THE LOVE YOU WANT

Miggy Delgado Alvares had rehearsed exactly one sentence all day, and it was not the sentence he was going to say. The rehearsed sentence was: “Hey, Hannah, I saved you a seat.” Simple. Casual. Six words, if you counted hey as a word, which Miggy did, because he had counted everything. He had practiced it in the shower, on the walk to his morning lecture, and in the third-floor bathroom of the engineering building, where he had stared at his own reflection and said it so many times the words had stopped sounding like English. The sentence he actually said, when Hannah Gabriel walked into the Golden Lotus at 7:42 on Thursday evening with her hair still damp from the rain, was this: “Seat. Hi. There is one. Of those.” Hannah paused with one hand on her umbrella. She looked at the empty chair beside him, then at Miggy, then at the chair again, like a woman trying to translate a menu in a country she had never visited. “Of those,” she repeated. “Chairs,” Miggy said, with the quiet dignity of a man watching his own funeral from the back row. Across the table, Angelo Galvez made a sound like a kettle coming to a boil. He had his napkin pressed to his mouth and his shoulders were shaking and his eyes were wet, and when he finally lowered the napkin he said, with great and terrible sincerity, “That was beautiful. Somebody write that down.” “I’m writing it down,” said Ella, who was not writing it down, but who did have her phone out and angled suspiciously at the table. “Please don’t,” Miggy said. “Too late,” said Mark, from the far end, mouth full of dumpling. “It’s in the cloud now. It will outlive us all.” Hannah laughed. It was the laugh she used on all of them, a short, bright, exasperated burst, the kind you gave a puppy that had just knocked over a lamp. She hung her umbrella on the back of the empty chair, which meant she was not going to sit in it, and Miggy felt the small, specific disappointment of a man who has been rejected by furniture. “You three are unbelievable,” she said, and sat down at the other end of the table, between Nathalie and Xendrick, as far from Miggy as the circular geometry of Table Nine allowed. Which, Miggy reflected, was not very far. It was a round table. That was the whole point of a round table. Nobody was ever far from anybody. He had never felt a greater distance in his life. They had been coming to the Golden Lotus every Thursday for three years, and Table Nine was theirs by tradition, if not by law. It sat in the back corner beneath a faded poster of Mount Fuji that had nothing to do with the restaurant, which served a hybrid of Chinese and Filipino comfort food that the owner, Mrs. Tan, refused to explain. The tea came in a dented steel pot. The booth cushions were held together with duct tape the color of old mustard. The pancit was the best in the city, and Mrs. Tan knew everyone’s order by heart. Seven chairs. Seven people. Nathalie, who was going to be a surgeon and who ran the group the way a surgeon would, with a calm, unblinking authority and a deep belief that everyone else was probably doing it wrong. Mark, tall, soft-spoken, perpetually hungry, who was studying music and who could make any room feel like it had a warm blanket draped over it. Xendrick, who said about eleven words a night and made each of them count. Ella, who photographed everything, posted almost none of it, and could pry a secret out of a stone with nothing but a raised eyebrow. Angelo, who talked enough for all of them put together. And Hannah. And Miggy. If you had asked Miggy to explain the group, he would have said it was an accident, and he would have been right. It had been the first week of freshman year, the week of the great Hargrove Library blackout, when a storm knocked out half the campus power and left seven strangers trapped in the east elevator between the second and third floors for fifty-one minutes. Miggy remembered every second of it. He remembered the emergency light turning everything the color of weak tea. He remembered Mark sitting on the floor and announcing he was going to be fine and then not being fine for about ten minutes. He remembered Nathalie taking command with a flashlight and a clipboard that she had inexplicably been carrying. He remembered Ella photographing the glow of the emergency light and insisting it was art. He remembered Xendrick saying nothing, and Angelo saying everything. And he remembered Hannah, standing in the corner with her arms crossed and her chin up, deadpanning, “If we die in here, I want it on record that I wanted to take the stairs.” The elevator had erupted into laughter. Even Xendrick. They had been inseparable since. Not because they had anything obvious in common. Because of the fifty-one minutes. Because of the flashlight, and the bad jokes, and the stupid, lasting fact of having been scared together in the dark. Miggy could not have told you the exact moment he started falling for Hannah. That was the cruel part. If there had been a moment, a lightning bolt, a slow-motion shot of her hair catching the sun, he could have pointed to it. He could have said there, that’s where it started, and filed it, and maybe understood it. But it had not worked like that. It had been a thousand tiny things, accumulating so quietly that by the time he noticed, the thing was already enormous and already his. The way she tucked her pen behind her ear and then forgot it was there and searched the whole table for it. The way she hummed when she was reading, off-key, never the same song twice. The way she said “Respectfully,” before saying something that was not respectful at all. The way she would stay behind after every Thursday dinner to help Mrs. Tan stack the chairs, pretending it was nothing. Three years. Three years of Thursdays. And he had said, at most, perhaps four hundred sentences to her that were not, in some way, about homework. “All right,” Angelo announced, tapping a chopstick against his teacup like a man about to deliver a toast. “Order of business. First, I would like to formally congratulate Miggy on his new job as the group’s official comedy relief.” “I didn’t apply for that,” Miggy said. “Nobody applies. You are chosen.” Angelo leaned back in his chair and spread his arms wide. Angelo was the kind of handsome that looked effortless and was, Miggy suspected, extremely labor-intensive: dark hair that always fell the right way, a jacket that always looked slightly too expensive for a college student, a smile that arrived a half-second before the rest of his face. He was also the funniest person Miggy had ever met, which was a large part of why it had taken Miggy three years to realize that Angelo never really told you anything about himself at all. “Second item. It has come to my attention that certain members of our little family are, how shall I put this, emotionally constipated.” Nathalie put her face in her hands. “Angelo.” “I’m not naming names.”