“Twelve thousand what?”
“Steps.” She gestured to the plastic band on her left hand. “I got a Fitbit. A knockoff, but same difference. Also, if I stop, this thing won’t count your first thirty steps for some dumb reason. In the instructions, it says, ‘in case you just shaking hands,’ as if anybody shakes hands thirty freaking times. Those instructions are all written by Chinese people who obviously don’t know anything about American customs. Not that I mean there’s anything wrong with Chinese people,” she added anxiously. “Is that what you’re supposed to call them? ‘Chinese people’? It sounds kind of insulting. Anyway, those lost thirty steps, over and over—they really add up.”
“And this matters why? That back-and-forth of yours is putting me into a trance.”
“Well, you post your steps. Every day. Online. Just about everybody clocks up, like, twenty K or more, and Marley Wilson, this total cunt from senior year, regularly posts thirty.”
“How many miles is that?”
“Just under fifteen,” Tommy said promptly.
“Unless she’s really hoofing it, walking that mileage could take five hours a day. Does she do anything else?”
“Whatever else she does isn’t the point.”
“Why do you care how many steps other people take?”
“You don’t get it. But you should. The main reason it bugs you that Remington’s started running is you stopped.”
“I didn’t say it bugged me.”
“Didn’t have to. He’s beating you. Even if he’s only gone six minutes, he’s beating you.”
“I still exercise by other means.”
“Not for long. You went on that whole rant last week about how impossible it is to do anything aerobic that doesn’t involve your knees. You can’t even swim, when they get too puffy.”
It was ridiculous to feel wounded when Tommy was only quoting Serenata back to herself.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Tommy added, waving a fully outside-out rubber glove in triumph, “most people who do marathons totally give up running pretty soon afterward. Like those World’s Biggest Losers who go right back to being fat. They check that box on the bucket list, and then move on.”
“Did you know the term ‘bucket list’ only goes back about ten years? I looked it up. A screenwriter wrote a list of things he wanted to do before he ‘kicked the bucket.’ So he called it ‘The Bucket List.’ Since at the very top was getting a screenplay produced, he wrote a movie with the same title. It must have done okay, because the term went viral.”
“Ten years ago, I was nine. Far as I’m concerned, we’ve said that forever.”
“That expression ‘going viral’ itself went viral only a few years earlier. I wonder if there’s a name for that—something that is what it describes.”
“You care more about the names of stuff than I do.”
“It’s called being educated. You should try it sometime.”
“Why? I told you, I want to be a voice-over artist, too. I can already read pretty good. Now I just have to get better at once more, with feeling, like you said.”
This peculiarly age-discrepant friendship had first taken off after the girl discovered that Serenata Terpsichore had recorded the audiobook of one of her favorite young adult novels. Tommy had never known anyone whose name had appeared on an Amazon download, so the credit made her next-door neighbor a superstar.
“I think what grates about these abruptly ubiquitous expressions—”
Tommy wasn’t going to ask.
“Meaning, suddenly everyone says it,” Serenata added. “It’s just, people throwing around fashionable lingo think they’re so hip and imaginative. But you can’t be hip and imaginative. You can be unhip and imaginative, or hip and conformist.”
“For a lady who doesn’t care about what other people think, and what other people do, you sure talk a lot about what other people think, and what other people do.”
“That’s because other people are constantly crowding me.”
“Do I crowd you?” Tommy asked shyly, actually coming to a stop.
Serenata pulled herself up—it was a Bad Knee Day—and put an arm around the girl. “Certainly not! It’s you and I against the world. Now that you’ve paused, the next thirty steps are a write-off. So let’s have tea.”
Tommy slid gratefully into a chair. “Did you know that within fifteen minutes of sitting down, your whole body, like, changes and everything? Your heart and stuff.”
“Yes, I’ve read that. But I can’t stand up twelve hours a day anymore. It hurts.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, before. About the running and stuff. ’Cause anyway, for an old person—you still look pretty hot.”
“Thanks— I think. Strawberry-mango okay?” Serenata lit the burner under the kettle. “But being halfway well put together won’t last. Exercise has been my secret. A secret that’s out, I gather.”
“Not that out. Most people look terrible. Like my mother.”
“You said she has diabetes.” With bad timing, Serenata put out a plate of almond cookies. “Cut her some slack.”
Tommy March was not unloved, but under-loved, which was worse—just as full-tilt fasting had a strengthening absolutism, whereas a never-ending diet made you peevish and weak. Her father had cut and run long ago, and her mother rarely left the house. Presumably they were on public assistance. So even in a town with depressed property values—this vast brown clapboard had been a steal at $235K, with two baths, three porches, and six bedrooms, two of which they still hadn’t put to any use—naturally Tommy’s mother was still renting. She’d never encouraged her daughter to go to college. Which was a shame, because the girl had plenty of drive, but her urge to self-improvement was unmoored. She pinballed from fad to fad with little awareness of the larger social forces that worked the flippers. When she declared herself a vegan (before realizing two weeks in that she couldn’t live without pizza), she imagined that the idea just came to her out of the blue.
Typically for the time, then, Tommy was skittish about sugar. As if stealing the confection behind her own back, her hand darted at a cookie like a lizard’s tongue and snatched the snack to her lap. “You’re still being, like, all grumpy-out-of-it-old-lady about social media, right?”
“I have better things to do. In the real world.”
“Social media is the real world. It’s way more real than this one. It’s only ’cause you shut yourself out of it that you don’t know that.”
“I prefer to use you as my spy. I used Remington the same way for years. He went out into the American workplace and reported back. As for what he found there . . . A layer of insulation seems prudent.”
“I just think you should know . . . Well, on these YA platforms . . .” Tommy had stopped looking Serenata in the eye. “It’s got kinda not so great, for white readers of audiobooks to use accents. Especially of POCs.”
“People of color!” Serenata said. “Bet you thought I didn’t know that. Remington always thought it was hilarious that at work if he’d ever said ‘colored people’ instead, he’d have been fired. But then, he was fired anyway. So much for hoop jumping, if you’re not in pro basketball.”