Just as I’m resetting the temperature for seventy-nine, the shower turns off, so I swing my suitcase up onto the foldout chair, unzip the bag, and start rooting through it for something lightweight to wear to dinner.
Alex steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam with a towel wrapped around his waist, one hand securing it at the hip as the other swipes through his wet hair, leaving it sticking up
and out messily. “Your turn,” he says, but it takes me a second to compute through the haze of his long, lean torso and the sharp jut of his left hip bone.
Why is it so different seeing someone in a towel than in a bathing suit? Thirty minutes ago, Alex was technically more naked than this, but now, the smooth lines of his body feel more scandalous. I feel like all the blood in my body is just bobbing to the surface, pressing against my skin so that every inch of me is more alert.
It never used to be like this.
This is all because of Croatia.
Damn you and your gorgeous islands, Croatia!
“Poppy?” Alex prompts.
“Mm-hm,” I say, then remember to at least add, “Yeah.” I spin back to my bag and grab a dress, bra, and underwear at random. “Okay. Bedroom’s all yours.”
I hurry into the steamy bathroom and shut the door as I’m stripping off my bikini top only to freeze, stunned at the sight of a huge blue-tinted glass capsule that occupies the entirety of one wall, complete with a reclined seat on either side, like it’s some kind of group shower from The Jetsons.
“Oh my god.” This, I’m sure, was not in the photographs. In fact, this whole room is unrecognizable from the one on the website, transformed from the subtle, beachy grays of its former self into the glowing blue and sterile whites of the hypermodern sight before me.
I snatch a towel off the rack, wrapping it around myself, and throw the door open. “Alex, why didn’t you say anything about the—”
Alex grabs for his towel and pulls it around himself and I do my absolute best to pick up where my sentence stumbled off and pretend that didn’t happen. “—spaceship bathroom?”
“I figured you knew,” Alex says, his voice hoarse. “You booked this place.”
“They must’ve remodeled since the photos were taken,” I say. “How did you even figure out how to work that thing?”
“Honestly,” Alex says, “the hardest thing was just wresting control from the 2001: A Space Odyssey– style artificial intelligence system. After that, the biggest issue was just that I kept mixing up the controls for the sixth shower head with the ones for the foot massager.”
It’s enough to break the tension. I dissolve into laughter and he does too, and it stops mattering so much that we’re standing here in our towels.
“This place is purgatory,” I say. Everything is just nice enough to make the issues that much more glaring.
“Nikolai is a sadist,” Alex agrees.
“Yes, but he’s a sadist with a spaceship bathroom.” I lean back into the bathroom to study the many-headed, multiseated shower again.
I burst into another fit of laughter and lean back out to find Alex standing there, grinning.
He’s pulled a T-shirt on over his damp upper body but hasn’t risked swapping the towel out.
I turn back to the bathroom. “Okay, I’ll leave you to dance naked around the apartment in privacy now. Use your time wisely.”
“Is that what you do?” Alex calls. “Dance around the apartment naked whenever I’m in the other room? You do, don’t you?”
I spin away as I’m pulling the door shut. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Porny Alex?”
DESPITE THE FACT that Alex spent every spare moment of junior year picking up shifts at the library (and thus I spent every spare moment sitting on the floor behind the reference desk eating Twizzlers and teasing him whenever Sarah Torval bashfully drifted by), there isn’t money for a big summer trip this year.
His younger brother is starting community college next year, without much financial aid, and Alex, being a saint among mere men, is funneling all his income into Bryce’s tuition.
When he broke the news to me, Alex said, “I understand if you want to go to Paris without me.”
My reply was instantaneous. “Paris can wait. Let’s visit the Paris of America instead.”
He arched a brow. “Which is?”
“Duh,” I said. “Nashville.”
He laughed, delighted. I loved to delight him, lived for it. I got such a rush from making that stoic face crack, and lately there hadn’t been enough of that.
Nashville is only a four-hour drive from Linfield, and miraculously, Alex’s station wagon is still kicking. So Nashville it is.
When he picks me up the morning of our trip, I’m still packing, and Dad makes him sit and answer a series of random questions while I finish. Meanwhile, Mom slips into my room with something hidden behind her back, singing, “Hiiii, sweetie.”
I look up from the Muppet-vomit explosion of colorful clothing in my bag. “Hiii?”
She perches on my bed, hands still hidden.
“What are you doing?” I say. “Are you handcuffed right now? Are we being burglarized?
Blink twice if you can’t say anything.”
She brings the box forward. I immediately yelp and slap it out of her hand onto the floor.
“Poppy!” she cries.
“Poppy?!” I demand. “Not Poppy! Mom! Why are you carrying a bulk box of condoms around behind your back?”
She bends and scoops it up. It’s unopened (luckily?), so nothing spilled out. “I just figured it’s time we talked about this.”
“Uh-uh.” I shake my head. “It’s nine twenty a.m. Not the time to talk about this.”
She sighs and sets the box atop my overfilled duffle bag. “I just want you kids to be safe.
You’ve got a lot to look forward to. We want all your wildest dreams to come true, honey!”
My heart stutters. Not because my mom is implying that Alex and I are having sex—now that it’s occurred to me, of course that’s what she thinks—but because I know she’s espousing the importance of finishing college, which I still haven’t told her I don’t plan to do.
I’ve only told Alex that I’m not going back next year. I’ve been waiting to tell my parents until after the trip so no big blowup keeps it from happening.
My parents are ultrasupportive, but that’s partly because both of them wanted to go to college and neither of them had the support to do so. They’ve always assumed that any dream I could have would be aided by having a degree.
But throughout the school year, most of my dreaming and energy have been devoted to traveling: weekend trips and short stints over breaks from school—usually on my own, but sometimes with Alex (camping, because that’s what we can afford), or with my roommate, Clarissa, a rich hippie type I met in an informational meeting about study-abroad programs at the end of last year (visits to each of her parents’ separate lake houses). She’s starting next year— senior year— in Vienna, and getting art history credits for it, but the longer I considered any of those programs, the less interested I found myself.
I don’t want to go to Australia only to spend all day in a classroom, and I don’t want to rack up thousands more in debt just to have an Academic Experience in Berlin. For me, traveling is about wandering, meeting people you don’t expect, doing things you’ve never done. And aside from that, all those weekend trips have started to pay off. I’ve only been blogging for eight months, and already I have a few thousand followers on social media.
When I found out I failed my biological science general requirement, and thus it would take me an extra semester to graduate, that was the final straw.
And I’m going to tell my parents all this, and somehow, I’ll find a way to make them understand that school isn’t right for me the way it is for people like Alex. But today is not that day. Today, we’re going to Nashville, and after the last semester, all I want is to let loose.
Just not in the way my mother is implying.
“Mom,” I say. “I am not having sex with Alex.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she replies with a cool, calm, and collected nod, though that manner goes completely out the window as she goes on: “I just need to know that you’re being responsible. Oh my goodness, I can’t believe how grown-up you are! It’s making me teary just thinking about it. But you still have to be responsible! I’m sure you are, though. You’re such a smart girl! And you’ve always known yourself. I’m so proud of you, honey.”
I’m being more responsible than she knows. While I’ve made out with a few different guys over the last year, and did more than that with one, I’ve still stayed pretty safely in the slow lane. When I tipsily admitted this to Clarissa during a trip to her mom’s lake house on the far shore of Lake Michigan, her eyes widened like she was gazing into a scrying pool, and she said in that airy way of hers, “What is it you’re waiting for?”
I just shrugged. The truth is, I’m not sure. I just figure I’ll know when I see it.
Sometimes I think I’m being too practical, which isn’t something I’ve ever been accused of, but with this, I feel at times like I’m waiting for the perfect circumstances for a First Time.
Other times I think it might have something to do with Porny Poppy. Like after all that, I’m incapable of losing myself in a moment, in a person.
Maybe I just need to make a decision, choose someone from a lineup of the loosely held crushes I’m harboring on some of the guys Alex and I run into regularly at parties. People in the English department with him, or communications department with me, or any of the other regularly occurring characters in our lives.
But for now, I’m holding out hope, waiting for that magical moment when it feels right with one person in particular.
That person is not going to be Alex.
Actually, if I were to just choose someone, it probably would be. I’d be straight-up with him, explain what I wanted to do and why, and probably insist both of us sign something in blood saying it would only happen once and we would never speak of it again.
But even if it comes to that, I make a silent and solemn vow right now, I will not be using a condom from the bulk box my mom just tucked into my suitcase.
“I really, really swear to you I don’t need these,” I say.
She stands and pats the box. “Maybe not now, but why not hold on to them? Just in case.
Also, are you hungry? I’ve got cookies in the oven, and—shoot, I forgot to run the dishwasher.”
She hurries from the room, and I finish packing, then drag my bag downstairs. Mom’s at the island, chopping browned bananas for banana bread while the cookies cool, and Alex is sitting in that very rigid way beside my father. “Ready?” I say, and he springs off the stool like I was born ready to not be sitting next to your very intimidating father.
“Yep.” He scrubs his hands down the fronts of his pants legs. “Yeah.” It’s right around then that he clocks the box of condoms tucked under my arm.
“This?” I say. “This is just five hundred condoms my mom gave me in case we start boning.”
Alex’s face flushes.
“Poppy!” Mom cries.
Dad looks over his shoulder, aghast. “Since when are you two romantically involved?”
“I don’t . . . We don’t . . . do that, sir,” Alex tries.
“Here, will you carry these out to the car, Dad?” I toss them over the island to him. “My arm’s getting tired from holding it. Hopefully our hotel has those big luggage carts.”
Alex is still not-quite-looking at Dad. “We really aren’t . . .”
Mom digs her hands into her hips. “That was supposed to be private. Look, you’re embarrassing him. Don’t embarrass him, Poppy. Don’t be embarrassed, Alex.”
“It was never going to be private for long,” I say. “If that box doesn’t fit in the trunk, we’re going to have to strap it to the top of the station wagon.”
Dad sets the box on the side table and starts reading the side of it with a furrow in his brow. “Are these really made out of lambskin? Are they reusable?”
Alex cannot hide his shudder.
Mom offers up, “I wasn’t sure if either of them is allergic to latex!”
“Okay, we’ve got to hit the road,” I say. “Come give us hugs goodbye. The next time you see us, you might just be grandpar—” I drop off, stop rubbing my tummy meaningfully when I see the look on Alex’s face. “Kidding! We’re just friends. Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad!”
“Oh, you’re going to have an amazing time. I can’t wait to hear all about it.” Mom comes out from behind the counter and pulls me into a hug. “Be good,” she says. “And don’t forget to call your brothers when you get down there! They’re desperate to hear from you!”
Over her shoulder I mouth at Alex, desperate, and he finally cracks a smile.
“Love you, kiddo.” Dad clambers off the stool to give me a squeeze. “You take care of my little baby, okay?” he says to Alex before pulling him into the backslap hug that startles him anew every time it happens. “Don’t let her get engaged to a country singer or break her neck on a mechanical bull.”
“Of course,” Alex says.
“We’ll see,” I say, and then they walk us outside—box of condoms left safely on the island—and wave to us as we back down the driveway, and Alex grins and waves back until we’re finally out of sight, at which point he looks at me and says flatly, “I am very mad at you.”
“How can I make it up to you?” I bat my eyelashes like a sexy cartoon cat.
He rolls his eyes, but a smirk twists up in the corner of his mouth as his eyes return to the road. “For one thing, you are definitely riding a mechanical bull.”
I kick my feet up onto the dashboard, proudly displaying the cowgirl boots I found at a thrift store a few weeks ago. “Way ahead of you.”
His eyes slide to me, move down my legs to the bright red leather. “And those are supposed to keep you on a mechanical bull how?”
I click my heels together. “They’re not. They’re just supposed to charm the handsome country singer at the bar into scraping me off the mat and into his farm-buff arms.”
“Farm buff,” Alex snorts, unimpressed by the idea.
“Says Gym-Buff,” I tease.
He frowns. “I exercise for my anxiety.”
“Yes, I’m sure you couldn’t care less about that gorgeous body. It’s incidental.”
His jaw pulses, and his eyes fix on the road again. “I like to look nice,” he says in a voice that implies an added, Is that a crime?
“I do too.” I slide one of my feet along the dash until my red boot is in his field of vision.
“Obviously.”
His gaze darts over my leg down to the middle console where his aux cable sits in a neat loop. “Here.” He hands it to me. “Why don’t you get us started?”
These days we always take turns running sound in the station wagon, but Alex always gives me the first shot, because he is Alex, and he is the best.
I insist on an all-country playlist for the length of the drive. Mine is populated by Shania Twain, Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, and Dolly Parton. His is all Patsy Cline and Willie Nelson, Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash, and a helping of Tammy Wynette and Hank Williams.
We found the hotel on Groupon months ago, and it’s one of those kitschy, one-off places with a neon-pink sign (cartoon cowboy hat balanced atop the word VACANCY) that makes the nickname “Nashvegas” finally make sense to me.
We check in and take our stuff inside. Each room is vaguely themed after a famous Nashville musician. Meaning there are framed pictures of them all over the room, and then the same hideous floral comforters and dense tan fleeces on all the beds. I tried to request the Kitty Wells room, but apparently when you book through Groupon, you don’t get to pick.
We are in the Billy Ray Cyrus room.
“Do you think he gets paid for this?” I ask Alex, who’s pulling up the bedding to check for bedbugs along the bottom of the mattresses.
“Doubtful,” he says. “Maybe they throw him the occasional frozen yogurt Groupon or something.” He pushes back the drapes and gazes out at the flashing neon sign. “Do they do rooms by the hour here?” he says skeptically.
“Doesn’t really matter,” I say, “since I left the condom crate at home.”
He shudders and drops onto one of the beds, satisfied that it’s bug free. “If I hadn’t had to witness that, it would actually be pretty sweet.”
“I would have still had to witness it, Alex. Don’t I matter?”
“Yeah, but you’re her daughter. The closest my dad ever came to giving us a sex talk was leaving a book about purity on each of our beds around the time we turned thirteen. I thought masturbating caused cancer until I was, like, sixteen.”
My chest squeezes tight. Sometimes I forget how hard Alex has had it. His mom died from complications during David’s birth, and Mr. Nilsen and the four Nilsen boys have been wife- and motherless since. His dad finally dated a woman from their church last year, but they broke up after three months, and even though Mr. Nilsen was the one to end it, he was still so torn up that Alex had to drive home from school in the middle of the week to get him through it.
Alex is the one his brothers call too, when something goes wrong. The emotional rock.
Sometimes I think that’s why we’re so drawn to each other. Because he’s used to being the steadfast big brother and I’m used to being the annoying little sister. It’s a dynamic we understand: I lovingly tease him; he makes the entire world feel safer for me.
This week, though, I’m not going to need anything from him. It’s my mission to help Alex let loose, to bring Silly Alex back out of Overworked, Hyperfocused Alex.
“You know,” I say, sitting on the bed, “if you ever want to borrow some overbearing parents, mine are obsessed with you. I mean, clearly. My mom wants you to take my virginity.”
He leans back on his hands, his head tipping. “Your mom thinks you haven’t had sex?”
I balk. “I haven’t had sex. I thought you knew that.” It seems like we talk about everything, but I guess there are still a few places we haven’t gone.
“No.” Alex coughs. “I mean, I don’t know. You left a few parties with people.”
“Yeah, but nothing serious ever happens. It’s not like I dated any of them.”
“I thought that was just because you didn’t, like, want to date.”
“I guess I don’t,” I say. Or at least so far I haven’t. “I don’t know. I guess I just want it to be special. Not like it has to be a full moon and we’re in a rose garden or anything.”
Alex winces. “Outside sex isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
“You little minx!” I cry. “You’ve been holding out on me.”
He shrugs, ears reddening. “I just don’t really talk about this. With anyone. Like even just saying that made me feel guilty, like I’m wronging her somehow.”
“It’s not like you said her name.” I lean forward and drop my voice. “Sarah Torval?”
He bumps his knee into mine, smiling faintly. “You’re obsessed with Sarah Torval.”
“No, dude,” I say. “You are.”
“It wasn’t her,” he says. “It was another girl from the library. Lydia.”
“Oh . . . my . . . god,” I say, giddy. “The one with the big doll eyes and the same exact haircut as Sarah Torval?”
“Stoooop,” Alex groans, pink spreading over his cheeks. He grabs a pillow and hurls it at me. “Stop embarrassing me.”
“But it’s so fun!”
He forces his face to relax into the On-the-Verge-of-Crying Puppy Face and I scream and fling myself backward on the bed, my whole body going limp with laughter as I drag the pillow over my eyes. The bed dips under his weight as he sits beside me and tugs the pillow
off my face, leaning over me, hands braced on either side of my head, insinuating his Sad Puppy Face into my line of sight.
“Oh my god,” I gasp through a mix of tears and laughter. “Why does this have such a confusing effect on me?”
“I don’t know, Poppy,” he says, the expression deepening sorrowfully.
“It speaks to me!” I cry out through laughter, and his mouth pulls into a grin.
And right then. That.
That is the first moment I want to kiss Alex Nilsen.
I feel it all the way to my toes for two breathless seconds. Then I pack those seconds into a tight knot, tucking them deep in my chest where I promise myself they will live in secret forever.
“Come on,” he says softly. “Let’s go get you on a mechanical bull.”
WE GET THE thermostat down to seventy-nine and set it for seventy-eight before we leave for a Mexican restaurant called Casa de Sam, which has a great score on Tripadvisor and only one dollar sign signifying its cost.
The food is great, but the air-conditioning is the real MVP of the night. Alex keeps leaning back in the booth, closing his eyes, and making contented sighs.
“Do you think Sam will let us sleep here?” I ask.
“We could try just hiding in the bathroom until closing,” Alex suggests.
“I’m afraid to drink too much and get heat exhaustion,” I say, taking another sip of the jalapeño margarita we ordered a pitcher of.
“I’m afraid to drink too little and not be able to knock myself out for an entire night.”
Even thinking about it has my neck crawling with sweat. “I’m sorry about the Airbnb,” I say. “None of the reviews mentioned faulty air-conditioning.” Though now I’m wondering how many people stayed there in the dead of summer.
“It’s not your fault,” Alex says. “I hold Nikolai fully responsible.”
I nod, and the silence unfurls awkwardly until I ask, “How’s your dad?”
“Yeah,” Alex says. “Good. He’s doing good. I told you about the bumper sticker?”
I smile. “You did.”
He gives a self-conscious laugh and thrusts his hand through his hair. “God, getting old is boring. My best party story is that my dad got a new bumper sticker.”
“Pretty great story,” I insist.
“You’re right.” His head tilts. “Next do you want to hear about my dishwasher?”
I gasp and clutch my heart. “You own your own dishwasher? Like, it’s in your name?”
“Um. They don’t typically register dishwashers to your name, but yes, I bought it. Right after I got the house.”
A nameless emotion stabs at my chest. “You . . . bought a house?”
“I didn’t tell you?”
I shake my head. Of course he didn’t tell me. When would he have told me? But still it hurts. Every single thing I’ve missed in the last two years hurts.
“My grandparents’ house,” he says. “After my grandma passed away. She left it to my dad, and he wanted to sell it, but it needs work he didn’t have the time or money for, so I’ve been living in it, fixing it up.”
“Betty?” I swallow the tangle of emotions rising in my throat. I only met Alex’s grandmother a few times, but I loved her. She was tinier than me and fierce, a lover of murder mysteries and crocheting, spicy food and modern art. She’d fallen in love with her priest and he’d left the priesthood to marry her (“And that’s how we became Protestants!”) and then (“eight months later,” she told me with a wink), Alex’s mother had been born with a head of thick dark hair just like hers and a “strong” nose like Alex’s grandfather, God rest his soul.
Her house was a funky quad-level from the early sixties. It had the original orange and yellow floral wallpaper in the living room, and she’d had to put ugly brown carpet over the
hardwood and tile—even in the bathroom—after she slipped and broke her hip several years ago.
“Betty’s gone?” I whisper.
“It was peaceful,” Alex says, without looking at me. “You know, she was really, really old.” He’s started to fold our straw wrappers, precisely, into small squares. He shows no sign of emotion, but I know Betty was pretty much his favorite family member, maybe tied with David.
“God, I’m sorry.” I fight to keep my voice from shaking, but my emotion is rising, tidal-wave style. “Flannery O’Connor and Betty. I wish you’d told me.”
His hazel eyes drag up to mine. “I wasn’t sure you wanted to hear from me.”
I blink back tears, glance away, and pretend I’m sweeping my hair out of my face rather than wiping at my eyes. When I look back at him, his gaze is still fixed on me.
“I did,” I say. Shit, the tremors have arrived.
Even the mariachi band playing in the back room seems to quiet to a hum, so that it’s just us in this red booth with its colorful hand-carved table.
“Well,” Alex says softly. “Now I know.”
I want to ask if he wanted to talk to me in all that time, if he ever typed out messages that went unsent or thought about calling for so long he actually started to dial.
If he too feels like he lost two good years of his life when we stopped talking, and why he let it happen. I want him to say things can be how they were before, when there was nothing we couldn’t say to each other, and being together was as easy and natural as being alone, without any of the loneliness.
But then our server comes by with the check. I instinctively reach for it before Alex can.
“That’s not R+R’s card?” he says, like it’s a question.
Without actively deciding to, I lie. “They just reimburse us now.” My hands tingle, itch with discomfort over the deception, but it’s too late to take it back.
When we get outside, it’s dark and starry. The heat of the day has broken, and though it still must be in the upper seventies, it’s nothing compared to the one hundred and six we were dealing with earlier. There’s even a breeze. We’re silent as we cross the parking lot to the Aspire. There’s a heaviness between us now that we’ve brushed against what happened in Croatia.
I’d convinced myself we could leave it in the past, but now I realize that every time I learn something new from the last two years, it will press on that same raw spot in my heart.
It’s got to be having some kind of effect on him too, but he’s always been good at bottling up his feelings when he doesn’t want to share them.
The whole ride home I want to say, I’d take it back. If it would fix this, I’d take it back.
When we reach the apartment, it is officially hotter inside than outside. We both beeline for the thermostat. “Eighty-one?” he says. “It went up again?”
I rub the bridge of my nose. A headache is starting behind my eyes, from heat or alcohol or stress, or all of it. “Okay. Okay. We’ve got to turn it back up to eighty, right? And let it drop to that before we lower it again?”
Alex stares at the thermostat like it just knocked an ice cream cone out of his hand. There are unintentional shades of Sad Puppy Face in his expression.
“One degree at a time. That’s what Nikolai said.”
He adjusts the temperature to eighty, and I slide open the door to the balcony.
But the wall of plastic sheeting is keeping out the fresh air. In the kitchenette, I rifle through drawers until I find a pair of scissors.
“What are you doing?” Alex asks, following me onto the balcony.
“Just the bare fucking minimum,” I say, slicing the scissors into the middle of the plastic.
“Oooh, Nikolai’s gonna be maaaaad at you,” Alex teases.
“I’m not too happy with him either,” I say, and cut a long flap in the plastic, pulling it aside and loosely knotting it, so there’s a gap for air to flow through.
“He’s going to sue us,” he deadpans.
“Come at me, Nicky.”
Alex chuckles, and after a few seconds of silence, I say, “Tomorrow I was thinking we could check out the art museum and go take the tramway. The view’s supposed to be amazing.”
Alex nods. “Sounds good.”
Again we lapse into quiet. It’s only ten thirty, but things are just awkward enough that I think calling it a day might be our best bet. “Do you need into the bathroom before . . .”
“No,” Alex says. “Go ahead. I’m gonna catch up on some emails.”
I haven’t checked my work email since I got here, and I’ve also let a few messages from Rachel sit, along with the always overflowing group text between my brothers and me. It’s largely just the two of them brainstorming ideas that won’t go anywhere. Last I checked in, they were concocting a board game called War on Christmas and demanding I contribute puns.
So at least I’ll have something to do while lying on the chair bed, wide awake.
Headache still building, I tug my hair into my go-to stubby ponytail and cross the scuffed wooden floors to the space-age bathroom. In its strange blue light, I wash my face, but rather than applying any of the fancy moisturizers or serums that Rachel is constantly offloading on me, I splash my face with cold water when I’m done, rub some on my temples and my neck.
In the mirror, my reflection looks as wretchedly stressed as I feel. I need to turn this around and remind Alex how things used to be, and I only have five days left to do it, the last three of which will be peppered with wedding festivities.
Tomorrow has to be amazing. I need to be Fun Poppy, not Weird, Hurt Poppy. Then Alex will loosen up, and everything will smooth out. I change into a pair of silky pajama shorts and a tank top, brush my teeth, then step back into the living space to find that Alex has turned off all the lights except the lamp beside the bed, and he’s lying on the chair mattress in a pair of exercise shorts and a T-shirt, his same book from earlier in hand.
I happen to know that Alex Nilsen has always slept shirtless, even when the temperatures are not this absurdly high, but that’s neither here nor there because the point is, I’m supposed to take the foldout chair.
“Get out of my bed!” I say.
“You paid,” he says. “You get the bed.”
“R+R paid.” Just like that, I’m deeper into the lie. It’s not like it’s a harmful one, but still.
“I want the chair,” Alex says. “How often does a grown man get to sleep on a fuzzy foldout chair, Poppy?”
I sit beside him and make a big show of trying to push him off, but he’s too solid for me to budge him. I twist around, bracing my feet against the floor, my knees against the edge of
the bed thing, and my hands against his right hip, as I grit my teeth and try to push him off of it.
“Stop it, you weirdo,” he says.
“I’m not the weirdo.” I turn sideways, try to use my hip and side body to force him off.
“You’re the one who’s trying to steal my one joy in life, this weird bed.”
In that moment, when all my weight is pretty much focused in my hip, he stops resisting and scoots sideways a little, and somehow I tumble halfway onto the chair bed and halfway onto his chest, forcefully knocking his book onto the floor in the process. He laughs, and I laugh too, but I’m also feeling kind of tingly and heavy and, frankly, turned on, lying on him like this.
Worst of all, I can’t seem to make myself move. His arm has come around my back, loose over the curve at its base, and when his laughter settles, I look up into his eyes, my chin resting on his chest. “You tricked me,” I hum. “I bet you didn’t even have emails to respond to.”
“For all you know, I don’t even have an email account,” he teases. “Are you mad?”
“Furious.”
His laugh shivers through me, goose bumps chasing it down my spine, and the heat of the apartment sinks into my skin, gathers between my legs.
“I’d forgive you eventually,” I say. “I’m very forgiving.”
“You are,” he agrees. “I’ve always liked that about you.”
His hand just barely brushes the skin between the bottom of my tank top and the top of my shorts, and I shift against him, feeling as if we could melt into each other.
What am I doing?
I sit up suddenly and take my hair down just to put it back up. “You’re sure you’re cool to sleep on the chair bed?” My voice comes out too high.
“Of course. Yeah.”
I stand and pad over to the bed. “Okay, cool, then . . . good night.”
I turn off the light and climb onto bed. Onto, not into, because it’s way too hot for blankets.
WHEN I STARTLE awake, it’s still dark out, and I’m sure we’re being robbed.
“Shit, shit, shit,” the robber is saying for some reason, and it sounds like he’s in pain.
“The police are on their way!” I yelp—which is neither a true statement nor a premeditated one—and scramble to the edge of the bed to snap on the light.
“What?” Alex hisses, eyes squinting against the sudden brightness.
He’s standing in the dark in the same black shorts he went to sleep in and no shirt. He’s bent slightly at the waist and gripping his lower back with both hands, and as the sleep clears from my brain, I realize he’s not just squinting against the light.
He’s gasping for breath like he’s in pain.
“What happened?” I cry, half tumbling off the bed toward him. “Are you okay?”
“Back spasm,” he says.
“What?”
“I’m having a back spasm,” he gets out.
I’m still not sure what he’s talking about, but I can tell he’s in horrible pain, so I don’t press for more information aside from asking, “Do you need to sit down?”
He nods, and I guide him toward the bed. He slowly lowers onto it, wincing until he’s finally sitting, at which point some of the pain seems to ease up.
“Do you want to lie down?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Getting up and down is the hardest part when this happens.”
When this happens? I think but don’t say, and guilt stabs through my chest. Apparently this is another one of those Poppy-less developments from the last two years.
“Here,” I say. “Let me prop some pillows up behind you.”
He nods, which I take as confirmation that this won’t make things worse. I puff up the pillows, stacking them against the headboard, and he slowly reclines, his face contorted in pain.
“Alex, what happened?” I glance at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s five thirty in the morning.
“I was getting up to run,” he says. “But I guess I sat up weird? Or too fast or something, because my back spasmed and—” He tips his head back against the pillows, eyes scrunching closed. “Shit, Poppy, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” I say. “Why are you sorry?”
“It’s my fault,” he says. “I didn’t think about how low to the ground that cot thing is. I should’ve known popping out of bed like that would do this.”
“How could you have possibly known that?” I say, disbelieving.
He massages his forehead. “I should have,” he repeats. “This has been happening for, like, a year now. I can’t even bend over to pick up my shoes until I’ve been awake and moving around for at least half an hour. It just didn’t occur to me. And I didn’t want you to get a migraine from the chair, and—”
“And that’s why you should never be a hero,” I say gently, teasing, but his expression of misery doesn’t so much as waver.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he says. “I didn’t mean to mess up your trip.”
“Alex, hey.” I touch his arm lightly so it won’t disturb the rest of his body. “You didn’t mess up this trip, okay? Nikolai did.”
The corners of his mouth twist into an unconvinced smile.
“What do you need?” I ask. “How can I help you?”
He sighs. If there’s one thing Alex Nilsen hates, it’s being helpless. Which goes hand in hand with being waited on. In college, when he had strep throat, he ghosted me for a week (the first time I was truly mad at him). When his roommate told me Alex was laid up with a fever, I made very bad chicken noodle soup in our dorm kitchen and brought it to his room.
He locked the door and wouldn’t let me in for fear of passing the strep along, so I started yelling, “I’m keeping the baby, okay? ” through the doorway and he relented.
It makes him uncomfortable to be fussed over. Thinking about that has a similar, if distilled, effect on me as looking at the formidable Sad Puppy Face. It overwhelms. The love rises less like a wave and more like an instantaneously erected steel skyscraper, shooting up through my center and knocking everything else out of its way.
“Alex,” I say. “Please let me help.”
He sighs, defeated. “There are muscle relaxants in the front pocket of my laptop bag.”
“On it.” I retrieve the bottle, fill a glass of water in the kitchenette, and bring him both.
“Thanks,” he says apologetically, then takes the pill.
“No problem,” I say. “What else?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he says.
“Look.” I take a deep breath. “The sooner you tell me how I can help you, the sooner you get better, and the sooner this is over, okay?”
His teeth skim over his full bottom lip, and I’m mesmerized by the sight. I startle when his gaze cuts back to me. “If there’s an ice pack here, that would help,” he admits. “Usually I alternate between cold compresses and heating pads, but the important thing is just sitting still.”
He says this with disdain.
“Got it.” I slip my sandals on and grab my purse.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Going to the pharmacy. That freezer doesn’t even have an ice cube tray, let alone an ice pack, and I doubt Nicky has a heating pad either.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Alex says. “Really, if I sit still, I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”
“While you sit upright in the dark? No way. For one thing, that’s extremely creepy, and for another, I’m up, so I might as well be of use.”
“This is your vacation.”
I walk toward the door, because there’s nothing he can do to stop me. “No,” I say. “It’s our summer trip. Don’t dance around naked until I get back, okay?”
He heaves a sigh. “Thanks, Poppy. Seriously.”
“Stop thanking me. I’m already drafting an absurd list of ways for you to repay me.”
That finally wins a faint smile. “Good. I like to be useful.”
“I know,” I say. “I’ve always liked that about you.”
WE GET BACK to our downtown hotel room at two thirty in the morning, a little bit hammered. Usually, we don’t drink so much, but this whole trip has been a celebration.
We are celebrating the fact that Alex has graduated from college, and that soon he’ll be leaving to get his MFA in creative writing from Indiana University.
I tell myself it’s not that far away. In fact, we’ll be living closer to each other than we have been since I dropped out.
But the truth is, even with all the traveling I’ve been doing, I’m itching to get out of my parents’ house in Linfield. I’ve started looking for apartments in other cities, flexible jobs bartending and serving where I can work myself to exhaustion, then take weeks off to travel.
Spending time with my parents has been great, but everything else about being home makes me feel claustrophobic, like the suburbs are a net pulling tighter and tighter around me as I struggle against it.
I run into my old teachers, and when they ask what I’m doing, their mouths twist judgmentally at the answer. I see classmates who used to bully me, and some that were friendly enough, and I hide. I work at an upscale bar forty minutes south, in Cincinnati, and when Jason Stanley, my first kiss, came in with his orthodontist-perfected smile and the kind of clothes full-time white-collar jobs require, I dove into the bathroom. Told my boss I had vomited.
For weeks after that, she kept asking how I was doing in a voice that made it perfectly clear she thought I was pregnant.
I was not pregnant. Julian and I are always careful about that. Or at least I am. Julian, in general, is not careful by nature. He is a person who says yes to the world, almost regardless of what it asks. When he visits me at work, he finishes drinks that get left on the bar, and he’s tried most drugs (heroin excluded) once. He’s always up for weekend trips to Red River Gorge or Hocking Hills—or slightly longer trips to New York, on the overnight bus that’s only sixty dollars round trip but often has no bathroom. He has the same kind of flexible schedule I do—he’s a college dropout too, but he left the University of Cincinnati after only one year.
He was studying architectural design, but really, he wants to be a working artist. He shows his paintings at DIY spots around the city, and he lives with three other painters in an old white house that makes me think of Buck and the transients of Tofino. Sometimes, after one too many beers, sitting on the porch while they all smoke weed or clove cigarettes and talk about their dreams, it makes me so nostalgic I could cry from some mixture of sadness and happiness whose proportions I can never quite sort out.
Julian is rake-thin with hollowed-out cheekbones and alert eyes that can feel like they’re x-raying you. After our first kiss, outside his favorite bar, a grungy place downtown that has a bike repair shop in the back, he told me he didn’t ever want to get married or have kids.
“That’s okay,” I told him. “I don’t want to marry you either.”
He laughed gruffly and kissed me again. He always tastes like cigarettes or beer, and when he spends his days off work—he works in a UPS warehouse at the edge of town—
painting at home, he gets so lost in his work that he forgets to eat or drink. When we meet
up afterward, he’s usually in a foul mood but only for a few minutes, until he has a snack, at which point he melts back into a sweet, sensitive boyfriend who always kisses and touches me so sensually that I regularly find myself thinking, I bet this would look beautiful on film.
I consider saying it to him, asking if we should set up a camera and take some pictures, and I’m immediately embarrassed to have even considered it.
He’s the second person I’ve ever slept with, but he doesn’t know that. He didn’t ask. The first still comes into my bar every once in a while and flirts a little, but we can both tell that whatever mild attraction there was when he first started coming in fizzled after those two quick hookups. They were kind of awkward but fine, and in the end, I’m glad I got them out of the way because I have a sense that Julian would’ve been too freaked to come near me if he’d known how inexperienced I was. He would’ve been afraid I’d get too attached to him, and probably I have, but I think he has too, so for now, it’s okay that we spend every spare minute together.
Julian met Alex once when Alex was home for Christmas break at my bar, a second time during spring break at Julian’s grungy bike bar, and a third time for breakfast at Waffle House before Alex and I left for this trip.
I can tell Julian has very little opinion of Alex, which is mildly disappointing, and likewise I’m aware that Alex despises Julian, which probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.
He thinks Julian is reckless, careless. He doesn’t like that he always shows up late, or that sometimes I don’t hear from him for days, then spend weeks with him almost constantly, or that he hasn’t met my parents though they live in the same city.
“It’s okay,” I insisted when Alex shared these opinions with me on the flight to San Francisco a few days ago. “It works for us.” I don’t even want him to meet my family.
“I can just tell he doesn’t get it,” Alex said.
“Get what?” I asked.
“You,” he said. “He has no idea how lucky he is.”
It was both a sweet and a hurtful thing for him to say. Alex’s take on our relationship made me feel embarrassed, even if I wasn’t sure he was right.
“I’m lucky too,” I said. “He’s really special, Alex.”
He sighed. “Maybe I just need to get to know him better.” I knew from his voice he didn’t think that would fix the problem at all.
In my daydreams, I’d imagined the two of them becoming best friends, so close that it made sense for our summer trip to expand to include Julian, but after seeing how they interacted, I knew better than to even float the idea.
So Alex and I headed to San Francisco on our own. My credit card earned me enough points to get one of the round-trip plane tickets free, and Alex and I split the cost of the other.
We started with four days in wine country, staying at a new Sonoma bed-and-breakfast that comped two nights in exchange for the advertising they’d get to my twenty-five thousand followers. Alex good-naturedly agreed to take my photo doing all kinds of quaint things:
Sitting on one of the old-fashioned red bikes the B and B has for guests, wearing a giant straw sun hat, fresh flowers in the wicker basket fixed to the handlebars.
Walking on the nature trails through the scrubby meadows and their scraggly trees.
Sipping a cup of coffee on the patio, and a chilled old-fashioned in the sitting room.
We lucked out with the wine tastings too. The first winery we visited comped your tastings if you bought a bottle, and I researched the cheapest one online before we went.
Alex took my picture posing in between rows of vines with a glimmering glass of rosé, one leg kicked out to the side to show off my ridiculous purple-and-yellow-striped vintage jumpsuit.
I was tipsy by then, and when he knelt, right in the dried-out dirt in his light gray pants, to take the photo, I almost fell over laughing at the bizarre angle he’d chosen for the picture.
“Too many wine,” I said, gasping for breath.
“Too. Many. Wine?” he repeated, delighted and disbelieving, and as I fell into a crouch in the middle of the aisle, laughing my head off, he took a few more pictures from way down low, pictures that would make me look like a sassily dressed skin triangle.
He was being a horrible photographer on purpose, not out of protest but to crack me up.
It was the flip side of the Sad Puppy coin, another performance for me and me alone.
By the time we hit the second winery, we were already sleepy from the alcohol and sunshine, and I let my head droop against his shoulder. We were inside, on a technicality: the whole back of the building was a windowed garage door that pulled up so you could move freely from the patio, with its bougainvillea-encroached lattice, to the light, airy bar with its twenty-foot ceilings, big-ass fans spinning lazily overhead, their rhythm like a lullaby.
“How long have you two been together?” the sweet, middle-aged woman running the tasting asked as she returned with our next pour, a light and crisp Chardonnay.
“Oh,” Alex said.
Midyawn, I squeezed his biceps and said, “Newlyweds.”
The bartender was tickled. “In that case,” she said with a wink, “this one’s on me.”
Her name was Mathilde, and she was originally from France but moved to the United States after meeting her wife online. They lived in Sonoma but had honeymooned just outside San Francisco. “It’s called the Blue Heron Inn,” she told me. “It’s the most idyllic place I’ve ever seen. Romantic and cozy, with this roaring fire and lovely patio—just a few minutes from Muir Beach. You two must see it. It is perfect for newlyweds. Tell them Mathilde sent you.”
Before we left, we tipped Mathilde for the cost of the free tasting and then some.
For the next couple days, I deployed the newlyweds card regularly. Sometimes we got a discount or a free glass; sometimes we got nothing but a smile, but even those felt genuine and meaningful.
“I feel kind of bad,” Alex told me as we were walking it off in one vineyard.
“If you want to go get married,” I said, “we can.”
“Somehow, I don’t think Julian would take that too well.”
“He won’t care,” I said. “Julian doesn’t want to get married.”
Alex stopped and looked down at me, and then, entirely because of the wine, I started crying. He cupped my face and angled it up to his. “Hey,” he said. “It’s all right, Poppy. You don’t really want to marry Julian, do you? You’re way too good for that guy. He doesn’t deserve you.”
I sniffed back my tears, but that just let more out. My voice came out as a squeak. “Only my parents are ever going to love me,” I said. “I’m going to die alone.” I knew how stupid and melodramatic it sounded, but with him, it was always so hard to rein myself in, to say
anything but the absolute truth of how I felt. And worst of all, I hadn’t even known that was how I felt until this moment. Alex’s presence had a way of drawing the truth right to my surface.
He shook his head and pulled me into his chest, squeezing me, lifting me up into him like he planned to absorb me. “I love you,” he said, and kissed my head. “And if you want, we can die alone together.”
“I don’t even know if I want to get married,” I said, wiping the tears away with a little laugh. “I think I’m about to start my period or something.”
He stared down at me, face inscrutable for another beat. It didn’t make me feel x-rayed, like Julian’s eyes. It just made me feel seen.
“Too many wine,” I said, and he finally let a fraction of a smile slip over his lips and we went back to walking off the buzz.
We checked out bright and early from our B and B and called the Blue Heron Inn on speakerphone as we headed back toward San Francisco. It was the middle of the week, and they had plenty of rooms.
“Would you by chance be the Poppy my darling Mathilde said would be calling?” the lady on the phone asked.
Alex shot me a meaningful look, and I sighed heavily. “Yes, but here’s the thing. We told her we were newlyweds, but it was a joke. So we don’t, like, want any free stuff.”
The woman on the other end of the phone gave a hacking cough, which turned out to be laughter. “Oh, honey. Mathilde wasn’t born yesterday. People pull that trick all the time. She just liked you two.”
“We liked her too,” I said, grinning enormously over at Alex. He grinned enormously back.
“I don’t have the authority to give anyone a free stay,” the woman went on, “but I do have a couple year-round passes you can use to visit Muir Woods if you like.”
“That would be amazing,” I said.
And just like that we saved thirty bucks.
The place was adorable, a white Tudoresque cottage tucked down a narrow road. It had a shingled roof and warped windows lined with flower boxes and a chimney whose smoke curled romantically through the mist, windows softly aglow as we pulled into the parking lot.
For two days, we moved between the beach, the redwoods, the inn’s cozy library, and the dining room with its dark wooden tables and blazing fire. We played UNO and Hearts and something called Quiddler. We drank foamy beers and had big English breakfasts.
We took pictures together, but I didn’t post any of them. Maybe it was selfish, but I didn’t want twenty-five thousand people descending on this place. I wanted it to stay exactly as it was.
Our last night we booked a room at a modern hotel that belonged to the father of one of my followers. When I posted about the upcoming trip and asked for tips, she DMed me to offer the room for free.
I love your blog, she said, and I love reading about Particular Man Friend, which is what I call Alex when I mention him at all. I mostly try to leave him out of it, because he, like the Blue Heron Inn, isn’t something I want to share with thousands of people, but sometimes the things he says are too funny to leave out. Apparently he’s bled through more than I realized.
I decided to try harder to keep him out of it, but I accepted the free room, because Money.
Also the hotel has free parking for guests, which, in San Francisco, is the equivalent of a hotel giving out free kidney transplants.
We dropped our bags as soon as we got into the city, then headed back out to make the most of our only day in downtown San Francisco. We left the car and took cabs.
First we walked the Golden Gate Bridge, which was amazing, but also colder than I’d expected and so windy we couldn’t hear each other. For probably ten minutes, we pretended to be having a conversation, waving our arms exaggeratedly and shouting nonsense at each other as we power walked over the crowded walkway.
It made me think about that water taxi ride in Vancouver, how Buck kept vaguely gesturing, talking at an easy clip like one of those orthodontists who can’t stop asking you open-ended questions while his hands are in your mouth.
Luckily the weather had decided to be sunny; otherwise, we would have probably gotten hypothermia on the bridge. We stopped halfway across, and I pretended to climb over the railing. Alex made his trademark grimace and shook his head. He grabbed my hands and tugged me away from the railing, leaning in close so I could hear him over the wind when he said against my ear, “That makes me feel like I’m going to have diarrhea.”
I broke into laughter and we kept walking, him on the inside, me closest to the railing, resisting a powerful urge to keep messing with him. Probably I’d accidentally actually fall over and not only die but traumatize poor Alex Nilsen, and that was the last thing I wanted.
At the far end of the bridge, there was a restaurant, the Round House Cafe, a round, windowed building. We ducked inside to drink a cup of coffee while we gave our ears a chance to stop ringing from the wind.
There were dozens of bookshops and vintage stores in San Francisco, but we decided two of each should be enough.
We took a cab to City Lights first, a bookstore and publisher in one that had been around since the height of the beatnik era. Neither of us was a big beat person, but the store was exactly the kind of old, meandering shop that Alex lived for. From there we stopped by a store called Second Chance Vintage, where I found a sequined bag from the forties for eighteen dollars.
After that, we’d planned to go to the Booksmith, over by the Haight-Ashbury, but by then, that big English breakfast from the Blue Heron Inn had worn off and the Round House coffee had us both feeling a little jittery.
“Guess we just have to come back,” I said to Alex as we left the shop in search of dinner.
“Guess so,” he agreed. “Maybe for our fiftieth anniversary.”
He smiled down at me, and my heart swelled until it felt so big and light my body could float away. “Just so you know,” I said, “I would marry you all over again, Alex Nilsen.”
His head tipped sideways. He affected the Sad Puppy Face. “Is that just because you want more free wine?”
It was hard to choose a restaurant in a city with this much to offer, but we were too hungry to pore over the list I’d compiled, so we just went classic.
Farallon is not a cheap place, but on the second day of wine tasting, when we were both slaphappy, Alex had ordered another drink, crying, “When in Rome!” and ever since, whenever one of us had waffled about buying something, the other had insisted, “When in Rome!”
So far, this had been limited mostly to enormous ice cream cones and used paperback books, and lots of wine.
But Farallon is gorgeous, and a San Francisco staple, and if we were going to spend too much money, it might as well happen there. As soon as we walked into the building, with its opulent, rounded ceilings and gilded light fixtures and golden-edged booths, I said, “No regrets,” and forced Alex to high-five me.
“Giving high fives makes me feel like my insides have poison ivy,” he murmured.
“Might as well get that out of the way in case you’re about to find out you’re allergic to seafood.”
I was so enraptured by the over-the-top decor that I tripped three times on our way to the table. It was like being in the castle from The Little Mermaid, except not animated and everyone was fully clothed.
When our server left us with our menus, Alex did that old-man thing, where he opened it and reared back from the prices with widening eyes, like a startled horse.
“Really?” I said. “That bad?”
“It depends. Do you want more than one half-ounce of caviar?”
It wasn’t the kind of expensive that the upper middle class of Linfield would avoid, but for us, yes, it was expensive.
We split a two-person platter of oysters, crab, and shrimp along with one cocktail.
Our server hated us.
When we left, we walked past him, and I thought I heard Alex saying under his breath,
“Sorry, sir.”
We went straight to a walk-up pizza place and scarfed down a whole large cheese pizza between the two of us.
“I ate way too much,” Alex said as we were walking along the street afterward. “It was like some kind of Midwestern demon possessed me while I was sitting in that restaurant and that tiny platter came out. I could hear my dad in my head saying, ‘Now, that’s not economical.’”
“I know,” I agreed. “Halfway through, I was just like, get me out of here, I need to get to a Costco and buy a five-dollar bag of noodles that could feed a family for weeks.”
“I think I’m bad at vacation,” Alex said. “All this living large makes me feel guilty.”
“You’re not bad at vacation,” I argued. “And pretty much everything makes you feel guilty, so don’t blame that on the living large.”
“Touché,” he agreed. “But still. You probably would’ve had more fun if you’d taken this trip with Julian.” He didn’t say it like a question, but the way his eyes darted over to me, then back to the sidewalk ahead of us, I could tell that it was one.
“I thought about inviting him,” I admitted.
“Yeah?” Alex pulled one hand from his pocket and smoothed his hair. For some reason, the streetlights passing over him on the dark sidewalk made him seem taller. Even slouching, he was towering over me. I guess he always was. I just didn’t always notice because he so often brought himself down to my level or pulled me up to his.
“Yeah.” I looped my arm through his elbow. “But I’m glad I didn’t. I’m glad it’s just us.”
He looked down over his shoulder at me and slowed. I slowed beside him. “Are you going to break up with him?”
The question caught me off guard. The way he was looking at me, his eyebrows pinched and mouth small, caught me off guard too. My heart tripped over its next beat.
Yes, I thought right away, without any consideration.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
We kept walking. Up ahead we stumbled upon a bar that was Hemingway themed. That may seem rather ambiguous as a theme, but they pulled it off with their sleek dark wood and amber light and fishnets (not the stockings, actual nets for fish) suspended from the ceiling.
The drinks were all rum cocktails, named after Hemingway books and short stories, and over the next two hours, Alex and I had three each, along with a shot. I kept saying, “We’re celebrating! Come on, Alex!” but really, I felt like there was something I was trying to forget.
And now, as we’re stumbling back into our hotel room, it occurs to me that I don’t remember what I was trying to forget, so I guess it worked.
I kick off my shoes and collapse onto the nearest bed while Alex disappears into the bathroom and comes back with two cups of water.
“Drink this,” he says. I grunt and try to swat his hand away. “Poppy,” he says more firmly, and I brattily push myself upright and accept the cup of water. He sits on the bed beside me until I’ve drained my glass, then goes back to refill both of them.
I’m not sure how many times he does this—I’m edging closer to sleep all the while. All I know is that eventually, he sets the glasses aside and starts to stand up, and from my half-dream, full-drunk state, I reach for his arm and say, “Don’t go.”
He settles back down on the bed and lies beside me. I fall asleep curled up against his side and when I wake up the next morning to my alarm going off, he’s already in the shower.
The humiliation at having made him sleep next to me is instantaneous and flaming hot. I know right then I can’t break up with Julian when I get home. I have to wait, long enough to be sure I’m not confused. Long enough that Alex won’t think the two events are connected.
They’re not, I think. I’m pretty sure they’re not.
I FIND A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR pharmacy in Palm Springs and drive toward it through the first soft rays of sunrise. Afterward, I get back to the apartment before most other stores have opened. By then the parking lot of the Desert Rose has started to bake again, and the cool hours of predawn shrink to a distant memory as I climb the steps, loaded with grocery bags.
“How are you doing?” I ask Alex as I shut the door behind me.
“Better.” He forces a smile. “Thanks.”
Liar. His pain is written all over his face. He’s worse at hiding that than his emotions. I put the two ice packs I bought into the freezer, then go to the bed and plug in the heating pad. “Lean forward,” I say, and Alex shifts enough for me to slide the pad down the stack of pillows where it can sit across his midback. I touch his shoulder, helping to slow his descent as he leans back. His skin is so warm. I’m sure the heating pad won’t be comfortable, but hopefully it will do the trick, warming the muscle until it relaxes.
In half an hour, we’ll switch to the ice pack to try to bring down any inflammation.
I may have read up on back spasms in the quiet, fluorescent-lit aisles of the drugstore.
“I’ve got some Icy Hot too,” I say. “Does that ever help?”
“Maybe,” he says.
“Well, it’s worth a try. I guess I should’ve thought of that before you leaned back and got comfortable again.”
“It’s fine,” he says, wincing. “I never really get comfortable when this happens. I just sort of wait for the medicine to knock me out, and by the time I wake up, I usually feel a lot better.”
I slide off the edge of the bed and gather the rest of the bags, carrying them back to him.
“How long does it last?”
“Usually just a day if I stay still,” he says. “I’ll have to be careful tomorrow, but I’ll be able to move around. You should go do something you know I’d hate.” He forces another smile.
I ignore the comment and search through the bag until I find the Icy Hot. “Need help leaning forward again?”
“No, I’m good.” But the face he makes suggests otherwise, so I shift beside him, take his shoulders in my hands, and slowly help him ease upright.
“I feel like you’re my nurse right now,” he says bitterly.
“Like, in a hot and sexy way?” I say, trying to lighten his mood.
“In a sad-old-man-who-can’t-take-care-of-himself way,” he says.
“You own a house,” I say. “I bet you even ripped the carpet out of the bathroom.”
“I did,” he agrees.
“Clearly you can take care of yourself,” I say. “I can’t even keep a houseplant alive.”
“That’s because you’re never home,” he says.
I twist the top off the Icy Hot and get a glob onto my fingers. “I don’t think so. I got these hardy things, pothos and ZZ plants and snake plants—they’re, like, the kinds of plants they stick in lightless malls for months at a time and they still don’t die. Then they move into my apartment and immediately give up on life.” I steady his rib cage with one hand so I don’t
jostle him too much and, with my other, reach around to carefully massage the cream onto his back.
“Is that the right place?” I ask.
“A little higher and to the left. My left.”
“Here?” I look up at him, and he nods. I tear my gaze away and focus on his back, my fingers turning gentle circles over the spot.
“I hate that you have to do this,” he says, and my eyes wander back to his, which are low and serious beneath a furrowed brow.
My heart feels like it drops through my chest and soars back up. “Alex, has it ever occurred to you that I might like taking care of you?” I say. “I mean, obviously I don’t love that you’re in pain, and I hate that I let you sleep in that abominable chair, but if someone’s going to have to be your nurse, I’m honored it’s me.”
His mouth presses closed, and neither of us says anything for a few moments.
I pull my hands away from him. “Hungry?”
“I’m okay,” he says.
“Well, that’s too bad.” I go to the kitchen and rinse the leftover Icy Hot off my hands, grab a couple of glasses, and fill them with ice, then return to the bed and arrange the remaining grocery bags in a row. “Because . . .” I pull out a box of donuts with a flourish, like a magician producing a bunny from a hat. Alex looks dubious.
He isn’t a big sugar person. I think that’s partly why he smells so good, like even the obsessive cleanliness aside, his breath and body odor are always just sort of good and I’m guessing it’s because he does not eat like a ten-year-old. Or a Wright.
“And for you,” I say, and dump out the yogurt cups, box of granola, and berry mix, along with a bottle of cold-brew. The apartment’s way too hot for drip coffee.
“Wow,” he says, grinning. “You’re a real hero.”
“I know,” I say. “I mean, thank you.”
We sit and feast, picnic-style, on the bed. I eat mostly donuts and a few bites of Alex’s yogurt. He eats mostly yogurt but also devours half of a strawberry donut. “I never eat this stuff,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
“It’s pretty good,” he says.
“It speaks to me,” I say, but if he catches the reference to that very first trip we took together, he ignores it, and my heart sinks.
It’s possible that all those little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him. It’s possible that he didn’t reach out to me for two full years because, when we stopped speaking, he didn’t lose something precious the way that I did.
We have five more days of this trip, counting today—though today and tomorrow are our last wedding-event-free days—and right now I dread something bigger than awkwardness.
I think about heartbreak. The full-fledged version of this thing I’m feeling right now, but sprawling out for days on end with no relief or escape. Five days of pretending to feel fine, while inside me something is tearing into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s nothing but scraps.
Alex sets his cold brew on the side table and looks at me. “You really should go out.”
“I don’t want to,” I say.
“Of course you want to,” he says. “This is your trip, Poppy. And I know you haven’t gotten everything you need for your article.”
“The article can wait.”
His head cocks uncertainly. “Please, Poppy,” he says. “I’ll feel terrible if you’re stuck inside with me all day.”
I want to tell him I’ll feel terrible if I leave. I want to say, All I wanted for this trip was to be anywhere with you all day or Who cares about seeing Palm Springs when it’s one hundred degrees out or I love you so much it sometimes hurts. Instead I say, “Okay.”
Then I get up and go to the bathroom to get ready. Before I go, I bring Alex an ice pack and swap out the heating pad. “Are you going to be able to do this on your own?” I ask.
“I’m just gonna sleep when you leave,” he says. “I’ll be fine without you, Poppy.”
This is the last thing I want to hear.
• • •
NO OFFENSE TO the Palm Springs Art Museum, but I just don’t really care. Maybe I could under different circumstances, but under these circumstances, it is clear to me and everyone working here that I’m just killing time. I’ve never really known how to look at art without someone else there to be my guidepost.My first boyfriend, Julian, used to say, You either feel something or you don’t, but he was never taking me to MoMA or the Met (when we took the overnight bus to New York we skipped those entirely) or even the Cincinnati Art Museum; he was taking me to DIY
galleries where artists would lie naked on the floor with their crotches tarred-and-feathered while recordings of audio from the P.F. Chang’s dining room played at full volume.
It was easier to “feel something” in those contexts. Embarrassment, revulsion, anxiety, amusement. There was so much you could feel from something that over-the-top, and the smallest details could tip you one way or another.
But most visual art doesn’t trigger a visceral reaction in me, and I’m never sure how long I’m supposed to stand in front of a painting, or what face I’m supposed to make, or how to know if I’ve chosen the dullest one from the lot and all the docents are silently judging me.
I’m fairly sure I’m not spending the appropriate amount of time gazing meaningfully at the art here, because I’m finished walking through in less than an hour. All I want to do is go back to the apartment, but not if Alex specifically wants me not to.
So I do a second lap. And then a third. This time I read all the placards. I pick up the literature at the front reception area and take it with me so I have something else to study intensely. A balding docent with paper-thin skin gives me the evil eye.
He probably thinks I’m casing the joint. For all the time I’ve spent in here, I might as well have been. Two birds, one stone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Finally, I accept that I’ve worn out my welcome, and I head to Palm Canyon Drive, where there’s supposed to be some amazing antiques shopping.
And there is. Galleries and showrooms and antiques stores all lined up in a neat row, sprinkled with bright pops of midcentury modernist colors—robin’s-egg blues, brilliant oranges, and sour greens, vibrant mustardy yellow lamps that look almost illustrated and Sputnik-patterned couches and elaborate metal light fixtures with spokes sticking out in every direction.
It’s like I’m on vacation in the 1960s’ image of the future.
It’s enough to hold my interest for all of twenty minutes.
Then I finally bite the bullet and call Rachel.
“Helloooooooo,” she cries on the second ring.
“Are you drunk?” I ask, surprised.
“No?” she says. “Are you?”
“I wish.”
“Uh-oh,” she says. “I thought you weren’t texting me back because you were having an amazing time!”
“I’m not texting you back because we’re staying in a four-foot shoebox that’s a trillion degrees and I have neither the space nor mental fortitude to send you a detailed message about how bad it’s going.”
“Oh, darling,” Rachel sighs. “Do you want to come home?”
“I can’t,” I say. “There’s a wedding at the end of this, remember?”
“You could,” she says. “I could have an ‘emergency.’”
“No, that’s okay,” I say. I don’t want to go home—I just want things to go better.
“Bet you’re wishing you were in Santorini right now,” she says.
“Mostly I just wish Alex weren’t laid up back in the room with a back spasm.”
“What? ” Rachel says. “Young, fit, rockin’-bod Alex?”
“The very same. And he won’t let me do anything to help him, really. He kicked me out and I went to the art museum, like, four times already today.”
“Four . . . times?” she says.
“I mean,” I say, “I didn’t, like, leave and come back. I just feel like I took four full-length seventh-grade field trips in a row. Ask me anything about Edward Ruscha.”
“Oh!” Rachel says. “What was his pseudonym when he was working at Artforum magazine in layout?”
“Okay, don’t ask me anything,” I say. “Turns out I did not actually read the pamphlet I was staring at that whole time.”
“Eddie Russia,” Art School Rachel blurts out. “Don’t at all remember why. I mean, obviously it just sounds like his name, but why not use your real name in that case, you know?”
“Totally,” I agree, starting back to the car. There’s sweat gathering at my armpits and in the backs of my knees, and I feel like I’m getting a sunburn even standing under the awning of this coffee shop. “Should I start writing under the name Pop Right, without the W?”
“Or become a DJ in the nineties,” Rachel says flatly. “DJ Pop-Right.”
“Anyway,” I say. “How are you? How’s New York? How are the pooches?”
“Good,” she says, “hot, and okay. Otis had a minor surgery this morning. Tumor removal
—benign, thank God. I’m on my way to pick him up now.”
“Give him kisses for me.”
“Obviously,” she says. “I’m almost to the vet, so I should go, but let me know if you need me to get injured or whatever so you can come home early.”
I sigh. “Thanks. And you let me know if you need any expensive mod furniture.”
“Um. Sure.”
We hang up, and I check the time. I’ve successfully made it to four thirty p.m. I think that means it’s appropriately late to pick up sandwiches and head back to the Desert Rose.
When I get inside, the balcony door is shut against the heat of the day, but the apartment is still nastily hot. Alex has put a gray T-shirt back on and is sitting up where I left him with his book open and two more sitting on the mattress beside him.
“Hey,” he says. “Have a good time?”
“Yep,” I lie. I tip my chin toward the door. “You’ve been up and walking around.”
His mouth twists into a guilty frown. “Just a little bit. I had to pee anyway, and take another pill.”
I climb onto the bed and set the bag of sandwiches between us, pulling my legs underneath me. “How do you feel?”
“A lot better,” he says. “I mean, I’m still trapped here, but it hurts less.”
“Good. I brought you a sandwich.” I tip the plastic bag upside down and the paper-wrapped sandwich slides out of it.
He takes his and slightly smiles as he unwraps it. “A Reuben?”
“I know it’s not the same thing as stealing it from Delallo,” I say. “But if you want, I’ll put it in the fridge and go to the bathroom long enough for you to hobble over and take it.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “In my heart, it’s stolen from Delallo, and some would say that’s what really matters.”
“We’re learning so many important lessons on this trip,” I say. “P.S., I left Nikolai a voicemail on my way home about the air situation. Pretty sure he’s screening my calls.”
“Oh!” Alex says, brightening. “I forgot to tell you! I got it down to seventy-eight.”
“Seriously?” I spring off the bed and go check. “That’s amazing, Alex!”
He laughs. “This is a pathetic thing to celebrate.”
“The theme of this trip is Taking What We Can Get,” I say as I sit back down beside him.
“I thought it was Aspire,” Alex says.
“Aspire to reach seventy-five degrees.”
“Aspire to fit inside the swimming pool at some point.”
“Aspire to get away with the murder of Nikolai.”
“Aspire to get out of bed.”
“You poooooor thing,” I moan. “Trapped in bed with a book—your personal hell!—while I rub menthol on your back and hand deliver you your ideal breakfast and lunch.”
Alex makes the puppy face.
“Unfair!” I say. “You know I can’t use self-defense against you right now!”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll stop until you’re comfortable causing me bodily harm again.”
“When did this start happening?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess a couple months after Croatia?”
The word lands like a firework in the middle of my chest. I try to keep my face placid but have no idea how I’m faring. He, for his part, shows no sign of discomfort. “Do you know why?” I recover.
“I hunch a lot?” he says. “Especially when I’m reading or on my computer. A massage therapist told me my hip muscles were probably shortening, pulling on my back. I don’t know. My doctor just prescribed me muscle relaxants, then left before I could think of any questions.”
“And it happens a lot?” I say.
“Not a lot,” he says. “This is the fourth or fifth time. It happens less when I’m exercising regularly. I guess sitting on the plane and in the car and all that . . . and then the chair bed.”
After a moment, he asks, “You okay?”
“I guess I just . . .” I trail off, unsure how much I want to say. “I feel like I missed a lot.”
His head tilts back against the pillows, and his eyes wander down my face. “Me too.”
A half-hearted laugh rises out of me. “No, you didn’t. My life’s exactly the same.”
“That’s not true,” he says. “You cut your hair.”
This time, the laugh is more genuine, and a contained smile curves over Alex’s lips.
“Yeah, well,” I say, fighting a blush as I feel his gaze move over my bare shoulder, down the length of my arm to where my hand rests on the bed near his knee. “I didn’t get a house or buy my own dishwasher or anything. I doubt I’ll ever be able to.”
His eyebrow arches, and his eyes retrain on my face. “You don’t want to,” he says quietly.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I say, but honestly I’m unsure. That’s the problem. I haven’t wanted the things I used to want, the things I wanted when I made just about every big life decision I’ve made. I’m still paying off student loans for a degree I didn’t finish, and even if I saved myself another year-and-a-half’s worth of tuition, lately I find myself wondering if that was the right choice.
I fled Linfield. I fled the University of Chicago, and if I’m being honest, I sort of fled Alex when everything happened. He fled me too, but I can’t place all the blame on him.
I was terrified. I ran. And I left it up to him to fix it.
“Remember when we went to San Francisco, and we kept saying ‘when in Rome’
whenever we wanted to buy something?” I ask.
“Maybe,” he says, sounding uncertain. I’m guessing my expression must be something along the lines of crushed, because he apologetically adds, “I don’t have a great memory.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That makes sense.”
He coughs. “Do you want to watch something, or are you going back out?”
“No,” I say, “let’s watch something. If I go back to the Palm Springs Art Museum, I think the FBI will be waiting for me.”
“Why, did you steal something priceless?” Alex asks.
“I won’t know until I have it appraised,” I joke. “Hopefully this Claude Moan-ay guy turns out to be a big deal.”
Alex laughs and shakes his head, and even that small gesture seems to cost him a shock of pain. “Shit,” he says. “You have to stop making me laugh.”
“You have to stop assuming I’m joking when I’m talking about robbing art museums.”
He closes his eyes and presses his mouth into a straight line, smothering any more laughter. After a second he opens his eyes. “Okay, I’m going to go pee for—hopefully—the last time today and take another pill. You can grab my laptop from the bag and pull up Netflix, if you want.” He cautiously turns, sets his feet on the ground, and stands.
“Got it,” I say. “And do you want me to leave the nudie mags in there or get those out too?”
“Poppy,” he groans without looking back. “No joking.”
I push off the bed and tug Alex’s laptop bag onto the chair as I sort through it for the computer, then carry it back to the bed with me, opening it as I go.
He hasn’t shut it down, and when I brush the mousepad, the screen flares to life, demanding that I log in. “Password?” I call toward the bathroom.
“Flannery O’Connor,” he calls back, then flushes the toilet and turns on the sink.
I don’t ask about spaces, capitalization, or punctuation. Alex is a purist. I type it in and the log-in screen vanishes, replaced by an open web browser. Before I’ve realized it, I’m inadvertently snooping.
My heart is racing.
The water turns off. The door opens. Alex steps out, and while it might be better to pretend I didn’t see the job posting Alex had pulled up, something’s come over me, yanked out the part of my brain that—at least occasionally—filters out things I shouldn’t say.
“You’re applying to teach at Berkeley Carroll?”
The confusion on his face quickly transforms into something akin to guilt. “Oh, that.”
“That’s in New York,” I say.
“So the website suggested,” Alex says.
“New York City,” I clarify.
“Wait, that New York?” he deadpans.
“You’re moving to New York?” I say, and I’m sure I’m talking loud, but the adrenaline has me feeling like the whole world is stuffed with cotton, deadening all sound to a muffled hum.
“Probably not,” he says. “I just saw the posting.”
“But you would love New York,” I say. “I mean, think about the bookstores.”
Now he gives a smile that seems both amused and sad. He comes back to the bed and slowly lowers himself down next to me. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was just looking.”
“I won’t bother you,” I say. “If you’re worried I’ll, like, show up on your doorstep every time I have a crisis, I promise I won’t.”
His eyebrow lifts skeptically. “And if you find out I have a back spasm, will you break into my apartment with donuts and Icy Hot?”
“No?” I say, pitch lifting guiltily. His smile widens, but still, there’s something vaguely sad about it. “What is it?”
He holds my eyes for a while, like we’re caught in a game of chicken. Then he sighs and runs a hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he says. “There’s some stuff I’m still trying to work out. In Linfield. Before I make a decision like that.”
“The house?” I guess.
“That’s part of it,” he says. “I love that house. I don’t know if I could bear to sell it.”
“You could rent it out!” I suggest, and Alex gives me a look. “Right. You’re way too high-strung to be a landlord.”
“I believe you mean that everyone else is way too lax to be a tenant.”
“You could rent it to one of your brothers,” I say. “Or you can just keep it. I mean, your grandma owned it, right? Do you owe anything on it?”
“Just property taxes.” He pulls the computer away from me and exits out of the job posting. “But it’s not just the house. And it’s not just because of my dad and brothers either,”
he adds when he sees my mouth opening. “I mean, obviously I’d miss my nieces and nephew a lot. But there are other things keeping me there. Or, I don’t know, there might be.
I’m just kind of . . . waiting to see what happens.”
“Oh,” I say, realization dawning. “So, like . . . a woman.”
Again he holds my gaze, as if daring me to push the matter. But I don’t blink, and he cracks first. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
“Oh.” And now all that vibrating excited energy seems to be freezing over, sinking low in my stomach. “So it’s Sarah. You are getting back together.”
He bows his head, rubs at his brow. “I don’t know.”
“She wants to?” I say. “Or you do?”
“I don’t know,” he says again.
“Alex.”
“Don’t do that.” He looks up. “Don’t chastise me. It’s really grim out there, dating-wise, and Sarah and I have a lot of history.”
“Yeah, a sordid history,” I say. “There’s a reason you broke up. Twice.”
“And a reason we dated,” he fires back. “Not everyone can just not look back like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demand.
“Nothing,” he says quickly. “We’re just different.”
“I know we’re different,” I say, defensive. “I also know it’s grim out there. I’m single too, Alex. I’m a card-carrying member of the Unsolicited Dick Pic Support Group. Doesn’t mean I’m running to get back with one of my exes.”
“It’s different,” he insists.
“How?” I snap.
“Because you don’t want the same things I want,” he says, half shouting, possibly the loudest I’ve ever heard him speak, and while his voice isn’t angry, it’s definitely frustrated.
When I rear back from him, I see him deflate a little, embarrassed.
He goes on, quiet and controlled once more. “I want all that stuff my brothers have,” he says. “I want to get married and have kids and grandkids and get really fucking old with my wife, and to live in our house for so long that it smells like us. Like, I want to pick out fucking furniture and paint colors and do all that Linfield stuff you think is so unbearable, okay? That’s what I want. And I don’t want to wait. No one knows how long they get, and I don’t want ten more years to go by and to find out I have fucking dick cancer or something and it’s too late for me. That stuff is what matters to me.”
Any remaining fire goes out of him, but I’m still quivering with nerves and hurt and shame, and most of all anger with myself for not understanding what was going on every time he defended our Podunk hometown, or changed the topic from Sarah, or anything else.
“Alex,” I say, on the verge of tears. I shake my head, trying to clear the storm clouds of gathering emotion. “I don’t think that stuff is unbearable. I don’t think any of it’s unbearable.”
His eyes lift heavily to mine, dart away again. Careful not to knock him, I shift closer and pull his hand into mine, fold my fingers through his. “Alex?”
He looks down at me. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry, Poppy.”
I shake my head. “I love Betty’s house,” I say. “And I love thinking about you having it, and as much as I hated school, I love thinking about you teaching there and how lucky those kids are. And I love what a good brother and son you are, and—” My words catch in my throat, and I have to stammer tearily through the rest of them. “And I don’t want you to marry Sarah, because she takes you for granted. She would never have broken up with you in the first place if she didn’t. And honestly, aside from that, I don’t want you to marry her, because she never liked me, and if you marry her . . .” I trail off before I can start sobbing.
If you marry her, I think, I will lose all of you forever.
And then, Probably no matter who you marry, I will have to lose you forever.
“I know that’s so selfish,” I say. “But it’s not just that. I really think you can do better.
Sarah will be great for someone, but not for you. She doesn’t like karaoke, Alex.”
This last part comes out pathetically teary, and as he gazes down at me, he tries his best to hide the smile that pulls at his mouth. He frees his hand from mine and wraps his arm around me, pressing me lightly to him, but I don’t let myself sink into him like I want for fear of hurting him.
This injury, while miserable for him, is actually turning out to be a good buffer, because everywhere we’re touching has started to buzz, like my nerves are jockeying for more of him. He presses a kiss to the top of my head, and it feels like someone cracked an egg there, something warm and sultry dripping down over me.
I shove down the hazy memories of everything that mouth did in Croatia.
“I’m not sure I actually can do better,” Alex says, drawing me out of a blushworthy scene.
“When I open Tinder, it just shows me a middle finger.”
“Seriously?” I sit up. “You have a Tinder account?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Poppy. Grandpa has a Tinder.”
“Let me see it.”
His ears go red. “No, thanks. I’m not in the mood to get brutally heckled.”
“I can help you, Alex,” I say. “I’m a straight woman. I know how men’s Tinder profiles are received. I can figure out what you’re doing wrong.”
“What I’m doing wrong is trying to find a meaningful connection on a dating app.”
“Well, obviously,” I say. “But let’s see what else.”
He sighs. “Fine.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and hands it to me. “But go easy on me, Poppy. I’m fragile right now.”
And then he makes the face.
NEW ORLEANS.
Alex is curious about the architecture—all those old Crayola-colored buildings with their wrought-iron balconies and the ancient trees writhing up right through the sidewalks, roots sprawling out for yards in every direction, breaking up cement like it’s nothing. The trees predate it, and they’ll outlast it.
I’m excited for alcohol in slushy form and kitschy supernatural shops.
Luckily there is no shortage of any of it.
I’m thrilled to find a large studio apartment not far from Bourbon Street. The floors are stained dark, and the furniture is heavy wood, and colorful paintings of jazz musicians hang on exposed brick walls. The beds are cheap looking, as is the bedding, but they’re queens, and the place is clean, and the air-conditioning game is so strong we have to crank it down so that every time we come in after a day in the heat, our teeth don’t chatter.
All there really is to do in New Orleans, it seems, is walk, eat, drink, look, and listen. This is basically what we do on every trip, but the fact is underscored here by the hundreds of restaurants and bars sitting shoulder to shoulder on every slender street. And the thousands of people milling through the city with tall neon novelty cups and mismatched straws. Every block or so the smells of the city switch from fried and delicious to stinking and rotten, the humidity trapping the sewage and putting it on display.
Compared to most American cities, everything looks so old that I imagine we’re smelling waste from the 1700s, which miraculously makes it more bearable.
“It feels like we’re walking around inside someone’s mouth,” Alex says more than once about the humidity, and from then on, whenever the smell hits, I think of food trapped between molars.
But the thing is, it never lasts. A breeze sweeps through to clear it out, or we wander past another restaurant with all its doors propped open, or we round the corner and stumble onto some beautiful side street where every balcony overhead is dripping with purple flowers.
Besides, I’ve been in New York for five months now, and during the last two months of summer, it’s not like my subway stop has smelled like roses. I’ve seen three different people peeing on the steps inside, and watched one of those people do it a second time a week later.
I love New York, but, wandering New Orleans, I wonder if I could be just as happy here.
If maybe I could be happier. If maybe Alex would visit me more often.
So far he’s visited New York once, a few weeks after his first year of grad school ended.
He brought a carload of my stuff from my parents’ house to my apartment in Brooklyn, and on the last day of his trip, we compared calendars, talked about when we’d next see each other.
The Summer Trip, obviously. Possibly (but probably not) Thanksgiving. Christmas if I could get time off work at the restaurant where I’m serving. But everyone wants off for Christmas, so instead I floated the idea of New Year’s Eve and we agreed to figure it out later.
So far we haven’t talked about any of that on this trip. I haven’t wanted to think about missing Alex while I’m with him. It seems like a waste.
“If nothing else,” he joked, “we’ll always have the Summer Trip.”
I had to actively decide to see that as comforting.
From morning until hours after dark, we wander. Bourbon Street and Frenchmen, and Canal and Esplanade (Alex is particularly enamored of the stately old houses on this street, with their overflowing flower beds and sun-blanched palms rising up alongside craggy oaks).
We eat fluffy, sugar-dusted beignets in an open-air café and spend hours picking our way through the knickknacks being sold outside the French Market (alligator-head key chains and silver rings set with moonstones), the freshly baked breads and chilled local produce and dense little cakes topped with kiwi and strawberries and bourbon-soaked cherries and pralines (in every imaginable manner) being sold in the booths inside.
We drink Sazeracs and hurricanes and daiquiris everywhere we go, because “Staying on theme matters,” as Alex says dramatically when I try to order a gin and tonic, and from there, we have both our mantra and our alter egos for the week.
Gladys and Keith Vivant are a Broadway power couple, we decide. True performers, to their very cores, and as their matching tattoos read, All the world’s a stage!
They start every day with some acting exercises, stick to one prompt for a whole week at a time, letting it guide their every interaction so as to better inhabit the Character.
And theme, of course, is vital.
Or, you could say, it matters.
“Theme matters!” we scream back and forth, stomping our feet whenever we want each other to do something the other isn’t thrilled about.
There are a whole lot of vintage stores that seem to have never been cleaned before, and Alex is not thrilled about trying on the suede leather pants I pick out for him in one of these, just as I am not thrilled when he wants to spend six hours in an art museum.
“Theme matters!” I shout when he refuses to enter a bar with an—no joke—all-saxophone band playing in the middle of the day.
“Theme matters!” he cries when I say I don’t want to buy shirts that say Drunk Bitch 1
and Drunk Bitch 2 like those Thing 1 and Thing 2 shirts they sell at theme parks, and we leave the shop wearing the shirts over our clothes.
“I love when you get weird,” I tell him.
He squints tipsily at me as we walk. “You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.”
“You make me weird too,” I say; then, “Should we get real tattoos that say ‘All the world’s a stage’?”
“Gladys and Keith would,” Alex says, taking a long drink from his water bottle. He passes it to me afterward, and I greedily chug half of it.
“So that’s a yes?”
“Please don’t make me,” he says.
“But, Alex,” I cry. “Theme matt—”
He pops the water bottle back into my mouth. “Once you’re sober, I promise you won’t think it’s funny anymore.”
“I will always think every joke I make is hilarious,” I say, “but point taken.”
We hit happy hour after happy hour, with varying results. Sometimes the drinks are weak and bad, sometimes they’re stiff and good, often they’re stiff and bad. We go to a hotel bar
that’s mounted to a carousel and each buy one fifteen-dollar cocktail. We go to, allegedly, the second-oldest continuously operating bar in Louisiana. It’s an old blacksmith shop with sticky floors that looks like a half-assed living museum, except for the gigantic trivia machine set up in the corner.
Alex and I sip slowly on one shared drink while we wait our turn. We don’t break the record, but we make the scoreboard.
The fifth night, we wind up at a fratty karaoke bar with an over-the-top stage and laser-lights show. After two shots of Fireball, Alex agrees to sing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” onstage in character as the Vivants.
Halfway through the song, we get into a miked fight about the fact that I know he’s sleeping with Shelly from makeup. “It doesn’t take an hour to put on a freaking fake beard, Keith!” I shout.
The applause at the end is muted and uncomfortable. We take another shot and head to a place Guillermo told me about that serves a frozen coffee cocktail.
Half the places we’ve gone have been places Guillermo recommended, and I’ve loved all of them, especially the hole-in-the-wall po’boy shop. Having a chef for a boyfriend has perks.
When I told him where Alex and I were going, he got out a piece of paper and started writing down everything he could remember from his last trip, along with notes about pricing and what to order. He starred all his must-eats, but there’s no way we’ll get to all of them.
I met Guillermo a couple months after moving to New York. My new (first New York) friend Rachel got a request to eat at his new restaurant for free, in exchange for posting a few pictures of it on her social media. She does that kind of thing a lot, and since I’m a fellow Internet Person, we do these sorts of things together.
“Less embarrassing,” she insists. “Plus cross-promotion.”
Every time she posts a picture with me, my subscriber count goes up by hundreds. I’d been hanging around thirty-six thousand for six months, but have ballooned to fifty-five thousand through sheer association with Her Brand.
So I went with her to this restaurant, and after the meal, the chef came out to talk to us, and he was gorgeous and sweet, with soft brown eyes, dark hair swept back off his forehead.
His laugh was soft and unassuming, and by that night, he’d messaged me on Instagram, before I could even post the pictures I’d taken to my account.
He found me through Rachel, and I liked the way he told me that right up front, without embarrassment. He works most nights, so on our first date, we went for breakfast instead, and he kissed me when he picked me up rather than waiting until he dropped me off afterward.
At first, I was seeing a few other people and he was too, but several weeks into it, we decided neither of us wanted to see anyone else. He laughed when he told me, and I laughed too, just because I’d gotten in the habit of giving encouraging laughter from being around him.
It’s not like it was with Julian, not all-consuming and unpredictable. We see each other two or three times a week, and it’s nice, the way this leaves space in my life for other things.
Spin classes with Rachel and long walks down the mall of Central Park with a dripping ice cream cone in hand, gallery openings and special movie nights at neighborhood bars.
People in New York are friendlier than the rest of the world warned me they would be.
When I tell Rachel this, she says, “Most people here aren’t assholes. They’re just busy.”
But when I say the same thing to Guillermo, he gently cups my jaw, laughs, and says,
“You are so sweet. I hope you don’t let this place change you.”
It’s sweet, but it also worries me. Like maybe the thing Gui loves best about me isn’t some essential part, but something changeable, something that could be stripped away by a few years in the right climate.
As we wander the streets of New Orleans, I think multiple times of telling Alex about what Guillermo said, but every time I catch myself. I want Alex to like Guillermo, and I worry he’d be offended on my behalf.
So I tell him other things. Like how calm Guillermo is, that he laughs easily, how passionate he is about his job, and food in general.
“You’ll like him,” I say, and I really believe it.
“I’m sure I will,” Alex insists. “If you like him, I’ll like him.”
“Good,” I say.
And then he tells me about Sarah, his unrequited college crush. He ran into her when he was up in Chicago visiting friends a few weeks ago. They grabbed a drink.
“And?”
“And nothing,” he says. “She lives in Chicago.”
“It’s not Mars,” I say. “It’s not even that far from Indiana University.”
“She’s been texting me a little,” he admits.
“Of course she is,” I say. “You’re a catch.”
His smile is bashful and adorable. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe next time I’m in town we’ll meet up again.”
“You should,” I press.
I’m happy with Guillermo, and Alex deserves to be happy too. Any tension that five percent of our relationship—the what-if—let in seems to have been resolved.
While staying in the French Quarter had seemed ideal when I booked our Airbnb, it turns out the nights are pretty loud. The music goes on until three or four and starts up surprisingly early in the morning. We find ourselves venturing to the rooftop pool at the Ace Hotel, which is free on weekdays, and napping on a couple of chaise lounges in the sun.
It’s probably the best sleep I get all week, so by the time we take the cemetery tour on the last day of the trip, I’m slaphappy from fatigue. Alex and I expected haunting ghost stories.
Instead we get information about how the Catholic Church cares for some graves—the ones for which people bought “perpetual care” generations ago—and lets the others crumble to dust.
It is decidedly boring, and we’re baking in the sun, and my back hurts from walking in sandals all week, and I’m exhausted from barely sleeping, and halfway through, when Alex realizes how miserable I am, he starts raising his hand every time we stop at another grave for more bland factoids and asking, “So is this grave haunted?”
At first our tour guide laughs his question off, but he’s less amused every time it happens.
Finally, Alex asks about a big white marble pyramid at odds with the rest of the stacked, rectangular French- and Spanish-style graves, and the tour guide huffs, “I certainly hope not!
That one belongs to Nicolas Cage!”
Alex and I deteriorate into cackles.
This was supposed to be a big reveal, probably with a built-in joke, and we ruined it.
“Sorry,” Alex says, and passes him a tip as we’re leaving. I’m the one who works in a bar, but he’s the one who always has cash.
“Are you secretly a stripper?” I ask him. “Is that why you always have cash?”
“Exotic dancer,” he says.
“You’re an exotic dancer?” I say.
“No,” he says. “It’s just helpful to carry cash.”
The sun is going down, and we’re both bone-tired, but it’s our last night, so we decide to get cleaned up and rally. While I’m sitting on the floor in front of the full-length mirror, putting on makeup, I peruse Guillermo’s list and shout out suggestions to Alex.
“Eh,” he says after each one. After a handful, he comes to stand behind me, making eye contact in the mirror. “Can we just wander?”
“I’d love to,” I admit.
We hit a couple dingy pubs before we wind up at the Dungeon, a small, dark goth bar at the end of a skinny alleyway. We’re told that pictures are expressly forbidden, before the bouncer lets us into the red-lit front room. It’s so packed that I have to hold on to Alex’s elbow as we make our way upstairs. There are plastic skeletons hanging on the wall, and a red-satin-lined coffin stands waiting for a photo op that you’re not allowed to take.
Despite our mantra for this trip, and all the free personal shopping I’ve done for him, Alex has continued to largely loathe themed parties, events, and apparently bars too.
“This place is horrible,” he says. “You love it, don’t you?”
I nod, and he grins. We have to stand so close I have to tip my head all the way back to see him at all. He brushes my hair from my eyes and cups the back of my neck, as if to stabilize it. “I’m sorry for being so tall,” he says over the metal music thrumming through the bar.
“I’m sorry for being so short,” I say.
“I like you short,” he says. “Never apologize for being short.”
I lean into him, a hug minus the arms. “Hey,” I say.
“Hey, what?” he asks.
“Can we go to that country-western bar we passed?”
I’m sure he doesn’t want to. I’m sure he finds the whole thing humiliating. But what he says is, “We have to. Theme matters, Poppy.”
So we go there next, and it’s the polar opposite of the Dungeon, a big open bar with saddles for seats and Kenny Chesney blaring out to no one but us.
Alex is chagrined at the thought of sitting on the saddles, but I hop up and try to make his Sad Puppy Face at him.
“What is that?” he says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m being pathetic,” I say. “So that you will please make me the happiest woman in the state of Louisiana and sit on one of these saddle seats.”
“I can’t decide if you’re too easy to please or too hard,” he says, and swings one leg over, pulling himself onto the saddle next to mine. “Excuse me,” he says, to a burly bartender in a black leather vest. “Give me something that will make me forget this ever happened.”
Still polishing a glass, he turns and glares. “I’m no mind reader, kid. What do you want?”
Alex’s cheeks flush. He clears his throat. “Beer’s fine. Whatever you’ve got.”
“Make that two,” I say. “Two of those alcohols, please.”
As the bartender turns to get our drinks, I lean over to Alex and almost fall off my saddle in the process. He catches me and holds me up as I whisper, “He’s so on theme! ”
It’s only eleven thirty when we leave, but I’m wiped out and as unthirsty as I’ve ever been in my life. So we just walk down the middle of the street with all the other revelers: families in matching reunion T-shirts; white-clad brides with silky pink BACHELORETTE sashes and towering heels; drunk middle-aged men hitting on the girls in pink BACHELORETTE
sashes, stuffing dollar bills in their dress straps as they walk past.
Overhead, people line the upstairs balconies of bars and restaurants, waving purple, gold, and green beads around, and when a man wolf-whistles and shakes a handful of necklaces at me, I hold my arms up to catch them. He shakes his head and pantomimes lifting his shirt up.
“I hate him,” I say to Alex.
“Me too,” Alex agrees.
“But I have to admit, he is on theme.”
Alex laughs, and we walk onward, with no destination in mind. Gradually, the foot traffic slows as we approach a brass band (saxophone-and-other-woodwind free) that’s set up shop in the middle of the street, horns blasting, drums rattling. We stop to watch, and a few couples start dancing. In the twist of the century, Alex offers me his hand, and when I take it, he twirls me in a lazy circle and pulls me in close, one hand around my back, the other folded against mine. He rocks me back and forth, and we both giggle sleepily. We’re not on the beat, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just us.
Maybe that’s why he can handle the public affection. Maybe, like me, when we’re together he feels like no one else is there, like they’re phantoms we dreamed up as set dressing.
Even if Jason Stanley and every other bully from my past were here, mocking me through a megaphone, I don’t think I’d stop dancing clumsily with Alex in the street. He spins me out and back in, tries to dip me, almost drops me. I yelp when it happens, laugh so hard I snort when he catches me and swings me upright onto my feet, rocking me some more.
When the song ends, we break apart and join the crowd in applause. Alex crouches for a second, and when he stands up, he’s holding out a strand of chipped purple Mardi Gras beads.
“Those were on the ground,” I say.
“You don’t want them?”
“No, I want them,” I say. “But they were on the ground.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Where there’s dirt,” I say. “And spilled booze. Possibly vomit.”
He winces, starts to lower the beads. I catch his wrist, stilling him. “Thank you,” I say.
“Thank you for touching these filthy beads for me, Alex. I love them.”
He rolls his eyes, smiles, slips the beads over my neck as I duck my head.
When I look back up at him, he’s beaming at me, and I think, I love you more now than I ever have. How is it possible that this keeps happening with him?
“Can we take a picture together?” I ask, but what I’m thinking is, I wish I could bottle this moment and wear it as a perfume. It would always be with me. Everywhere I went, he’d be there too, and so I’d always feel like myself.
He takes his phone out, and we huddle together as he snaps a picture. When we look at it, he makes a sound of strangled surprise. Probably in an effort not to look so sleepy, he threw his eyes wide in the last possible second.
“You look like you saw something horrible exactly when the flash went off,” I say.
He tries to pull the phone out of my hands, but I spin away from him, jog out of reach as I text it to myself. He follows, fighting a smile, and when I hand it back, I say, “There, now that I have a copy, you can delete it.”
“I would never delete it,” Alex says. “I’m just only going to look at it when I’m alone, locked in my apartment, so that no one else ever sees my face in this picture.”
“I’m going to see it,” I say.
“You don’t count,” he says.
“I know,” I agree. I love that, being the one who doesn’t count. The one who’s allowed to see all of Alex. The one who makes him weird.
When we get back to the apartment, I ask when he’s going to let me read the short stories he’s been working on.
He says he can’t—if I don’t like them, he’ll be too embarrassed.
“You got into an amazing MFA program,” I say. “You’re obviously good. If I don’t think they’re good, I’m obviously wrong.”
He says that if I don’t think they’re good, then U of I is wrong.
“Please,” I say.
“Okay,” he says, and gets out his computer. “Just wait until I’m in the shower, okay? I don’t want to have to watch you reading it.”
“Okay,” I say. “If you have a novel, I could read that instead, since I’ll have the whole length of an Alex Nilsen shower.”
He tosses a pillow at me and goes into the bathroom.
The story really is short. Nine pages, about a boy who was born with a pair of wings. All his life, people tell him that this means he should try to fly. He’s afraid to. When he finally does, jumps off a two-story roof, he falls. He breaks his legs and wings. He never gets them reset. As he recovers, the bone heals in its misshapen form. Finally, people stop telling him that he must’ve been born to fly. Finally, he’s happy.
When Alex comes back out, I’m crying.
He asks me what’s wrong.
I say, “I don’t know. It just speaks to me.”
He thinks I’m making a joke and chuckles along, but for once, I wasn’t referencing the gallery girl who tried to sell us a twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture.
I was thinking about what Julian used to say about art. How it either makes you feel something or it doesn’t.
When I read his story, I started crying for a reason I can’t totally explain, not even to Alex.
When I was a kid, I used to have these panic attacks thinking about how I could never be anyone else. I couldn’t be my mom or my dad, and for my whole life, I’d have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else.
It made me feel lonely, desolate, almost hopeless. When I told my parents about this, I expected them to know the feeling I was talking about, but they didn’t.
“That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with feeling that way, though, sweetie!” Mom insisted.
“Who else do you think about being?” my dad said with his particular blunt fascination.
The fear lessened, but the feeling never went away. Every once in a while, I’d roll it back out, poke at it. Wonder how I could ever stop feeling lonely when no one could ever know me all the way. When I could never peer into someone else’s brain and see it all.
And now I’m crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I’m not in my body. Like there’s some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we’re just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely, dancing around each other, unhindered.
I’m crying because I’m relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.
ALEX!” I SHRIEK at the sight of his Tinder profile. “No!”
“What? What?” he says. “There’s no way you’ve read everything by now!”
“Um, first of all,” I say, brandishing his phone out in front of us, “don’t you think that’s a problem? Your bio looks like the cover letter to a résumé. I didn’t even know Tinder bios could be this long! Isn’t there some kind of character limit? No one is going to read this whole thing.”
“If they’re really interested, they will,” he says, slipping the phone out of my hand.
“Maybe if they’re interested in harvesting your organs, they’ll skim to the bottom just to make sure you don’t mention your blood type— do you?”
“No,” he says, sounding hurt, then adds, “just my weight, height, BMI, and social security number. Is what I wrote good at least?”
“Oh, we’re not talking about that just yet.” I pluck his phone from his hand again, angle the screen toward him, and zoom in on his profile picture. “First we have to talk about this.”
He frowns. “I like that picture.”
“Alex . . .” I say calmly. “There are four people in this picture.”
“So?”
“So we have found the first and largest problem.”
“That I have friends? I thought that would help.”
“You poor innocent baby creature, freshly arrived to earth,” I coo.
“Women don’t want to date men who have friends?” he says dryly, disbelieving.
“Of course they do,” I say. “They just don’t want to play Dating App Roulette. How are they supposed to know which one of these guys is you? That guy on the left is, like, eighty.”
“Biology teacher,” he says. His frown deepens. “I don’t really take pictures by myself.”
“You sent me those Sad Puppy selfies,” I point out.
“That’s different,” he says. “That was for you . . . You think I should use one of those?”
“God, no,” I say. “But you could take a new picture where you’re not making that face, or you could crop one that’s you and three biology teachers of a certain age so that it’s just you.”
“I’m making a weird face in that picture,” he says. “I’m always making a weird face in pictures.”
I laugh, but really, warm affection is growing in my belly. “You have a face for movies, not photographs,” I say.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’re extremely handsome in real life, when your face is moving how it does, but when one millisecond is captured, yes, sometimes you’re making a weird face.”
“So basically I should delete Tinder and throw my phone into the sea.”
“Wait!” I jump out of bed and snatch my phone off the counter where I left it, then climb back up beside Alex, tucking my legs underneath me. “I know what you should use.”
He dubiously watches me scroll through my photos. I’m looking for a picture from our Tuscany trip, the last trip before Croatia. We’d been sitting outside on the patio, eating a late dinner, and he slipped away without a word. I figured he’d gone to the bathroom, but when I
went inside to get dessert, he was in the kitchen, biting his lip and reading an email on his phone.
He looked worried, didn’t seem to notice I was there until I touched his arm and said his name. When he looked up, his face went slack.
“What is it?” I asked, and the first thing that jumped into my mind was Grandma Betty!
She was getting old. Actually, as long as I’d known her she’d been old, but the last time we’d gone to her house together, she’d barely gotten up from the chair she did her knitting in. Until then, she’d always been a bustler. Bustling to the kitchen to get us lemonade.
Bustling over to the sofa to fluff the cushions before we sat down.
But the thought didn’t have time to gestate because Alex’s tiny, ever-suppressed smile appeared.
“Tin House,” he said. “They’re publishing one of my stories.”
He gave a surprised laugh after he said it, and I threw my arms around him, let him draw me up and in against him tight. I kissed his cheek without thinking, and if it had felt any less natural to him than it did to me, he didn’t show it. He turned me in half a circle, set me down grinning, went back to staring at his phone. He forgot to hide his emotions. He let them run wild over his face. I tugged my phone out of my pocket, pulled up the camera, and said,
“Alex.”
When he looked up, I captured my favorite picture of Alex Nilsen.
Unfiltered happiness. Naked Alex.
“Here,” I say, and show him the picture. Him, standing in a warm golden kitchen in Tuscany, his hair sticking up like it always did, his phone loose in his hand, and his eyes locked onto the camera, his mouth smiling but ajar. “You should use this one.”
He turns from the phone to me, our faces close though, as ever, his hangs over mine, his mouth soft with a trace of smile. “I forgot about that,” he says.
“It’s my favorite.” For a while neither of us moves. We linger in this moment of close silence. “I’ll send it to you,” I say weakly, and break eye contact, pulling up our text thread and dropping the picture into it.
Alex’s phone buzzes in his lap where I must’ve dropped it. He picks it up, does his half-cough tic. “Thanks.”
“So,” I say. “About that bio.”
“Should we print it out and find a red pen?” he jokes.
“No way, man. This planet is dying. No way I’m wasting that much paper.”
“Ha ha ha,” he says. “I was trying to be thorough.”
“As thorough as Dostoyevsky.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Shh,” I say. “Reading.”
Already knowing Alex, I do find the bio kind of charming. Mostly in that it speaks to that lovable grandpa side of him. But if I didn’t know him, and one of my friends read me this bio, I would suggest that perhaps this man was a serial killer.
Unfair? Probably.
But that doesn’t change things. He lists where he went to school, when he graduated, talks in depth about what he studied, the last few jobs he had, his strengths at said jobs, the fact that he hopes to get married and have kids, and that he is “close with [his] three brothers and their spouses and children” and “enjoys teaching literature to gifted high school students.”
I must be making a face, because he sighs and says, “It’s really that bad?”
“No?” I say.
“Is that a question?” he asks.
“No!” I say. “I mean, no, it’s not bad. It’s kind of cute, but, Alex, what are you supposed to talk about when you go out with a girl who’s already read all this?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Probably I’d just ask them questions about themselves.”
“That feels like a job interview,” I say. “I mean, yes, it is a rare and wonderful thing when your Tinder date asks you a single question about yourself, but you can’t just not talk about yourself at all.”
He rubs at the line in his forehead. “God, I really hate having to do this. Why’s it so hard to meet people in real life?”
“It might be easier . . . in another city,” I say pointedly.
He glances askance at me and rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “Okay, what would you write, if you were a guy, trying to woo yourself?”
“Well, I’m different,” I say. “What you’ve got here would totally work on me.”
He laughs. “Don’t be mean.”
“I’m not,” I say. “You sound like a sexy, child-rearing robot. Like the maid from The Jetsons but with abs.”
“Poppyyyyy,” he groan-laughs, throwing his forearm over his face.
“Okay, okay. I’ll take a crack at it.” I take his phone again and erase what he wrote, committing it to memory as well as I can in case he wants to restore it. I think for a minute, then type and pass the phone back to him.
He studies the screen for a long time, then reads aloud, “‘I have a full-time job and an actual bed frame. My house isn’t full of Tarantino posters, and I text back within a couple hours. Also I hate the saxophone’?”
“Oh, did I put a question mark?” I ask, leaning over his shoulder to see. “That’s supposed to be a period.”
“It’s a period,” he says. “I just wasn’t sure if you were serious.”
“Of course I’m serious!”
“‘I have an actual bed frame’?” he says again.
“It shows that you’re responsible,” I say, “and that you’re funny.”
“It actually shows that you’re funny,” Alex says.
“But you’re funny too,” I say. “You’re just overthinking this.”
“You really think women will want to go out with me based on a picture and the fact that I have a bed frame.”
“Oh, Alex,” I say. “I thought you said you knew how grim it was out there.”
“All I’m saying is, I walk around all day with this face and a job and a bed frame, and none of that has gotten me very far.”
“Yeah, that’s because you’re intimidating,” I say, saving the bio and going back to the slideshow of women’s accounts.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Alex says, and I look up at him.
“Yes, Alex,” I say. “That is it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Remember Clarissa? My roommate at U of Chicago?”
“The trust-fund hippie?” he says.
“What about Isabel, my sophomore-year roommate? Or my friend Jaclyn from the communications department?”
“Yes, Poppy, I remember your friends. It wasn’t twenty years ago.”
“You know what those three people had in common?” I say. “They all had crushes on you.
All of them.”
He blushes. “You’re full of shit.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not. Clarissa and Isabel were both constantly trying to flirt with you, and Jaclyn’s ‘communication skills’ just utterly failed whenever you were in the room.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” he demands.
“Body language, prolonged eye contact,” I say, “finding every excuse to touch you, making overt sexual innuendos, asking you for help with papers.”
“We always did that over email,” Alex says, like he’s found a hole in my logic.
“Alex,” I say calmly. “Whose idea was that?”
The look of victory leaches from his face. “Wait. Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I say. “So with that in mind, would you like to take your new photo and bio for a spin?”
He looks aghast. “I’m not going to go on a date during our trip, Poppy.”
“Damn right, you’re not!” I say. “But you can at least try it out. Besides, I want to see what kinds of girls you swipe right for.”
“Nuns,” he says, “and aid workers.”
“Wow, you’re such a good person,” I say in a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. “Please allow me to show my appreciation with a—”
“Okay, okay,” he says. “Don’t give yourself an asthma attack. I’ll swipe, just go gently on me, Poppy.”
I bump my shoulder lightly against his. “Always.”
“Never,” he says.
I frown. “Please call me on it if I ever make you feel bad.”
“You don’t,” he says. “It’s fine.”
“I know I joke rough sometimes. But I never want to hurt you. Not ever.”
He doesn’t smile, just gazes back steadily like he’s taking the time to let the words soak in. “I know that.”
“Okay, good.” I nod, train my eyes on his phone screen. “Ooh, what about her?”
The girl on-screen is tanned and pretty, bending at the knee and blowing a kiss at the camera. “No kissy faces,” he says, and swipes her off the screen.
“Fair enough.”
A girl with a lip ring and dark eye makeup appears in her place. Her bio reads, All metal, all the time.
“That’s a lot of metal,” Alex says, and swipes her away too.
Next up, a girl in a green leprechaun hat, grinning in a green tank top, holding up a green beer. She has big boobs and a bigger smile.
“Oh, a nice Irish girl,” I joke.
Alex vanishes that one without comment.
“Hey, what’s wrong with her?” I ask. “She was gorgeous.”
“Not my type,” he says.
“Hokay. Moving on.”
He rejects a rock climber, a Hooters waitress, a painter, and a hip-hop dancer with a body to rival Alex’s own.
“Alex,” I say. “I’m beginning to think the problem lies not with the bio but with the biographer.”
“They’re just not my type,” he says. “And I’m definitely not theirs.”
“How do you know that?”
“Look,” he says. “Here. She’s cute.”
“Oh my god, you’ve got to be kidding me!”
“What?” he says. “You don’t think she’s pretty?”
The strawberry blonde smiles up at me from behind a polished mahogany desk. Her hair is clipped back into a half ponytail and she’s wearing a navy blue blazer. According to her bio, she’s a graphic designer who loves yoga, sunshine, and cupcakes. “Alex,” I say. “She’s Sarah.”
He rears back. “This girl looks nothing like Sarah.”
I snort. “I didn’t say she looks like Sarah”—though she does—“I said she is Sarah.”
“Sarah’s a teacher, not a graphic designer,” Alex says. “She’s taller than this girl and her hair is darker and her favorite dessert is cheesecake, not cupcakes.”
“They dress exactly the same. They smile exactly the same. Why do all guys want girls who look like they’re carved out of soap?”
“What are you talking about?” Alex says.
“I mean, you had no interest in all those cool, sexy girls and then you see this wannabe kindergarten teacher and she’s the first person you even consider. It’s just . . . typical.”
“She’s not a kindergarten teacher,” he says. “What do you have against this girl?”
“Nothing!” I say, but it doesn’t sound like it’s true, even to me. I sound annoyed. I open my mouth, hoping to walk my reaction back a little, but that’s not what happens at all. “It’s not the girl. It’s—it’s guys. You all think you want a sexy, independent hip-hop dancer, but when that person appears in front of you, when she’s a real person, she’s too much and you’re not interested and you’ll go for the cute kindergarten teacher in the turtleneck every time.”
“Why do you keep saying she’s a kindergarten teacher?” Alex cries.
“Because she’s Sarah,” I blurt out.
“I don’t want to date Sarah, okay?” he says. “And also Sarah teaches ninth grade, not kindergarten. And also,” he goes on, picking up steam, “you talk a big game, Poppy, but I guarantee that when you’re on Tinder, you’re swiping right for firefighters and ER surgeons and professional fucking skateboarders, so no, I don’t feel bad for homing in on women who look like they’re probably sweet—and to you, yes, maybe a little bit boring—because it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that maybe women like you think I’m boring.”
“Fuck that,” I say.
“What?” he says.
“I said, fuck that!” I repeat. “I don’t think you’re boring, so that whole argument fails.”
“We’re friends,” he says. “You wouldn’t swipe right on me.”
“I would too,” I say.