Golden Hour

by Chantel Guertin

  But I don’t care. Those eyes, those dimples, that smile, those lips. Rein it in, Pippa.

  Dylan snaps his fingers. “Actually, this is perfect that we ran into each other. I was thinking about asking Ben Baxter for some advice on doing a music video, but I don’t have his number. The guys and I wrote a new song we’re pretty pumped about, and we thought maybe we do a video for it. Ben’s doing video stuff at college, right? And his dad runs a big studio?”

  Ben Baxter. Half the reason Dylan and I broke up was because he was jealous of Ben. The other half was my jealousy of Muse. Last year, Dylan and Ben couldn’t stand to be near each other. Now they’re going to make a music video together?

  “He should be back in Spalding next week. I’ll text you his number.”

  Dylan gets a funny look on his face and asks, “You still have my number, right?”

  There’s a moment of silence between us, his eyes intent on mine. Me, biting my lip and thinking about how I never replied to his text last year. Finally, I nod.

  “Cool. So what about you?” Dylan says.

  My heart is pounding again. “Huh?”

  “This summer. What’re you up to?”

  “Oh, um. Me. Right. Spalding. Yeah. I’ll be there.”

  He laughs. “Cool.”

  Ramona returns and is about to hop back over the counter, but Dylan puts a hand on the counter, to stop her. “You guys are totally done here. Check out the band.”

  “Thanks again for the rescue, Dylan,” Ramona says. “I’m kinda dying to catch them.” She nudges my shoulder. “You ready?”

  Ready to leave this tiny little space I’m sharing with Dylan McCutter? No thanks. What I’m dying to do is throw myself across the counter and invite Dylan to lie on top of me. But that would probably be weird.

  But before I can make a fool of myself by opening my mouth, Dylan says, “Go! Go! That’s what you came for, not to hang out here.” He looks at me. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Hey, can I get a T-shirt, or what?” some guy behind us barks before I can reply.

  “What size?” Dylan says, turning his attention to the small line that’s formed again. I hop over the counter, grabbing Ramona’s arm to steady myself.

  She pulls me close as we head into the venue. “Wow, I did not in a million years see that coming.”

  “Yeah, me either.” Maybe I’ll see you around.

  “Remind me again why you let him get away?”

  “No clue,” I say. But of course, that’s not true. She gives me a look and I tell her I’ll tell her everything later. She nods and then a second later, we’re inside the concert hall, pushing our way through the crowd.

  “Hey, there’s Matt!” she says, waving wildly. “My boyfriend,” she explains to me, and then repeats the line over and over as she pulls me through the crowd. Finally, when we’re about three rows from the stage, she stops.

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  She leans over, her face inches from mine. “No, but it works every time for getting to the front of a crowd.” I laugh and then turn my attention to the band. The music’s loud and the band is full of energy and within seconds I’m bopping along to the music, singing, swaying.

  An hour and a half later we make our way, sweaty and hoarse, out of the venue. We have to walk right by the merch booth and my stomach gets all knotted, but when we reach it, it’s already cleared out, the booth dark. No Dylan to be seen.

  “You wanna get something to eat?” Ramona says. “I know a great spot a few blocks that way.” We walk along 23rd, back towards 5th and into a 24-hour diner, one of those ones with the neon signs, and we slide into a vinyl booth. I text Emmy to let her know what’s up.

  “All right, spill it,” she says once we’re seated and the waitress has dropped off plastic-coated menus. I know exactly what she means because I’m still thinking about Dylan too. After I remind her how we broke up, and the text he’d sent, saying that he still thought of me as a friend, she asks the question that I’ve asked myself a million times.

  “Why didn’t you just text him back, like, anything? Keep the possibility of getting back together alive?”

  I fiddle with the metallic corner on the menu. “Did you ever have a friend from camp when you were younger? And you swore to be penpals, and for the first few weeks when you got back home you did write letters and mail them to each other? But then school and sleepovers and other friendships and life got in the way and you kept thinking, I should write, but then you’d forget, and then before you knew it, even though you still wanted to be in touch, you felt weird about it, like too much time had passed and you lost your nerve? Like what if she’d forgotten about you or didn’t want to be penpals anymore?”

  “Ughhhh. Totally.”

  “Well, that’s what it felt like. Plus, I kept thinking how I was technically the one who broke up with him but he really didn’t seem to care. And then he was dating Muse. And then he went away for the summer, and then he went to college and I just felt dumb. Like he’s doing all this new cool stuff and why would he want to hear from some ex-girlfriend he’d probably already forgotten about? He’d be like, Who is this, again?”

  “Relationships,” Ramona says, picking up a menu. “The struggle is real.”

  I laugh and scan my own menu, realizing that I haven’t thought about Tisch in hours. And even though we’ve been talking about my failed relationship, which is admittedly not the most fun topic, I’m having fun. It feels like the first time in forever that I just lived in the moment and haven’t been worried about college or my future or my life. Worrying about a guy you used to like is a lot more fun than worrying about an SAT score. But as I look over the menu, not really reading the words, it also hits me that this is what next year could’ve been like: Ramona and me, ordering food at a diner late on a Friday night, without a curfew and talking and laughing. No worries, at least for a night.

  The waitress returns to take our order, pulling a pen and pad from the front pocket of her retro mustard-yellow dress. Ramona looks at me. “You ready?” she says, but she must notice my mood has taken a nosedive.

  “We’re gonna need some heartbreak shakes,” she says to the waitress. “Super sized with sympathy sauce on top.”

  The waitress stares at Ramona, pen in mid-air. “It’s been a long day, ladies. How about two large chocolate milkshakes with whipped cream?”

  SATURDAY, APRIL 29

  Over a breakfast of waffles and coffee with David and Emmy in the East Village, I tell them how the meeting with Vishwanathan went. Then I swear them to secrecy: they can’t tell Mom. Both disagree—and swear anyway. At the Port Authority I grab a quick selfie of the three of us then hug them goodbye, trying to rein in my thoughts that this might be the last time I see both of them for a long time.

  Mom’s waiting at the bus depot for me when I arrive home. She hugs me tight. “Maybe we’re going to have to do a few more of these one-nighters away to get me used to you being gone,” she says, and I don’t remind her that I’m supposed to be gone for an entire month in July when I’m backpacking with Dace. I switch gears and tell her about my afternoon with Ramona, including the concert, excluding the sneaking-in part, obvs. But I do tell her about Dylan.

  “Wow. How was that?” she asks as she puts my bag in the trunk and we both climb into the car.

  “OK, I guess. Just seeing him reminded me how much I liked him, but then also how hurt and mad at him I was. It’s hard to have all those feelings about one person.”

  “Mmm,” she says, patting my leg. “Get used to it. That’s love.” She turns onto Church Street and heads toward home. I stare out the window, thinking about Dylan.

  “And the pre-orientation? Did you meet a lot of the instructors?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say, realizing I didn’t really think through what a pre-orientation would involve.

  “And
what about dorms? Did they talk to you about how that works? Do you get to choose your building?”

  My phone dings. It’s Ben, announcing his return to Spalding for the summer.

  “I’m not sure,” I say, distractedly, to Mom as I text Ben back and make a plan to hang out.

  “And what about roommates? Is there anyone from Tisch camp you want to be roommates with?”

  I look up from my phone. “Mom,” I say, with more of an edge than I intend. “So many questions.”

  She looks over at me. “Pippa, I’m just interested.” Then she softens. “It can be a bit overwhelming, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, don’t worry. It’s only April. You still have all summer to get ready. Speaking of which, do you think it’s still a good idea to travel with Dace? I was thinking it might be better to put off travel till next summer, after you’ve got a year of college under your belt?”

  I look back out the window, watching as the houses zip by. I know what Mom’s trying to say. Should I really be going backpacking, spending money instead of making it? Since I didn’t get a scholarship? To a school I didn’t even get into?

  *

  “So let me get this straight,” Dace says as we lie on my bed, eating “healthy” root vegetable chips that taste terrible. Dace came over seconds after I got home for our Sleepover Saturdays ritual. I’ve filled her in on everything. “What you’re saying is that this Tisch dude essentially told you to stop being a workaholic and to have fun for the next six weeks?”

  “Not exactly,” I say, taking a sip of seltzer water.

  But Dace pops up off the bed and goes over to my desk, returning with a pen and pad of paper. “SATs, photography, college apps—none of that stuff was my expertise. But fun? This I can help you with.” She lies down on the bed and puts the pen in her mouth as she thinks. “First up, you can come to Monday Morning Meditation with me.”

  “That doesn’t sound fun.”

  Dace rolls her eyes. “It’s to get you in the zone. Help you focus on having fun. Trust me. Meditation totally helped me switch gears.” She starts a list. “You could get your driver’s license. Because that opens up a whole new realm of fun.”

  “You already drive me everywhere I need to go,” I say, dismissing thoughts of getting to Hanlan’s for garbage picking. “I don’t need it.”

  She writes Get license on the list then holds her pen up. “Also! We could go skydiving. I have always wanted to go skydiving. And bungee jumping. Let’s save that for our trip—you can jump off the Danube Tower in Austria. That would be cool. Oh, and backpacking around Europe definitely counts.”

  She writes Skydive and Bungee jump and Backpacking around Europe on the list.

  My phone dings with an Instagram notification.

  DylMc started following you.

  I stare at my phone. Even though post-breakup I unfollowed Dylan first, it still burned when I noticed he’d stopped following me.

  Dace gives me a look. “What?”

  I show her the screen as I take a sip of bubbly water because NBD or anything.

  She squeals.

  I can feel my cheeks start to burn. “Do I follow him back? Of course I do. Do I?”

  “Wait until tomorrow. Play hard to Instagram.”

  An hour later, we’re lying in my bed, lights out, but all I can think about is Dylan. Is he scrolling through my photos right now? Is he wishing there were photos of me, rather than color-matched flat lays and flowers? I close my eyes, but all I see is Dylan’s face, his eyes, that dimple. What is it about being out of sight, out of mind? It’s not that I never thought about Dylan before seeing him last night, but I had basically exhausted the opportunities to stalk him online—googling him only brings up five results, and nothing new had appeared all year long—so I was forced to make him a memory. But now?

  “You still awake?” I ask Dace.

  “Hmm?” she murmurs.

  “Nevermind.”

  “You dreaming about McDreamy?”

  “Kinda. You think it’s been long enough?”

  “Def.”

  I grab my phone and hit the request button on his IG.

  “He’s probably asleep,” I say.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’m not going to look at my phone til morning.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  We continue that dozing off convo for a while, and then my phone dings.

  DylMc accepted your friend request.

  I want to scour his photos to see every single thing he’s posted since we broke up, but at the same time I want to savour it. Maybe I’ll only let myself look at one photo a day.

  That’s it. One picture. Except it’s kind of hard to look at only one photo. Because obviously his entire gallery loads, and it’s only natural that my eyes glance over the whole page. But OK, I’ll just put my hand over the photos and click on the first photo. It’s a T-shirt that says Don’t stop. Never stop, which I recognize as a Cherry Blasters line—our band. I take it as a sign that I have the go-ahead to look at all his photos.

  An hour later I’ve scrolled through every single photo in his feed, all the way back to the ones from when we were together. It’s all still there. Him and me. Our entire relationship. The bench at the hospital. The gazebo. The picture of us opening our Christmas presents together—our early Christmas in his bedroom. But between then and now? Pictures of him with friends, skiing. On a road trip, playing cards in his dorm room, him at a beach, with a girl. Girl friends, guy friends. His entire year, documented. I click over to my feed and think about what he must have thought, looking at my photos. I’m lame and boring. I barely went to parties, I didn’t date, I didn’t go on any exciting trips. And even the hard stuff I went through? I didn’t document anything on here. It’s just an overcurated feed that completely misrepresents my year. If my year were a color, what would it be? Beige. Plain old boring, safe beige.

  MONDAY, MAY 1

  “Heyyyyyy, Pippaaaaaaaa,” Annie drawls, head tilted, approaching me as Dace and I walk the path from the parking lot to the front doors. I look from Annie to Emma, beside her, whose head is also on an angle. I forgot they’d be at school early. Drama club rehearses in the mornings.

  “Hey?” I say, raising my eyebrows.

  “How are you doing?” I know this tone of voice. It’s the one everyone—and I mean everyone: the cashier at Duane Reade, the mailman, our neighbors—used on me after Dad died. Why is Annie acting like someone died?

  “Fiiiiiiine. How are you doing?” I reply, mimicking her tone.

  She sighs. “It’s just so crazy. Like, you of all people?” She shakes her head. “God, you’re, like, the benchmark for everyone else. If you didn’t get into your first choice, with your focus and drive, what’s going to happen to the rest of us, amiright?” She looks to Emma beside her and she nods, her black curls springing all over the place.

  Um, what?

  “Well, I don’t know what you’d be worried about, actually. Emma, congratulations on Brown,” I say flatly. “And Annie, you’re in at UCLA, right? Anyway, I didn’t not get in.”

  “But you got waitlisted,” she says, as though I caught an STI over the weekend. Which I definitely didn’t, since I spent Sunday inside, wallowing and watching bad movies with Dace. “What are you going to do?”

  “Monday Morning Meditation, for starters,” Dace interjects. “That’s why we’re here at the crack of dawn. We barely slept after that party last night. Come on, Pip. We don’t want to be late.”

  “Um, what party was that?” I say to Dace as we head through the front doors.

  She throws her head back and laughs. “Give them something else to talk about. Eek, but we really better hurry. Meditation starts in five.”

  “I didn’t think you were serious about me coming to meditation,” I say as I open my locker. Usually, whi
le Dace is at Monday Morning Meditation, I edit my photos for photo club. “Not that I’m not appreciative for the convo cut.”

  Dace turns to me. “You’ve got something better to do at 8 a.m. that doesn’t have anything to do with photography?”

  “No, but I don’t even have a yoga mat,” I say, shoving my backpack in my locker and closing the door.

  “I’ve got you covered.” Dace opens her locker and pulls out a mat. “Also, it’s called a meditation mat.”

  *

  There are a dozen girls all sitting on yoga—er, meditation—mats when we enter the gym. For a moment I think about turning right around and fleeing, but Dace loops arms with me and leads me over to a space just big enough for us to both fit our mats. “Unroll and take off your shoes and socks,” she whispers.

  “Why?”

  “It helps you connect with the earth.” I don’t mention that actually, the pool is in the basement beneath us so we’re technically about 20 feet away from the earth.

  “Welcome.” I look up to see Anisha, a pretty sophomore I’ve never said two words to, smiling expectantly from a few mats over. “Pippa, right?”

  “Right,” Dace says. “This is her first Monday Meditation, but I’m sure it’s not going to be her last.”

  “Well, it’s nice to have you join us. Find a comfortable position and let us begin.” Anisha bows her head and then dings the bell by her knee and places her hands on her bare knees. I sit cross-legged and put my hands on my knees, trying not to squirm.

  “Let’s close our eyes, and turn our attention inwards,” Anisha says in her soothing voice. “Think of your word of intention for today’s practice. The one that is going to guide you. It might simply be for this meditation, or it might be the word that gets you through your day. Or even your entire year.”

  A one-word mantra.

  “As you breathe out, exhale your mantra into the meditation space. Engrain the word into your mindfulness experience.”