WE PRESS OUR WAY TO THE BACK OF THE CATHEDRAL, past the souvenir shop, and eventually out to the steps facing Fifth Avenue. Across the street, there are actually barricades to contain all the people fighting their way toward Rockefeller Center.
Max pauses on the top step, looking terrified.
“Are you afraid of crowds?” I ask.
“Crowds are no problem for me. I’m a tower. I’m worried about you.”
“Because I’m not tall?”
“Because . . .” Max pauses again. “You know something? I have no idea why I’m worried. Eliza always got freaked out by crowds.”
“Well, she’s tiny.” A quick mini-fantasy unreels in my mind. Eliza under the feet of a stampeding crowd, and nobody can hear her screams. As mini-fantasies go, this one’s really gratifying.
“And she’s Eliza,” he says. Which clearly means something specific to him, completely different from what it means to me. “Mostly I just worry. About everyone.”
“I’m tougher than I look,” I say, pretty sure that’s true.
Max stares at me for a moment and then grins. “Okay, then. Where are we headed?”
I look to see which direction is less congested. “This way,” I say, pointing uptown. “Central Park Zoo.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He offers his hand and I take it and try not to overthink this interaction but fail miserably. Would Jamie freak out if he saw this? asks a new Thought Worm.
We’re friends, Thought Worm. Grow up already.
Once we’re walking, Max lets go of my hand, and we travel in silence for a block. Then he says, “So, when you see lots of people in one place, you see multiple instances of copulation, right?”
“You make it sound soooo hot.”
He laughs. I like making people laugh, but I like it extra with Max. This is definitely a boy who needs to smile more.
“Well,” he says. “I see potential future-me’s.” He points to a guy a few paces in front of us, wearing a long camel-colored overcoat and a black leather man-purse, and whispers, “I could end up as him, for instance. I wonder what I do for a living where I need a bag like that.”
“With a bag like that, I’d lay bets you’re still single.”
“You do one,” Max says, elbowing me.
I scan the sidewalk and nod toward a woman with a tight ponytail and expensive stroller. “I could be her,” I say. “Parenthood would be cool. Although that stroller freaks me out. It looks like it should be protecting an alien egg, not a human baby.”
Max snorts, then stops to avoid walking into a guy coming out of a deli. Beard, mustache, glasses, wool beanie, plaid shirt, down vest, huge coffee drink. Max shoots me a sideways glance.
“God, no,” I say. “Please don’t be a hipster.”
“Can I at least have a standard coffee order?”
“Fine. Something simple and classic, though. Cream and sugar. No fancy-pants.”
“You’ve thought about this,” says Max.
“Europe,” I say by way of explanation. “I’m a café au lait.”
Max smiles. He tilts his head as if he’s trying to see me from a different angle, as if a forty-degree adjustment might show him something new. Then he starts walking again, I follow, and he says, “Tell me something about your trip.”
I think for a moment. “We learned about architecture when we visited the Eiffel Tower. Then we had a contest to design and build one ourselves out of recycled materials.”
“You packed a lot of experiences into a few months,” he says softly, his voice sounding like it’s coming from far away.
“Maybe in college you can spend a semester abroad.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
I’ve talked a lot about me and now I want to give him a turn.
“Brown’s a tough school to get into. You must be pretty psyched.”
Max shrugs, like it was something that happened by accident. Oops! I slipped and fell and applied to an Ivy League school and they accepted me. I can tell he prefers to downplay how ridiculously smart he must be, and he doesn’t even know my baggage. It takes me forever to do a single homework assignment. It doesn’t matter how many people talk to you about learning differences, that everyone learns at their own pace. It’s fucking embarrassing.
Max also doesn’t know I once wanted to go to his school, where kids plan out their own learning. “All the weirdos go there,” said Emerson once, when someone mentioned the place, and all I could think was maybe all the weirdos are waiting for me to join them. Before I even met all these Dashwood people, I’d done my own research on it. I wanted to transfer so I printed out pages and pages from the Dashwood website. I begged my parents, shoving the papers into their hands. But they couldn’t buy into the “democratic school” philosophy, couldn’t believe that kind of freedom would work for someone like me, who had to be reminded three times every night to brush her teeth. Then my mother found out about the Movable School and how I could spend a semester of hands-on learning, and still get high school credit for it. It seemed like a great compromise at the time, but now that it’s over, I wish I didn’t feel as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff.
We stop to wait for a light to change. I put my toes on the tip of the curb and look down and think maybe a cliff is no different than a street corner. Sometimes you just have to take a step, and sometimes you have to take a leap, and either way, all that really matters is that you’re not standing still.