evening, as she gazed into the sunset during the slow walk back from Linh’s house, Abby had reflected, This is my very own real-life hurt/comfort story.
She’d thought putting a label on it might help. She was wrong.
Abby and Linh had never spoken about anything that happened that afternoon. But a few days afterward, Linh started talking about breaking up.
She was casual about it at first. So casual Abby got away with pretending not to understand, for a while. The problem was, Linh kept bringing it up. They were going to be apart for the summer anyway, she’d pointed out, with Linh off in Hanoi and Abby in Massachusetts—and everyone knew long-distance relationships were basically impossible. Maybe, she’d finally said one afternoon, casting a sideways glance at Abby, they were only delaying the inevitable.
Abby didn’t let on how much that hurt. She hadn’t stopped caring about Linh just because her family was slowly imploding.
But she didn’t want to fight about it, because the very idea of fighting made her think about her parents. When Abby’s mom and dad were fighting, they didn’t even seem to care if they were hurting each other. Sometimes, they almost seemed to want to hurt each other.
So the night before Linh’s flight, when she oh-so-casually mentioned breaking up again, Abby closed her eyes and nodded. She was tired, and so she agreed, because agreeing was easy.
She’d told herself it was temporary. That by the time the summer ended, Linh would realize how wrong she’d been, and they could pick up where they’d left off. For now, though, they’d agreed to be “just friends.” Abby figured that was better than nothing at all.
They emailed every day that summer. At first, they kept it light. Linh told Abby about all the mistakes she was making as she struggled to learn Vietnamese, and about how every time she tried to cross the street she was positive she was going to get hit by a speeding motorcycle. She told funny stories, too, about how it was so oppressively humid that standing on the riverbanks watching the dragon boat races felt like standing in the middle of a thick wet cloud, and how she’d feared for her life the first time she climbed onto the back of her cousin’s motorized scooter, but once they started moving the adrenaline rush was so addictive she was thinking about borrowing the scooter and venturing out on her own.
As the summer went on, though, Linh’s emails changed. She started writing Abby long messages late at night about how complicated her feelings were becoming the longer she stayed in Hanoi. She wrote about how frustrating it was when strangers greeted her in Vietnamese, then started politely treating her like an out-of-touch foreigner when they realized she didn’t understand. The language barrier put a constant strain on things at home, too, since Linh was spending all her time with her cousins. She was having a great time getting to know them, but communicating was still a big challenge. And as the end of the summer got closer, it was upsetting her more and more to think that this could be one of the last chances she’d have to spend time with all the relatives she’d grown close to.
Abby read all of Linh’s emails closely. She spent hours looking up college cultural exchange programs and internships in Vietnam that Linh might be able to apply to next year, and she sent her long, detailed replies full of links and bullet points.
She tried to read between the lines of what Linh was saying, too. Sometimes, sprinkled throughout the stories about her trip, there would be occasional less-specific comments. Comments like, It’s just so hard to know if you’re making the right decisions until it’s already too late. And, Lately I’ve been changing my mind so often I can barely think in a straight line.
Those comments gave Abby hope. Maybe too much hope.
But she knew better than to ask about that over email. That conversation should wait until they were in the same country, at least. So instead she told Linh funny stories of her own, like the one about the poetry reading her creative writing camp had gone to, and how all the boys had giggled and made inappropriate gestures during the poems about sex, and how it made her feel bad for all the straight and otherwise non-gay girls who had to put up with that kind of thing on the regular.
Abby didn’t usually say much about her real life in those emails. There never seemed to be anything worth saying. She mentioned once or twice that her parents seemed to carefully coordinate their phone calls so that she never wound up talking to them both on the same day, and that she and Ethan only texted each other in emojis now. But she always tried to make those stories funny, too, using plenty of emojis of her own.
Either way, all that emailing had brought her and Linh closer—or so Abby thought. She was sure that when the school year started up again, Linh would realize she’d been wrong to freak out about what happened, and things could go back to the way they’d been. Or at least some approximation.
Abby wasn’t that concerned about the details of exactly how they’d get back together. Not as long as the end result involved being held again. Being held, and feeling like she mattered to someone.
But that still hadn’t happened, and Abby was still trying to act like that was perfectly fine. In the meantime, her family was slowly, slowly, slowly falling apart—but she was supposed to pretend everything was fine there, too.
And if Abby herself was also in the middle of a very gradual collapse, then hey, at least no one else seemed particularly bothered by it.
Mom cleared her throat, but she was still giving Abby that expectant half smile. As though she genuinely thought they’d now launch straight into old-fashioned girl talk about Abby’s postbreakup social life.
“Hey, so, um...” Abby tried hard to think of something to say. She had to throw her mom off track before she suggested they dig into low-calorie ice cream and pop in a Little Women DVD or something. “I think I’ve decided. Is it okay if I make my donation this year to the ACLU?”
“Of course.” Mom smiled. She was always up for talking about charitable giving. Everyone in the Zimet-Cohen family chose a charity to give to out of their savings every year. “I might do the same thing, after I figure out how much to give to the Northam campaign. So, Abby, I wanted to let you know—”
“Also, I meant to tell you.” Abby cut her off before she could launch into some other topic Abby didn’t want to talk about. “I finally have an idea for my senior project. I’m going to write a lesbian pulp fiction novel.”
Mom stopped short and raised her eyebrows. “What exactly is that?”
“Oh, I thought you’d know. They were big in the fifties.”
“Believe it or not, I wasn’t alive in the fifties.” Mom laughed again.
“Well, all I’m saying is, they’re old.” Abby rolled her eyes. “Plus it turns out some of them are pretty awesome. I kind of can’t stop thinking about this one that I read. Here, this is what they looked like.”
She pulled up Satan Was a Lesbian and held out her phone. Mom peered at the screen, a crease forming between her eyebrows.
“I know that one looks ridiculous, but if you can believe it, some of the books are really good.” Abby knew she was prattling on, but at least her mom wasn’t awkwardly trying to relate to her anymore. “I just read one about these women living in New York, and they’re both fascinating. Especially this one, Paula. She might be my new favorite fictional character of all time.”
Mom was still gazing down at
