by Gayle Forman
“So,” she says to Nathaniel. “Where are you headed?”
“Guess I’ll meet my dad,” Nathaniel replies unsteadily.
This is the most she’s heard him speak, so at least he isn’t brain damaged. Though he still seems pretty dazed, and looking at him makes her feel, bewilderingly, homesick.
“Are you staying with friends? At a hotel? Or Airbnb?”
No response.
“Or does your father live here?”
“Uhh. My dad’s taken care of that.”
Is it her, or is he not making a lot of sense? She looks at Harun, cocks her head to the side. He gives the slightest of nods.
“Maybe you should call your father,” Harun suggests.
“I don’t want to worry him,” Nathaniel says.
“I don’t think you should be out wandering alone after a concussion,” Harun says.
“Right!” Freya says, remembering something from a TV show. Was it Grey’s Anatomy? She and Sabrina used to watch that together religiously. “In case you fall asleep.”
“Fall asleep?”
“It’s dangerous to fall asleep,” Freya says. She has no idea if this is accurate, but as Hayden would say, the truth is how you sell it. “You might not wake up.”
“The doctor didn’t say anything about that,” Nathaniel says in slow, measured words. “He wasn’t even sure it was a concussion.”
“The doctor was incompetent,” Harun says. “When my brother Abdullah was concussed, he was told not to go to sleep without supervision, in case he had a subdural hematoma. If you get those, you die.” Harun turns to Nathaniel. “You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”
When Nathaniel doesn’t answer, Freya answers for him: “No,” she says. “You wouldn’t.”
* * *
— — —
Now that Nathaniel’s head is clearing, he’s more confused than ever.
He understands what happened to him. The girl, Freya, fell onto him, and the other guy—Harun?—saw it go down, but what he doesn’t understand is what they’re still doing here.
He gets why they didn’t leave him in the park, though he wouldn’t have been surprised or even all that disappointed if they had. And he understands why they took him to a doctor and even paid for the doctor—they felt guilty and obligated.
But whatever debt there was has been paid. They’re free to go. He’s told them it’s all good so many times.
And yet they’re still here.
Which unnerves him. Almost as much as the questions they continue to fire at him. Because after warning him about his imminent death—which made him almost laugh—they started quizzing him about his plans, asking for specifics—wheres, whens, addresses, things for which Nathaniel has not prepared.
“Maybe we should wait until you talk to your father,” Freya says.
Nathaniel is not by nature a deceptive person, but he’s learned a few tricks over the years to throw people off the trail, to protect his father, to protect himself.
Nathaniel pulls out his phone. “Oh, look. He left me a message.”
“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” says Harun.
“The ringer’s off.”
They don’t make it easy, these two. Nathaniel excuses himself and puts on a big show of listening to the voicemail and calling his father back and talking to dead air. Yeah, he says to his father, saying how great it is to be in New York City. Me too, he replies when his dad says he’s looking forward to seeing him. After a minute or two of this he hangs up and returns to the others.
“So?” Harun says.
“He says we can meet earlier,” Nathaniel says.
“Now?” Harun asks.
Nathaniel nods.
“Maybe we should escort him up there,” Harun says to Freya. “Hand him off.”
It’s getting worse and worse. Why are they so persistent?
“Well, not now now,” Nathaniel says, tripping over his story. “In a few hours. He’s busy.”
“Busy? Did you not tell him you were concussed?” Harun demands. He seems affronted by Nathaniel’s father’s perceived neglect. And Nathaniel feels that age-old instinct to protect his father flare up.
“I didn’t tell him,” he says. “I didn’t want to worry him.”
He expects an argument from Harun, who has been a fierce interrogator so far, but he just nods at this, as if in agreement about the need to not worry fathers unnecessarily.
“Let me at least get you a car,” Freya says.
They’ve wasted enough time and money on him already. But if he accepts the car, they’ll be done with him.
“Okay,” he agrees.
“Where are you headed?”
“Umm, 175th Street,” Nathaniel guesses.
“Where are you staying?” Freya asks.
“With friends of my dad’s.”
They seem to accept this, but Nathaniel is still uneasy. What if they want to come with him? What if they want to meet his dad?
“What’s the address?” she asks.
Why are they doing this? He’s given them every opportunity to leave. Why are they making it so hard? He knows that they are nice people who mean well, but don’t they know that once you start feeding a stray cat, it will come back, it will depend on you?
He doesn’t have an address. Can he make one up? Like 43 175th Street? Is that a place?
“My Uber’s not working,” Freya says, slapping her phone against her thigh.
Reprieve. Nathaniel exhales. “I can just take the subway.”
“No,” she says in a harsh voice. “I’ll put you in a cab and give the driver cash.”
She steps out into the street to hail a cab, and Nathaniel watches her. She raises her hand confidently, as if certain she will be seen. Nathaniel wonders what that must feel like.
Though he’s engineered his departure, he’s already mourning the absence of this formidable girl, this persistent boy. He’s seeing them disappear through the rear window of a taxi. He’s feeling the leaden weight of his solitude. At least he’ll see his father soon.
Freya jumps back onto the curb, holding her foot in her hand, cursing. Droplets of blood fall on the sidewalk. A shard of green glass glints from her heel.
“Are you okay?” Harun asks.
“I guess there’s a reason people don’t go barefoot in the city,” she says ruefully, hopping on one foot.
“That looks pretty bad,” Harun says. “Maybe you should go back to the urgent care?”
“No way. That doctor was a grade A douche, and they’ll charge a hundred dollars for a piece of gauze.” She glances at her foot. The blood is staining her jeans. “Fabulous. I look like a homeless serial killer.”
Normally, Nathaniel carries a first aid kit with him at all times; he started carrying one after the thing with his eye. Probably a strip of gauze and some Neosporin wouldn’t have changed anything, but it’s better to be prepared. But he left his kit at home. He didn’t see the point of being prepared.
“I can fix it for you,” Nathaniel says. “We just need some gauze and wipes.”
“There’s a pharmacy across the street,” Harun says.
The three of them cross the street, a wobbly chain like before but with the order shuffled: where once a shaky Nathaniel was flanked by Freya and Harun, now Freya is hopping between them. She keeps insisting she’s fine, but that’s a lie Nathaniel can see through.
Harun offers to get supplies, and so Nathaniel stays outside with Freya and her bloody foot.
“I’m so sorry,” he tells her.
“Why are you sorry?” she asks in a sharp voice.
“Because it’s my fault.”
“How is this your fault?”
“I threw up on your shoes.”
“You threw up because I fell on you,” s
he replies. “If anyone should be apologizing, it’s me.”
“No,” Nathaniel says.
“No?”
“Don’t apologize. I’m glad you fell on me.”
“Why would you be glad I fell on you?” she asks.
Because you can’t fall on something that doesn’t exist, he thinks. He may be feral, but he’s not been out of the world so long that he doesn’t know this is a profoundly odd thing to say. So he doesn’t say it.
* * *
— — —
Inside the pharmacy, Harun buys more supplies than necessary. To his mind, if he assembles the right first aid kit, he can keep Freya around for a little while longer, enough time to figure out how to get her in front of James, who’s clearly blocked him and won’t see any texts, and even if he did, probably wouldn’t believe him. Once James sees Freya in the flesh, though, he’ll have to understand that it’s a sign that they should be together.
He puts a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his basket, a box of bandages, a roll of gauze, some medical tape, Neosporin, and a pair of scissors. He passes over the generic products for the more expensive name brands because it’s Freya. All together, it comes to almost thirty dollars, and he pays from the stash of money he purloined from his trip fund. It feels good to do something slightly worthy with the money, even if his intentions aren’t so noble. But he’d like to think that he would be helping out in the same way even if it weren’t Freya. Only maybe he would’ve bought the cheaper bandages.
* * *
— — —
As Freya sits on a cement planter, Nathaniel uses the scissors to extract the glass still lodged in her foot. He gently cleans the area with the hydrogen peroxide, and though he knows this must sting, Freya does not even flinch.
Formidable, he thinks.
He slathers her foot in ointment and slowly wraps the heel in gauze.
He takes his time. Because he is methodical by nature, but also because it feels incredibly good to touch another human being, and particularly this human being. It has been such a long time, and as he holds Freya’s foot against his knee, getting some of her blood on the front of his jeans, where it will match the drop of her blood on his shirt from when he wiped her face before, he feels something hatching inside him. He pictures a bird, all tiny and helpless. He remembers when a nest fell out of the eaves of their house and he and his father tried to save the chicks, feeding them with eyedroppers. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” his father had said, quoting Emily Dickinson, but then the birds had died and Nathaniel had realized that it was actually grief that was the thing with feathers.
He doesn’t want to hope. He can’t afford to hope. But there it is, the fluttering in his chest, all because a pretty girl (a beautiful girl) with beautiful eyes (sad eyes) is letting him hold her bare foot as he dresses a wound that he himself caused.
He doesn’t want to hope. But he doesn’t want to let go just yet. Is there some middle ground, a space where he can allow himself this bit of human kindness without getting too attached? It’s so easy to get attached. Three baby birds, a shoebox, and an eyedropper. They’d buried the birds not far from where Mary’s ashes were scattered. His father had wept.
Freya’s foot is bandaged and taped, but Nathaniel can’t quite let her go. Just a few minutes more. His father won’t mind. He has lost the battle, and hope has won, and the desperation to get away has reversed itself. Because of a foot. A foot he can’t seem to let go of. A foot that, miraculously, is still resting in his lap.
He stares at the foot of this formidable girl and holds his breath, because if he moves so much as an inch he will break the spell and Freya will surely leave.
* * *
— — —
The spell goes both ways. Freya can’t move either. Doesn’t want to move. Nathaniel may be holding on to her filthy foot, but it feels like he’s palming her heart. It feels like she has a heart.
Please don’t let go, she thinks.
* * *
— — —
Nathaniel doesn’t let go.
* * *
— — —
Harun doesn’t want to let go, either. “Maybe we should get you some shoes,” he suggests. Freya does need shoes. But more to the point, her buying shoes will buy him time. “There’s a store down the block.”
* * *
— — —
“Shoes!” Nathaniel says. What a brilliant idea. He could hug Harun. “I need to buy you shoes.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Freya says, pulling her foot back.
“No,” Nathaniel says, yanking her foot toward him. “I have to replace the ones I ruined.”
“I didn’t even like those shoes,” she says. “You did me a favor.”
He doesn’t care if she liked them or not. He’s the one who needs the favor. He needs this. Just for a little longer. Is it too much to ask? Probably. But he’s asking anyway.
“I have to buy you shoes.”
Freya’s foot stiffens, and Nathaniel knows he’s revealed a part of himself that must be kept secret. The wild, feral part that Dad said they could show each other but not anyone else (Don’t tell your mother) because they wouldn’t understand. Nathaniel tries to remember the person he once was, athletic, even popular. He tries faking being him. “It’s just the right thing to do, to get you new shoes, you know?” His voice sounds strange and foreign, like someone on TV. Is she buying it? Can he pass as his old self? Was he ever his old self?
“I really don’t need you to buy me shoes,” Freya says.
She starts to pull her leg away, but Nathaniel can’t let go. He’s a drowning man, and her ankle is his life preserver. But she’s pulling it away, leaving him no choice but to reveal the feral man inside. “Please,” he begs. “Let me buy you shoes.”
* * *
— — —
Freya doesn’t need new shoes. At home, she has rows of them; many of them, like the pair she threw away earlier, had been given to her in hopes of a mention online. It used to thrill her, all the freebies in exchange for her word. But now that she knows it all might go away soon, it’s like wearing shoes made of lead.
In any event, she doesn’t need Nathaniel to buy her shoes. Certainly not $375 shoes, which was what the ones he puked on today cost. She wonders if he even has $375 to his name.
She pictures his wallet, the lonely bills, the creased photo strip, the folded business card. She glances at his shoes, a pair of dirty canvas sneakers that she would bet $375 have holes in the soles.
* * *
— — —
This is a bet she would win.
* * *
— — —
And that’s when she understands: he is her responsibility. He is, for today anyway, her person. She doesn’t need new shoes, but she needs this to continue. So if Nathaniel wants to buy her shoes, she’ll let him buy her shoes.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s get me shoes.”
* * *
— — —
Who is made happier by this statement? Harun, Nathaniel, or Freya? Hard to tell.
* * *
— — —
The store Harun pointed to is a chain, the kind of place Freya used to shop in but hasn’t in years because dream it, be it.
It’s empty, and there are comfy seats inside, but Freya gestures to the bench outside. “You wait out here.” It comes out as a command. She’s told that she can come across as imperious, bitchy. She’s read people sniping about this. She needed us when she started out, but now she’s too good, they write. No, Freya wants to reply. I still need you. But she wasn’t permitted to respond anymore, and so the silence seemed to confirm their suspicions. Anyway, Hayden told her not to worry about it. Some early fans would always feel betrayed when their secret got out. This did not make Freya feel better. She didn’t want to betray anyone else.
But she doesn’t want Nathaniel coming into the shoe store, because she has no intention of spending the fifty-dollar bill he’s thrust into her hand. So she softens her voice and says: “Girls and shoes can take a while.”
It’s the first time Freya sees Nathaniel smile.
“Take all the time you need,” he says, and he looks like he means it, which must be a first among the ranks of young men.
“Yes, no rush at all,” Harun adds.
A second.
She leaves them there and goes inside, surveying the inventory, inhaling the smell of new leather.
“See anything you like?” the clerk asks.
Before Freya goes out for an event, she and her mother consult a series of photographs a stylist has shot for them, different outfit combinations for different occasions. Never the same thing twice. Sometimes she likes the clothes, sometimes she doesn’t, but she always feels as though she’s playing dress-up. “That’s the point,” says her mother, who sounds more like Hayden every day.
Freya scans the shoes and stops at a pair of orange flats with thick rubber soles. She flips them over. Eighty dollars but half off. When Nathaniel pressed the fifty into her hand, she took it, but only to placate him, figuring she’d find a way to give it back later. Still, it feels right to stay within Nathaniel’s budget. “I’ll take these in a size eight,” she calls to the clerk.
While she waits for the shoes, she pulls out her phone, but before she looks at it, her gaze is drawn to the window. Outside, Harun and Nathaniel sit side by side, hands folded into their laps, like obedient children waiting for their mother. Looking at the pair of them, she feels another lurch in her chest.
She puts her phone away. The clerk brings the shoes, and Freya slips them on. They fit perfectly. Freya pays with her credit card and returns to the boys.