Page 84 - Vol. V #6

(Ghosting continued from preceding page)
have the same striking features. But she did know that every time she got a message, the silence outside her apartment seemed less daunting.
plate for the last remnants of corn beef hash. “The texts aren’t particularly profound. But they aren’t creepy either.”
~
“So why respond?” Rachel asked. Abby could feel the harsh judgment in the voice, the words point- ing towards her chest and expecting her to open her palms and give whatever was wanted of her.
In college, Abby had traveled a great deal with the tennis team. It seemed much of her college expe- rience was spent in the back of a van, highlighting books and trying to catch up on work she was missing while being whisked away to tourna- ments in Saratoga, Portland, New Haven. Aside from Rachel, she hadn’t made many friends. She was reminded of a time in her sophomore year when an RA knocked on her door to encourage her to attend the hockey team’s pep rally. Abby knew that the RA was doing this to every student on the hall, that she wasn’t special. But it stayed with her on the drive to the next tournament where she wordlessly muscled through a text
In truth, Abby didn’t have a good reason for her responses. Not anything she could vocalize, any- way. This texter kept reaching out to her. They acknowledged her. Each text was a thread to an- other person, or another entity of sorts. More and more she’d look at the guys she texted with and the conversations would continue and then not. She would wake up one day and find the thread severed and she hadn’t even realized it. They were no more real than The Ex-Whatever—their fates equally ambiguous. With The Ex-Whatever, the threads were bare but they were there, con- tinuous, a single finger held out to hers, reaching just far enough.
on statistics. And she even found herself attend- ing the silly school rally—where she talked to no one, and didn’t even find the RA in the crowd— but still came away from it with a pocketed warmth, a candle that she could draw out when in a hotel room in New England, alone, waiting for the call from the coach to assemble for the next tournament.
“I haven’t been able to date much recently,” Abby said, although that wasn’t completely true. There had been the product manager from the startup who kept glancing at his phone and never asked her questions. Then there was the finance guy with the exceptional wardrobe that he revealed was bought by his ex, who he still wasn’t over.
The Ex-Whatever’s texts came in from time to time. She’d go on a bad date or work a long day and there was a text waiting for her. They were common, everyday messages aside from the sender: “Feels like a dive bar kind of night. / BART is the worst. / What’s your favorite ice cream place?”
“With this conference coming up, I just haven’t had the time.” She offered the words, which she’d heard other people say before, and hoped they would serve her purpose here: a bodyguard to take the hit.
Abby explained the situation to Rachel once.
~
~
“And this is the guy, the dead guy? The guy you didn’t even meet?” Rachel asked. They sat in a brunch place in downtown Oakland, a rare visit to the East Bay for Rachel but an opportunity for Abby to smooth over any raw feelings between the two. The paper behind her, Abby had made a promise to herself to get out more.
Her paper ended up being about a subtle rela- tionship between two signifiers on a particular type of bacterium. People thought, previously, that there was a kind of marking that told the protein whether to signal this particular way, but she found that it actually was truly random, that the protein didn’t care, it reacted the same way.
“Yeah, well, probably not,” Abby said, scraping her 75
After the paper’s completion, her advisor submit- ted it to the conference and found, weeks later,