JOSH

Hazel Bradford. Wow.

Pretty much everyone we went to college with has a Hazel Bradford story. Of course, my old roommate Mike has many—mostly of the wild sexual variety—but others have ones more similar to mine: Hazel Bradford doing a mud run half marathon and coming to her night lab before showering because she didn’t want to be late. Hazel Bradford getting more than a thousand signatures of support to enter a local hot dog eating contest/fund-raiser before remembering, onstage and while televised, that she was trying to be a vegetarian. Hazel Bradford holding a yard sale of her ex-boyfriend’s clothes while he was still asleep at the party where she found him naked with someone else (incidentally, another guy from his terrible garage band). And—my personal favorite—Hazel Bradford giving an oral presentation on the anatomy and function of the penis in Human Anatomy.

I could never quite tell whether she was oblivious or just didn’t care what people thought, but no matter how chaotic she was, she always managed to give off an innocent, unintentionally wild vibe. And here she is in the flesh—all five foot four of her, a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, huge brown eyes, with her hair in an enormous brown bun—and I don’t think anything has changed.

“Can I call you Jimin?” she asks.

“No.”

Confusion flickers across her face. “You should be proud of your heritage, Josh.”

“I am,” I say, fighting a smile. “But you just said it ‘Jee-Min.’ ”

I’m given a blank stare.

“It’s not the same,” I explain, and say it again: “Jimin.”

She takes on a dramatic, seductive expression. “Jeee-minnnn?”

“No.”

Giving up, Hazel straightens and sips her margarita, looking around. “Do you live in Portland?”

“I do.” Just behind her, in the distance, I see my sister walk up to Dave, pull him down to her level, ask him something, and then they both look at me. I’m positive she’s just asked where Tabby is.

I knew, when Tabitha took the job in L.A.—her dream job to write for a fashion magazine—that there would be weekends when one or the other of us would be stuck and unable to fly south (me) or north (her), but it sucks that on three out of four of her weekends to come up here, she’s flaked last minute.

Or maybe not flaked so much as had a last-minute work emergency.

But what kind of emergencies do they have at a style magazine?

Honestly, I have no clue. Whatever.

Hazel is still talking.

I turn my attention back down to her just as she seems to wrap up whatever it was she was asking. She stares at me expectantly, grinning in her wide-open way.

“What’s that?” I ask.

She clears her throat, speaking slowly, “I asked whether you were okay.”

I nod, tilting my bottled water to my lips and trying to wipe away the irritation she must see slashed across my mouth. “I’m good. Just mellow. Long week.” I do a mental tally: I averaged eleven hours and thirty-five clients a day this week alone so I could be free all weekend. Knee replacements, hip replacements, bursitis, sprains, torn ligaments, and one dislocated pelvis that made my hands feel weak before I even attempted to work on it.

“It’s just that you’re sort of monosyllabic,” Hazel says, and I look down at her. “You’re drinking water when there are Dave’s margaritas to be had.”

“I’m not very good at …” I trail off, gesturing with my bottle to the growing melee around us.

“Drinking?”

“No, just …”

“Putting words together into sentences, and then sentences together into conversation?”

Pursing my lips at her, I say primly, “Socializing in large crowds.”

This earns me a laugh, and I watch as her shoulders lift toward her ears and she snickers like a cartoon character. Her bun wobbles back and forth on the top of her head. A guilty pulse flashes through me when I realize that despite being goofy, she’s sexy as hell, too.

I can feel the reaction work its way from my heart to my groin, and cover with “You are so weird.”

“It’s true. I’m around kids all day—what do you expect?” I’m about to remind her that it seems like she’s always been this way when she continues, “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a physical therapist.” I look around the yard to see whether my business partner, Zach, has shown up yet, but I don’t see a flash of orange hair anywhere. “My partner and I opened our practice about a year ago, downtown.”

Hazel groans in jealousy. “You get to talk about cores all day, and working things nice and deep. I would never get any actual work done.”

“I mean, I occasionally get to tell people to take their pants off, but it’s rarely the people you want to see naked from the waist down.”

She gives me a thoughtful frown. “I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if clothes were never invented.”

“I literally never wonder that.”

Hazel rolls on without pause. “Like if we were just naked all the time, what things would have been developed differently?”

I take a sip of my water. “We probably wouldn’t ride horses.”

“Or we’d just have calluses in weird places.” She taps her lips with her index finger. “Bike seats would be different.”

“Very likely.”

“Women probably wouldn’t shave their labia.”

A jarring physical reaction cracks through me. “Hazel, that is a terrible word.”

“What? We actually don’t have hair inside our vaginas.” I stifle another shudder and she levels me with the fiery stare of a woman scorned. “Besides, no one winces at the word ‘scrotum.’ ”

“I absolutely wince at ‘scrotum.’ And ‘glans.’ ”

“Glaaaans,” she says, elongating the word. “Terrible.”

I stare at her for a few quiet seconds. Her shoulders are bare, and there’s a single freckle on her left one. Her collarbones are defined, arms sculpted like she exercises. I get a flash of a mental image of Hazel using watermelons as weights. “I feel like you’re making me drunk just by speaking.” I peer into her glass. “Like some kind of osmosis is happening.”

“I think we’re going to be best friends.” At my bewildered silence, she reaches up and ruffles my hair. “I live in Portland, you live in Portland. You have a girlfriend and I have a huge assortment of Netflix series backlogged. We both hate the word ‘glans.’ I know and love your sister. She loves me. This is the perfect setup for boy-girl bestship: I’ve already been unbearable near you, which makes it impossible to scare you away.”

Quickly swallowing a sip of water, I protest, “I’m afraid you’re going to try.”

She seems to ignore this. “I think you think I’m fun.”

“Fun in the way that clowns are fun.”

Hazel looks up at me, eyes on fire with excitement. “I seriously thought I was the only person alive who loves clowns!”

I can’t hold in my laugh. “I’m kidding. Clowns are terrifying. I won’t even walk too close to the storm drain in front of my house.”

“Well.” She threads her arm through mine, leading me closer to the heart of the party. When she leans in to whisper, my stomach drops somewhere around my navel, the way it does at the first lurch of a roller coaster. “We have nowhere to go but up.”

..........

Hazel sidles us up to a pair of guys standing near the built-in grill—John and Yuri, two of my sister’s (and now Hazel’s) colleagues. Their conversation halts as we approach, and Hazel holds out a firm hand.

“I’m Hazel. This is Josh.”

The three of us regard her with faint amusement. I’ve known them both for years.

“We go way back,” John says, tilting his head to me, but he shakes her hand, and I watch her methodically take in his shoulder-length dreads, mustache, beret, and T-shirt that reads SCIENCE DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE. I hold my breath, wondering what Hazel is going to do with him because, as a white dude with dreadlocks, John has made it pretty easy for her, but she just turns to Yuri, smiling and shaking his hand.

“John and Yuri work with Em,” I tell her. I use my bottle to point to John. “As you may have guessed, he teaches science to the upper grades. Yuri is music and theater. Hazel is the new third grade teacher.”

They offer congratulations and Hazel curtsies. “Do third graders get music?” she asks Yuri.

He nods. “Kindergarten through second is vocal only. In third they begin a string instrument. Violin, viola, or cello.”

“Can I learn, too?” Her eyebrows slowly rise. “Like, sit in on the class?”

John and Yuri smile at Hazel in the bemused way that says, Is she fucking serious? I imagine most elementary school teachers nap, eat, or cry when they have a free period.

Hazel does a little dance and mimes playing a cello. “I’ve always wanted to be the next Yo-Yo Ma.”

“I … guess so?” Yuri says, disarmed by the power of Hazel Bradford’s cartoon giggle and bewitching honesty. I turn and look at her, worrying about what Yuri has just gotten himself into. But when he checks out her chest, he doesn’t seem worried at all.

“Yo-Yo Ma began performing when he was four and a half,” I tell her.

“I’d better get cracking, then. Don’t let me down, Yuri.”

He laughs and asks her where she’s from. Half listening to her answer—only child, born in Eugene, raised by an artist mother and engineer father, Lewis & Clark for college—I pull out my phone and check the latest texts from Tabby, each of them sent about five minutes apart. I hate that I get a tiny bit of pleasure knowing that she kept checking her phone.

I blow out a controlled breath, and type,

..........

“She said you were going to be best friends?” My sister frowns at a shirt and drops it back on the pile at Nordstrom Rack. “I’m her best friend.”

“It’s what she said.” A laugh rises in my chest but doesn’t make its way out when I remember Hazel accepting her fourth margarita from Dave and asking me to staple her shirt to her waistband. “She’s a trip.”

“She’s made me weird,” Em says. “It’ll happen to you, too.”

I think I know exactly what Em means, but seeing the effect Hazel has had on my sister—making her more fun-loving, giving her social confidence that only now, in hindsight, can I really attribute to Hazel—I don’t consider this oddness a bad thing. And Hazel is so unlike Tabby and Zach—so unlike everyone, really, but maybe the polar opposite of my girlfriend and best friend, who both tend to be quiet and observant—that I think it might be fun to have her around. Like keeping interesting beer in the fridge that you’re always surprised and pleased to find there.

Is that a terrible metaphor? I glance at my sister and mentally calculate the amount of physical damage she could inflict with the hanger she’s holding.

“She’s half ‘hot exasperating mess’ and half ‘color in a monotone landscape.’ ” Em pulls the shirt from the hanger and hands it to me. I fold it over my arm, letting her—as usual—pick my clothes. “I can’t believe Tabby isn’t here, again.”

I don’t bite. It’s the third time she’s tried to bait me into a conversation about my girlfriend.

“Doesn’t she know that relationships take work?”

Sliding my gaze over to her, I remind her, “She has a deadline, Em.”

“Does she really, though?” Her voice is high and tight and she takes out her frustration on a pair of shorts she throws back down on the stack in front of her. “Doesn’t this evasion of hers feel like … like …”

I prepare for this with a deep breath, hoping my sister doesn’t go there.

“Like she’s cheating?” she asks.

And she went there.

“Emily,” I begin calmly, “when Dave is working crazy hours at the school, and you come over and eat dinner at my place and vent about how you haven’t seen him in days, do I tell you, ‘Well, maybe he’s got someone on the side’?”

“No, but Dave is also not a flaky asshole.”

This trips my fuse. “What is your deal with Tabby? She’s only ever been nice to you.”

She flinches at my volume, because it’s pretty high, which I know is rare. “It’s not even that you’re too good for her, or she’s too good for you,” she says, “it’s like you guys are in different circles. You have different values.”

It’s true that our parents—who moved here from Seoul when they were newly married and nineteen—aren’t huge fans of Tabitha, but I also think they might not be huge fans of any non-Korean girl I date. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what Emily means. I give her a bewildered look.

She turns to face me fully, ticking reasons off on her fingers. “Tabby is the only person I know who has silk sheets. She spends hours getting ready to end up looking like she’s just rolled out of bed. You, on the other hand, love camping and still occasionally wear the sweatpants I got you for Christmas nine years ago.”

I shake my head, still not following.

“She thinks of Heathers as a pretty good guide to social etiquette.” Emily stares at me. “She laughs at Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion completely without irony but has sat through four Christopher Guest films with us without cracking a single smile. Even when she does come home to visit you, she spends half her time battling out Who Wore It Better debates in the comments on Instagram.”

I blink, trying to connect the dots. “So your issue with her is … you think she’s shallow?”

“No, I’m not saying that. If those things make her happy, then fine. What I’m saying is I think you don’t have a lot in common. I watch you guys interact and it’s, like, silence, or ‘Can you hand me the carrots over there on the counter?’ She is very, very enmeshed in the world of fashion, and Hollywood, and appearances.” Emily stares up at me, and I get the silent communication as I shuffle the load of clothes she’s selected for me from one arm to the other.

“Well, then it’s convenient for both her and me that I don’t care what I wear. Obviously, I let the women in my life choose.”

My sister’s eyes narrow and I watch as she shrewdly takes a different tack. “What do you guys do when she’s here?”

I file through the images of Tabby’s last few visits. Sex. Walking to the corner for groceries. Tabby didn’t want to go canoeing or hiking and I didn’t feel like hitting the bars, so we stayed in for more sex. Dinner out nearby, followed by sex.

I’m pretty sure my sister doesn’t want that level of specificity, but she doesn’t need me to answer, apparently, because she rolls on. “And what do you do when you visit her?”

Sex, clubs, crowded restaurants, everyone on their phones texting people across the room, more clubs, me complaining about the clubs, me hiking Runyon Canyon alone, coming back to her place and having more sex.

Emily looks away. “Anyway, I’m meddling.”

“You are.” I guide her toward the cashier; I’m getting bored looking at clothes.

I pay for our items, thank the woman at the register, and we leave, walking along the paved path of the outdoor mall, ducking past kiosk workers aggressively waving skin cream samples at us. Emily looks up at me with reconciliation in her smile. “Let’s get back to what we were talking about before.”

We are in agreement here. “I think we were talking about the barbecue.”

She slides her eyes to me. “You mean we were talking about Hazel.”

Ah. Clarity slaps me. Turning, I stop her with a hand on her shoulder. “I already have a girlfriend.”

My sister gives me a pruney face. “I’m aware.”

“In case you’re trying to start something between me and Hazel Bradford, I can tell you without any question that we are not compatible.”

“I’m not trying anything,” she protests. “She’s just fun, and you need more fun.”

I give her a wary glance. “I’m not sure I’m man enough to handle Hazel’s brand of fun.”

Emily swings a shopping bag over her shoulder and flashes me a toothy grin. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”