Revenge Body

I climbed the last flight of stairs to the roof around 10 on a Thursday night in August, and I want it noted that I almost turned around twice on the landing. The stairwell in Juan's building smells like hot tar and old weed, and every step I took made my sandals slap against the concrete like the whole floor could hear me being stupid.

Here's the deal, and I'm only explaining it once because I've already explained it to my sister Dana twice and she called me insane both times.

Three months ago my boyfriend Patrick Clancy cheated on me with a woman named Quinn Fitch. Eight months of dating, gone, because Patrick has the self-control of a golden retriever at a cookout. I found out because he left his iPad signed in. Amateur hour. And the thing about Quinn, the thing that made it worse than your standard betrayal, is that she has an Instagram where she posts herself running marathons and drinking green juice and captioning things like "protecting my peace." Protecting her peace. From my boyfriend, apparently, very up close.

So Quinn has an ex. His name is Juan Keller, he's 26, Mexican-American, Sunset Park born and raised, and he does landscaping, and according to his own profile he has arms like he gets paid by the bicep, which technically he does. Quinn dated him for six months and dumped him five months ago for reasons nobody online explained. I swiped right on him eleven days ago. He matched in four hours. We texted for a week. I'm Korean-American, from Fort Lee, the daughter of two pharmacists who still think I'm going to law school, and I mention this only because his first message was a picture of a kimchi jar in his fridge and the words 'is this a sign.' He was funny in a dry way that I did not expect, and I kept reminding myself of the mission every time I laughed at one of his messages.

The mission: photos. Rooftop, skyline behind us, my hand on his chest, posted to my story where Dana would screenshot it and Ari's friend Isaac would screenshot it and eventually it would migrate to the group chat where a girl I used to work with still talks to Quinn's cousin. That's it. That was the entire plan. Revenge body, revenge rooftop, revenge beer in a man's hand. Petty. I'm aware. Dana said the word insane again and I hung up on her.

The stairwell door opened onto the roof and the heat hit me first. August in Brooklyn, even at night, is like opening an oven you forgot you left on. The Manhattan skyline was lit up across the water, all orange and fake-looking, like a backdrop they roll out for people having bad decisions.

He was leaning against the parapet with his shirt off, drinking a beer, and I hate to report that my plan got instantly harder to remember.

"Hey," he said, and he did the smirk. I'd seen the smirk in three photos and it was worse in person. "I wasn't expecting you to actually show."

"I was in the neighborhood," I said.

My voice cracked on neighborhood. It cracked like I was fourteen, except I'm twenty-four, so it cracked like a twenty-four-year-old liar. Juan took a slow pull of his beer and looked at me over the top of the can, and I busied myself with looking at the skyline like Manhattan had something new to show me since 2019.

"In the neighborhood," he repeated. "Off Bushwick Avenue. At ten at night."

"There's a taco place."

"Two blocks the wrong way."

"Whatever," I said, and toed the gravel on the roof, and he laughed, not mean, just amused, and held out a beer he had waiting in a bucket of melted ice. I traded him the tin of chocolate chip cookies I'd brought as a prop. He'd planned ahead too, apparently. I had planned a photo op and a getaway window of ninety minutes.

I took the beer and we stood there for a while not talking, which was fine, because the view was doing the work. His roof is the top of a four-story walk-up and you can see the whole lower skyline, the bridges, a water tower closer in with a pigeon situation happening on it. He has string lights stapled along the parapet, half of them dead, and a plastic adirondack chair that's missing an arm. A guy who sits up here alone a lot. I know that type of chair. I own that type of chair.

"So," I said, going for casual and landing somewhere around documentary narrator, "you used to date Quinn Fitch."

I said it like gossip. Like we were two coworkers at a microwave. Inside, my reasoning was flawless. I had come all this way, if I didn't bring her up it would be weird later, and also I wanted to hear him trash her so I could feel better about the whole thing. Flawless. Airtight.

Juan went quiet. Not offended quiet. Thinking quiet. He set his beer on the parapet and pulled out his phone, and my stomach did a little drop because I thought, here it comes, he's going to show me a photo of her, this plan has already exploded before liftoff.

He scrolled and turned the phone around. "My sister's birthday. June. That's Ellie, that's my mom, that's my cousin Hector who ate all the flan."

It was a backyard. Folding tables, a banner, a kid blowing out candles in the middle of the frame. And in the background, slightly out of focus, holding a solo cup and laughing at something out of frame, was Quinn.

I froze. I mean fully froze, beer halfway to my mouth, and Juan watched my face do whatever it did.

The photo was from June. His family's party. Quinn at his family's party, a few months after she dumped him, which meant either the dumping was recent-news or she kept showing up to Keller functions, and either way my brain lit up with explanations and none of them helped me. Here's what I knew for sure: the woman who slept with my boyfriend was in this man's family album, and I was standing on his roof in a skirt I'd bought specifically for evidence purposes.

"That's," I said.

"Quinn," he said. "Yeah. She and my mom are still weirdly close. Don't ask, I've given up."

I said nothing. The silence went on long enough that it developed a texture. Juan tilted his head at me, and I watched the misunderstanding assemble itself behind his eyes in real time, and I did nothing to stop it because I am a coward with a skincare routine.

"Hey," he said, softer. "If this is about her. She's ancient history. We ended fine, it was months ago, whatever. You don't have to make that face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making a face."

"I have a face," I said. "It came like this."

He laughed, and I laughed, and then both of us heard how fake my laugh was and it got worse. He took a step toward me, all reassuring, and said something like people deserve better than being someone's second chapter, I don't even remember exactly, because I was busy having a full internal audit of my life. He thought I was jealous. Of Quinn. He thought I'd swiped right on him carrying some insecurity about his past, and if I let him keep believing that, fine, that was almost better than the truth, except it wasn't, because the truth was so much stupider.

I needed ninety seconds and a locked door. Any door.

"I have to pee," I announced.

Smooth. Silky. The words of a seductress. Juan blinked. "Okay. Kitchen's the second door, bathroom's past it, the little hallway."

"The little hallway," I repeated, like a hostage repeating instructions.

The problem with Juan's apartment, which I learned in the next four minutes, is that the bathroom window is also the fire escape window, and the fire escape is how you get down from the roof without going through the apartment, and I did not want to walk through his apartment past his kitchen where I would presumably see more photos and say more stupid things. So I took the fire escape. Down two levels of rattling iron stairs in the dark, sweating through my top, telling myself that a five-minute reset in his bathroom, splash water on my face, rehearse one normal sentence, return to roof, execute plan.

The stairs clanged under me like I was announcing my shame to the whole block. I got to the bathroom window, which was open about eight inches at the bottom, and I tried the lock so it would stay put, and the lock didn't budge, and when I gave it a little frustrated wrench the whole window frame shifted