The Year of Yes Read Online Free PDF Page A

had, for years, been traumatized by a boyfriend dubbing her round and muscular ass Shelfie. He’d shared with her his revolutionary feeling that her derriere should be used as a kind of knickknack ledge, and brokered ass grabs to his friends in exchange for pot. His band had collaborated on an ode to the ass, entitled “She’s a Shelf,” which, years later, still echoes through the post-grunge clubs of Seattle. At least, living in New York, most of the comments about the family rump were positive. And if it incited men to ask me out, who was I to judge them? Maybe they liked me for my ass, I thought, but surely they’d like me for other reasonsonce they got to know me. They’d like me for my capacity to quote from The Canterbury Tales, for my ability to sew them a quilted toga, for the entirety of my personality. Of course they would.
    RESOLVED, I MARCHED into the kitchen, where Victoria and Zak were pretending not to be sharing the table. Vic was wearing headphones to block out Zak’s muttering. Zak was wearing an expression straight out of Edvard Munch. Taken as a trio, Zak (half-African American, half-Caucasian), Vic (Chinese), and I (Northern European mishmash) had the look of a multicultural Three’s Company. I got along with both of my roommates, but they didn’t care for each other.
    Vic had been born in Taiwan and had spoken only Chinese until she was five, at which point her family had moved to Lafayette, Louisiana. She had a fascinating accent—slightly Chinese, slightly Southern—and her cooking accommodated both fried chicken and thousand-year-old eggs. She also had a pierced tongue, which, with extreme difficulty, she had so far managed to keep hidden from her mother. Vic was an interesting compendium of personality traits: both hypercritical (she’d been known to wail, in the manner of a flaming gay fashion critic, after seeing a large woman dressed in a tube top, “Oh no, she didnnnn’t!”) and maternal. She could be counted on to wrap blankets around you and feed you soup when you were sick, and hug you and feed you ice cream when you were crying over some bad boyfriend. She’d also be clicking her tongue in annoyancethat you’d been so dumb as to get your heart broken in the first place, but nobody was perfect.
    I’d met Zak on the first day of classes. He had curly, close-cropped black hair, big glasses, and a brain that never stopped. Zak was almost ridiculously Berkeley, the child of a wayward Vietnam vet and a lesbian. He was stunningly bright and incredibly well-read, and, for these traits, as well as for his enormous, though unpredictable, generosity, I had promptly developed a crush on him. The crush had ended midway through the year, when he’d bleached his hair yellow. I’d found Vic, and shallowly announced: “I’m over him. He looks like a duckling.”
    I’d had the crush reprieve for about a month and a half while the duckling grew out, and then summer hit, and I’d moved to a sublet in a sketchy bit of south Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the end of three months, Vic had returned from her sister’s house in New Orleans, and she and I had set about trying to find an apartment. One day we’d been walking through Washington Square Park, and had stumbled over Zak sitting with his back against a wall, meditating on his lack of living space. We’d offered him a slot in our undetermined home-to-be. Though my crush was on hold, I’d been excited to imagine that we could potentially become best of best friends by sharing a bathroom. I’d never had a male roommate before.
    Now that Zak and I lived together, I was constantly on the verge of falling madly and idiotically in love with him. Considering that he insisted he didn’t want me, I pretended a similar disinterest. To our mutual best friend, Griffin, I maintained that Zak and I were soul mates, but Zak denied it. Ha, I said, though quietly. We had chemistry, damn it.Since we’d moved in together, we’d stayed up late every