Imagines

You look at the time and realize how late it is and decide to table that mental debate for later. You delete all your work and drop everything onto the floor, grabbing a towel and running for the shower. You have to be at work soon. A good lesson: never experience happiness, because something will immediately remind you not to be happy.

AFTER YOUR SHOWER, you’re brushing your hair when you accidentally catch sight of yourself in the foggy mirror. You flinch, like you’re seeing a ghost. You wipe off the glass to see yourself better. You stand there and look at yourself, hardly recognizing what you see. Honestly, you hardly look in the mirror anymore. Like, ever, if you can help it. You hate what you look like, so what is even the point if it’s just going to ruin your day and confirm what you already know to be true about yourself?

You’ve tried the Instagram makeup filters, and they kind of help, but not really. It’s not enough. You’re not even sure you’re doing them right. There are tutorials, lessons you can buy to help you learn how to achieve better results with the makeup. How to make it look like you know what you’re doing. You haven’t purchased them yet, but you feel, on a deep level, like you should.

You give up on your hair and your appearance and walk back to your bedroom, and your heart immediately launches out of your chest because Hi! There’s your boyfriend, standing in your room, holding the phone that Kim gave you.

“Um, hi?” you say, your voice more meek and unsure-sounding than you intended.

Your boyfriend looks at you, and those are not his eyes. “We need to talk,” he says, and that is not his voice.

“Okay,” you say, and you sit on the edge of the bed, waiting. You are in trouble. You are in So. Much. Trouble.

“Where did you get this?” he asks simply, coldly.

You do not 100 percent want to answer this question, but you sense this is kind of an important crossroads in your relationship.

“What are you doing here?” you ask.

“I asked you where you got this.”

“Why are you going through my stuff?”

You can see the thing fluttering beneath his jawline. “I came home to surprise you and saw you were in the shower, so I came in here to wait, and I saw this”—he holds the phone out, directly in front of your face—“on the floor, so I picked it up to see what it was, and now I have to ask: Where did you get this?”

You can feel every cell in your body vibrating. What is this conversation? What does it mean? You mentally scan through twenty different lies you could offer him, but they all sound terrible. And also: he’s your boyfriend. Since when do you lie to him?

“It’s from work,” you say.

“You found it at work? When? Or someone gave it to you at work? Who?” This isn’t a conversation. This is an interrogation.

“Kind of. Not exactly.”

“This is a phone with a front-facing camera. A front-facing camera like the ones used for selfies! Do you even know how illegal this is? If someone gave this to you, I need to alert my team. I need to bring them in immediately.”

“I—” you start to say, then stop, unsure how to proceed, really just wanting this conversation to be over. Wanting him out of your room. Wanting to fast-forward past the next big chunk of your life. You’d been in such a good mood when you decrypted that file, and now you feel like scum, like the lowest, most terrible person on the planet. Why can’t you just tell him where you got the phone?

“I wasn’t doing anything with the phone,” you say, trying to sound reassuring. “I mean, it’s not connected to the internet or anything.”

“That’s not the point. The point is there are laws, laws I have sworn to uphold. And I find out my girlfriend, right under my nose, has been—”

“I’m sorry!” you say. “I’m sorry, okay? I just brought it home yesterday. I’ll take it back tonight, and you won’t see it ever again. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

No lies so far, yay, you.

“What were you thinking?” he presses.

“I just . . . it was a project I was doing at work. I found the parts and just started messing around with them.”

Well, so much for that; those are definitely lies, and you are definitely terrible.

Your boyfriend is quiet, staring at you, and you finally meet his eyes. They reflect nothing back—no emotion, no love, no patience. This is awful. He must hate you so much right now. Why are you putting him through this?

“You made this,” he says.

You nod.

“You?” he asks, for confirmation.

“Wait, are you saying you don’t believe I made it?” Your voice is rising; you start to feel yourself getting defensive. Okay, technically you didn’t make it, and it would never have occurred to you to make it, but is it beyond all reason or possibility that you could have? What kind of question is that for him to ask, anyway?

“What is wrong with you?” your boyfriend asks. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Doing what to you? You don’t believe I could make this? I used to be pretty great at electronics, you know. It’s how we met.”

Your boyfriend had been one of the viewers #actually-ing you in the comments. Not one of the really nasty ones, of course. He didn’t say you were ugly or a slut or anything like that. He just suggested that you were misinformed about the usefulness of modding the firmware on your router. And it was obnoxious, but it was so comparatively less obnoxious than the comments you typically received that you responded and engaged with him. It led to a thread that suggested he was at least communicating with you in a way that took you kind of seriously. And that had led to emailing, and that had led to meeting up IRL, and that had led to the entire rest of your life up to this point.

Your boyfriend looks confused, conflicted, frustrated. You know you’ve backed him into a corner now. “It’s not that I don’t think you could have hacked this phone,” he says. “It’s just, it’s just—” His voice starts to quaver. There are almost tears in his eyes.

What is going on?

“Why do you suddenly feel the need to take selfies?” he asks. “Don’t you like the pictures I take of us?”

He’s shaking, dropping the phone down by his side, looking off at the wall. Oh. OH. This is about his hurt feelings. That’s different. That’s easy to fix.

“Oh, sweetie,” you say, rushing to him and wrapping your arms around him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I love the photographs you take of us. I love being in your pictures. I love all the pictures of us. You do a GREAT job. Better than any pictures I could ever take of myself. I don’t need to take selfies, I promise.”

He’s wiping the tears from his eyes. “I always try to take at least one good picture of us on every date,” he offers quietly.

“Yes, you do. And I love them,” you say. You’re holding his face in your hands. “I’m so sorry. I was just messing around at work, and I didn’t think about how it would affect you. The pictures you take of me are more than enough for me. You don’t need to be worried, okay? I’ll take the phone apart and put everything back at work. No one will ever know, I promise.”

He nods, sniffling, drying his eyes.

“Okay? Are we okay? I’m sorry. I’m so so so so sorry.” You lean up to kiss his cheek. He’s still not looking at you.

“I have to get to work,” you say. “Do you want to drive me? So we can get a little more time to hang out? I like when you drive me places.” You move away and start to get ready. You take the phone out of his hands and feel his eyes on you as you bend, as casually and meaninglessly as possible, to throw it into your backpack.

“Okay,” he says. “Sure.” There’s something going on behind his eyes. He’s still so far away. You feel like your love is a chain, you feel like he’s hanging off a tall bridge from the end of your love, and you have to haul that love, hand over hand, all the way up, to bring him back to the bridge, to reality, to life, to you. It’s delicate work—at any minute the love could sl

ip from your hands and he’ll fall back down, and you’ll have to begin the work of pulling him up again. It’s exhausting.

“I need to finish getting dressed and then we’ll go, okay?”

You pick up your clothes and turn away, pausing briefly as you think of the phone lying in your bag on your bed. Part of you wishes there was a way to take the bag and walk away, and then just keep on walking, forever. But that’s not realistic. There is no part of you that’s capable of something like that.