Wendy tried to be happy for her friend. Sure, there was no point in getting your undies in a bunch when you didn’t win the lottery. That was still true. But when your best friend won a nice chunk of money playing one of those scratch-off games, it stung.
She forced herself not to look at Noah.
“Eee!” Jane was glowing. “I’m so excited! I can’t—”
Wendy could practically see the wheels turning in Jane’s head as Jane clamped her mouth shut. She was belatedly realizing that since Wendy wasn’t going, she shouldn’t be too over the top with her excitement.
Wendy and Jane didn’t usually do awkward. They were too deeply embedded in each other’s lives for that.
But it turned out there was a first time for everything.
“It’s going to be great!” What could Wendy do but recite her lines? “We can go dress shopping tomorrow!”
She must not have been a very convincing actress, though, because Jane’s face took on a pained expression and things got even more awkward.
“You should take Wendy,” Tim said.
Wait. What? Was he talking to Noah?
“Yes!” Jane said. “That is a brilliant idea! We’ll double!”
What was happening?
“I can’t.” Noah looked at her with apology in his eyes.
Wendy opened her mouth to agree, but no sound came out.
“I work Saturday nights,” he added.
“But only until eight,” Tim countered. “Wendy can arrive with us, and you can meet us there.”
Noah looked like Wendy felt: trapped. But then he seemed to shake himself out of it, and he smiled. It wasn’t his usual easy, confident smile, though. It was kind of an awkward, little one, like he was an extraterrestrial trying to master a strange human custom. “All right. Let’s do it.”
Jane shrieked with joy, picked up her magazine, and started babbling about how amazing Wendy would look in a silver dress she’d seen in it.
Wendy opened her mouth to tell everyone this was a bad idea. But then she shut it. The problem, this time, wasn’t that her voice had deserted her. It was that her scruples had deserted her. She wanted to go to the stupid prom with Noah. She wanted to get that silver dress and some ridiculously high heels she’d barely be able to walk in, and be seen with a cool senior under a disco ball in the school gym.
But more than all that, she wanted to dance with Noah. When she went running with him, she always felt like there was a bubble around them, a protective shield that temporarily kept out the real world. Inside the bubble they could laugh and talk without the oppression of reality.
Inside the bubble, they could be together.
Dancing, she imagined, would be like that, but more. He would literally have his arms around her. Her heart pounded like they were on a run.
“It’s not like I ever have time to go to dances anyway,” Noah said. “I should probably go to one before I graduate, right?”
Noah’s expression was impossible to read. But he formed his face into another smile. Not an awkward one this time but also not one of his signature easy ones. There was…heat in that smile?
Could that be right?
“Anyway, I actually think it will be fun. What do you say, Wendy?”
She felt that hand on her cheek like it had never left.
Could she be brave? Could the wallflower step away from the wall long enough to take what she wanted?
Yes.
So, heart beating like crazy, she smiled back at him. “I say yes.”
“Hello?” Jane waved her hand in front of Wendy’s face. “Hello? Paging Wendy Defendy. Someone’s at the door downstairs.”
“What?” Wendy shook her head as the sound of the front door buzzer rang through the apartment. Holy shit, she’d totally tuned out while she’d made that unfortunate walk down bad-memory lane. But she took comfort in the notion that she hadn’t made it all the way to the conclusion of the prom disaster. If she ever wrote an autobiography, she would just leave that chapter out. She wasn’t that girl anymore. She’d worked hard to not be. She’d picked herself up off that dance floor and changed. Noah had left for college two weeks after the dance, and the next time she’d seen him, she’d become someone else.
“Sorry. I sort of spaced out there for a minute. It’s been a long week.” She walked over to the buzzer. “Yes?”
“It’s Mary.”
Wendy buzzed her in. Every once in a while, her aunt stopped in unannounced. It was so delightfully old-school that it always made Wendy happy.
“Wendy.” Mary engulfed her in a hug before she even got all the way into the condo. “I was in the neighborhood, and I thought I’d bring you this. I saw it at the church rummage sale and thought of you.”
It was an old copy of Let’s Go Czechoslovakia.
Wendy smiled and refrained from pointing out that Czechoslovakia wasn’t a country anymore.
“I don’t even know if you’re doing Eastern Europe on this trip of yours,” Mary said. Even though they didn’t have a lot in common, Mary enthusiastically supported Wendy’s interests. That meant watching legal dramas on TV and giving her outdated travel guides.
“Jane! What a nice surprise!” It was Jane’s turn to get the Mary hug.
The Mary hug was a good thing.
In fact, when Mary released Jane, Wendy went in for another one.
“Oh!” Mary sounded startled, but she wrapped her arms around Wendy again. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes.” Wendy’s voice was embarrassingly squeaky. Thinking about the prom, which was something she usually avoided doing at all costs, had weakened her defenses. “I’m just glad you’re here.” They might not have a lot in common, but Wendy could count on Mary. Mary would never abandon her to social mortification and heartbreak. She glanced at Jane. Unlike literally everyone else in Wendy’s life, Mary was a constant—she would never change.
“We have a new choir director at church.” Her aunt pulled back from the embrace but kept her arms on Wendy’s shoulders and examined her face. “He’s doing all these modern songs. Half the congregation is up in arms, but I think he’s amazing.”
“Oh?” Wendy welcomed the small talk. “What do you mean by ‘modern songs’?”
“You want to come with me on Sunday and check it out? I heard they’re working on a ‘mash-up.’” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “I have no idea what that means.”
Jane cleared her throat, drawing Wendy’s attention. Because they had BFF ESP, Wendy knew Jane was saying, You can’t go to church Sunday because you have a previous engagement with Josh Groban.
When Wendy didn’t say anything immediately, Jane said, “Miss Mary, I was just trying to convince Wendy to come to New York with me for a little impromptu weekend getaway.”
“Oh, that sounds like much more fun than questionable choral mash-ups!” Mary exclaimed.
Instead of commenting, Wendy poured her aunt a cup of tea. Her gaze landed on the package from Noah. She started ripping it open in order to postpone having to make a decision about New York.
“Airfares are cheap right now,” Jane said. “And we can stay with Noah.”
Right. Yay. In addition to being tormented by memories of teenage Noah, she’d get all kinds of unwanted exposure to the current-day one.
Inside the package was, as Jane had predicted, her blouse, nestled carefully in a tissue-paper-lined box and restored to its previous pristine state. There was also a note.
Sorry again for the beer shower. Took this to my local wizard of a dry cleaner, then promptly forgot about it, hence the delay. Do you still collect these? —N.
Wendy gasped. Under the blouse was a New York Yankees Pez dispenser. She did use to collect them—though as a lifelong Yankees hater, she never would have collected this particular one. It had been a rare flight of fancy for her as a kid. She’d never told anyone the story behind the collection. The last time she’d been with her father, the day before his fatal heart attack, he’d g
iven her a Pez. Wendy, like nine-year-old girls everywhere, had been drawn in by the Disney princess marketing machine. Her father almost never gave in to her request for treats from the store, but that day he had ruffled her hair and handed over a Princess Jasmine dispenser.
And then, the next day, he died.
She had eaten the candy at his funeral, hiding Jasmine in her pocket and pulling back her head, the little rectangles of candy the perfect size for covert eating. She would pretend to cry—well, she hadn’t actually had to pretend—bring a tissue up to her face, and slide a Pez into her mouth.
She’d gone on to collect the rest of the princesses. And it had spiraled from there.
Leave it to Noah to remember that.
“What is that? Oh!” Jane smiled. “You used to collect Pez! I forgot about that! What happened to your collection?” She looked around as if expecting a collection of plastic, head-retracting candy dispensers to suddenly appear in Wendy’s condo.
“Oh, they’re in a box somewhere.” In her storage locker, to be exact. She’d debated getting some kind of shelf or something to display them—grown-ups were allowed to collect quirky things, right?—but in the end she’d decided they were too immature for an adult woman to have. Or at least to advertise that she had considering she hadn’t been able to bring herself to actually get rid of them.
“You know what? I think that’s a sign!” Jane nodded at the Yankees Pez. “How crazy is it that Noah sends you a New York–themed Pez dude at the exact same time I’m trying to convince you to go there with me? Come on, this is probably your last chance before your big trip.”
You should come to New York with Jane next time she visits.
“Listen to Jane,” Mary said. “Get out of here for the weekend.”
Well, that was it. They were unanimous. Jane, Mary, and the imaginary Noah voice in her head all wanted her to go to New York.
Wendy tore open the package, loaded the dispenser, slid back the player’s little plastic baseball cap, and pressed a tart orange candy against her tongue.
Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she’d regret it. But…
“Okay. New York, here we come.”
Chapter Six
Noah loitered in the baggage claim area in LaGuardia Friday night, his heart light. It had been a long but productive week at work—jury deliberations on a multi-week trial had concluded, and he’d put away a murderer. Maybe that was an odd thing to inspire light-heartedness, but there was nothing like the successful completion of a trial to give him a satisfying feeling of control and order. And on top of that, his sister was arriving for a visit.
“Noah!” Jane appeared seemingly from nowhere and launched herself at him. “Surprise! Wendy came with me!”
A strange spike of adrenaline made it seem like he suddenly had heat-seeking vision. As he looked over his sister’s shoulder at her best friend, who was approaching at a more sedate pace, he somehow became a superhero capable of seeing things regular people couldn’t. Like, for example, the little horizontal slice of skin that was barely visible between the top of Wendy’s jeans and the hem of her cropped shirt. It disappeared and reappeared as she moved, creating a kind of hypnotic effect. Probably no one else would notice it. So maybe it wasn’t heat-seeking vision so much as it was Wendy-seeking vision?
He pulled away from his sister. Wendy drew closer and…shit. He had no idea how he was supposed to greet her. Should he hug her like he had Jane? Shaking her hand seemed way too formal.
And, hello, why was he thinking so hard about this? This was Wendy. Of course he should hug her.
She was a little stiff initially, making him fear he had miscalculated, but after a second she softened against him and wrapped her arms loosely around him, returning the embrace. Her breasts brushed against his chest, and God damn those breasts. He tried to tell himself that objectively speaking, Wendy had smaller than average breasts. So how was it possible that he was so affected by them? It was just that they seemed so…perfectly proportional to the rest of her. And more than just that, their smallness was part of their appeal. It was hard to make sense of.
Well, it was hard to make sense of with his mind.
Other parts of him were having no problem making sense of the whole Wendy thing.
Which, shit— He pulled away, grabbing the handle to his sister’s roller suitcase and tugging Wendy’s duffel bag off her shoulder.
She didn’t want to let it go, but he glared at her until she relented and fell into step beside him.
“You should be thanking me,” she said.
For giving me a woody? He shot her a bewildered look, because she couldn’t know how she had affected him. She couldn’t know about the Wendy-seeking vision. Could she?
“Because I’m here, you’re off the hook for Josh Groban duty.” She cracked up. He’d noticed when he was in Toronto for the photo shoot that she had developed a sort of signature laugh. She would throw back her head and…cackle. That was really the only word for it. It was like she was so delighted by what she was saying, she couldn’t contain herself. Like cursing, she hadn’t done that when she was a girl. He didn’t quite know what to make of the laughing, swearing, grown-up Wendy.
“Although maybe I’m making too much of an assumption here,” she went on. “Maybe you actually love Josh Groban. I’m just thinking about your unnatural devotion to Nirvana back in the day and guessing that a fluffy-haired Sinatra wannabe isn’t really your jam.”
It was his turn to laugh, a big, genuine laugh, and it felt good. “Hey, Cobain was a certified genius. Way better than your precious Neko Case.” He had forgotten how they used to battle it out for the stereo after school—at least until they had to join forces and unite against Jane, who had always wanted to listen to Mandy Moore.
Wendy opened her mouth, surely to escalate the argument about whose long-ago musical taste was better, but he cut her off. “Wendy Lou Who, despite your perplexing devotion to sensitive singer-songwriters, your underlying assertion regarding my position on Josh Groban is correct. So, yes, I should thank you. You are a goddamned saint for taking on Groban duty. Not only will I reimburse you for your ticket, I’ll take you two out wherever you want to go for dinner tomorrow before the show. Hell, I’ll take you out tonight, too. What’s your pleasure?”
“Oh, and Kurt Cobain wasn’t a sensitive singer-songwriter?”
He was trying to formulate his rebuttal—even though she was kind of right—when Jane said, “My pleasure is to hole up at your apartment with a Big Mac Extra Value Meal and finish chapter twelve.” Jane was working on book eight of her Clouded Cave series, and she’d been complaining about what a slog this volume was. “I told my agent to give me interim deadlines, and I was supposed to email her chapters eight through twelve by yesterday.”
The way she wailed “yesterday” made Noah smile. He found Wendy’s gaze, and they shared a knowing look. It shouldn’t have been surprising that they were so in tune—Wendy knew his sister as well as he did.
“Jane.” Wendy stopped in her tracks and turned to face her friend. “We’re in New York City to buy a magical fairy princess wedding dress and to see your favorite talentless man-child singer! You’re not going to stay in and write! Or eat McDonald’s! God.”
Noah was in complete agreement. “Listen to Wendy. She was always the smart one.” He dodged Jane’s mock-outraged punch. “There are so many things we could do tonight. We could see a show, hit some galleries—or there’s an exhibition at the library on the history of the book.” God knew his sister loved libraries.
“Listen, you guys. I know it’s dumb, but I’m not going to be able to relax until this is done. If I don’t finish this chapter, it’s going to ruin Josh Groban! If you just let me do this tonight, I promise I’ll be the world’s best tourist and bride-to-be the rest of the weekend.” Jane started walking toward the exit as if to signal the end of the discussion. Noah and Wendy had no choice but to follow her. She waved her hand at them as they caught up, the way a society
lady would dismiss a servant. “You two can go out, though. In fact, I insist. I’ll get this done way faster if you’re not underfoot. You guys are both crazy I-heart-New-Yorkers—you can have a little urban hipster geek-out.”
Noah looked at Wendy. He could suddenly imagine lots of worse ways to spend a Friday night.
* * *
“Wow!” Wendy exclaimed as the taxi pulled up in front of Noah’s building.
Noah grinned. Her curiosity had been piqued ever since the taxi turned north on 678. “Do you live in the Bronx?” she’d demanded, and when he’d assured her no, just really, really far up Manhattan, she’d said, “Hmm,” and raised her eyebrows slightly, like she was surprised but trying to hide it.
Jane laughed. “Noah lives in this, like, Tudor castle in Manhattan. Have I never told you that?”
“Not a castle,” Noah said. “Just a co-op.” But he did love his building and his neighborhood. Hudson Heights felt to him like a hidden oasis in the city, and the enormous Hudson View Gardens co-op complex was its gem. He glanced at Wendy. “So you’ve been to New York a bunch of times?”
“You probably don’t realize how much Wendy has turned into a major travel monster,” Jane said. “I swear, she’s always jetting off somewhere.”
He hadn’t known that. Like the swearing and the signature laugh, that didn’t jibe with his memory of the teenage Wendy.
“Well, not always,” Wendy said. “But I do like to travel. When I can’t get off big chunks of time from work, which I often can’t—it’s hard when you’re a litigator, which I’m sure you know—I tend to hit nearby big cities for long weekends. New York is a short, easy flight from Toronto.”
“You’ve probably never been this far north in Manhattan, though.” Most tourists didn’t venture as far as his neck of the woods.
“I’ve been to the Cloisters,” she said with a hint of superiority, naming the museum that was indeed half a dozen blocks north of him. Wendy had to be good at everything, didn’t she? Even tourism.
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