by Dana Czapnik
I once heard a tourist on the subway complain about nearly being sideswiped by a cab as he was crossing the street and he said the problem with New York was that there’s always the possibility of meeting your death around every corner. Which is true. But. There’s also always the possibility of something else.
* * *
The door to my apartment is unlocked, which is unusual. Normally my parents aren’t home at this hour.
“Hello?” I yell as I tentatively close the door behind me. I kick off my sneakers and socks because my feet are soaked.
“Loose?”
“Yeah?”
I walk into my kitchen, and there’s Percy sitting at the table with an old New Yorker open and a chunk of Gouda cheese sliced on a plate.
“What are you doing here?”
“Your mom gave me a key, remember?”
“That was years ago. You’ve never used it.”
“You’ve always returned my calls.”
It’s true. Percy has been calling my phone every other night for the past week. Ever since I hung up on him after prom. I’ve refused to come to the phone, so my parents pretend I’m out and they take a message. So far both of them have been smart enough not to ask what happened. I wonder if they’ve secretly figured it out.
“Okay. Now you’re here. What’s up?” I let my bag drop onto the floor and I take a seat on the counter next to the sink. I wring out my hair and wash my hands. I want to go take a hot shower and change into some clean, dry clothes. But I’m too curious to hear what he has to say.
“You just playing some ball?”
“Yep.” Curt.
“The courts in Riverside?”
“Yep.”
“I went down there looking for you before I came here. We must’ve just missed each other.”
“Must’ve.” I avoid eye contact with him. Looking at anything in the room: my mom’s recipe note cards in the recipe holder I made for her in art class when I was seven. The everything from my everything bagel that falls onto the counter as I remove it from the paper bag.
“So, can we, like, be friends again already?” He says it as though he’s annoyed at me, like I’m in the wrong. But I can tell he doesn’t really mean that. Even so, I can’t answer that question. I don’t know if we can be friends again now. Or ever. I offer him silence and I take a bite of my bagel. “I don’t even know where you’re going to school next year. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Berkeley.”
“Oh. I was hoping for someplace in Boston. I’ll be at Harvard in the fall.”
“Wasn’t your plan San Diego? ‘Weed and girls in bikinis, man,’ ” I say in a fake stoned voice, intending for my snark to have more bite. But a bit of affection winds up seeping through the cracks.
“No. No San Diego for me.” He shakes some stray hair out of his face.
“Yeah. I kinda knew that was gonna happen.” I slide off the counter and sit down at the table. Take a piece of cheese from the Gouda Percy has sliced and place it on a piece of bagel. “Luckily they have, like, a fantastic philosophy department at Harvard, because it’s Harvard.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see.” Percy starts pressing his index finger over stray poppy seeds that have fallen on the table from my bagel and placing them, one by one, on a white napkin.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, part of the deal is I have to major in econ. So . . .”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“You could always double major. Or minor in it?”
“Yeah. Maybe. But I’m starting school on academic probation because my dad really had to call in some serious favors to get me in, so I have to keep my GPA above a 3.0 in order to keep my spot there, and you know I’m shit at math, so we’ll see if I can really manage a double major.”
“Oh.”
“But I have electives and stuff. It’s not like I have to exclusively take classes within the econ department or anything.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure there’s a spot for some mediocre fish tacos in Cambridge somewhere.”
Percy doesn’t laugh. “I doubt it.”
At a dinner party once, my mom was talking with a friend of hers about wealthy New Yorkers and she started sort of gossiping about the Abneys. About how their children were raised entirely by nannies, even on the weekends, and how his dad had a new young wife every two years and how his mother’s face had been lifted so many times she’s hardly recognizable. And she said something to the effect of, “Extreme wealth is disfiguring.” And, look, there’s nothing wrong with going to Harvard. Everyone I know would kill to go to Harvard if they could get in, even if they got in on something other than their own merit. But for Percy, going to Harvard will have a domino effect. The life I thought he wanted for himself will never happen. Money is an addiction stronger than love or sex or heroin. Money is its own god, religion, code of ethics. That’s what Harvard is for Percy: a roofie dispensed by the high priests running the cult of money.
“I saw your girl today, by the way. I like her,” I say, changing the subject.
“You never like any of my girls.”
“Well, most of them are pretty awful. But Lauren’s cool.”
“Lauren is great, but she’s going away this summer, and then we’re heading to different schools in the fall. I’m not doing the long-distance thing.”
“Yeah. Well, you should at least do her a solid and call her to let her know that.”
He breathes in through his teeth. “That’s uncomfortable. I find that if you stop calling them back, after a while they get the hint.” I look at him sadly. He’s not joking. He’s being serious.
“I didn’t call you back, and you didn’t get the hint. Instead you broke into my house.”
“But that’s different. You and I are best friends. This needed to happen. To set the world back straight. You’re kind of the only real person I have, Lucy. I’ve missed you.”
I say, “Me too,” because that’s the thing you’re supposed to say to the person who’s sitting across the table from you, vulnerable. I do miss him, of course. Yes, of course. But.
* * *
We sit at my kitchen table for a long while. Eating cheese and catching up. I tell him about winning the championship, and I show him my yearbook with the now unsullied picture of me hoisting the trophy. He apologizes for not coming to the game, telling me he thought about it but figured I wouldn’t have wanted him there. I tell him he was right, but that isn’t really true. The game was three months after we’d slept together, and by then, I’d almost given up hope. He hadn’t come to any of my regular-season games. But still. I thought for sure our decade and a half of friendship would win out over one night of awfulness and I’d see his face peeking out from his old aquamarine Patagonia coat in the gym and we’d make up and maybe he’d say something redeemable to me and life would resume at its normal clip. I searched for him in the stands that day, and when the game horn sounded and I still didn’t see him there, I suddenly realized I was free of him. It was a crushing liberation.
I tell him they retired my jersey at school and put our trophy and our team picture in a curio cabinet in the upper school hallway. I tell him how only the teachers acknowledged our accomplishment. That we got some lukewarm applause at the last school assembly, but that was it. He tells me that toiling in obscurity is the nobler experience and that as long as I acknowledge my achievement, that’s all that matters.
I ask him about his scribbling on sidewalks and bus stops, and he tells me that he and James finally got nabbed for it. They’d marked up a La Decisión comic strip on the subway with some red Sharpie, and a transit cop arrested them. They spent five hours in jail, and the city threatened to charge them with criminal mischief, which could’ve bought them up to four years’ time. But Percy bargained with his dad to pay for both his and James’s lawyer, because he knew James would have been stuck with some affordable ent
ry-level attorney who could have botched the case. They both got off with a fine and some community service, and because they were first-time offenders with promising futures, the judge let them off without a mark on their records—an important thing for James, who is going to Juilliard on scholarship in the fall. That’s how Percy got roped into Harvard. He bartered a deal.
I tell him, “I guess there really is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.”
And he says, “There is definitely such a thing as an atheist in a foxhole, but sometimes you have to make a sacrifice for a friend.”
He asks if I want to go smoke a J on the roof, and I tell him I’ll keep him company but I don’t want to smoke. He goes, “Trying out some clean livin’?” and I go, “Not really,” but he drops the subject anyway.
And as we sit and talk and fall into rhythms and patterns we’ve memorized, I’m given a flash into a possible future. A kitchen table in a sprawling penthouse. Percy in a nice sharp suit and an unconscious scowl, reading the Financial Times. Two tall children with dusty hair and a nanny who keeps them well coifed. A massive floor-to-ceiling refrigerator that is so airtight, it requires your entire body weight to open it. A stilted conversation about a new restaurant that’s gotten rave reviews but we found bland. The smell of homemade cappuccinos and cleaning fluid and captivity. A gold-plated kennel, the angry mutt in me barking at shadows between the bars.
Before he leaves, he takes a book out of his black Jansport backpack. “I read this last month and thought of you.”
The book is a faded pink, with lipstick-red 1970s type that reads On Being Alone, by Juliette Marchand.
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“Me neither. I only read it because it was published in America in 1976, and Paul at the Strand had put it on his recommendation shelf.”
“Paul knows what’s up.”
“She’s a French existentialist.”
“My favorite.”
“I know. I’ve been carrying it around for a week, hoping to run into you. You’ll have to tell me what you think.”