The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  So I did the only logical thing. No, I didn’t go up and talk to them. Don’t be ridiculous.

  I followed them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Brooklyn

  It was colder than ever out on the street, and there were snow flurries, improbably, swirling down from the orange sky above Union Square. I had always heard that when it was seriously cold, it couldn’t snow—it got too cold to snow—but that clearly wasn’t the case. Honestly, though, it could have been 32, it could have been ten below zero, it could have been 45, either way I would have been freezing. I was a Florida girl, in a sweater and a peacoat. Anyone would have been cold, but I had an unfair disadvantage. It was sixty-five at home right now. I had the weather app on the phone, crowing this information to me triumphantly. Sixty-five and breezy, to be exact. Unnaturally warm for a winter’s night, with a clear sky and a waxing gibbous moon. The horses would be glowing white and inky black against the gray sea of the paddocks. I would be complaining about the moonlight and get up to draw the curtains after we turned out the light and climbed into bed together. I felt the knife twist in my stomach again, but I shook my head to deny it. I was more than that. I was more than the farm and Alexander. I was more than horses and dirt beneath my fingernails. I knew it. I knew it.

  I followed the party down into the icy confines of the subway station, through the turnstiles and down the stairs, along with a flood of others, all ages, all races, all styles. We went through the tunnels and down more stairs, down and down and down, to the platform for the L train, where a collection of similarly dressed kids stood lounging on the platform. A piercing recorded voice announced that the next Brooklyn-bound train would be arriving in two minutes. I felt a leap of excitement and trepidation. Were we going to Brooklyn? What if I got lost? I’d wandered into Brooklyn exactly once, and I had no idea where I’d been. I remembered one of Alexander’s acquaintances at Belmont once saying that he’d been brought up in a hell-hole somewhere in Brooklyn. That was all I had to go on in Brooklyn—a Banana Republic and a hell-hole. Which one would I end up in tonight?

  This was such a bad idea. I shouldn’t be down here, following some group of twenty-somethings into a train under the river. I had to go back to the hotel and get some sleep. I had to be up by five to get ready for the car and get to Aqueduct by seven to see the horse work. I should go back up the steps and into the night, hail a cab, and go to bed. My head very clearly told me what to do, and didn’t that echo everything I’d ever been taught as a horsewoman? If you want to be in the horse business, you must be the sort of person who thinks with the head and not the heart.

  The train pulled in, bright and silver and sparkling with automation, and the crowd of young people plowed in, and I plowed in amongst them.

  I kept an eye on the group from Barnes & Noble that I’d decided to follow. It seemed pretty arbitrary at this point; nearly everyone in the train looked identical. The men wore tight jeans and boots and woolen coats and scarves and had beards and knitted caps. The women were the same, except that they didn’t have beards. Yet. You know how that goes. But as it was, the train was pretty strictly 40-and-under; possibly 30-and-under. It was the antithesis of Florida. This was where all the young people lived. Whereas I lived with their grandparents. I could have followed anyone on this train, and chances are I would end up someplace altogether more exciting and more dangerous and almost certainly louder than anywhere I would end up back home, in their grandparent’s neighborhood.

  But I followed the first group, because I was starting to like them. The taller girl was the ringleader, but she had a nervous habit of brushing the long ends of her bangs behind her ears. She laughed at everything the other girl had to say, and she smiled coquettishly at the guy, who was so tall and lanky that he looked like an anorexic. But he smiled a lot, too. They seemed like nice people. Not the sort of people who would lead me to some drug-crazed warehouse party (those happened, right?) where the night would end when the police came to investigate accidental deaths from leaping off the roof (I must have seen this on the evening news once). More like the sort of people who would lead me to some fun club where we would see a cool band and have a couple of beers—and it would be really close to the subway station, so I wouldn’t get lost. That was what was going to happen. I willed it to be so.

  We got off the subway at a stop in Brooklyn called Bedford Avenue, along with a sea of others who had gotten on with us at Union Square, and after squeezing out of the narrow stairwell with the crowds, I nearly lost my group as they crossed the street. It must have snowed more here, because the street was wet and slushy at the corners, but it hadn’t deterred the nightlife and behind the closed doors of the bars I could hear bass thumping and people shouting. The sidewalks were crammed with college-age kids and I had an idea that this was what I had been looking for, in my dream life, in my responsibility-free sitcom life in New York City, but at the moment it all looked a bit more than I had bargained for. A little darker, a little louder, a little dirtier. A hell of a lot colder. I hoped we would turn down Bedford Avenue—it was bright and relatively cheerful. But the crowds would disperse little by little at the corners, as groups turned off into the darkness of the side streets, heading off to their unknown destinations, and the quartet I had decided to follow did the same. I paused, torn, as they crossed Bedford, jumping over a puddle to get to the opposite sidewalk, and started to disappear into the murky street beyond. My head said to stay in the safety of the crowd, maybe just go home to the hotel.

  My heart said to follow.

  It was a dilemma.

  I’ve had enough of my head, I thought. I’ve had enough of you, thank you very much. My heart wanted to know—could I be one of these careless kids, could I stay up all night and not once worry about a herd of hundreds depending on me for everything, could I just have fun like normal people had fun? Now or never. I went sloshing across the street, leaping the puddle in front of the sidewalk, and went on after my group of adopted besties.

  We turned up a street and then down another, and I could see that my optimistic reliance on Manhattan’s grid wasn’t going to help me here. The streets had names, not numbers, and there was a diagonal-running one to throw the clean right angles off, and all the blocks looked alike, anyhow, with dark warehouses and fenced-off empty lots and brick tenements with cracked and peeling Victorian flourishes rotting from their front porches and window casements, and I got that panicking, tight feeling in my chest as I realized I couldn’t turn back now. I’d never find my way back, and the five of us were practically alone on the uneven pavement. The crowds had thinned out until there was hardly anyone on the sidewalks at all, and the streets were eerily free of traffic. An occasional car passed, but no taxis at all. There would be no hailing of a cab, and finding a subway out here seemed out of the question. I was in pretty deep now.

  Half a block ahead of me, the quartet of friends went stomping through the icing sidewalks, crossed another street, and turned down a wide, deserted avenue with a sharply cold wind whipping down it. Manhattan glittered to my right, and I realized that the only thing standing between us and the East River were a few rows of low garages with garlands of razor wire festooning their roofs. There was no time to ponder just how dangerous this neighborhood might be. Ahead of me, the trio disappeared into a warehouse, the concrete sidewalks illuminated momentarily by the yellow glow of the lights within, and then the door slammed shut and they, and the light, were gone.

  A warehouse. I’d followed them all the way from Manhattan just to be left here in this industrial wasteland in the middle of the night, standing outside of a warehouse. I looked up and down the avenue, but there was no one on the street. I was utterly alone. So this is what it came down to, when you followed your heart? You ended up lost and alone on a cold street, shadowed by razor wire. I leaned back against the bricks of the warehouse and closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. Why couldn’t I at least try a new life? Why was I completely unsuited for
anything but the farm?

  The bricks at my back were pulsing, I realized dimly. I opened my eyes. There was music playing in there.

  Someone laughed, drunkenly, down the street and I watched a couple come skipping up the sidewalk, lurching across the pavement and jumping patches of ice. They came to the big steel door right next to me, turned the handle, and opened it wide.

  Music and light spilled out of the warehouse. It wasn’t someone’s living room or a secret opium den, it was a huge, bright space in there, thumping with bass and a someone torturing a guitar while he wailed into a squealing microphone. There was some energetic keyboard jangling. The girl who had opened the door laughed and said, “Oh no, they sound terrible!”

  A bouncer, a huge heavy-set bulldog of a man with tattoos darkening his neck and rings widening his earlobes so that you could look right through them, like novelty glasses, gestured unsmilingly with his hand and there was a fumbling in coat pockets for cash and IDs.

  They went in, and I slipped over to catch the door. I showed my ID, smiled, and tried to look practiced at this sort of this thing. “What’s the cover?”

  “Eight,” the bouncer grunted, and I shoved a ten in his hand, and didn’t wait for change; I just went charging indoors into the racket and the glare, hoping that at least the press of bodies would translate into a little warmth.

  It was exceedingly warm, actually, and I started imitating the masses around me, stripping off hat and coat and scarf and gloves and sweater in no particular order, whatever was expedient, and the coat check girl, who glowed with warmth as she presided over a few sliding clothes racks purloined from a Salvation Army, took a dollar from me and gave me a ticket from a spool. At last! Getting all those layers off felt amazing. Being warm and having freedom of motion for the first time in hours! I shook my shoulders and loosened my neck a little, feeling like a horse turned out after a hard ride, finally liberated of saddle and bridle. Time to enjoy myself. Pretend I was used to wandering dark streets and entering secret warehouse concerts late at night. Perfectly normal Thursday night out.

  There were three men making a terrible sound on the stage, impressively loud despite having only a keyboard, a guitar, and a drum kit between them. What they lacked in numbers they made up for in volume, though, and the sound system thudded and crackled and squealed in protest while the singer went on screeching, his hair across his face, his plaid shirt knotted around his waist, sweat glistening on his rather scrawny chest. He wasn’t exactly TV-ready, but I supposed he meant whatever he was singing, judging by the level of emotion he was throwing at it. The keyboardist was engaged in some sort of dance with his instrument, flinging his upper body up and down as he abused the keys, so intimate with it, in fact, that he didn’t seem to notice that he was apparently playing a different song altogether from that of the taciturn guitarist, who stood facing the wall to his right, evidently pretending that he was alone in his bedroom and not on a makeshift stage in a warehouse decorated with. . . oh. That. . . that was pretty terrible.

  There was a massive teddy bear head, mounted on a wooden plaque like a deer trophy, hanging on the back wall of the warehouse.

  It fixated me, the teddy bear head. It was the sort of ridiculously sized teddy bear that carnies offer as the grand prize before they hand you the smallest little stuffed snake on the wall as your reward for knocking over all the milk jugs. The sort of gigantic teddy bear that inspires nightmares of being chased through echoing hallways by murderous plush animals before you wake up, screaming, and kick all of your former furry friends off the end of the bed in a horror. (Just me? Oh.) In any case, it was a massive teddy bear head. I couldn’t take my eyes off its black glass eyes, which were staring blankly down at the bacchanalia below it.

  “Scary, right?” said a voice in my ear. “It gives me nightmares every time I come here.”

  I turned and saw a smiling man standing next to me, his face disconcertingly close. Of course, he’d practically had to shout directly into my ear canal for me to hear anything over the tinnitus trio’s heroic efforts to deafen us all. Still, I wasn’t used to having a stranger kissing-distance when I made first eye contact.

  His smile widened into a grin. “New here?”

  I nodded, smiling with a little effort. No use pretending—I’d been giving that teddy bear trophy the full tourist treatment: undivided, rapt attention that I would never have afforded the Chrysler Building or the Statue of Liberty.

  “Too loud on the floor. Come on, I’ll show you the best spot,” he said in my ear, and started to push through the crowd. I followed, not altogether certain that he wasn’t going to lead me out the back door and into the dark alley behind, where he would probably kill me and chop me up in little pieces. I mean, that happened to girls like me, didn’t it? Girls who wandered off to places where they didn’t belong? Whole television networks were devoted to this exact situation.

  At the back of the room, close to where the teddy bear was mounted above us all, surveying the scene like a plush god of Hell, there was a patio and balcony of sorts constructed. It would have been the pride and joy of a trailer-park resident, a little someplace to put the grill and maybe the spare sofa, except that this one was indoors and raised high enough that you could stand beneath it. He led me beneath it, past a few couples who were engaged in rapturous make-out sessions on the wooden benches built into the back wall, and then up a set of truly alarming stairs, made, as best as I could tell, out of remnants from lumber yards and things found in aforementioned dark alleys. I hesitated, but no—I was following my heart and not my head. The wood sagged gently beneath my boots with every step. It would be a flashy headline: Gallop girl dies in warehouse party patio collapse.

  Up top, just under the murky tin ceiling, the air was incredibly hot. There were round cafe tables scattered around the mezzanine, and little groups sat comfortably, drinks on the tables before them, looking down at the performance, which was muted by nearly half, since we were now higher than the speakers. The men were in t-shirts and the women were in various states of semi-undress, no one wearing anything more concealing than a camisole, giving the whole place a bizarre feeling of summer garden party.

  “Nice, right?” the young guy smiled at me, and I thought that he smiled rather excessively for someone who didn’t know me at all. I could guess that he was trying to pick me up. I just wasn’t sure why. Did I look easy? Simple, lost, confused? Probably all of these things. The only guys in Ocala who tried to pick me up were dudes in cowboy hats at the feed store, and that really wasn’t my scene. I would have been all kinds of flattered by this guy, who looked like he’d walked out of a magazine cover in his tight jeans, red and white plaid shirt, and horn-rimmed nerd glasses. I would have been. Except I was pretty sure that this was less about my looks, and more about my dazed look, which made me easy prey for a man on the prowl.

  But still, there was something to be said for being someone’s focus, the more I thought about it. I decided to let it go where it would.

  “Want to sit and have a drink?” he asked, all puppy-dog friendly. “I have a table right over there.” He gestured to a table in the corner, piled with coats and sweaters in a “this-seat-is-saved” kind of message.

  “Sure, thanks,” I said. Did I add a syllable to ‘thanks’? I was once again feeling nervous that I might have unknowingly developed a southern accent.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Oh—whatever you’re having,” I said amiably, not ready to be troubled with making a decision, and settled into the metal chair.

  He came back with two caramel-brown shots and two big cans of Rolling Rock. “The specialty here,” he explained. “Too good to pass up. But if you don’t want the shot—”

  I’m a racetracker. But bless him for thinking I could be otherwise. I tossed it back and smiled, setting the glass down.

  His eyebrows went up. He turned back his own glass. “So I’m Ryan,” he said. “Twenty-four, graphic designer, bass player in really hor
rible band, live in Greenpoint. That’s me. You?”

  I grinned, fortified already by the whiskey. It was warm and fierce and utterly delicious in my mouth and throat and chest. “Alex, twenty-five, horse trainer, live in Florida.”

  “Horse trainer? You’re kidding!”

  “Oh no,” I said, popping open the can of Rolling Rock. I pointed at the horse. Whiskey loosened my tongue immediately. “Always a favorite of mine, just because of this little guy.” I tickled the white horse’s chin, and Ryan grinned. “So anyway, yeah, I train racehorses. I’m assistant manager on a two hundred-acre farm in Ocala.”

  “Whoa,” he said. “That’s pretty amazing. I mean—wow. You get on racehorses? You’re like a jockey? That’s unreal.”

  I smiled, pleased with the response. “Like a jockey, but I don’t do the racing. I let the real little guys do that.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Being a graphic designer sounds great!” I said sincerely. “I think I’d love that.”

  “Oh.” He shook his head. “Oh, everyone does that. Everyone here is either a graphics designer or an app designer or a social media expert. Or a writer.”

  “I’d like to be a writer,” I said, suddenly wistful. “I’d like to live here and be a writer.”

  He looked doubtful. “You’d rather live here and be a writer than ride racehorses?”

  “You think that’s no good?”

  “Oh, just,” he looked around. “There’s no shortage of writers.”

  The trio of poorly matched singers announced the end of their set with a flamboyant “Thankyougoodnight!” and the audience cheered, whether from admiration or relief, I couldn’t have said, and then it was suddenly quiet in the little warehouse. Despite the buzz of conversations and the clinking of glasses in the bar, it felt absolutely silent after the din of the band was silenced. Everyone lowered their voices a little, and then the truly drunk amongst the drinkers stood out, still shouting as if there was amplified music in the room. I smiled down at the crowd below, but I was suddenly confused about my place here, wondering if Ryan wasn’t right after all. Maybe this could never be more than a silly vacation, an idle dream. Maybe I wouldn’t want it any other way.