Clickbait by Holly Baxter

Author:Holly Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

I TEXTED ELLIE: HOW’S THE BABE?

Oh hello stranger, she messaged back. She’s fine. How are you?

I’m okay. I thought about all the things I wanted to say to her and knew she deserved to hear: Sorry I was a clueless idiot who tried to vie for your attention with your newborn baby; thanks for taking care of me when my whole life fell apart and possibly still is; I don’t know how I’ll repay you, and a lot of that guilt makes me feel inexplicably angry at you; your life is going how I imagined mine might go and clearly I can’t deal with that fact like a mature adult who’s supposed to know how to handle disappointment and understand context. Instead, I wrote: My sister’s moving to NYC.

There was a pause where I could see she was typing, then not, then typing again. Maybe she was weighing up how to phrase her reply without upsetting me. Or maybe she was so used to my negativity and histrionics that she wanted to choose her words extra carefully. “That’s Tash,” she’d say knowingly to Jake as they passed the baby between them. “No parade un-rained on.”

After a minute, her reply came through: Interesting development! Wine this week to discuss, if you don’t mind mixing your drinks with babies? Might have to be near my place if you don’t mind, since I’m now officially a member of the Park Slope Stroller Mafia.

Sure, I texted back. I’ve got a day off on Friday. Meet at the bar on Union around 5?

I thought about Ellie and Jake’s comfortable apartment in Park Slope with the hardwood floors and the extra room made up as a sad beige nursery for Charlotte Louisa. They were sure to graduate to a nice, boring suburban house within a couple of years, the kind with Bavarian-style wood paneling, a grassy yard, and a shed that could be done up as a man cave. Jake would commute in to work on the train or in a sensible, reliable Volvo, and Ellie would work part time from home through her second pregnancy, because, hello, Charlotte Louisa needs a sibling! Soon enough they’d be swallowed whole by the American Dream, indistinguishable from their parents and their parents’ parents and everyone else’s parents’ parents. They’d live in a neighborhood that was 98 percent white and stick a Black Lives Matter sign on their perfectly manicured lawn, and Jake would keep on doing his job at the bank, advising businesses that contributed to the economic inequality that most impacted people of color. Charlotte Louisa and her little brother or sister would go to a “good school,” and every time I went to visit, Ellie and I would sit out on the deck, a safe distance away from the automatic sprinklers, and she’d talk to me about how her mom is “so good with the kids,” how she “takes them every weekend,” how their relationship now functions on another level, parent-to-parent. The sound of Charlotte Louisa

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