Page 35 of Angel of Thursdays

“Shut up. He asked if you were free.”

Kevin Chao. Thin, enthusiastic, wore the same Giants cap every day. He and May had worked on a short doc together about Kevin’s grandmother’s detention on Angel Island, both of them in an editing suite past midnight eating peanut M&M’s and downing those diabolical little Korean energy drinks in the medicine bottles. That was junior year, before the everything.

“I could be free,” May said, sounding much calmer than he felt. “What’s the timeline?”

“I dunno, I didn’t interview him. I gave him your number.”

“You gave him my number.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t thank you, jackass. Did you give him yours too? Put a little heart emoji next to it?”

“You were about to thank me. And he’s too fucking old for me, quit projecting your old gay desires onto me.”

May kicked him under the counter. Louis kicked back. The woman at the next stool looked at them and then looked away. Probably she had raised sons and was here on election night getting chicken to find some respite from this exact energy at home. Or May was projecting.

The podcast thing whirled around in his brain like a trapped fly trying to find an exit window. The problem was the task. Editing and mixing. The people part, the making-someone-feel-safe-enough-to-talk thing—that hadn’t broken. That the accident hadn’t touched, or maybe it had, and he just couldn’t tell because the instinct ran on muscle memory instead of whatever the head injury had taken. But the production side was what Kevin wanted—the hours of technical work that required holding a sequence in your head while fiddling with levels and cutting dead air—that was where the System would have to hold up the sky. His old brain could hold a forty-minute edit in working memory. His current brain couldn’t reliably return Tupperware to moms, and it hadn’t been tested on this kind of work for going on two years.

May’s phone lit up on the counter. He reached for it, habit, the hand moved before the brain gave permission, and the lock screen caught before he could swipe it away. Cassiel’s face, still there, set because Lauren said it’d help with realism. It was a candid of him inside of Sparrow, looking down, mid-speech, the light from the window making his black hair glow brown and casting a pretty light along the side of his jaw.

Louis leaned over. “Is that a K-pop guy?”

“What?”

“Your lock screen. Is that—who is that?”

“Nobody,” May said.

“That’s clearly somebody.”

“It’s a stock photo. It came with the phone.”

“Your phone came with a stock photo of a random Asian dude in a nice coat?”

“Samsung’s really stepping up their game.”

“That’s an iPhone 13.”

Louis was glaring at him, their mother’s expression rendered in their father’s eyes. May stared back, going for innocent and vacant. Louis shook his head with a weary sigh and returned to his chicken.

But the lock screen question had added a second fly to the room and they were buzzing around each other. He couldn’t say ‘boyfriend’ because Cassiel wasn’t his boyfriend, they’d never used the word outside the cover story, which was a fiction they’d written at a café table that had since grown walls and a roof and a little purple mailbox but was still, technically and factually, fiction. He couldn’t say ‘client’ because one hundred and sixty dollars was sitting in his account for a morning he’d spent holding a man’s arm and feeling his own heartbeat and that wasn’t a service, that was⁠—

He couldn’t say ‘the guy I’m falling for’ because he hadn’t said it to himself yet, and saying it to Louis first would be insanity. So—stock photo. Moving on.

“Mama said you’re home for Thanksgiving. That’s still happening?”

There had been an actual invite, a rare voice message on WeChat from their mom—Son, are you coming for Thanksgiving? And he’d replied with a thumbs up.

“Yep,” said May.

“Cool,” said Louis. “So you can give me my Switch back.”

“Nope.”

The TV above the register was on CNN, muted, the scroll bar doing its thing. Louis had positioned himself with his back to it. Principled. May could see it over Louis’s shoulder, maps, numbers, talking heads, and it was the same as every other screen, bright and flat and slightly unreal, the news happening to someone else in a country that existed on the other side of glass. May crossed his eyes and tried not to see the colors.

“Kevin Chao is good people,” May said. “Gimme his number too. I’ll text him. But you should text him as well. And then if he texts me back and I don’t text him back in two business days⁠—”