authorized!” she replied. “Besides, with the dirt I find in here, she’ll know better than to come after me.”
“To mutually assured destruction,” I laughed, and we clinked our water glasses.
Will wandered off to change out of his suit, and Marlon trotted after him, tail wagging. Just as the guitar music hit a dramatic crescendo, Tessa murmured, “There, that should…” and struck the space bar. Words swarmed the screen.
“It’s not pretty,” she warned, “but it’s all here, everything in your inbox and sent folder from 2009.”
“There’s no way they taught you that at library nerd school,” Damien said.
Tessa stretched, smiled. “I used to hack into corporate servers in high school. I had issues with authority.”
“Damn, girl,” Damien said. “Quit making me question my orientation.”
She turned back to the screen. “It’s not directly from the server, but the archive was backed up in the cloud, probably because at some point you pulled it into a program.”
I frowned and then said, “Outlook?”
“That must be it. It’s kinda unwieldy, but I can index it for you.” More typing, more clicking. “Want me to drop all the emails into our shared folder?”
Something fluttered, apprehension at the idea of Tessa and Damien having access to my potentially embarrassing emails—the dumb stuff I cared about at twenty-three, the sexual quirks of whomever I was seeing, the cringe-y tales of how wasted we all had been. Really, it was a miracle that I’d made it through my twenties in one piece, protected only by the hubris of youth. I remembered making out with someone in the back of a camper as it barreled down the FDR Drive; his long-haired bandmate had volunteered to drive us back to Brooklyn, gesturing with his beer: “I shouldn’t be okay to drive, but I am.” How, how had we made it there safely?
Drunken disasters. There’d been the Warsaw Incident, but I hadn’t emailed about it, had I? Either way, I hadn’t met Tessa or Damien until years after that nonsense, so the names would be meaningless. But. Still.
I said sure. When she lifted her fingers from the keyboard and leaned back, I wanted to jump right in, push her out of the way, and start reading, but instead she crossed her legs and smiled.
“I used to write long emails back then, too,” she announced. “We spent so much time composing these novel-length messages, you know?”
“I know. Texting really killed the long-form personal confession.” I shrugged.
Damien finished his beer with a little ahh. “Didn’t you used to write essays? Like Modern Love–type stuff?” he asked.
“Oh, god.” I let out a laugh. “Yeah, that’s the exact kind of thing I was writing when I wasn’t treating emails to my friends like diary entries. I was always frustrated because I never had any good material. I didn’t really like that many guys and the ones I did like didn’t seem to like me, so I never had much to write about.”
The real answer was a longer one: I’d wanted to be a writer since I was little and had stumbled only by accident into the realm of fact-checking—a decent specialty in a shaky field, but just literal steps from the job I’d actually wanted. I’d had a few minor successes in my early twenties—a feature in the pretentious literary magazine n+1, a few clips in the fitness magazine that employed me—but I’d stopped pitching in my midtwenties, when all the staff writer jobs disappeared and journalists with résumés as long as the Iliad competed for the same editors’ attention. And I’d made peace with it long ago. I was a damn good research chief, and Sir was one of the nation’s oldest and most solid men’s magazines in the industry.
“You should think about submitting again,” Tessa nudged. She scratched at her button nose.
“Oh, maybe someday.” I cleared my throat and added, “Anyway.”
* * *
At home I dashed into the bathroom as soon as I got inside, and I stared at the inside of the door as I peed: a cheap door painted white, snowy when I moved in but now covered in black scuff marks. The area around the doorknob was a dirty beige; a crack bisected the door partway up. The kind of things a landlord deals with between tenants, a quick slap of paint to blot out the last renter’s marks. Five years on, the mess was all mine. Five years. It had seemed like such a nice, adult apartment when I’d first moved in.