Page 12 of The Librarians

How can Jonathan forget? When Ryan and Conrad walked in that night, a hush fell upon the gathering. Ryan is hot, but Conrad is stunning, and their combined height and beauty were such that despair instantly swamped Jonathan.

And then, late in the reunion, some women managed to corner Conrad.

Ryan came over, a little hammered, and said to Conrad, “Hey, Davoud Asadi isn’t coming. So you can be straight now.”

Conrad, who might have been completely wasted, tilted his head back against the top of his high-backed chair.

Perhaps because of his thick hair, slightly long and just beginning to curl, and his simple white shirt with a couple buttons open, he managed to look like an eighteenth-century aristocrat. “Brilliant. Whatever you say.”

He spoke clearly, if slowly, and with a British accent, no less.

The women hooted.

“Wait, you’re straight now? I’m straight too. Let’s get together!” cried one, three sheets to the wind.

Conrad squinted up at the chandelier over the table, as if he weren’t addressing his admirers but some invisible entity.

“If you’re at least five-nine, beautiful, stylish, and articulate, you may apply to be my girlfriend.

Bonus points if you’re Asian—and mysterious too.

And if you satisfy all of the above requirements, I don’t mind if you’re a few years older. ”

Thanks to a decades-long influx of techies, Jonathan and Ryan’s high school had a large plurality of Asian students. One of the women at the booth—Jonathan actually remembered her name, Maggie Liang—shouted, “Omigod, if I was six inches taller, I’d be your perfect woman!”

Her friends shrieked with laughter. “Shut up, Maggie. You’re the least mysterious person ever. We know how many tampons you used last month.”

Jonathan, who had been spying from a nearby table, finally went over and asked, “Is it true, you two aren’t actually together?”

“It’s true,” Ryan answered. “He’s just my roommate and you still have a chance with me.”

He winked at Jonathan, then kicked Conrad in the tread of the latter’s shoe. “Come on, let’s go home.”

Jonathan’s hopes, like Jon Snow stabbed and left to die in the cold, miraculously resurrected.

So yes, he remembers every detail of that exchange. “And?”

“And the next day I asked him about it and he swore he couldn’t have said anything of the sort because he doesn’t date Asians.”

Their fried pickles arrive, piled high on a plate. Jonathan eats a few pieces and screws up his courage. “Ryan, can I ask you a personal question?”

Ryan grins, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Let me guess. Is it about how I became a forensic pathologist?”

No, not really. But if that’s what Ryan considers a personal question then Jonathan had better go along. “Yes, that one.”

“I had a boyfriend in med school. His dad specialized in litigating medical malpractice. One Thanksgiving with the dad was enough to convince me I didn’t want to work on anyone who might sue me.”

“What about the boyfriend? He wasn’t scared?”

“Nope. He’s been doing heart surgeries on babies left and right—which goes to show that I was probably just looking for an excuse not to save lives.

” Ryan dunks a slice of fried pickle in the tangy dip.

“It worked out okay. I would have been matchmade to death if I were a doctor. But you tell people you do two hundred fifty autopsies a year and they can’t wait to leave you alone. ”

Jonathan laughs in spite of himself. “I can’t imagine why.”

“Me neither.” Ryan flashes another smile. “But it is what it is.”

Could it have been like this for them, drinks together after work, making each other laugh, had things been different?

Had Jonathan been different.

So many times he’d wondered, especially since the reunion, what would have happened if they’d met each other not in high school but later. After he left the navy. After he finally learned not to run away from himself.

Well, you’re sitting on adjacent barstools, aren’t you?

There was no need for a face-to-face meeting—Jonathan could have asked his questions over a phone call. But Ryan agreed to come in person.

Does that mean he isn’t, after all, averse to seeing Jonathan again?

Ryan looks at his watch. “Oh, sorry, gotta run. I have a date tonight. Wish me luck.”

Jonathan’s heart shrinks into an asteroid, a lonely rock lost in the vastness of space.

“Good luck,” he replies mechanically.

Ryan hops off his barstool. “And good luck to your colleague,” he says cheerfully. “Let me know if she needs anything else.”

The intelligence Jonathan gleaned from his old friend at the county examiner’s office does not comfort Astrid. Why did she think that it would? Sometimes there is no good news and the more one knows, the worse the situation becomes.

Jonathan hugs Astrid. “Don’t worry. The whole thing will sort itself out.”

But he doesn’t sound convinced. He sounds hollow—and he looks worn out, as if the news weighs fifty pounds and he has carried it on foot all the way from midtown.

After he leaves, Astrid does the fifteen-minutes-before-closing announcement. She, too, sounds hollow.

Hazel appears at her elbow. “Astrid, do you want to grab a drink after work?”

Astrid freezes. She does not get drinks with her colleagues. She doesn’t do anything with anyone, really. She simply cannot make up any more stories about her fictional Swedish parents’ fictional farm in southern Sweden, a little more than a stone’s throw from Copenhagen in Denmark.

And the last time she agreed to drinks after work was with Perry. Look how that turned out.

“I—I would love to, but most restaurants will be closed by the time we get there and I don’t know any good bars.”

“We don’t need to go anywhere.”

Hazel tilts her chin at the Den of Calories and the Wall of International Snacks therein.

She hasn’t dressed in anything half so luxe as what she wore her first day to work—today it’s only a white long-sleeve tee over a pair of loose-fitting jeans—but she still looks as if she stepped out of an inspiration board.

Astrid wants badly to be her friend, as she wants badly to be Jonathan’s and Sophie’s friend.

“Having a drink right here?” her voice squeaks. “Will Sophie be okay with it?”

Sophie gets off at six most days and is long gone.

Hazel is unfazed. “Text her and ask her if it’s okay for you and me to stay a little extra time to work on the donated books.”

Some portion of Astrid’s brain blares with alarm, but she obediently does as Hazel suggests. Sophie replies almost right away.

Astrid looks up from her phone. “Sophie says go ahead. She says thanks besides.”

Hazel smiles. “It’s settled, then.”

“Okay,” mumbles Astrid. Someone else must be speaking through her numb lips.

Shortly after nine p.m., Hazel slips out to H-E-B, which is five minutes away on foot, and returns with a combo tray of sushi and a bottle of screw-top white wine. She sets all the sushi on a paper plate and pours white wine into mugs.

Only after Astrid takes her first bite does she realize that she’s starving.

She devours five sushi in a row before pausing to take a sip of wine.

The bottle doesn’t look expensive, but the wine is brisk and delicious.

She eats another sushi, savors the acidity of the rice, the crispiness of the tempura shrimp, the spicy smoothness of the drizzle of sriracha mayo on top.

“I don’t remember supermarket sushi being this nice.”

Hazel laughs a little. “I don’t remember supermarkets selling sushi before I moved to Singapore—at least not this one. It used to have fried chicken and mac and cheese.”

“Oh? When was that?”

“Gosh, almost a quarter century ago. I was ten when we left.”

She really shouldn’t, because if she asks Hazel personal questions, then in turn, she will be expected to reciprocate with information about herself. But the question slips past her tongue anyway. “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you move to Singapore?”

Hazel opens her purse and pulls out, from a slender case, a pair of metal chopsticks. Astrid is completely charmed. Hazel pops a sushi into her mouth. “My mom is from Singapore. She and my dad divorced, so she went back to Singapore and took me with her.”

“Was it hard, moving to another country?”

“It was. But even more than the displacement, I had a tough time dealing with my parents’ divorce.”

Astrid is amazed that she’s learning so much, so easily, about Hazel. And that she hasn’t put a stop to it.

“Are your parents still together?” Hazel asks.

This question Astrid can answer truthfully, so she does.

“They are, but they’re hardly hashtag goals.

They might as well be roommates, rather than a couple.

The only thing they do together is watch the evening news, and then my dad goes off to his man cave and my mom watches her shows and plays games on her iPad. ”

“Are they here in the States?”

The question is a jagged rock scoring the inside of Astrid’s skull. It takes her a while to understand that Hazel hasn’t called her bluff. She’s only wondering whether Astrid’s parents have emigrated from Sweden.

“They—” Astrid stuffs another sushi in her mouth to buy a little time.

Unbelievably, the sushi still tastes good—clean and sharp, unlike the mess she’s made of her life.

She grabs her mug of wine and takes several sips. But there’s only so much she can do to put off answering a simple question. The old answers, long practiced, long perfected, surface. “Have you ever heard of Malmo?”

“It’s a city in Sweden, right?”

“Sweden is almost a thousand miles long north to south and Malmo is maybe fifteen, twenty miles from the southernmost tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula.”

She stops—she is speaking in her own accent and Hazel, judging by that flicker of bafflement in her eyes, has noticed. But she waits patiently for Astrid to continue.

Astrid lifts her mug, but it’s empty. Hazel unscrews the cap from the bottle and refills it. But the mug now feels glued to the table. Astrid can’t make it budge.