Page 14 of What's in a Kiss?

I haven’t mentioned Glasswell’s voice.

Instantly recognizable. Full of contradictions—warm yet gravelly, playful yet almost monotone. It’s been like that at least since I met him at eighteen, and now the rest of the world has noticed. Once, when I was buying my mom a Powerball ticket at a gas station, I saw aPeoplemagazine headline fretting over Glasswell’s recent bout of laryngitis. Glasswell’s voice is practically a national treasure.

Before I can watch Glasswell tumble from great heights, the YouTube clip cuts away from the climbing wall to a different clip of Glasswell on the couch of his talk show, accidentally spitting a mouthful of champagne into the face of a nonplussed Al Pacino. I laugh as I’m then dropped into a series of graceless Glasswell stumbles and some quick-cut stutters where he really struggles with the letter P.

Gram Parsons sighs, and we both know this is beneath me,that I’m clinging to my self-possession like my dog’s fur clings to everything I own. But this isn’t merely for me. I’m also doing this for Masha, for the good of her wedding weekend.

I may be a furloughed former public school drama teacher with Lyft decals on my budget car, but Glasswell’s merely mortal, too. And he’s made an ass of himself on national TV at least a dozen times more than me.

I can’t help laughing as the reel rolls into anEverything’s Jakemonologue where Glasswell’s fly is open and his boxers are printed with Minions.

That one’s so nice, I think I’ll watch it twice, but as I’m about to scrub backward, it cuts back to the scene I wanted to see: the infamous rock-climbing fail.

By now, Aurora, dressed in her own sleek black athletic wear, is high above Glasswell on the wall. Glasswell looks good, there’s no overstating what that harness is doing for his ass, but he’s also not more than six feet off the ground. And he’s not moving.

“Your ass is glass, baby!” Aurora’s voice taunts from above, in such a canned manner that I can tell this is one of the show’s lowbrow catchphrases. “Better catch up.”

Now the camera pans to a close-up of Glasswell’s face. And he looks... terrified. His skin is ashen, his jaw is tensed, sweat beads at his hairline. His eyes bore into the wall like he’s looking through the gates of hell.

This image of him does something to me—something I don’t expect. I lean closer to the screen and feel, in the lowest part of my stomach, a cringe on his behalf.

“You don’t have to do this,” I find myself telling him, wanting to swipe out of the app because this is too intimate. This is not the detached research I came for.

“I—I don’t have to do this,” Jake’s voice rasps, barely audible. And I know he didn’thearme, since that’s not physically possible according to any laws of time, space, or technology. But for an instant, it feels like he did. It feels like my words reached him in another realm. Like they weresupposedto. Like they were just what he needed to hear.

All at once, his arms release their death grip on the wall. For an instant, his expression relaxes completely. Then the video goes into slo-mo as Glasswell’s mouth connects with a fluorescent-green hold. Bloody mouthed, he cries out, “Ohhhhhhh sheeeeeeeeit” in 960 fps as his body rebounds off the wall. This was the meme. This was what social media seized on and made into a million jokes.

This and the next shot of Jake crumpled on the floor in the fetal position, Aurora at the summit, covering a laugh with her hand.

I stare at my phone, feeling an inexplicable desire to pass through my screen and go to Glasswell, to help him up off the ground—

I jump when I hear the Lyft chime that asks if I want a new passenger. I do, but I feel a little nauseous as I put my car in Drive. I want to stop watching. I’ve seen too much already. But YouTube auto-plays a second video. This one is a recent interview between Glasswell and Oprah.

I’m about to swipe to the Lyft app so I can focus on mypassenger, my driving, and the safety of the world at large... but Oprah’s first words have me hooked.

“We’ve gathered a group ofEverything’s Jakeviewers whose lives were changed by Jake Glasswell’s fall off the climbing wall. Jake, can you tell us a bit about this very special group of people?”

Car horns blare. I hardly hear them. “Give me a break, Oprah. All he did was chip a tooth,” I mutter, even as a part of me knows this isn’t true. There was something else that happened in that clip. Something essential.

“The stunt was meant to be a challenge,” Jake says, indulging Oprah. “For me to face an old fear of heights, dating back to when I was a child. I knew there was a risk of my panicking on air, but I wasn’t opposed to exposing myself in that way.”

“Let’s give him a Nobel,” I say to Gram Parsons.

“For the first week or so after that fall,” Glasswell continues, “I was just the butt of an internet joke. It comes with the job, and I’m used to it. I get that what happened was funny. But soon, I started getting letters from people who responded—not to the moment I spazzed out on the wall—but to the moment right before it.”

“ ‘I don’t have to do this,’ ” Oprah feeds him the line with gravity.

“That’s it,” Glasswell says. “And Beth, who’s sitting right there”—the camera cuts to a beaming blond woman, nodding as she fiddles with a gold chain at her neck—“she wrote to me that these simple words inspired her to leave a job where she didn’t feel valued.”

“Amazing,” Oprah says. “In fact, every person we’ve invited here today incited a major life change after watching you say those words andsurrenderto the climbing wall.”

“We call ithashtag JGlass Falling Up!” an older woman in a floral blouse chimes in from the panel.

“It’s remarkable,” Glasswell says with fake humility. “People began to share so much with me after that episode that I found I wanted to share even more of my own truth. That day on the wall, I wasn’t just letting go of my fear of heights. I was also letting go of some old pain. From my father.”

“Your father?” Oprah says.

Glasswell takes a breath, folds his hands over his lap. “I lost my father when I was eighteen.”

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