I’M BEING MOCKED BY A MAROON TUXEDO JACKET.
It’s hanging above my feet in the guest room/closet, all sharp-cornered and neat and simple. Me, I’m none of those things, especially right now.
I can tell it’s morning, not because of the light because there is no light, but because of the sound of the coffeemaker and hushed, worried voices coming from the living room.
After Emerson met me at the cab and brought me upstairs last night, we lay on his bed together, flat on our backs with our heads touching.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he’d asked me.
“No, thanks.”
Talking about it meant telling him the whole story, about the standing and the watching. That girl and guy must have been fighting for a good three minutes. I heard him call her Luna, I think. Three minutes of him bullying her, three minutes of me doing nothing. Well, not just me. Max, too. And one, two, three, four, five other people (I’m not counting the kid in the stroller). But Emerson thinks I just saw a girl step into the street and get hit by a bus.
“You could have PTSD,” Emerson had said. “I’m a teacher. I’m trained to deal with this stuff.”
“Please don’t sound so excited about it,” I told him.
Now I haul myself out of bed, purposely messing with the tuxedo jacket while opening the door. One shoulder sags halfway off the hanger, and I already feel better.
“Monkey’s up!” chirps Andrew when I emerge from the closet.
“Did you sleep?” asks Emerson, furrowing his brow. Oh my God, it’s the same brow furrow as Mom’s. There is just no escaping it.
“More or less,” I say, and even that’s a lie. Emerson doesn’t understand that I don’t really sleep because the Thought Worms are against it, and they are especially rebellious after a day and evening like that.
Andrew says, “I was just telling your brother that I can work some press contacts to find out what happened to her.”
Her. I almost like that better than an actual name, like she’s a proper noun that doesn’t need explaining.
“Can you do that?” I ask.
“He can try,” says Emerson. “It might be on the news, too. If there was security footage.”
A wave of horror hits me. I can see it now: a viral video of the “incident” and those of us standing by, doing nothing. Another example of New Yorkers not giving a damn! Modern apathy!
“I’d rather wait and see what Andrew can dig up,” I say, and sink into the chair.
Andrew pours me a cup of coffee. “There’s bagels,” he says.
I nod, but honestly, I’m not sure I’ll ever be hungry again. My phone, which I left on the kitchen counter, vibrates to let me know I have a message waiting.
Holy shit, says the text from Jamie. I still can’t believe that happened. Feeling freaked out. Headed back upstate now. Let me know how you’re doing.
I text him back Doing okay, talk soon and then think about this boy, although it feels like I’m not allowed to. Me kissing him and our breath mingling together in those moments before Max showed up. Before everything showed up.
Now I’m picturing Luna again, because she must have had a first kiss with that guy. There must have been a time when she was thrilled at the thought of him touching her, at all the possibilities that sparked.
Luna. I will let myself think about her more. She’s dead or in a coma, or awake, but suffering. How can we not know what happened next? Stories have endings, dammit. They shouldn’t trail off into multiple choice.
“I have to get to work,” says Andrew, shrugging into his coat. “I’ll call later if I snag some info for you.”
Emerson and I both watch him tug his gloves on, finger by finger. These precise movements confirm for me that he’s the owner of the taunting tuxedo jacket.
Andrew kisses us both good-bye and when he’s gone, Em turns to me.
“When’s Mom getting here?”
Oh, crap. I totally forgot about Mom, and about Wicked and her being upset and basically everything else in my life. I check my phone and there’s a message waiting from her, too.
“She says she’s coming in at three so we can have an early dinner first.”
I can’t talk to my mother about what happened and I can’t explain why.
“Want to come with me to return all the ugly stuff I got for Christmas?” asks my brother.
I can’t talk to him either, because he wasn’t there and I already omitted vital information from the story. I really want to call Jamie, but I’m afraid talking about Luna will kill off everything good about yesterday. I still want the everything good. Is that selfish and shallow of me?
Suddenly, I know what comes next.
“There’s something I have to do,” I say, “but can I meet up with you later?”
I walk west from the apartment. It’s cold but sunny, and all that’s left of the snow that fell before Christmas is a few blackened piles of slush in random corners.
I cringe at the sight of every bus and stand a good five feet from each curb when waiting for the lights to change. Every time I hear a raised voice behind me, I freeze and turn to see who it came from. The city goes about its business, even though something bad happened. Then again, bad things happen all the time, everywhere.
It does feel better to be out on the street, part of normal life, although of course this is not my normal life. I’m just borrowing it, really, until I can find one of my own.
The intersection of Park Avenue and Eighty-Second Street is over fifteen blocks away but I get there more quickly than I expected. There are apartment buildings on all four corners and I have no idea which is the one I want.
“Hi,” I say to the doorman at the first building. “Is there a guy named Max staying here?”
It sounds even weirder coming out of my mouth than I thought it would. The doorman gives me a confused, slightly wary look, like I’m one of those situations they’ve trained for.
“I mean, I’m looking for a friend. He’s staying with his grandfather, but I don’t know his grandfather’s name.”
The doorman shakes his head firmly and with certainty. “I’d know if there was someone staying with a grandfather. Sorry.”
“Okay. Wrong building, I guess. Thanks.”
A similar exchange happens at the next building, and I really, really want to take it as a sign to just abandon this idea.
“You must mean Mr. Levine!” says the doorman at the third building.
“That’s Max?” I ask. “Or his grandfather?”
“Both. Is he expecting you?”
“No,” I say, and I’m about to explain when the doorman makes a call. I turn to the gigantic lobby mirror and glare at my reflection.
“He’ll be right down,” says the doorman as he hangs up.
I sit on a leather couch. The lobby reminds me of a room in a French chateau our Movable School group visited in the Loire Valley.
The elevator dings.
“Kendall?”
I turn and there’s Max, looking confused and surprised but maybe not in a bad way.
“Hi.”
“Jamie left about a half hour ago to catch the bus.”
“I know.” We’re silent again. If I can’t even talk about this to Max, with whom I have nothing to lose, why am I here?
Max comes over to the couch and when he sees me sprawled on it, he smiles a bit, a smile edged in sadness. There’s something protective about the way he stoops over me, although he probably stoops for everyone.
“What?” I ask, sitting up straight.
“Did you have as bad a night as I did?” he asks.
I let out a sigh that sounds a lot like a sob. “If your night was hellish, then yeah.”
Max laughs and looks relieved. “I’m so glad somebody else knows what this feels like.”
There’s no need to explain what this means and it can’t really be named anyway.
“You want to get some breakfast?” asks Max.
Don’t cry, you dork. Don’t you dare cry.
I nod, biting my lip so hard that it bleeds.
We’re walking toward Lexington Avenue and the silence pushes against me from the inside. I really suck at silence, even in mortifyingly awkward situations like this. Especially in mortifyingly awkward situations like this.
When I can’t take the pressure of it anymore, I ask, “So you’re just hanging out with your grandfather until the semester starts?”
“Well, yes and no,” Max says. “There is no semester. I deferred school for a year.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
More silence. Dammit, he’s going to make me ask. Maybe I can control myself.
“Then what have you been up to since you graduated?” Okay, so, maybe not.
“Not much at all,” he says. I sense the baggage in that statement. He’s saying a lot even though it doesn’t sound that way.
“How’s Eliza?” I ask, because we already know I can’t control myself.
After a few seconds, Max replies, “I hear she’s okay. It’s been a while since we talked.”
I pause, nearly tripping over my own feet, then fall into step again.
“You guys broke up?”
“At Halloween.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. And I am, really. Because I probably had something to do with it.
“Her favorite holiday. Not the best timing, but that’s how it went down.” I glance at him and he’s glancing back at me. There’s a moment of oh crap and then we both look away. “It’s all good now, we’re friends,” he adds.
Then he stops and points to a coffee shop, an old-school one, all vinyl and fluorescent lights like on the Seinfeld reruns I watch with my dad. Max opens the door for me and we rush inside to grab a window booth.
“Jamie said that before everything happened, you guys had a good time together,” Max says as he unwraps his plaid scarf and tucks it next to him on the seat.
“Are those the words he used? A good time?”
Max thinks. “It might have been amazing or awesome. One of the really good A words.”
“Okay, I’ll take that,” I say. I picture the flowers Jamie bought for me. I try really hard to picture him buying them, handing a deli clerk his money with a giddy smile. Not in Jamie’s hand as he ran toward the girl, and definitely not lying in the street.
Maybe if I had done something to help Luna, or even helped someone help her, this morning would be different. I’d be sitting across from Jamie right now.
A waitress comes over. “Coffee,” says Max. I nod at him. “Make that two.” When she leaves, he leans toward me, his eyes so wide and round. I forgot that he has these baby-calf eyes; they’re hard to avoid looking at. “It’s disgusting coffee, but I like the vibe. My grandmother’s been taking me here since I was a kid. I mean, she did. She died last spring.”
I’m about to say the expected “I’m sorry” when the waitress comes back with a pitcher of coffee, pours us each a cup. I put my hands on it and even though it’s only lukewarm, it still feels good.
“Her name was Luna,” I blurt out.
“You heard that too?” We don’t need any context here, which is cool and heartbreaking. “I thought that’s what he said. I wasn’t sure, but you were closer than I was.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Max’s eyes go even wider, if that’s possible, and he shakes his head. “Nothing! Only that you could hear better. Not that . . . you should have . . .”
“Right,” I say. “Sorry.”
I’ve just given away how guilty I feel. But this is surprising: I don’t mind. It’s a relief, actually. Max opens his mouth like he wants to say something, then stops himself. I take a sip of my coffee, and he’s right, it’s total crap. Definitely not good enough to fill another awkward silence, so I do it myself.
“My brother’s boyfriend is trying to find out what happened to her. You know, where they took her. How she is. If she is, you know.”
Max puts down his coffee cup and slides his hands toward me on the table. Not exactly reaching out, but wanting to. His hands are giant, the fingernails bitten down to stubs. I get a flash of those hands on either side of my face as we kissed last summer. Block that out. Block block block.
“Will you let me know if you hear anything?” he asks, then swallows hard. “I’ll give you my number.”
He fishes a pen out of his coat pocket and writes on a corner of the paper place mat, tears it off and hands it to me. I nod and stuff it into my purse.
Silence again, and it’s excruciating. Knives in your ears or a hand on your throat would be nothing compared to this, I’m sure.
But the crazy thing is, I don’t want to leave.