Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  Flannery lowered her eyes, reverent. What other response was there when someone had just husked themselves in the brightness of the Apple Store, revealing the soft center of their hurt?

  “You’re helping me just by being here.” Flannery meant to sound only logical, a no-nonsense proponent of the buddy system, but her voice pitched and cracked on the here.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No, not at all.” She said it forcefully, as if it would be absurd to enjoy some food with Heath while Miss Sweeney was delusional and wandering the city. But it was pretty difficult to be righteous with Heath standing so close to her. “I mean, maybe. A little. I am kind of hungry, yeah.”

  Heath smiled. “That’s all the answers at once.”

  His voice sounded so … husky, so sweetly nicotined, and just as she thought those words, the red-pen voice of Miss Sweeney entered her mind: So he’s a sled dog enjoying a sugared Marlboro Light?

  “I have the metabolism of a hummingbird, Flannery. I’m forever starving, and I know a lovely place to eat just around the corner. Could we just go off-book for a bit and get some supper?”

  Heath reached for her hand, and when she hesitated, he said: “Come on. You can read more when we get there.” And so with her own heart speeding to a hummingbird thrum, she took his hand and quickly looked around the lower level for Miss Sweeney (which even to herself seemed perfunctory, as she was already envisioning sitting at another table for two with Heath) before heading upstairs and walking outside: Manhattan in the magic hour before nightfall, darkening dusk settling over the city.

  They walked up Broadway to the next crosswalk, amid all the real New Yorkers who were getting off work—carrying their to-go dinners in planet-killing Styrofoam—and talking on their cell phones, their voices frantic, heartfelt: “Did you find your keys?” “Is Mona home yet?” Every single soul seemed lost; all were resplendent in their hidden tenderness. Heath held her hand tighter. “You’ll love this place, Flannery. They do quite a nice shepherd’s pie if you’re in the mood for something savory.”

  Heath led her down a few blocks to a street lined with brownstones before he stopped at a glass door in the middle of a windowless brick building. Shamrocks and snowflakes decorated the glass door: O’KELLEYS EST. 1844, stenciled in Kelly green.

  Heath reached for the door handle.

  “Hey, wait. Is this a bar?” She winced at her Pollyanna ways.

  Heath laughed. “If you’re expecting a den of iniquity, I am afraid you’ll be terribly disappointed. You’ll see nobody doing Jell-O shots off various body parts at O’Kelleys, nor do they have wet T-shirt contests.”

  Heath pulled the worn handle—the string of silver bells on the door shivering against the glass—and Flannery stepped into pine paneling and the smell of warmed-over roast beef, an illuminated HAMM’S sign behind the bar, and a female bartender of a certain age with darkly penciled eyebrows and a fluffy mohair sweater, all pastel shades of green and pink that made Flannery think of swirled saltwater taffy.

  She looked at Flannery and then gave Heath a broad wink. “Did you kidnap this poor girl?”

  “Indeed I did, Eileen.” He reached over the bar, and they hugged. “That’s why, as her cruel captor, I’ll be feeding her your shepherd’s pie and cappuccino. For two, please.”

  Eileen didn’t look at Flannery but addressed her elliptically, as she filled two glasses with soda water from a spigot behind the bar. “Oh, of course, your Mr. Heathcliff doesn’t like plain water; he’s got to have his bubbles, doesn’t he? And His Nibs can’t have a nice hot coffee from the pot, he has to have his hand-crafted cappuccino with a light dusting of cinnamon.” She pushed the water across the bar at Heath. “There’s a nice booth open, best grab it before some pensive effing alcoholic with a Moleskine occupies it for the rest of the night.”

  “A lot of writers come here,” Heath told Flannery.

  “Oh, cool,” Flannery said, her voice lilting with pleasure. It was so thrilling to be at a bar!

  Eileen was now working on another order, using tongs to pull a pickled egg out of the murky depths of a glass gallon jar and mumbling to herself: “Why do people order these abominations?”

  “Why does she call you ‘Heathcliff’?”

  Heath shrugged. “Why not?”

  “I’ll sling your proverbial hash in a bit,” Eileen called over.

  Overcome with gratitude to find herself tucked inside another new world in the new world, Flannery smiled at her. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Miss Sweeney snarked, adding a quick: That last gratuitous “thank you” brought to you by the department of redundancy department.

  Eileen looked at Flannery and sighed, as if greatly disappointed, before she scolded Heath. “Christ eating a cracker, Heathcliff, you’ve got yourself a Catholic school girl with pristine manners, haven’t you? I tell you this, and you listen well: You are going to Hell in a handbasket made of thorned rose branches.”

  Two men sitting at the bar laughed and clinked beer mugs; it was all a little nerve-wracking, so Flannery was more than glad when Heathcliff picked up their waters from the bar. She followed him as he made his way through O’Kelleys, cutting across the improvised dance floor—a dozen feet of floor space created by a few tables shoved to the wall next to the jukebox—where a lone, drunken man in snakeskin cowboy boots swayed to Neutral Milk Hotel. Heath and Flannery mazed around the pool table and old-school foosball table, and finally made their way to the red vinyl booth in the back.

  Heath slid into the same side of the booth as Flannery and proceeded to slam his soda water. From her peripheral vision, Flannery watched his Adam’s apple bob with each gulp.

  She took a drink of soda water too, the bubbles fizzing like pure hydrogen peroxide in her throat as a powerhouse soprano belted out: “This is dedicated to the one I love.”

  Heath clapped his hand to his forehead. “Oh, Dear Lord, they have the Shirelles on the jukebox. I was just complaining about the high-tech world and not giving America credit for its two finest exports, the motorcar and Motown. As I’m not in possession of a vintage Mustang convertible, would you care to have a dance with me, Flannery?”

  Dancing? Flannery could see another couple in the next booth, two guys in plaid shirts, kissing. They looked bulky as lumberjacks but kissed so delicately—not the standard smash-mouthed PDA—that Flannery felt happy for them, for everyone! Oh, Manhattan, she thought, you are the city of love! But she still felt nervous about dancing.

  The Shirelles agreed, filling O’Kelleys with their smoke-and-honey vocals, and Heath was inspired too, urgent even. “Come on,” he pleaded, and she took his hand and allowed herself to be led out of the booth.

  “Wait, I’m already pretty hot.” As she took off Heath’s jacket, she immediately rued the double meaning and double entendre of that quick sentence—both a self-aggrandizing and delusional proclamation about her appearance, and also, more alarmingly, it sounded as if she were referencing some barroom barometer of sexual excitement. She put Heath’s jacket on the side of the booth with her backpack.

  Heath turned to the plaid-shirt kissers, who were taking a break from the action. “Keep an eye on things, Mates?” They nodded languorously at the jacket and backpack and sipped their cranberry-colored cocktails.

  Heath walked Flannery over to the little makeshift dance floor next to the jukebox. He put one hand on the side of her waist, and held out his other hand. She instinctively knew to clasp his hand and put her other hand on his shoulder. It’s the evolution of the species, Flannery thought. Our hands know where to go.

  Miss Sweeney’s red pen was gentle: Easy there, Charlene Darwin.

  Heath moved his feet. Flannery moved hers in time, two baby steps up, two to the side: This was dancing.

  Flannery felt like she might levitate, but had no choice but to live in the perfection of the moment. Heath reached down, his chin stubble scraping her temple, and put his mouth to her ear, his warm breath like supersonic CPR,
overstimulating her heart. “Why are you looking for her?”

  Flannery, dazed from the slow dancing and the proximity of Heath’s mouth, closed her eyes and listened to the Shirelles sing out the sweet ache of love—several seconds of bliss—before she answered.

  “Miss Sweeney is … nice.” Well, that sounded stupid, but forming words while Heath had his large hand on her waist was so puzzling: a far-off dream of conjugating Latin verbs underwater. “She helps me with my writing, but also with my life. She thinks I’ll be happy here. Her theory is that I’ll find my people here in Manhattan. Truthfully? I don’t have that many friends now.”

  “Join the club, Flannery. Your teacher sounds lovely.”

  “She is. She makes books come to life, which I know sounds massively stupid.” O, the beautiful weight of his hand, her forehead brushing against the softness of his worn shirt, her eyes fluttering shut, the dreamy half-darkness of the dance floor. “Not just Wuthering Heights, either. All the books: When we read The Diary of Young Girl—it wasn’t like reading it in junior high, where the horror of her ending overshadows every page—Miss Sweeney focused on her prose, on Anne Frank’s beautiful, lively writing.”

  “I’ve never heard of Anne Frank, Flannery. Another name for my reading list.”

  The Shirelles sang out: “Tell all the stars above, this is dedicated to the one I love.”

  His body was so close to hers, and she kept swaying to the Shirelles, but … How could Heath not have heard of Anne Frank? How was that even possible? Didn’t everyone, all across the world, know who Anne Frank was?

  “Heath?”

  “Yes?”

  She raised her face.

  “What is it, Flannery?”

  Could he be a lost saint of the moors, cheating death and passing through the ages in his corporeal perfection?

  Had he joined the most spectacular of the incorruptibles?

  It’s you, she thought. It’s you. Is it you?

  If Miss Sweeney had been leading her all along, if her revised edition of Wuthering Heights had been not just a diary, but a heartfelt travelogue written specifically for Flannery, then it was also entirely possible that Heath Smith, the brokenhearted boy on gap year, was Heathcliff himself, taking his leave from Wuthering Heights. And it wasn’t that he’d escaped the inevitable transformation from vibrant human to empty-eyed anatomy class skeleton. He had appeared living and breathing, wholly resurrected, though he had only ever existed on the pages of Wuthering Heights.

  Flannery knew it sounded hardcore crazy, a literary resurrection that perhaps took a greater suspension of disbelief than the heralded religious one, and who would believe it, who would open their mind and heart, and make themselves so vulnerable to the spirit world that lay just beyond the cover?

  He looked in Flannery’s eyes, and his face moved closer to hers, closer, closer still, until she couldn’t focus, and then came the shock of his mouth covering her own.

  Heath’s front teeth clicked Flannery’s, and they pulled apart and then kissed again. Her brain slowed, distilling her thoughts into pure sensation. There was no more: Could it really be you? There was just the taste of his chapped lips, his plush tongue: ethereal salt and cigarettes.

  Flannery felt tears prick her eyes. Flannery loved him, and she also loved every person in O’Kelleys, and the Blue People of Kentucky, and every last girl at Sacred Heart, and all the lost souls of Manhattan, and every person in the universe, and she loved each lonely galaxy and far-flung constellation and comet, and she most certainly loved the Shirelles for providing their transcendent soundtrack for her first kiss with Heath.

  Silence: The Shirelles stopped singing. The world quieted. Free-floating despair was a memory of a memory and then forgotten altogether. Life outside this moment blurred at the edges before it fell away, leaving no ache for permanence, no ache for an ephemeral moment to announce itself—This is a miracle! Take note!—and be smelted into a hallowed gold bar of remembrance. There was only:

  Mouth

  Warmth

  Purity

  And then

  “GET A … ROOM!”

  Flannery and Heath pulled apart, and as that phrase and its meaning registered in her mind, she smoothed down her hair and licked her lips and looked around at the amused, gaping faces at O’Kelley’s. She wondered what social response was required of her at this particular moment in life.

  Heath certainly knew.

  He raised his hands in the air, fingers splayed in the universal “A guy just can’t win” gesture.

  Who had yelled? The skinny dude at the bar receiving high fives seemed a likely suspect. And the first nasty guitar riff of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” was now playing on the jukebox; soon the infamous sex romp lyrics would start.

  Eileen sang along—“She had the sightless eyes telling me no lies/knocking me out with those American thighs”—as she carried their food on a round tray, following Flannery and Heathcliff, who shirked their way back to their booth.

  “Here you go, lovebirds.” Cinnamon-sprinkled hearts were swirled into the milk foam of their cappuccinos, and the starburst slits in the top crusts of their shepherd’s pies oozed golden gravy.

  “Cutlery?” She pulled forks and spoons from her apron pockets and clanged them down on the table. “Napkins?” She reached across the table and tapped the silver napkin dispenser with her burgundy fingernail. “Protection?” She produced a small green package, and laid it next to Heath’s shepherd’s pie like an after-dinner mint.

  “God!” Heath gasped. “Eileen!”

  Flannery was delighted to see Heath’s olive skin flush. Sure, she was blushing, too, but that was the norm, especially when dinner was served with a side order of Trojan.

  Eileen put her hands on her hip. “Is there a problem, sir?”

  “We won’t be needing that.” Flustered, he yanked a napkin out of the dispenser and covered up the condom package.

  Flannery joked: “You’ve made a nice little blanket for it.” She was warmly rewarded with Eileen’s phlegmy cackle. Flannery hardly knew herself. Who was this girl tossing out lighthearted bon mots about birth control?

  Heath sighed in mock despair. “God knows the last thing I need is you lot pairing up against me.”

  Eileen put her hand on Flannery’s head and gave her a gentle shake, as if she were a puppy. “I like this girl. She’s alright.” She slid her hand down to Flannery’s chin and turned her face so that Flannery was looking up at her. “Look at you. You’ve got the whole world ahead of you, don’t you?” Up close, Flannery could see Eileen’s reasoning behind her heavy-handed eye shadow application: the scar-slashed crescent of skin between her right eyelid and brow.

  “What a dream,” she whispered to Flannery. “What a dream it would be to be you, right now.”

  Had anyone ever looked at her so lovingly? That Flannery felt so seen, so beloved—and by a near stranger—seemed nearly as miraculous as kissing a boy in Manhattan on a wintry Thursday evening, and not just any boy: Heathcliff himself. But Eileen’s sudden and spectacular kindness was also a bracing antidote to the haze of dream-world, and filled Flannery with guilty panic. Here she was dancing at O’Kelleys while Miss Sweeney wandered the city in despair; here she was marveling at literary time travel as a true possibility, though literary time travel sounded so goofy and grandiose that it shamed her further.

  When Eileen pulled her hand away, Flannery was sorry to lose the feeling of a rough, warm hand cradling her chin but she unzipped her backpack and pulled out Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. “I need to read,” she told Heath. “I really need to read.”

  Eileen was walking away with her tray tucked under her arm, but she’d heard Flannery. “That’s the problem with a smart girl, isn’t it?” She looked over her shoulder and winked at Heath. “She’ll have the need, but the need will be to read.”

  “Alrighty, then, Eileen,” Heath called out. “Thank you for serving us such hearty portions of awkward.”<
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  Flannery opened the book. “I’m just going to—”

  “It’s what I do, Heathcliff,” Eileen yelled back. “I serve up the delectable awkward.”

  “Indeed,” Heath muttered happily and attacked his dinner. He stabbed his fork into the crust of his shepherd’s pie, and a delicious, savory-smelling steam rose up, lamb and potatoes and peas and rosemary.

  “Go ahead and read, Flannery. You should keep reading.”

  But she already was.

  Eleven

  I pulled the door open to the Apple Store, the glass ship in the city of dreams, and I could feel the movement, the swift currents of waves rocking the floorboards. I was in New York City, yes, but I was back in Kansas, too: I could feel the vibration of Brandon’s truck engine as we flew along the back roads, gravel crunching beneath the tires. No, I was not a nouveau Dorothy wanting to click my heels three times and go home, far from it. I loved Manhattan and I wanted to live there again, with Brandon. I only wanted another night at the Tallgrass preserve, to hear the cicadas and the call of the Eastern Phoebe, to lie next to Brandon on a cool slab of rock. Oh, but the glass ship ramped up my vertigo, and I stumbled over to a long table of computers and held on tight. I hurtled backward and the new buzzing in my ears was a plague of locusts descending, and my joints felt like they were connected by cold iron bars.

  “Hi. Can I help you?”

  I kept my eyes squeezed closed until my vision stopped shuttling around.

  “Um. Miss? Is everything going … okay for you?”

  Oh, you bet, I thought. I opened my eyes to an Apple employee in her bright blue polo shirt, giving me a smile of professional friendliness. But her eyes told a different story: Apparently I was now a scary person capable of weirding out a nice, normal gal. Other shoppers were giving me plenty of elbow room as well, observing my table-clinging from a polite distance.

  “Can I use a computer?” No, that didn’t sound quite right. “I want to try some out. I’m in the market…” But I couldn’t quite piece together that last sentence. I thought of the flea market where Brandon’s mom sold her big soft dolls, her Punk Softees, and where you could buy earrings for a dollar, but also Eames chairs and organic smoothies and bongs and Christian homeschool materials: Bible verse stickers, felt boards with Jesus and the saints, and the inspirational spelling book D Is for Disciple! Oh, how I wanted to be in that market on a sunny spring day, to bring his mom a blackberry ginger juice and revel in her warm smile of thanks, to see Brandon high-five his mom after she sold a one-of-a-kind treasure from her booth, Henry Rollins or Iggy Pop going home with some elderly, happy hipster.