At Coffee

by Victoria Chen

A month after they met, Jamie and Lily went to Target together. This was when they were 18 and this type of domesticity felt at once comforting and thrilling, perusing the Tupperware that their mothers owned, the throw pillows that maturity and wealth would someday bring them. An escape from this awkward abyss between everything that had already happened and everything that was still not yet happening. An influencer’s new line of chinaware was displayed at the front of the store, all sleek gold lines and dishwasher-safe durability. As they wandered the aisles, Lily imagined that someday everyone would love her for being the type of woman to have six wine glasses and a cheeseboard. Jamie bought a protein powder she had seen in a social media ad, and Lily bought a pack of 20 pairs of earrings for $15. It turned out that Jamie had a whey allergy, and the earrings were made out of something like poison, and they laughed at their red forearms and green ears.

Lily recounts this to Jamie at coffee six years later, remember how we used to do this? She talks about how these days, she feels a bit regretful about the constraints of her imagination. It seems to have begun and ended in the Target. She blames it on her mother and her high school—all that headache for all of them to end up with jobs at megacorporations and apartments with vinyl floors—but other people probably had similar mothers and similar high schools, and they went on to write movies or sell cartoons or save forests. She was bad at drawing as a child and didn’t know that you could write movies when you grew up. Through Lily’s rambling, Jamie bobs her head lightly but with an alertness. “God, that was so long ago,” she laughs.

Lily disagrees, but will admit to a certain vertigo in the realization that those days exist in the same life as these days. The summer after their freshman year, they lolled on the carpet floor of their apartment, the heat wave morphing July into one interminable Saturday afternoon. After a very scary career workshop, Lily had just given up on the idea of being a writer. “Most of you will not earn a comfortable wage when you graduate,” a man on a stage said, the podium like a pulpit. “If you do, you will likely not be working in the humanities.” She would need to find a new major in the fall. Jamie idly scrolled through her high school ex’s profile. Jamie zoomed in on a picture of him with his new girlfriend, inhaling pieces of her person, noting the designer jewelry, the freshly-done highlights. Jamie and Lily had both grown up in large Chinese-American communities and were only just now learning how afraid of white people they were. New Girlfriend was the all-American, blonde apparition from their shared nightmares, a villain in the ancient diasporic miseries that they once thought only existed in internet poetry. Lily learned from New Girlfriend’s profile that she was on her school’s volleyball team, and they googled her stats as if they could interpret them in any meaningful way.

Feverish orange light drenched the room. The blinds cast zebra stripe shadows across Jamie’s sweat-beaded face. Her dark baby hairs clung to her forehead, the rest of her mane fanned out luxuriously on the ground. Lily had been feeling ambiently anxious during sunsets that summer. Another day had passed that she hadn’t found a new skin care regimen. “We should go out,” Jamie said, clocking the doom. “It’s depressing that we’ve been like this all summer.”

“How else are we supposed to be?” moaned Lily. She often thought to herself that she was failing being 19, being 19 was failing her. Jamie leapt up and ran in circles around the apartment. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go,” she whined. They splurged on an Uber to the waterfront and, homesick for their mothers’ cooking, ate takeout from the one good Chinese restaurant in town. They tried to order in Mandarin, and the hostess tsked and said, “Please repeat that? English is okay.” The sky looked like a Fruit Rollup. Walking down the boardwalk, the humidity of dusk enveloping them, they basked in a shared malaise, a malaise like waking up from a dream about someone you used to love. It was stifling, but it was theirs.

At coffee, Lily senses that Jamie doesn’t relate to this type of melancholy anymore, that she has been calibrated toward an age-appropriate maturity, a discovery of the essential self. She looks younger somehow: the bags that were always under her eyes during undergrad are gone, even though she must be tired. Her hair looks shinier, but maybe Lily is imagining this. Jamie is working towards a PhD in computational genomics. Her research has something to do with breast cancer, but it’s been too long since graduation, and Lily doesn’t know much about this kind of thing now.

“Wow,” Lily says. “That sounds like exactly what you used to talk about doing.”

Jamie nods. “I don’t have any complaints. I just wish my friends lived a little closer, since Mal is all the way in Seattle, and Maya’s in DC.” Mal. Maya. And Lily is here, but that’s less important.

A silence falls between the two. “This is a cute place,” Jamie says, meandering her eyes around the coffee shop. It isn’t really, all light-wash wood and fake pothos. A pink neon sign that reads “Coffee bitch” flickers on the wall, mere moments away from its obsolescence. When Jamie texted that she would be in town for a conference (a “btw i’ll be in sf in a couple of weeks idk if you’re free” two years after the last text in their conversation, an unanswered “Happy birthday!” from Lily), Lily panicked choosing a meeting spot. Somewhere that showed off her taste and comfort with her new life in this new neighborhood, somewhere inoffensive. What did Jamie like now? What did she even like then?

Their friendship hadn’t imploded or exploded or combust into flames. Some nights Lily wishes it had, but their senior year felt a little more like a bath turning cold. Fewer classes together. One person doesn’t reach out for Friday night plans, but the other doesn’t either. Jamie signs up for a yoga class that Lily has to TA during. For a while, distance felt like respect for each other’s practices of self care, a celebration of each woman’s latent introversion. As with anything, this didn’t register as loss until it was too late. Lily is irritated by how mundane it all is. It’s tricky to square the anger that flares up within her—a feeling vaguely like the one she had when someone stole her bike: she thinks of it as grief, though that feels offensive to grief—with her impressive lack of effort to do anything about it.

Coffee, then, feels like a flicker of hope, an opportunity dropped into Lily’s lap. A decision she didn’t have to make.

It occurs to Lily that it would be both snarky and embarrassing to keep bringing up old memories. She is thinking about the 5th time she got drunk. She was going to be casual about drinking this time (telling clever jokes, winning board games) and stop embarrassing herself (abruptly asking people if they’re gay, having people come up to tell her she was so cute last night when she couldn’t remember anything she said). As they got ready in front of the mirror, Lily thought about how pretty they both looked when they went to these things together, plump and blushing like well-watered orchids. Still, Jamie had to drag Lily out of the party when she overheard her screaming something like “Sometimes I’m worried I might kiss my postdoc” at a guy in their stats class, and Lily was crying by the time they emerged onto the boulevard.

“Was I being crazy?” Lily blubbered.

“Honestly, you were, a little,” Jamie said. “Hold my hand. Don’t get lost.” She tugged on Lily’s arm down the street.

Lily paused to look back every few steps, whining that it was still so early, they shouldn’t have left. When Lily was drunk, she allowed herself to think thoughts she would never dream of vocalizing: Jamie was being unfair, and it was just like her to think of Lily as some sad, vapid drunk girl that needed saving from herself. Lily pulled away and began sprinting, wind piercing, night blurring. She hurtled past a security guard stationed in front of the dorms, thinking that she might have just looked like she was going for an evening jog. She turned to see if Jamie was following and jogged backwards, but she didn’t notice the edge of the sidewalk and tumbled to the pavement.

Jamie, choking with laughter, knelt down to Lily. “Shit,” she snickered. “Are you okay?”

Lily began to panic. “Did the security guard see me? Do you think he knows I’m drunk?”

“Obviously he does,” Jamie cackled. “Get up, get up.”

“Oh my god, am I going to be arrested?”

“Genuinely, you’re screaming. Get up, get up!”

Lily began to cry again, perhaps because she was convinced she would be expelled in the morning, perhaps because she was still thinking about her postdoc. Or maybe it was just the enormity of the night overwhelming her, the sharp and frigid air frightening in the middle of a cold snap in April. With each breath, something furious flew into her, and she fought it as it tried to wrestle its way back out. The silence roaring, the fluorescent of the bodega the last living creature on this earth, the world cracking open.

There were many nights like this. Some nights there was a guy involved—lounging in a rowhouse basement, flirting in the kitchen, texting from his dorm—and some nights Jamie would leave for the bars with the other girls. They would wake up in the too-bright mornings (or afternoons) a little angry at each other, at the other friends, at hookups. One of them would text “bagel?” and they would get bagels.

But they are good memories, anyway. They cloak everything, all this dust on the sill.

“So, how’s work?” Jamie asks, swirling her matcha. The ice tumbles around the cup, clearing its throat.

“It’s, like...” Lily scans her eyes across the ceiling. She looks back down at Jamie and shrugs.

Jamie purses her lips into a toothless smile so sardonic the corners point down. “Okay, awesome.”

“No, sorry.” Lily sighs. “I don’t mean to be cynical and weird about it.”

But you are, and I’m just trying to make conversation. Lily can read it on Jamie’s face, but Lily hasn’t figured out how to talk about her life in any kind of normal way. When people ask her about her job at parties, the way she reacts (eyes rolling and tone darkening) makes them think she is sort of mad at them. They retreat and float through the lazy river of the evening. Lily finds her bitterness impolite, even intellectually illegible, but it comes about without remorse, the bile in an endless Sunday hangover. She’s bored and repulsed when she floats from above, watching herself describing her life of trendy hobbies that she has no passion for (rock climbing two years ago, pottery now), of bland restaurants, of toothbrushes that connect to apps (she laments imagining how her mother, who immigrated from China at age 18 and waitressed in Alabama for five years while getting a degree in civil engineering, would feel about the fact that she is so anxious and forgetful that she needs a digital blue alien named Mona to remind her to brush her teeth). But it’ll always occur to her that she also doesn’t quite belong in the ether, looking down from above, and it’ll make her crazy if she has to think about where she is actually supposed to be for too long, and anyway all she has to do is answer the question “How’s work?” and why can’t she just do that? And she is bored again by this train of thought but in a different, more punitive way from before.

“What’s so bad about it?”

This Lily finds slightly more manageable. “It’s just unstimulating, you know? My whole job is coding this one button on this one page no one ever goes to. It’s like a liability thing I guess, you know, to make sure this gajillion-dollar company will have a gajillion and one dollars tomorrow.”

Jamie considers this. “Yeah, that does sound pretty shitty, I guess.” Lily can’t quite pin down why this feels so brutal, or what she would have wanted Jamie to say instead.

“Do you want to go on a walk?” Lily says.

It’s drizzling out. Lily’s hot latte is turning lukewarm and unpleasant, while Jamie’s fingers are a furious shade of red holding the iced matcha, now a watery, condensation-laden mess. Lily points out places she frequents: “That’s the shawarma place I go to, they have good shawarma. That’s the bookstore I go to, they have good books.” Jamie says nothing, but Lily can imagine what she might have said if they were still 19: I don’t live here. I don’t really get why you’re telling me this.

They walk into a small vintage goods store to escape the cold. In a cramped corner with a precarious-looking hutch, Lily marvels at teacups. Her favorite is one with a pale pink peony pattern and a delicate gold rim. Ancient and full of wisdom, whimsical and laughing in the face of sensibilities like ergonomics, the teacup seems like the type of thing that could become a collection, a collection that could transfigure into a persona. “This is so nice,” Lily says. When she turns to show Jamie, she is finishing up the text she’s sending. She politely tucks her phone away.

They amble about the store, the warmth of the room slowing their movements. Jamie peruses the vinyls. Lily can’t trace the origin of this new hobby. Jamie was memorably “not so into music” in college, and she was never one to follow trends too closely.

Lily buys the teacup, and Jamie buys a Bob Dylan vinyl. Outside the store, Lily chuckles and says, “I didn’t know you were into that kind of thing. It’s kinda white people of you.”

Jamie laughs dryly. “Tom sort of got me into it, yeah.”

Lily nods. “Makes sense. How is he?”

“He’s good, he’s good.”

“What’s it been, like, five years now?”

“Five years in June.”

“Wow,” Lily trails off. “I can’t believe it.” She diverts her gaze from Jamie and starts walking toward the park.

“What can’t you believe?”

“I just...” Lily smiles, trying to signal that she means well. “I didn’t really see this coming for you.”

“Why?”

“I mean, you were always so...” Lily searches for a way to say “you used to hook up with everyone and it seemed like you would keep doing that” without sounding like she’s saying “you were such a slut.”

“A slut?” Jamie says.

“That’s not what I mean. It all just seems so much more old-fashioned than I thought you’d be into.”

“You just bought a fucking teacup.”

Lily offers a half-hearted hiccup of a laugh. She can still play this off as banter, the kind between people that watch each other throw up on the sidewalk once a month. “I just mean, like, don’t you want to be a little more independent for a while? See who you would have been outside of a relationship?”

“What difference does it make? I am in a relationship. That’s part of who I am now.”

This takes Lily by surprise. “We used to talk all the time about not wanting to have our identities wrapped up in men,” Lily laughs. “Remember that time Annie couldn’t make it to your birthday party because of Alex’s ‘stomach issues’?”

It’s not clear to Lily if Jamie does remember this. “I just think of it as, like, there’s no such thing as a pure version of myself that is uncontaminated by my relationships with other people. Of course my identity is going to be wrapped up in the people and relationships I care about. It’s useless to think it won’t be. As long as I’m happy, I don’t see the problem.”

“Do you think you’ll marry him?”

“I don’t know.” Jamie twitches her lips.

“Well, how’s living together going? You guys seem pretty happy, right?”

“I don’t really want to talk about this with you.” Jamie stops walking to turn to Lily.

They have arrived under a tree in the park, fat drops of water periodically dripping off leaves onto their scalps.

“Look, are you upset?”

“I just think you don’t know that much about me anymore. So just— I feel like you’re
being really judgey.”

“Why don’t I know that much about you anymore?” Lily’s eyes narrow. Her heart jumps through her throat as she says it. She is surprised at her own hostility, but perhaps she shouldn’t be. This has always been their nature: two selfish people that have given so many pieces of themselves to each other and now want them back. Loathing that they can’t get them back. This will always be the war.

“You left. You moved here. I found out you took that job through Ellie Sharp. That’s on you.” Jamie’s voice crackles with a contempt that makes Lily feel shy.

“I didn’t owe you an explanation. I still don’t.”

“Well, it would have been the nice thing to do. You weren’t being nice.”

“You were the one that never wanted to hang out anymore.” Lily throws up her arms. “You always do this, you would ignore me for weeks to fuck off with your boyfriend and expect me to not care. It makes me feel like you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

Lily wants to scream. She feels 14. The epiphany that Jamie would never be in her life again has arrived to her in sporadic bursts over the past few years. Those moments in the middle of the night that felt like a cloud of dust kicked up, whirling into a storm. The dust clogged every breath and filled every tiny pathway in her lungs. Then came the panic, like falling. Farther and farther she descended into the crack in the earth, reaching for a memory that sat motionless at the precipice. In the morning, she would take a stroll (that felt more like a procession) through her neighborhood, making spectacle of her misery, stepping around the slush of posters blown off of their posts and pressed against the sidewalk. Cherry blossoms blooming ominously in February. She would sense that some kind of ghost was nestling inside of her, poking around in her veins, finding places to stretch its limbs. It would never leave. This was the only place it could go.

“It’s just been a rough couple of years for me. You should have called,” Lily says.

“Look, it’s not my fault you’re unhappy with your life. I told you to look into other jobs. I told you to stay on the East Coast. I did everything I could for you. And it’s not like you called either.”

“God, you can be so cruel.”

“And you sound petulant. Poor Lily, rich and sad at 24. Get a grip.”

“What, so I can’t be sad?”

Jamie scoffs. “You don’t literally need to be rich, Lily. You’re not going to combust into flames if you don’t make $200,000 a year.”

“I don’t make $200,000 a year.”

Jamie takes a sharp breath and a long blink. “I shouldn’t have to be the one to tell you this either. I shouldn’t have to teach you how to grow up.”

“Oh, because you’re so grown up? You go to grad school and think you know everything about the world now? Or is it the half-marathons?” Lily had laughed when she saw that post, a shiny Jamie holding up a silver medal in front of the finish line. Glad you’re doing well, Jamie, she thought. Glad you got all your bearings together without me.

“At least I’m trying,” Jamie says.

Lily sighs. She should have set more rigorous goals for this coffee, it’s gotten so off-track. “I’m really glad you’re liking it in Philly. It sounds nice.”

Jamie nods. She pulls out her phone. “I should go. There’s a dinner thing with my coworkers. It’s in like an hour.”

For a moment, Lily roots about for a way to stall. Do you need to go? Maybe I can see you after? She’s embarrassed by the thought as soon as it happens. The look in Jamie’s eyes is irritated, but mostly it’s bored. If Jamie ever had any objective of reviving their friendship, of resuscitating the dead, it’s clear to Lily she’s lost interest in it now.

“Right, yeah,” Lily mumbles.

“I guess I’ll see you in another couple of years or something.”

“Yeah, I’ll let you know if I’m on the East Coast again.”

“Sure, if you can find the time.” Jamie’s eyes dart to meet Lily’s gaze for a second, then shift to the ground. Lily watches Jamie cross the park gates and disappear down the avenue.

At graduation, their last names sat them next to each other, and they acted like lab partners that got along decently, discussing which postgames were happening where and how much time were people allotting to get dinner with their parents. Fireworks went off and they looked so pathetic to Lily, the smoke and the faint color in broad daylight. All that violent, arrogant noise just for those blue flowers to disappear into a blue sky. This made her cry, head bowed, staring at the cap on the ground. Spindly arms embracing her, wordlessly saying goodbye. This moment comes to Lily in dreams sometimes.

At home, Lily is greeted by the things that always greet her. The Tupperware her mother used, the throw pillows she can now afford. She takes the teacup out of its packaging and sets it on the kitchen shelf. She thought it would make the apartment feel somehow different. She frowns. She rubs at a slight crack at the teacup’s ledge she hadn’t noticed before, and a chunk of porcelain falls off. In her hand, it is like a tooth, smooth and menacingly sharp. In front of her bathroom mirror, she holds it up to her crooked smile. In color, shape, size, it’s nearly a perfect match. If this were a world where people had porcelain teeth, this would be one of her canines. If I had porcelain teeth, she thinks, they would break easily, but they would not be a part of me. The dentist would be painless. You could even make porcelain teeth beautiful, like clothing. They don’t need to last.

She shakes the feeling that she has missed a chance here, that she has run out of time under some statute of limitations. She surely has some agency over it all, some sense of center that belongs to her, not to her histories, not to Jamie. Her teeth are still chattering slightly from the rain, but she decides to have a cold shower. She lifts her face to the spray of water, relishing in all the good health this will bring her, the clarity of her thoughts and the constricting of her pores. Eventually, her skin goes numb. She is numb to faith and she is numb to grief. She is numb to a sorrow that threatens to color the rest of her life, to submerge it in the violent hues of the void: a sorrow that threatens in the bath gone cold, in the coffee gone tepid, in the world gone up in flames—a sorrow that is over now.

Victoria Chen graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering. She currently resides in Seattle, Washington, where she originally grew up. She has received writing instruction at Hugo House in Seattle, a nonprofit organization that offers classes and workshops. You can find additional writing from Victoria in Litbreak Magazine.