Next Stop Love, #1

by Rachel Stockbridge

  “Oh. Them. Yeah, I guess that’s a good reason,” Fabiana said, though she didn’t sound convinced. She shook her head. “Whatever. We’ll figure it out.”

  She didn’t give him a chance to respond, shutting herself in the bathroom again. Julian bit off another piece of muffin, touched by the fact that she’d said ‘we’ and not ‘you.’ They hadn’t been a team for a long time.

  The stupid thing was, Julian hadn’t told Mr. Fisk he was no longer interested in the position at the art center. He couldn’t make himself go through with it. He kept coming up with feeble distractions that prevented him from calling, or talking himself in circles to justify how he might still be able to avoid Vito.

  That could have just been a fluke, after all. And if Julian was careful to take the more roundabout subway route to Christopher St. Station, and kept the hell away from Washington Square Park, the chances of running into Vito again were slim to none. New York City was a big place.

  Plus, that custodian gig was also the only job Julian had been offered since moving up here. He’d had two more interviews locally since, and neither one had gone well. One position was already filled by the time Julian got there, and the interviewer at the second place couldn’t seem to get past Julian’s ink. He couldn’t keep running in circles like this forever, while his bank account drained to nothing.

  It scared him, how much he wanted that teaching job. He’d been lucky to have great art teachers when he was in high school and middle school, and the idea of fostering creativity in other people held a draw he couldn’t quite explain.

  Just yesterday, he had spent hours on his phone, researching art-related lesson plans for younger kids. The last few pages of the sketchbook Fabiana had given him were now crammed with ideas. He even had a growing list of books he wanted to dig up at the library next time he went.

  Rationally, he knew he was getting ahead of himself. Letting hope grow would only mean he’d end up getting hurt when life cut him down again. But . . .

  He wanted an excuse to draw again. And there was still that tiny part of him that wanted to believe things could get better. That his shitty, shitty luck had to turn around eventually.

  Would it be so bad just to ask Mr. Fisk what was required to apply for the teaching position? He wouldn’t be agreeing to take it on. He’d just be getting the facts. In all likelihood, the standards would be above Julian’s abilities, and that would be the end of it. At least he would know.

  Julian pulled out his phone as Fabiana switched on her hair dryer. Just asking wouldn’t hurt, right?

  Taking a deep breath, he dialed Mr. Fisk’s number at the art center. It was Saturday, so he expected it to go to voicemail, but Mr. Fisk picked up on the second ring.

  “Greenwich Village Center for the Arts, Harold Fisk speaking,” he said brightly.

  “Mr. Fisk, this is Julian Moon,” Julian said in a rush, before he could lose his nerve. “I was wondering—if it’s still open—if you could tell me what exactly you’d want from me to apply for that teaching gig?”

  Seven

  After the three days of running into Julian in one week, he was nowhere to be found. Beatrice didn’t see him at Java Mama on Sunday during her shift. She never saw him around his apartment building on her way to or from the local train station. He’d gone a whole week without barging into her study rooms with scary-looking guys chasing him.

  Not that Beatrice wanted terrifying library confrontations to become part of her day-to-day life. Once had been quite enough for one decade.

  It was just strange. To have someone burst into her life so emphatically and then . . .

  Nothing.

  She wasn’t sure why she kept worrying the issue. No matter how explosive that first meeting had been, Julian ought to be fading from her memory by now. Not lodging in a back corner of her mind to irritate her at random moments. It wasn’t like she had a lot of extra time on her hands to spare for making new friends.

  She just couldn’t make sense of it. She had only seen him once at Java Mama, in all the time she’d worked there.

  Not that there was anything surprising about that. He’d probably come around to the idea that terrible coffee was not, in fact, good.

  Shaking her head, Beatrice pushed that line of thought back into its corner and tried to focus on something productive. Her Friday afternoon lit class had just let out, and she was crossing through the park on her way to the NYU food court to grab something to eat on the train home. The sun was already setting, glinting off the tall buildings around her, and casting the Washington Square Arch in gold. The trees were showing off their fall colors in all shades of yellow and red. At every gust of wind, leaves broke free and drifted, dancing, to the ground.

  Beatrice took in a big lungful of crisp autumn air, inhaling the mingling scents of earth and cold and the city grit. She slowed her purposeful stride to more of a stroll, allowing herself to savor her surroundings. Yes, she wanted to get to the subway before dark, but the streets around NYU were well-lit and relatively safe. This was one of Beatrice’s favorite times of year. It seemed a shame to waste an opportunity, however brief, to revel in it while it lasted.

  Anyway, she could spare the time to amble in the park today. To her great satisfaction, she wasn’t behind on any of her homework this week. The backlog was clear. She had routine studying and some minor things due on Monday, but that was it. She wouldn’t even have to do any coursework on the train tonight. Which meant she might be able to catch a short nap, if the train wasn’t filled with skeevy-looking guys. For the next few hours, she was free.

  “Bee!”

  Beatrice’s head snapped around, a sense of foreboding stealing over her. She hoped to God she had misidentified the voice. That it was only some random student calling out to someone with the same nickname, who happened to sound exactly like her little brother.

  Her hopes were dashed the second she set eyes on the gawky figure running up the sidewalk towards her, nearly knocking over a student in headphones when she didn’t step out of the way fast enough.

  He threw an apology over his shoulder at the girl, then waved frantically at Beatrice. “Hey!”

  Beatrice’s heart sank. Nathaniel was her half-brother, but they looked so alike most people would never guess. He had the same walnut-brown hair as Beatrice, and the same abundance of freckles. He was three years younger and three inches taller—or he had been the last time they’d measured. Still short, for a boy, but he’d been smug about being the taller sibling since the day he discovered he surpassed her in height by a quarter inch. He was sometimes obnoxious, often grumpy, and always full to bursting with more affection than he seemed to know what to do with.

  He was also supposed to be in California.

  “Gnat!” Beatrice barked, marching back up the sidewalk towards Nath, all thoughts of enjoying the foliage scrubbed from her mind. “What are you doing in New York?”

  “I was looking for you everywhere.” Nath stopped, dropping his duffel bag on the sidewalk beside him. He also had a backpack slung over one shoulder. That wasn’t good. He wasn’t supposed to come home before Thanksgiving, which was still three weeks away. “You weren’t answering your phone.”

  “Did something happen?” Beatrice demanded, seizing his shoulder like she could squeeze the truth out of him. “Are you hurt? You didn’t go and do something stupid and get yourself expelled, did you?” She pressed her hands to her face, envisioning all the reasons Nath might have been expelled from Stanford. “Oh my God, they caught you smoking weed, didn’t they?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Nath said, tossing her a grumpy frown. “And smoking weed isn’t illegal in California, grandma. I just—” He sucked his cheek and looked around, as though a convincing lie might present itself from behind the Washington Square Arch. “I decided to come home, is all.”

  Beatrice pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Nath,” she groaned.

  “You don’t know what it’s like there,” her little b
rother said defensively. “Everything’s weird, and I don’t know anybody, and I suck at all my classes—”

  “Dad’s going to kill you,” Beatrice said, dragging her fingers down her face and looking at Nath over the top of them. “And then Mom’s going to kill you. And then they’ll chop you into tiny pieces and put you down the garbage disposal.”

  “That’s why I wanted to come find you first,” Nath said, his eyes widening into his best impression of a puppy in an ASPCA commercial. “They won’t kill me if you back me up.”

  “No, they’ll still kill you,” said Beatrice. “They’ll just kill me, first.” She groaned again. “Nath . . .”

  “Please, Bee,” Nathaniel begged, pressing his hands together. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell them without you. You’re like . . . You’re like this calm presence of reason. They never yell as much when you’re there.”

  “You know that’s not true. It’s just that some of it gets directed at me.”

  “Please, Bee. You have to help me. I can’t face them alone.”

  Beatrice shook her head, but she knew she’d already lost the battle. She should be immune to the puppy-dog look by now. But he looked so sad and helpless. She couldn’t have felt guiltier if she’d gone out of her way to kick an actual puppy. “Okay,” she relented, trying to sound as put-out as possible. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  Nath brightened, all traces of the puppy face gone. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, wrapping her in a tight hug and rocking her back and forth. “You’re the best sister in the world!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Beatrice grumbled, detaching herself from the hug and trying to restore some of her dignity. “Did you eat on the plane? Do I need to feed you?”

  “I’m starving,” Nath confessed. “Can we get pizza? The pizza in California is awful. They serve it with ranch dressing.”

  Beatrice wrinkled her nose. “Ew, why?”

  “Because it’s a disgusting cardboard monstrosity and the ranch dressing is supposed to distract you from the fact you’re eating crap. I need real pizza, stat.”

  “We’re getting dinner from the food court,” Beatrice said, in her strictest older-sister voice. He was still in trouble for dropping all this drama on her head without warning. She couldn’t give in to everything he wanted.

  Turning on her heel, she started walking, trusting him to catch up. “I can’t believe you dropped out,” she grumbled when he fell into step with her.

  “California sucks,” Nath said. And that was all he had to say on the matter.

  * * *

  The blowout at home had been harder to wrangle under control than usual. Nath hadn’t come up with a better excuse for dropping out of college by the time they got home, which didn’t help. Beatrice’s mom had demanded a better explanation while her step-dad, Mike, refused to negotiate at all. His sole focus had been on forcing Nath to return to California and re-enroll at Stanford.

  But Nath stood his ground and refused to either expound on his reasoning or go back. So Mike issued an ultimatum: If Nath didn’t go back to Stanford, he’d have to find somewhere else to sleep. Nath had started for the door, threatening to sleep in the park with the raccoons.

  Beatrice had put a stop to the yelling before he walked out, but only by resorting to shouting herself. The best she could do was to get everyone to promise not to make any rash decisions until they’d slept on it. Mike’s ultimatum—which was only issued in the heat of the moment—had been suspended. Nath was set up on an air mattress for the night. Everyone stopped arguing, at last.

  It was a temporary solution. Even when she came up with the compromise, Beatrice had known her whole weekend would be consumed with playing referee. Every free moment had been spent talking to her still-fuming family members, trying to get them all to understand each other.

  Unsurprisingly, Beatrice’s weekend was terrible. And the arrival of Monday morning did nothing to relieve her mood. She was behind on her schoolwork again. What little coursework she’d managed to complete over the weekend was done on the sly at work. It got so bad, she’d almost called in sick on Sunday. She’d wanted to hole up in the library for a few hours with a challenging list of Spanish words she had to memorize, but she couldn’t afford the dent in her paycheck.

  Not that there was anything to be done about that now, Beatrice thought as she walked down the narrow, outdoor platform of her hometown’s train station, a ceramic travel mug of coffee in her mitten-encased hands. She’d caught up from falling behind on her assignments before. She could do it again. Even while refereeing her family’s ridiculously explosive confrontations.

  She pushed away the thread of resentment threatening to further sour her mood and tried to put the weekend out of her mind. She could vent to Kinsey and Sasha at lunch. In the meantime, the long school day meant she wouldn’t have to deal with her family until this evening.

  As she made her way to her usual waiting spot near the end of the platform, her eyes wandered over the other commuters. She recognized a lot of faces after weeks of going back and forth to the city, though she didn’t know any names.

  Then her eyes snagged on a figure she did know.

  She didn’t realize she’d been looking for Julian until she saw him standing there, not ten feet away, waiting for the southbound train. He had the hood of his sweatshirt up, earbuds in, and was playing a game or something on his phone.

  Her spirits sprang from her toes to somewhere over her head like a buoy shooting up out of the water. She bounced over without even thinking about it.

  “Hey!” she said brightly, poking his arm.

  Julian startled back and yanked one of the earbuds out of his ear. “Jesus Christ,” he said, putting a hand on his chest. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  Beatrice took a mirroring step back, feeling herself flush. Why she couldn’t have one normal conversation with this boy was beyond her. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s—it’s fine. Sorry,” Julian said, running a hand through his curls and knocking his hood down in the process. Frowning, he jerked it back up. “Beatrice, right?”

  “That’s me.” She adjusted the strap of her bag to distract from how awkward she felt. It didn’t help much. “Are you going into the city?”

  “Um. Yeah.” His eyes stayed on his earbud cord as he wrapped it around the phone. “New job.”

  “Good job?”

  “I think so.” He stashed his phone in a pocket. “There’s this art center in Greenwich Village. I’m mostly cleaning paint off the floors, but they’re going to try to get me set up to teach a couple of the younger classes.”

  “A-ha!” Beatrice said, pointing at him in triumph.

  He drew back a fraction, staring at her outstretched finger in alarm. “What, ‘a-ha?’”

  “I knew you looked like an artist,” she said, grinning. “You just need a beanie and a charcoal smudge on your face and you’d fit the stereotype exactly.”

  He scoffed, shaking his head. “I’m not an artist. The only reason they have me teaching the younger kids is they can’t find someone else to do it, and my high school art teacher is on the board. I haven’t really drawn in years.”

  “Why not?” Beatrice asked, a split second before she realized what an intensely personal question it was. “No, sorry. That’s kind of nosy, isn’t it?”

  “No. Well, yeah. But I don’t—” Julian huffed and tried again. “It’s not a big secret is what I mean.” He held up his left hand and did a sort of half-wave with it. “Broke my hand. Fell out of the habit after that, I guess.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “You’re on your way to school?”

  “Yeah.” Beatrice sighed. “And I’m going to have to do my statistics homework on the train again because I stupidly went out with my boyfriend on Saturday, even though I was already behind on my assignments for this week.”

  “Oh. Well—I’m sure he would have understood,” Julian said, shoving his hands in his pockets.

>   “Maybe,” Beatrice said. She’d tried to explain to Greyson about her busy schedule and her family drama. But a little break from the stress wouldn’t hurt. And she had to eat sometime. And he’d already driven all the way up to her apartment.

  He wasn’t wrong. On paper, a few hours away from her family seemed like a great idea. It wasn’t Greyson’s fault that his well-meaning attempt to cheer her up had only twisted the source of her stress.

  Beatrice shook her head. “He was just trying to help. I wouldn’t have been able to get much done at home, anyway. Not with—” She stopped, realizing she was on the verge of venting her whole weekend to some guy who seemed perpetually annoyed by her, and whom she had spoken to for less than an hour altogether.

  It was a bad habit she had, throwing her friendship at people who had no intention of catching it. She’d thought it was a habit she’d broken. It hurt when she liked someone a lot and later realized they only tolerated her because they didn’t know how to back out without hurting her feelings.

  And yet Julian wasn’t checking his phone, or looking for the train, or doing anything at all to put any more distance between them. He was looking straight at her, his body squared with hers. He lifted an eyebrow when she cut herself off, as though he was listening and not just being polite.

  “Shitty roommates?” he guessed.

  She made a ch noise that wanted to be a laugh when it grew up. “Do parents count as roommates?”

  He considered this for a second. “Depends on how shitty they are.”

  “They aren’t that bad. They’re just—” Beatrice huffed. And then, maybe because she desperately needed to get it off her chest, she said, “My little brother showed up Friday and announced he wasn’t going to Stanford anymore. My parents didn’t take the news well. He didn’t take their not taking it well well. I somehow ended up as the complaint receptacle for all sides. It’s a whole Thing,” she said, splaying her fingers for emphasis.