresso cup at an angle. I lean back in my wicker café chair and resume lurking her profile, which I can do in plain sight because I have a privacy shield.

It's the typical, enigmatic hot-girl dross on her main feed, scones cut out onto a marble surface dusted with flour, her in a party dress in a field. A photo of her taking a photo in a mirror with a film camera.

In an image farther down, Rae is wearing a white blouse and a black cap and gown. Grinning. It's a whole different energy. When I arrive at the caption, I close my eyes. I need a moment. I somehow sense the words before they fully register. She graduated from Oxford. It's crushing that most of the caption is in Korean. She's like me but so much better.

My will to live leeches out of my skin and disappears into the atmosphere. I should be in class. I once calculated it, and a Monday, Wednesday, Friday course costs forty-seven dollars, not counting rent. Counting rent in this city, it's exactly one zillion.

"Yeah, hi." Jeremy flags down a passing server. A curvy woman with a tight Afro turns to us, arms laden with a full tray of food. "Yeah, can you get me a clean glass of water?" He holds his smeared glass to the light.

"I can," she says through her teeth, crinkling her eyes and nodding in a way that suggests she's garroting him in her mind.

"That's not our server," I whisper when she leaves. As a restaurant kid, albeit a pan-Asian strip-mall operation that charges a quarter for to-go boxes, I cringe with my whole body. Jeremy shrugs.

I check myself out in the strip of antique mirror behind Rae's and Jeremy's heads. I swear my face is wider now than it was this morning. And the waistband of my mom jeans digs into my gut flesh, stanching circulation in my lower belly and thighs. I can feel my heartbeat in m