by Meg Leder
I smelled Doritos.
Eph stood next to me, his favorite navy-blue knit hat on, straight brown hair tufting out underneath, cheesy orange residue around the corners of his shit-eating grin.
“Did you seriously just burp in my ear?”
He smiled bigger, shrugged, and purposefully chewed Doritos with his mouth open.
“Why would you do that to me? You’re disgusting. Apologize.”
“Come to the park with me.”
“Apologize.”
“Come to the park with me.”
I turned and started walking down the steps, not in the mood.
“Come on, Pen. It’s a perfect day to go to the park with a tall, handsome hottie. . . .”
His skateboard clattered against the concrete, and I heard the wheels whirring right behind me.
I ignored him, pointedly marching ahead.
“So what was up with you this morning? Your neck was kind of splotchy.”
Great.
Hands on my hips, I spun around. He jerked his board to the side to avoid running into me, skidded to a stop.
“Apologize.”
“Come to the park,” he said, giving me his winningest smile.
I frowned, and started walking up Central Park West again.
“I heard Joss is going to be more involved with the next run of the Buffy comics,” he said.
He was right over my shoulder—I smelled the Doritos and the sweaty-guy stink and, underneath, the other parts of Eph: mint, fresh-cut grass, the ocean.
He needed to apologize.
“I think maybe one of the actors is involved too? And get this: The guy at the comic-book store said he heard a rumor that they’re finally bringing back Marcy, the invisible girl. Awesome, yeah?”
I resisted the urge to point out that while Marcy was fine, they should have been bringing back the witch Tara. Now that would have been awesome.
Eph continued to talk while I waited to cross Sixty-Ninth, watching a curly-haired woman talking to a bald man, her small black-and-white dog eagerly running circles around his giant gray Muppety one, making me dizzy. Ford would have stood for absolutely zero percent of any of that.
“. . . and I’m thinking that now is maybe when they’ll finally end the Angel and Buffy crap once and forever.”
WHAT?
Eph knew how I felt about Buffy and Angel’s cosmic destiny, how they were meant to be. He was 110 percent picking a fight.
I bit my tongue, forced my gaze forward, refused to be baited, and watched the dogs run into the park.
“Because Angel? The worst. Mr. Existential Crisis. I’m glad she shoved him into the fucking Hellmouth. Now, Spike? He’s her real friend. That’s who Buffy should be boning.”
I whirled around to shoot Eph the stink eye. He kicked the skateboard to his hand, and I could tell he was being all purposefully tall, looking down at me with the sun shining behind him so it was right in my eyes and making me feel like I needed to squint.
I refused to grant him the satisfaction.
My index finger was pointy against his ribs. “Buffy shoved Angel into the Hellmouth to save the world. And don’t be vulgar. It’s frakking.”
He stood one foot on his board again, rolling it back and forth. “She wouldn’t have had to save the world if he hadn’t turned all evil, thanks to her sleeping with him.”
His figure was dark in front of me, and the sun spots floating all around him made me dizzy. He was ruining my afternoon. “Stop slut-shaming Buffy,” I said, pushing against his chest for emphasis.
I pushed harder than I planned.
With a look of surprise on his face, he toppled backward, the board shooting out from under his foot, and crashed hard on the sidewalk, his elbows slamming against the concrete, his half-zipped backpack spilling open.
“Eph!”
I dropped to my knees and leaned forward, too anxious to touch him in case something was broken.
“I’m so sorry,” I said under my breath, mentally counting the three freckles across the bridge of his nose, his Orion’s belt, scanning his arms and legs for anything that seemed jagged and broken, counting his freckles again, the bridge of his nose crooked from when I punched him in fourth grade for lifting up my skirt on the playground.
What if he’d broken something?
“Are you okay? I didn’t mean to push that hard, I . . . I’m sorry.”
His eyelashes fluttered, like he was dreaming, but the rest of him was dead still.
What if he had a concussion?
“Eph . . .”
He slowly opened one eye; the other one stayed scrunched, shut tight.
“Pen,” he whispered. “Do you . . .”
I leaned closer, so I could hear him.
“Do you admit you’re wrong about Buffy’s one true love now?”
Wait. WHAT? I straightened as he opened both eyes and pulled himself up, examined his elbows (both skinned), and smiled his infuriating cocky smile.
A few of the onlookers (because we had onlookers plural now, as if the whole thing weren’t embarrassing enough) started clapping, while a short, dowdy, disapproving woman murmured loudly to her friend, “She pushed him.”
Right then a super-tall, thin, strawberry-blond-haired, willowy girl, who probably had traveled on a unicorn straight from some mystical elven city to this particular moment, kneeled down next to Eph, handing him his skateboard like she was paying tribute to some king, and I barfed a little in my mouth.
“Are you okay?” she asked; even her high cheekbones were all concerned. “I’m Mia.”
“Ephraim,” he replied. “And I am now.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered.
She smiled, all eyelash batting and lip puckering, and I felt my hackles rise in protest, full of self-righteous indignation. She was hitting on him right in front of me. What if Eph and I were together? Was that so hard to imagine? I was of dateable age, wasn’t carrying around a stuffed cat in my purse, didn’t have a third arm growing out of my forehead.
She held out her hand—I swore I had seen the elf queen do the same move in Lord of the Rings—and he took it, smiling his stupidest, charmingest Eph smile, and stood up, one perfect inch taller than her.
Several of the old ladies watching actually cooed.
Whatever.
I scooted around on my knees and began gathering the papers and crap that had spilled from his bag: his old copy of The Hobbit—the one he brought everywhere—a brand-new calculus textbook, a jumble of keys on a skiing carabiner, a Moleskine journal . . .
Without giving it a second thought, I opened the journal, expecting to see more comics like the ones he’d always drawn: crass and cartoony, plenty of fart jokes, with renderings of his favorite comic-book villains thrown in for good measure.
But these pages were different.
These were pages and pages of intricate city scenes: tiny metropolises, blue-inked lines intersecting at sharp angles, with small people moving their way through the world.
I recognized major cities—London with Big Ben and the Eye, Paris with Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. And then there were cities that defied logic: skyscrapers sprouting from clouds, waterfalls pouring under streets.
I snuck a glance over my shoulder. Eph was deep in conversation with Elf Queen Girl.
I rested back on my knees, flipped to the next page of Eph’s sketchbook.
The scene was Times Square, frantic and chaotic, a giant Phantom of the Opera sign, stock-exchange prices rolling by on an electronic ticker, the discount TKTS booth with a winding line, a little Naked Cowboy in the corner eating a hot dog, an Elmo impersonator scowling at the world around him.
I peered closer. There, in the corner of the page, waiting at a traffic light, was a stegosaurus wearing an I NYC T-shirt. Tiny spines poked through the back of the shirt.
It was so weird and incongruous, but so absolutely perfect at the same time, that I felt goose bumps rise up and down my arms. I met Eph the
year I started first grade, right when my family moved to New York City for my dad’s new job at the American Museum of Natural History. Eph’s dad worked there too, and our parents introduced us in the lobby, a looming T. rex next to us. Despite Eph’s parents’ objections, at the time he only answered to Superman (and constantly wore the cape to prove it). He also swore that there was a real live dinosaur, a T. rex, living in the museum and that it wandered the halls at night.
The cape was long gone now, but it seemed like the fascination with dinosaurs and Superman had stuck around.
On a hunch I flipped back to a previous spread: Paris. I scanned the page, and there, wrapped around the base of the Eiffel Tower, was a brontosaurus, its long neck winding up but not high enough, trying to get a glimpse of the top.
In a roller-rink scene, crowded with people skating under a disco light—couples with linked arms, children sandwiched between parents, a small boy clutching the railing—there, in the middle of it all, a triceratops with oversize skates hunched down for balance or maybe to fit in better with the crowd.
At the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, actors participated in the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene, and behind the stage, by the turtle pond, a little T. rex pressed against a tree, its face pure longing.
They were the most magnificent things I’d ever seen.
“Did you find your surprise?” Eph asked.
Startled, I twisted around.
The Elf Queen was gone, but he was grinning, pleased with himself despite the presence of two skinned elbows, and I figured he must have ended up with her number.
“These?” I asked, holding up his notebook. “Eph, these are phenomenal. How long have you been drawing them?”
He looked up, a blush spreading from his neck to his cheeks. If I didn’t know better, I almost would have thought he was embarrassed.
He yanked the notebook out of my hands (I immediately felt the loss of its magic, my palms left open and empty). I watched wordlessly as he snatched his bag up and shoved the notebook deep in there, followed by the books I’d stacked neatly on the sidewalk.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. . . .” I stood up, brushed off my knees, tried to straighten. I was three degrees off balance, the whole world tilting slightly. Eph never kept stuff from me. “It’s amazing. You’re so good.”
“That’s what she said,” he replied, so automatically and smugly and insufferably that I remembered why I had just, albeit accidentally, pushed him over.
“You are the worst, Ephraim O’Connor.”
“I’m not the one who tried to kill me.” He zipped and shouldered his bag, effectively ending the dinosaur conversation.
“Hardly.”
He squinted, pushing his hair off his face and back under his hat. “Come to the park with me.”
“Apologize.”
He let out this long, aggrieved sigh, dug in the outside pocket of his bag, and tossed me a small, red-orange-wrapped square.
“Your surprise.”
I barely caught it.
“Holy cow, where did you get this?” I breathed, holding it reverently in both hands.
Dark chocolate Kit Kats were my favorite candy in the entire world, nectar of perfection, the candy of the gods, rarely found in stores in the US and usually enjoyed only when my dad brought them back through customs at Heathrow. Finding them in person in New York City was like finding the holy grail.
“Bodega in the West Village. Now come to the park with me?”
I thought of the tiny dinosaurs I’d seen in his notebook, imagined them standing on his shoulders, protecting the secret parts of him, the parts that still believed in dinosaurs.
“Okay, apology accepted,” I said, turning toward the park. “For now.”
Anne of Green Gables, book
Anne of Green Gables, liber
Copyright 1908
New York, New York
Cat. No. 201X-3
Gift of Jane Marx
“SO FRENCH CLUB IS SPONSORING a monthlong trip to Paris this summer,” Audrey said, sitting cross-legged at the end of my bed.
“That’s cool.” I tossed her the giant bag of M&M’S we’d grabbed at the bodega and dropped my book bag on the floor.
“I have to go. My dad said if I can save half, he’ll chip in the rest. I figure an August spent immersed in everything French will be killer on my college applications. Besides, it’ll help take my mind off not being at Gram’s.”
I sighed, flopping down next to her. After Audrey’s grandfather passed away peacefully last year, her grandma Mary had decided she’d spend one more summer at their house on Lake George before moving to a retirement community in Pleasantville, making the past August that Audrey, Eph, and I had spent there with her our last.
“What am I going to do without you for a whole month?” I asked.
“You’ll survive.” She opened up the bag and leaned over it, inhaling deeply. “Oh man, never disappoints.”
She handed it to me, and I sighed, smelling the chocolate too. Her grandmother had taught us the trick during one of our summer trips—how smelling an entire jumbo bag of M&M’S was almost better than eating the candy itself.
“Or better yet, why don’t you come with me to Paris?” Her face brightened as the idea started to take shape. “You and me and Cherisse can share a triple. All you have to do is join French Club. And start saving.”
“Aud, I take Spanish,” I said, not mentioning that if Cherisse was going to Paris, I’d rather spend next August on NYC garbage patrol. I hugged a pillow against my chest. “French Club no es bueno.”
“But you don’t have to speak French to join French Club. It’s more about the culture and food and movies—next week we’re watching this classic black-and-white French film about a girl who drives all around Paris on a Vespa with her cat in a shoulder bag. Doesn’t that sound fun?” She flopped down on her stomach next to me, propping an elbow up. “Besides, it’s a good way to meet cool people.”
Like Cherisse, I thought with an inner grimace.
“Like Cherisse!” Audrey said brightly.
“I don’t need to meet new people. I have you and Eph,” I reminded her.
She started to say something, thought better of it, and started again. “It can’t be the three of us forever, Pen.”
“Sure it can!” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me we’re breaking up?” I folded my arms in a mock huff.
“No, I’m trying to say—” she began earnestly.
“It’s been great getting to know me, but you want to spend time with other people?”
She ignored me. “That expanding our social circle is really important, and I—”
“Our social triangle isn’t fulfilling all your needs?”
“I love you and Eph, but sometimes—”
“It’s you, not us?”
“Shut up!” she yelled, scooping up Barnaby, my favorite stuffed animal of indeterminate species origin (Dog? Bear? Unknown) and winging him right at my head.
“Ow,” I said. “I would have thought by now you’d have learned firsthand the dangers of toys around heads, young lady.”
She grimaced. “Tom and George ran that Tonka truck up in my hair. They didn’t throw it at me. Besides, if they’d never done that, you and Eph might not have been my friends,” she said.
She was right. When Audrey joined our class in third grade, she was immediately known for four things: her sparkly silver shoes, her crazy-good double-Dutch jump-rope skills, the fact that she owned four American Girl dolls, and her beautiful, long, shining hair. None of which interested Eph or me very much. That is, until week two, when two boys in our class ran the spinning wheels of a battery-powered Tonka truck into her hair. Her sobbing was what brought Eph and me over to the crowd of gathering students. But it was the fact that she seemed so lonely, standing there in the center of the circle, that made me go over and say hi and, with Eph’s help, lead her to the school nurse (who made short work
of Audrey’s long locks, hacking out the truck with blunt scissors).
Even though Eph and I thought dinosaurs trumped dolls, Audrey fit with us somehow, or maybe it was more that she stuck with us, and had ever since.
“Okay, I know you don’t speak French. But listen for a second, okay?”
I nodded, resting my head in my hands in mock excitement. She ignored me.
“It’s just that at French Club . . .” Her voice lowered. “There are guys there too, Pen. Hot, dateable guys.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Yeah?” I tried to tiptoe casually around the elephant suddenly sitting in the middle of my heart. “Is Cherisse’s friend, that new guy, in French Club too?”
Audrey wrinkled up her pert little nose, a gesture I, owner of a “nose with character,” was desperately envious of.
“Wait, who? Keats? No. But there are other guys. . . . Come on, say you’ll at least try it.”
I folded my arms against my chest. “You know peer pressure doesn’t work on me, mi amiga. Besides, do you remember what I’m like with new people in general? I’m socially inept.”
“Pen.”
“I’m like the personality equivalent of . . .” I racked my brain. “Of crusted Norwegian scabies.”
Audrey groaned, hiding her head in her hands. “We should have never looked at my dad’s issues of Journal of Dermatology.”
“Worst. Dare. Ever.”
“Worst. Dare. Everest.”
I reached over to hook pinkies with her.
“Seriously, though, Pen. You are not crusted Norwegian scabies, not even close. It’s never as bad as you make it out to be.”
“It’s always as bad as I make it out to be,” I said.
“Such as . . . ?”
“Me trying to start a conversation with the coffee guy at Grey Dog who was all greasy-dirty hot, the one I had been crushing on, oh, for no less than a year, only to discover I had a booger on the outside of my nose in the middle of asking him what music was playing?”
(I was so mortified that I ran outside, leaving my purse behind, but then Audrey found me and made me cry-laugh by insisting that boogers were in the new issue of Vogue as the fall accessory, and I decided I wouldn’t run away forever after all.)