This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,28

time to give out samples, let alone chitchat. The world narrows down to the seven-by-nine-foot area of our booth, to the sound of boiling water and the sizzling of oil. We have a line for ordering, a line for cashing out, and a line of people waiting for fresh pot stickers that gets longer and longer, until we have to make them in batches of twenty to keep up with the pace. We run out of the thousands of quarter-sheet flyers that we copied on the Xerox machine at Will’s father’s law firm.

When I slide our last bag of pot stickers out of the wok into a serving container, I feel a boneless, aching relief.

We’re done.

I collapse onto an overturned crate. It’s the first time I’ve sat down since our first sale, my hair reeks of the smell of panfried oil, and I’m probably as dehydrated as the runners are going to be during the actual race.

When Will finishes checking out our last jiaozi customer, he glances at the heating lamp and then peeks in the empty dumpling cooler.

“Holy shit!” he exclaims. “We sold out! Jos, we did it. We knocked it out of the park.” He puts his fist out and I barely have the energy to raise my hand to bump it, but his euphoria is infectious. I allow myself a brief moment of victory.

We did it.

I only have a minute to savor it, though, before a middle-aged woman comes up with two teenage boys. “I’d like four orders of those dumplings everyone is eating, please.”

Within seconds, all my euphoria bleeds away, and a knot of dread forms in my belly.

“I’m sorry, ma’am—we’re out of dumplings.” Will says. “Would you like some fried rice?”

“No, that’s okay.” The woman sighs heavily and turns around to her kids. “They’re all out, kids. Guess we have to go to the pizza cart instead.”

Crap.

Just like that, disappointment sucks all the air from my lungs. We’ve underestimated demand and are leaving money on the table. Every person who stops by asking for dumplings only to pass when we can only offer fried rice is another blow. When I can’t stand the thought of any more lost revenue being shoved in my face, I send Priya out to scrounge up some masking tape so we can hang up a SOLD OUT sign over her amazing dumpling photo. A few people come looking for pot stickers anyway, like we have a secret stash squirreled away for VIPs.

“We shouldn’t have given out so many samples,” I say the tenth time someone frowns and walks away. That’s probably hundreds of dollars we left on the table. “We should’ve made more dumplings. They don’t go bad when they’re frozen. We could’ve used them up later if we made too many.”

Will is silent for a minute, like he’s thinking of the old adage: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Then he says, “We’ve been making dumplings practically nonstop since we found out we had a booth.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter if they’re homemade,” I fret. “For an event like this, we should’ve just bought premade dumplings and marked them up. We could have made thousands more.”

“Jos, we did the best we could with what we knew, and it’s still a huge success.”

But we could have done better. I don’t say it out loud, but I hear the voice—a combination of my dad’s and my uncle’s—in my head anyway.

WILL

The thing about fake news is that it preys on the truth. There’s always a kernel of reality that gets watered with misinformation and deliberate misinterpretation until it mutates into something hateful, hyperbolic, and divisive.

Last fall, Mr. Evans had a whole unit on the journalist’s role in a “post-truth” society. He had to explain the term—named the 2016 International Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries!—to us: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

In other words, the whole world’s starting to process news the way my brain does life.

Watching Jocelyn crumble into self-loathing, I realize that she has a post-truth brain, too.

My excitement at selling out trickles into unease when I realize that Jocelyn isn’t smiling. Instead, she’s staring out at the few people who are still milling around. I can practically see the moment when her brain morphs an objective fact (we ran out of dumplings) from something positive (we were so popular that we sold out) into something negative