What Doesn't Kill You by Tessa Miller

Author:Tessa Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER 11

Fight or Flight

When I met Jimmy in late 2010, I was barely twenty-two and he was on the cusp of twenty-three. We met through work—me, an intern at Condé Nast and him, an employee at a company pop-up shop. He shaved his head but always covered it with a beanie and wore layers of mismatched tops and acid-washed jeans with elastic ankles. His thumbnails were painted sky blue and his long, skinny arms were covered in tattoos. I thought he had the face of an angel, or a beautiful alien: pale skin, puffy lips, eyes set above dark bags, gapped teeth. He moved like a shaky dancer, graceful but unsure. His mind always seemed elsewhere. Sometimes when we spoke, I noticed him trembling. When he missed a couple of weeks of work, he told me it was a “bad flu.”

Something was weird about him, and the people I worked with talked about it. But I liked him. I liked weird. When he asked for my number, I gave it readily, even though my long-distance college boyfriend and I hadn’t technically broken up. Months passed. Then, late one February night, a text: “This is Jimmy. I’ve been away for the last couple months but I’m back in New York now. Do you want to meet for a drink?” I’d never really dated before—I’d had the same boyfriend since the summer before college and by then we’d ended things. Being asked to meet for a drink was exciting. “Can you do tonight?” I replied.

We met up at the unfortunately named Lolita, a bar on the corner of Broome and Allen. It had a neon pink sign and plenty of dark corners. Jimmy looked healthy. He wasn’t wearing a hat this time, so I saw that his hair was growing out. The circles under his eyes were lighter. He had on a loose-fitting gray button-down with several buttons undone to show off his smooth, pale chest. Around his neck was a long chain with charms that looked like ancient crests. He was so cool, but not effortlessly. He calculated every item of clothing, every tattoo, every text message, every body movement. Cool above all else.

We drank and talked and stepped outside to share Parliament Lights, our winter breath mixing with the plumes of cigarette smoke. His uncle had just died, so he had gone home to deliver the eulogy, he told me. He’d studied design at a college on the West Coast but had dropped out short of graduating to move to New York. He played in a bunch of bands that never went anywhere. He liked Graham Greene and Cormac McCarthy. He lived in a loft in Brooklyn, all plywood and milk crates. His parents had recently divorced due to infidelity; Jimmy pretended it didn’t bother him but would quietly cry about it after a few drinks.

“People must tell you you’re beautiful all the time, huh?” he asked, looking at me closely under pink neon.

We walked back to my apartment on Ludlow and almost immediately had sex.

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