Lisa Ko: The Leavers

His phone buzzed. A text from Roland: you ok?? He checked his e-mail. There were messages from music mailing lists, an article on unemployment rates and college degrees forwarded from his parents that he erased without reading. There was the message from a Michael Chen, the one he had received more than two months ago, which he still hadn’t replied to but hadn’t deleted either. Instead he read it again, then closed it, keeping the words simmering inside him at a near constant boil:

Hi Daniel,

I’m looking for a Daniel Wilkinson who used to be named Deming Guo. Is this you?

HI!! It’s Michael. You and your mom used to live with me and my mom and my Uncle Leon in the Bronx. My mother got married a few years ago and I live with her and my stepfather in Brooklyn. I’m a sophomore at Columbia.

I know we haven’t talked in years but if this is the right Daniel, can you write me or call me at 646-795-3460? It’s important. It’s about your mother.

If this is the wrong Daniel Wilkinson, can you let me know too so I don’t bother you again?

Hope to hear from you soon!

Michael Chen

“Fuck,” he said. “Motherfucker.” As if Michael and Leon and Vivian could come back ten years later, as if all of a sudden he mattered to them. They’d let him go, given him away. He couldn’t think of anything Michael could tell him about his mother that he wanted to know. Wherever she was, she was long gone.

He turned his phone off and walked uptown. His hiking boots chomped at the pavement. Crossing Canal, he stepped into a puddle and felt liquid splash the back of his jeans. He would never sell someone out like that. He wouldn’t quit or disappear, not like his mother or Leon. He’d go back to the apartment and apologize to Roland, learn all the songs, play until his fingers were sore, practice until he was absolved and good again, until he was perfect.

“I DON’T KNOW WHY they have to make this menu so hard to read.” Peter squinted at the jagged lettering, which was printed to look like handwriting. His legs hit the underside of the table and the silverware jumped. “And this chair. It’s sized for an infant.”

The waitress, who had a chunky nose ring between her nostrils, was already shouting over the jazz standards, but Peter asked her to repeat the brunch specials as Kay asked questions about the dishes. Is lemon curd very sour? I don’t like sour. What are pepitas? What is LaFrieda beef, why do they have to name the cow? The floppy velvet cushion on Daniel’s chair kept sliding out beneath him, and he bunched up the fabric, tucking it under his knees.

Daniel’s parents were in the same sort of clothes they’d been wearing for as long as he had known them, Peter in his rumpled khakis and earth-tone cardigan, Kay in her pastel turtleneck and wide-wale corduroys. After ten years he had stopped noticing how different they looked from him, but he hadn’t seen them in two months, had been working and riding the subway and walking the streets with all kinds of people, and now they were the ones who seemed different — quieter, diminished, out of touch. This role reversal was unexpectedly fulfilling.

“Controversy’s brewing at the college,” Kay said. “Excuse the coffee pun.”

Daniel drained his cup. “At Carlough?”

“The minority students have been protesting.” Peter placed a hard emphasis on minority . “They want the administration to establish an Ethnic Studies department.”

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“Well, it’s not that we don’t agree with them,” Kay said. “I mean, we do value diversity.”

“But the level of vitriol,” Peter said. “Frankly, it’s not helping their cause. I’ve had students walk out of my lectures. It’s simply disruptive.”

“It’s the white students, too, of course,” Kay added. “All this focus on trigger warnings, political correctness. I’m afraid we’re breeding a generation of coddled children. I’d like to think that we’ve raised you to not have that sort of entitlement, Daniel.”

“Of course, Mom.”

The waitress returned with their food and Peter ordered a coffee refill. Kay removed the teabag from her cup and pressed it against her spoon. Neither of them taught on Fridays, and they had gotten up at six in the morning to drive five hours to the city, planning to drive home right after lunch, refusing Daniel’s offer to stay the night in Roland’s apartment. “We are not sleeping on Roland Fuentes’ sofa,” Peter had said, as if the mere suggestion was absurd.

“Another coffee for me, too, please. And water.” Daniel had chugged two glasses of water when he woke up, but his mouth was still dry.

Kay studied him. “Were you out late last night? Did you just get up?”

He shook his head.

“Sure. Like I remember you getting up at the crack of dawn over summer vacation.”

“You know me,” Daniel said. “I like to rise with the sun.”

“Get a head start on the farm, right?”

Peter stirred sugar into his coffee. “How is Roland doing these days?”

When Daniel had woken up, forty minutes ago, after a few hours of negligible sleep, his coat was folded at the foot of the couch and Roland’s bedroom door was closed. They hadn’t seen each other since he had run out of the show.

He spoke through his teeth, tilting his sentences upwards. “Great! We played a show last night.” As he cut his omelet, his elbow bumped against Kay’s.

“Last night. Was it in a bar?”

“Mom. I haven’t been doing anything. A beer or two now and then.”

“You know what they say, temptations can lead to relapses. You should be at home with us, going to meetings — you are going to meetings, aren’t you?”

She asked him the same thing each time they spoke, and he always lied. “The one near Roland’s place. I told you about it.”

He’d seen the letter that had arrived from the dean at the end of last semester, the bold print detailing the terms of his academic dismissal. After his spring semester GPA fell to a 1.9, the school had put him on probation, and in October, he stopped going to classes. Peter had installed blocking software on Daniel’s laptop, though the poker sites had already banned him after he overdrew too many accounts.

His knee knocked against the table, sloshing Kay’s tea out of its cup, and Peter watched as he mopped the liquid with his napkin. “I’m doing good here. I’m making decent money at my job, not using my credit card, and Roland’s roommate is moving out in May so I’m going to take his bedroom. It’s not like Potsdam, where there’s nothing to do. I’m too busy to get distracted by that stuff here.”

“Nothing to do in Potsdam, he says.” Peter huffed. “It’s school. You’re supposed be studying, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. Not all this — stuff.”

“I don’t know,” Kay said. “These addictions, I’ve been reading about it, they go beyond self-policing, and New York City is so full of temptations.”

“Trust me, Mom.”

“There are bad elements everywhere, yes, but there are more people in New York City, more chances to run into bad elements.”

“Working in a Mexican restaurant like a common laborer,” Peter said.

“Don’t be racist,” Daniel said.

“What, it’s racist now to say Mexican? Well, you serve tacos and refried beans. If that’s not Mexican, I don’t know what is. Call a spade a spade.”

“A spade? Are you serious? The owners are rich and white, so you have nothing to be worried about. All kinds of people work there, all races and ages. Why, I even have an Indian co-worker who’s at FIT, and a Black co-worker who’s going to NYU. And the owners didn’t go to college and they’re fucking millionaires. I haven’t met them because they don’t even live in New York. One guy lives in a tree house in Washington state, his brother’s surfing in Costa Rica, and the other guy’s in Berlin.”