The Anti-Heroes

Chapter Nineteen EMILY

Chapter Nineteen

E MILY

“Emily, I’ve been trying to talk to you for a while now, but it feels like you’ve been avoiding me,” Miles says. “Might we have a confab?”

“Just say ‘chat,’ Miles,” I tell him, not even looking up from my iPad, where I’ve been studying photos on Zeus’s Instagram. As always, Chairman Meow is on my shoulder. I tab through Zeus’s grid, and there are literally hundreds of shots of him in the same exact poses in different locations. He’s partial to pursed lips and a peace sign. While his feed is somewhat disconcerting in its uniformity, I can guarantee it’s far more interesting than whatever Miles has to say next.

“I feel like you’ve been pulling away from me,” he says.

I’m glad he’s picked up on that, as it’s exactly what’s been happening. I give him a “Hmm” in response. I’m tired and full of dinner and I’m trying to unravel a particularly knotted thread with Zeus. Now is not the time to talk about us, and I’m hoping my body language conveys this. I do want to do this—and I need to do this—but not right now.

“I even joined your group as a way of getting closer to you. I wanted to see what was so important to you that you had no time for Memily.” This is his longtime portmanteau for us, and I refuse to acknowledge it. I would kill it with fire if I could. “This experience has opened my eyes, and now I have the testicular fortitude to do what should have been done a long time ago.”

Before I can suggest “Just say ‘balls,’ Miles,” I glance up to see him standing in front of me. I don’t like the look on his face—it’s too sincere, too serious. I can feel the rigatoni and five-cheese marinara begin to roil in my stomach, along with far too many breadsticks. Why do they have to be unlimited? Why? Nothing that good should be unlimited. But I hate waste! As a matter of fact, I hate the Olive Garden ... in theory. I recently read a study about the waste accumulated from their unlimited portions of salad and bread. In practice, I—hold on, why is he kneeling?

Oh, shit, he’s kneeling .

He is on one knee . No. No. Meow flies off my shoulder and runs toward the bathroom. Even he doesn’t want this. Why is this happening? Haven’t I done everything to dissuade him from wanting a future with me? Except for saying it outright, and I swear it’s coming soon. He begins fumbling in his pocket, and I want to run, but I can’t because all the gluten is weighing me down like a boat anchor.

“This has been a long time coming, and we both know it.”

Do we, Miles? Do we both know it? I feel like we do not. With his right hand, he gently takes my left, and for a moment, I profoundly regret not chopping it off while I had the chance. We could have gone to one of those new axe-throwing bars my students talk about; I could’ve made it seem like an accident. What does liability insurance look like in those places? First, we pump the patrons full of booze. Then we give them full-size axes to hurl and say, “Good luck.” This can’t be a wise business model.

He nudges open my clenched fist, and I feel the weight of something cold and metallic dropping into it. I squeeze my eyes shut because I can’t even look. It’s heavy. Why is it so heavy? How big is this awful blood diamond that it’s so heavy?

“Damn it, Emily, you’re making this more difficult than it should be.”

I’m so surprised by his sharp tone that my eyes snap open. When I look down at the future pending in my hand, I see ... my house key. My house key?

“You’re not the person I thought you were, Emily. I can’t do this anymore. Obviously, we’ll keep it professional at work, and also in the group, but I deserve more than this. Memily is no longer going to happen, but I will make it my job to ensure that we can remain friends.”

And just like that, I am racked with sobs. To spare his feelings, I do not tell him that they are tears of joy.

“Lemme get this straight, my man dumped you. He took in all of this”—B-Money swipes his hand in a circular direction in front of me—“and said, ‘Nah, I’mma do better.’”

Even if the group has been unsuccessful on every level—and I’m not saying it has—it has at least succeeded in opening up my (almost nonexistent) social circle. I’ve made new friends that I didn’t know I needed and now can’t imagine being without. I love waking up to whatever dog or cat meme Vishnu has sent us to start the day. I love how the only opinions Michael shares are unfiltered. I never pictured myself becoming confidants with the too-cool-for-school kid from the lousy coffee shop, yet here we are. I’m now as vested in his life and success as I am in Liv’s. Did not see that coming.

“Aw, thanks. That is exactly what happened,” I tell him. I cannot stop smiling. I haven’t been this happy since ... before. The joy in my heart brings me back to that day that Jeremy told me what we had was real. To always remember that. And I do. I remember the pure joy I felt.

B-Money snaps me out of my reverie. “How relieved were you that he didn’t propose?”

I laugh. “What’s the highest number? Infinity? A googol? That much.”

What’s weird is that Miles seemed just as relieved as me, once we recognized that we aren’t a match. We ended up talking for a couple of hours afterward and it was all so easy. I actually think we can be friends. I bet I’d even like that, strange as it may sound. He earned my respect by doing what I could not bring myself to do, by verbalizing that he wasn’t getting what he needed. He literally took control of the situation; I didn’t know he had it in him. We worked out visitation rights for Chairman Meow; I would genuinely hate for Miles to lose his true love. I let him keep the key for any cat emergencies. Besides, it’s not like he’s ever coming in without knocking first, anyway.

What’s interesting is, he admits he also joined the group to gain confidence, specifically, confidence to tell me my tenure is in real jeopardy. The chancellor doubts my commitment, which makes sense, as I’m not entirely confident in my commitment. Miles gave me the heads-up that she’ll be monitoring my class before the summer session ends and that I should be prepared. He’s been texting me advice on how I should handle this, which I now find less annoying and more touching. But the more I think of it, the more I wonder if teaching is the best use of my passion or talent, so I don’t see the point of worrying.

“Enough about Miles,” I tell B-Money. He’s going to be fine. He actually showed me some of the DMs he gets on his Instagram, and I can’t believe how many women are into him. Like, cute, normal women. He gets propositioned left and right, and they can’t all be Russian bots. There’s too many! I suspect he won’t be alone for long.

Regardless, at the moment, we have bigger fish to fry.

“Let’s crack this mystery.” I pull up Zeus’s grid on my iPad so we can get a closer look. “What do you make of all the selfies in the same pose?”

“Do you watch Survivor ?” he asks.

“The show where people are dropped in a jungle?”

“That’s the one.”

“Maybe once or twice. I kind of lived it, though. Does that count?”

“In this case, nah. And I do not even want to imagine the kind of bugs you encountered there.” He’s right; he doesn’t.

“So, what about the show?” I ask.

“Okay, people find these hidden immunity idols, right? The idols protect them from being voted out of the game. Sometimes these idols only have power if a person on the other team has one too. So they have to identify themselves to let the person on the other team know they’ve got it. But they can’t just say, Yo, I got the left half, and also, the teams are separated, so they can’t get together and talk.”

“This doesn’t sound like my experience in the jungle at all.”

He frowns at me. “Are you always such a buzzkill?”

“Actually, a lot less so now than I was before we started,” I admit.

“Big yikes. Anyway, the people with the idols, they have to say a phrase to identify themselves when the groups come together before a challenge. They gotta say something nonsensical like They say a stitch in time saves nine, but I only count eight. They sound like the heat has gotten to them, and everyone’s all, ‘Bruh, what?’ But the one person who knows what it’s supposed to mean is alerted, and they can make a plan from there.”

I don’t get it. “Bruh, what?”

B-Money shakes his head and it makes the little gold beads click against each other. “These selfies. I am saying they are some straight-up spy shit. They could be secret codes, because his face is the exact same in each shot, but the backdrop is different.”

“Code for what? For ‘I only have one look’?”

“Let’s zoom in on this one. First, there’s the caption, ‘ Feeling cute, might delete later? ’ That’s code! That’s code for a meetup time. Then, check it out—do you see that street sign way in the back? He is giving someone a location. This is a where and a when.”

I love that B-Money is into this too, but I sort of hate that he’s figured out more than I have. “But how would we possibly know where that is?”

“Reverse image search, girl. Lemme just ...” He taps at his phone and less than thirty seconds later, brings up a map. “He was here.” He points to a place in the industrial park beyond O’Hare.

“Whoa. I’ve never seen that before. Do you have some special software or app for that?”

He looks at me like I’m completely clueless. “It’s Google. And it’s not the Google. Just Google.”

“Are you calling me old?” I ask.

“I’m not not calling you old,” he replies. He’s not not right. “I’m just saying maybe you should stick with LinkedIn.”

I know this is supposed to be an insult, but I do use LinkedIn to find out what my former teammates are up to. None of them are out in the field anymore. A lot of them hold jobs that aren’t even related to environmental causes. We all used to be so passionate. I should reconnect. I bet some of them might be able to relate to what I’m going through. You know what? If I’ve learned anything from Fearless Inc., it’s that no person is an island. I need to open myself up, let people in, and I bet I could help some of them with what I’m learning. I am definitely going to be better about trying to connect and reconnect.

I ask him, “So, what do we do now?”

“We wait for him to post again.”

Okay, okay, I probably care about my job a little more than I let myself believe, although it’s hard to tell when I’m stuck teaching the nonscience students. But I do care, meaning I have to work on my lesson plan. Of course, I find the water table riveting, so we should cover that for the next few classes.

Creating a new lesson plan would be easier if I weren’t consumed with refreshing Instagram every fourteen seconds.

Something is up, though. I mean, how did Zeus know so much about us? Like, how did he know about B-Money’s boat? That’s super specific. How was he able to scoop us up after the kidnapping exercise? What is the likelihood that five people who so desperately needed a change were in the same place at the same time? Was that planned too? Were the woman with the stroller and the foiled robber plants of some sort, all part of some master plan? Are we being recruited for something? If so, what?

I could see my skills or Vishnu’s medical training used in some grand caper, but where do Liv and Michael and B-Money fit in? Does the CIA need Realtors and Luddite ad men and MCs? I don’t want to sell short what they do, but how do those skills gel with espionage? Is this espionage? What’s to be gained by turning us into would-be heroes, when we’ve clearly been anti-heroes for so long?

Or did we just join a gym with a new spin—creating a mind-body-spirit connection with a false derring-do narrative? Like, is this some ultrafunctional fitness fad everyone’s going to follow instead of SoulCycle or Barry’s Bootcamp? Is it strange that I’ll be so disappointed if it is?

I’m afraid I won’t be able to get anything done until we figure out where Zeus has gone; it feels like it’s the key to whatever this is. I mean, I can’t just disappear from class right before finals. We only have one week left—how does it make sense that Michael’s in charge for what should be the most important week? Something is afoot, I just know it.

What if this is a mission? What if we’re supposed to be looking for him? Is that what he wants? My mind is racing, and I just can’t concentrate on making the normally fascinating turbidity of groundwater interesting.

I start poking at my phone, refresh, refresh, refresh, refreshing. Nothing new from Zeus, but I do have a LinkedIn notification. I have always ignored these. When I was with BlueLove, all I wanted to do was tell everyone where I was and what I was doing. I don’t feel that same thrill now, even though I’m proud to be at a top-tier university. Bottom line, teaching instead of doing feels like giving up. Look at me. I’m the establishment now. I have a mortgage. I have a 401(k). I have underwear . I was an iconoclast and now I’m someone who DVRs Below Deck . I should be shaming yacht owners for conspicuous consumption, not tuning in to find out if Gary is going to hook up with Daisy again.

And what if I don’t get tenure? I’m not in love with this job, but that doesn’t mean I’m desperate to lose it. I worked so hard to get here. Not being given tenure is pretty much the university’s way of saying “Thanks for trying, but no thanks,” and my time as an assistant prof will wind to a close. Then what? Maybe I should spend some time on LinkedIn. I should cover my bases, see who’s out there and what other opportunities exist. Maybe the private sector isn’t so bad? The few BlueLovers I keep up with ended up there, and they seem happy enough.

The only LinkedIn notifications I get are for people who are already connected to people I know, so maybe the algorithm is onto something. I did say I wanted to reconnect with people, maybe broaden my professional horizons, share a little hard-fought wisdom, so I decide I may as well peruse the site while I wait for something new to populate on Zeus’s feed.

I click on the LinkedIn profile from the suggestion email, and even though this person has connections with some of my old BlueLove colleagues, I can immediately tell he is no one I’d want to associate with. This guy from Tennessee has been working as a “special project manager” for food and beverage companies for years, which, no thanks. Absolutely not. I know exactly what that nebulous job title means, and it’s nothing I support. I mean, Big Food and Beverage is just so gross in their practices. I just read in the Washington Post that they are paying registered dietitian influencers to hawk unhealthy eating because weight loss drugs are cutting into their profits.

So much of the trouble we’re in environmentally comes at the behest of Big Food, and there are a lot of oily lobbyists working hard to maintain the status quo, like this guy and his “special projects.” They’re willing to do whatever it takes to use the environment to better corporate profits, despite the fact that the industry is responsible for 36 percent of all global emissions (let alone the damage they’re doing to public health).

Don’t even get me started on the inequity between the greenhouse gas emissions from raising livestock versus the calories it produces. There’s so much more protein bang for the buck when you go plant based. One of the reasons I was in Brazil was the global demand for soybeans, which was leading to deforestation since the overwhelming percentage was used to feed—

Suddenly something catches my eye and throws the emergency brake on my internal rant.

Wait.

What the fuck?

What the fuck?

This guy’s profile photo looks exactly like Jeremy.