And then she sees something that sets her hair on fire. There, standing awkwardly by a nice red car, along with two white guys in blue blazers who are calling out to Hewitt girls, is Amir Rahimi.
Tillie is faster than she realizes, because without thinking, she’s left Molly behind and charged over to the car where Amir silently stands. She’s so glad he’s not talking to a girl right now, because homicide would be an absolute possibility. She grabs him by his red striped tie and pulls him onto the sidewalk. He gasps and grabs his throat. Everyone watches. She doesn’t release the pressure. She yanks him against the wall of the building to the left of Hewitt.
“Are you—” Her voice doesn’t sound like her. It sounds sharper, heavier. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Amir mouths words, but no sound comes out. His throat is still constricted. Tillie lets go, hard, and his head bounces against the wall a bit. He cradles it and rubs the spot that made contact.
Everyone is watching. Tillie could not give fewer shits.
“What are you—how could you even DO this to me?”
“Can we—” Amir says.
She yanks his arm and pulls him down the street, hard.
“Do you know what you did to me? Are you aware? Do you know how much you hurt me?”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“No. No. Absolutely not. My turn. You acted like you cared about me. I cared about you, Amir. You were the first boy I ever felt that way about. I’ll never get that back. Do you know that? You made me, like, love you, and then you went away. Not a single fucking word. What kind of person does that? What kind?”
All the nerves have gone away. Everything that stopped her from saying to Molly what she needed to say is gone, too, and suddenly Tillie’s head is turned and she is screaming in Molly’s direction.
“And fuck you, too!” she yells. “No, it’s NOT okay! Because of you and because of you”—she looks back at Amir, fury in her eyes—“I almost fucking killed myself yesterday. So no! Not okay! I’m so fucking tired of people shitting on me because they can! It’s over. Done!”
The tears start to fall down Amir’s face so fast that it unnerves Tillie. She expects him to fight back or run. She does not expect tears.
“You almost killed yourself?”
Tillie’s voice goes away again. She nods, holding his eye contact.
“Because of me?”
“Because of you and some other things. Yeah. It was stupid. It’s obviously so not worth it. Dying because some boy doesn’t like me.”
“I do like you,” he says quickly.
She laughs, low at first, and then like a cackle.
“I like you, but I’m—”
She stares at him.
He lowers his voice and leans in. “I’m gay and I’m fucking petrified, okay?”
“Oh,” she says. “That was not—oh.”
As soon as he says it, she gets it, she sees it, she knows it is true, not just something a guy says to cover shitty behavior, though in this case it is, in fact, still highly shitty behavior. And Tillie thinks: Thank god. Asshole. Poor Amir. If only there were a word for the combination of relief, fury, and sadness that wells up in her throat.
Amir motions to his friends that he’s okay and waves them away, and then he hugs himself into a defensive posture as she stands there, not answering. The power has shifted, and the furious part of her is glad. And the other part can’t allow him to go even another second feeling the way he must feel inside.
“Okay, so,” she says. She finds herself unable, or maybe just unwilling, to finish the sentence. “I almost killed myself because my gay boyfriend ghosted me. Okay.”
“I’m so sorry, T. I wanted to tell you, like a thousand times.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He looks both ways. “Why don’t I tell anybody? As soon as I do, it leads to a path that leads to the inevitability of me not having a family.”
“You wouldn’t—how do you know? Did your mom say that?”
“I just know, okay?”
Tillie sighs, feeling exhaustion in her shoulders. She looks around. She finds Molly, standing about ten feet away. Too far to hear this conversation, but close enough so Tillie knows she’s there.
She waves her hand over at Molly. “And this is Molly. Who I just also yelled at in front of a million people.”
Molly tentatively comes over and kind of salutes awkwardly. “Hey.”
Tillie turns to Molly, who smiles a bit at her as a sort of apology. “Thank you,” Molly says.
It’s the last thing Tillie expects to hear.
“Thank me?”
“You at least said it, you know? I deserved it. So, um. Thanks for being real with me.”
And the three of them stand, awkwardly, and Tillie looks at both the boy who tormented her and the girl who did so, and she feels angry still, and that anger is useful and useless and also she’s hungry. So she says, “And now, maybe you’re buying me lunch?”
She’s not sure who she’s addressing, so it’s a relief when they both say, almost in unison, “Yes.”
When all the men but Morris leave, Michael takes a nap.
“Of course I’m staying,” Morris had said. “It’s what we do. You don’t have to go through this alone.” Morris took Michael’s phone and said he’d answer calls and texts, and he’ll check in with Michael’s ex, who is en route by train.
Michael can barely react, and he hopes Morris understands.
Sleep comes fast. So do dreams.
His son is writing a song. The song’s lyrics float over his head, and Michael cannot hear what they are. He calls out to his son, to make the lyrics clearer, so he can hear them. He calls out to the world, to lower the volume, so he can hear the song.
Then his son, sitting with his laptop, smiling.
“I wrote something good,” he says when his dad walks in. “I wrote something really good.”
“Everything you write is good,” Michael says.
His son smiles. But the camera goes in, in, in, to his son’s bloodstream. Behind the smile. To the inner workings.
He opens his eyes. He sees it now. He sees what he didn’t see before, and it’s so damn simple. The thing he didn’t see. How did he not see it?
The thing is purple and blue and clogs the bloodstream, and it comes with a mournful sound. It’s heavy like lead, and it’s … everywhere.
I let him down, sleeping Michael thinks. I should have seen. I should have known. I should have done so much better.
Knowing it is potentially her last lunch outside of an institution for a while, and also for once utterly not giving a shit what anyone thinks, Tillie orders a croque-monsieur and a croque-madame at Maison Kayser for lunch. When the two sandwiches arrive, she has them face each other and she says, “Watch this, Amir. Watch how the monsieur does NOT ghost the madame. Even if he likes other monsieurs.”
“We all love us some croque,” Molly mutters, using the correct French pronunciation—cruck—before she takes a nibble of her salade niçoise. Tillie half cracks up. Amir, nursing a gratinée à l’oignon that is still too steamy to eat, does not.
Amir seemed all too happy to skip out on the afternoon. He told his buddies he was going, and Tillie could tell he was scared shitless that they’d heard him. She was pretty sure they hadn’t.
“So explain,” Tillie says. “Why you can’t come out. Why it was worth, you know. Being unimaginably cruel to me.”
“I’m guessing I’m going to have to apologize a bunch more times?”
Tillie nods. “Yeah. Like twenty-three. Or a hundred and six. I haven’t decided yet.”
“But at some point, you’ll be able to, like, accept? Because I really am sorry.”
“We’ll see. Meanwhile, amuse me. Tell me zis story.”
The lightness of the bad French accent is bullshit, but something about this whole day has stolen caring or giving a fuck from her entirely. It’s also really weird. Her best friend from fifth grade and her e
x-boyfriend, who don’t know each other, and shouldn’t, really. They are so not congruent in her mind.
“My mom,” he says.
“Muslim. Religious,” Molly says, almost dismissively.
Amir says, “Um. No. Muslim, yes. Not religious. Basically atheist. And just as American as you, so.”
Molly shrinks back into herself. “Sorry.”
He stares a little longer. “Anyway, Nava, her sister, is lesbian, and my mom basically disowned her. All my childhood I heard about her disgusting sister, my disgusting aunt. I haven’t seen her in forever. She lives in DC. My mother as good as told me if I’m gay, better to just not come home and tell her. Better to find a new place to live, and a new family.”
The girls listen, intently, and they eat in silence. Tillie is thinking about parents and disappointment, which she could write a book about. But this one. This thing of telling your kid not to come home if he’s a certain way? That’s a new one to her.
The whole thing makes her feel tired and confused in her bones.
“Sometimes maybe parents say stuff but they don’t mean it?” Molly finally says.
Amir shrugs. “Two months till I graduate. Then college. I just need to hold out a little longer, then I don’t have to live there, and I don’t have to pretend.”
“So … boyfriends?” Tillie asks. The word is hard to even say. She’s not sure how she’ll feel when he talks about that side of his life.
He shakes his head, hard. “Oh God no.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s what I said. Patience. I’m waiting. Georgetown.”
“I want to go there!” Molly says, like it’s a reflex, and then, as if something washes over her, she closes her eyes. “Or someplace else, I guess.”
“Why does it matter to you so much?” Tillie says, irked, because god forbid Molly should not be the center of attention for two minutes. She wants to know more about this lack-of-boyfriend thing. It makes Amir seem almost noble to her, and knowing that at least he wasn’t hiding something like that helps a bit. “Why do you care where you go to school?”
Molly stabs at a piece of lettuce. Forcefully.
“You wouldn’t get it,” she finally says, not putting the lettuce into her mouth.
“Try us,” Amir says, a little anger in his voice, and Tillie is glad he sees it, too.
“Okay, so. No, I’m not jumping off a—sorry, sorry,” she says, facing Tillie. “I’m just, I’m aware that you guys are dealing with more, so this all feels a little privileged.”
“We’re private school kids eating lunch at Maison Kayser. I’m pretty sure we’re at a privilege standstill here,” Tillie says.
“Ugh,” Molly says. “Why am I even—okay. So you know how they always say, ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere’? About New York?”
Tillie and Amir nod.
Molly puts her hand through her blond hair. “Well … apparently the converse is true, too, because if you can make it here? Well, he couldn’t make it here, either, but the point is, he couldn’t make it in Baltimore, either. My uncle Bill. He was an Allen-Stevenson kid. Then Horace Mann. He played football. He was good-looking. Not that I—” She pauses and looks down at her plate.
“You’re gorgeous, yes, we know,” Tillie says.
Molly rolls her eyes. “So Uncle Bill. He’s in Baltimore. He sells Formica countertops. Not well, either. It’s so bleak. I’m so, so scared, scared that like him, I’m peaking now, too, because he definitely peaked in high school. And Gretchen and Isabella are absolutely pulling away, okay? Gretchen texts me every day, but it’s less and less, and I’m just hanging by a thread. And this suspension thing is not helping, because now forget a good college.”
“What do you mean you’re hanging by a thread?” Tillie cocks her head. “I mean, really. You’re the center of everything.”
“Yeah, but I’m actually not.”
“Okay …”
“They have no idea who I am.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the worst.”
“You’re the worst?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I’m a fraud.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m a geek! Okay? I want to go to things like FanCosCon!” Molly says it so seriously, and so loud, that all three of them look at one another. After a few awkward beats, they each break out laughing.
“What?” asks Tillie.
“It’s so much worse than you think,” Molly says, masking her face with her hands.
“It really isn’t, though, is it?” Tillie says.
“Ugh. It is and it isn’t, okay? I’m just … I’m supposed to be this one girl, and I’m supposed to, like, care about Jasmine on YouTube and her fucking eyeliner, and I really, truly don’t. What I do care about is Sarah J. Maas—her books are everything, and all I want to do is be immersed in that world, and meet Sarah J. Maas, and there are just some things you don’t do when you live on Madison Avenue and your mom is my mom, and that is clearly, clearly one of them. So I am kind of hanging by a thread because who I am, like, inside? It’s not acceptable. I can’t be. So I won’t be.”
“Oh,” Amir says, smirking. “I have no idea what that would be like.”
This makes Molly laugh at herself a bit.
Tillie finds herself feeling different than she’d expected as she lunches with the odd combination of Amir and Molly, the two people she most wanted to murder just four hours ago. And she thinks: How strange. How strange that I might have ended my existence for these two people, and I had no idea, no idea. That they are so not worth that, and that they have their own shit I didn’t even know about, and there’s something there, a lesson, like. And she thinks, Next time I’m there, I need to remember … and then Molly starts talking some more, and she forgets what she was supposed to remember.
She doesn’t really hear all that Molly is saying, because she’s thinking about belonging. And how, at the moment, she almost feels like she belongs. Almost.
“So?” Molly asks. She is looking at Tillie expectantly.
“Um …”
“Quick answer, no hesitation: Are you a danger to yourself?”
“What? No. No. I’m not.”
She means it, and the thought makes her smile a bit in realization. Something has changed here. Quickly, something has changed, and it feels like a cloud has lifted. Or two.
“Good,” Molly says. “So what’s next? Because we’re pretty much in agreement. You deserve a chance. Both of us will talk to your mom. Because I’ve seen a danger to yourself, Tillie Stanley. And what I see here? What we see? Not that. So if you want, we can, like, go pick up your phone now. Go pick it up and we’ll take you home, and we will explain everything, and, I mean, it’s not like we can promise that your mom won’t send you away, but it’s worth a shot, right?”
Tillie looks to Amir, who is smiling shyly at her. To Molly, who’s still looking at her expectantly, and with eyes that are nearly kind. Tillie almost says yes. And then she realizes: There’s one more cloud. No. Yes. She’s doing things today. She’s got to continue. She’s so close.
“My dad,” she says.
“What about your dad?” Molly asks.
“I need to say some things to him. Will you come?”
Molly to Amir. Amir to Molly. Something communicated.
“We’re in,” Amir says. “Let’s go.”
Tillie is able to find her dad’s office building without too much trouble amid the chaos of businesspeople rushing about on their cell phones at Fifty-First and Third, and a quick elevator trip later, the three teens are in the posh lobby of her dad’s hedge fund.
“You say you’re his daughter?” the receptionist, a petite white woman with beautiful straight brown hair asks, staring at her perhaps a second too long, and something acrid pours through Tillie’s chest. What she wouldn’t give to never feel that again.
“Yes,” s
he says.
She calls and then half turns and puts her hand over the mouth end of the phone. Tillie looks, exasperated, to Amir and Molly. Molly is on her phone, not paying attention, but Amir has seen it.
“That’s ridiculous,” he says.
“Right?” says Tillie. “There’s always an asterisk. I hate it.”
The receptionist’s nasally voice grabs their attention.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “He’s not available.”
Tillie looks to Amir and Molly as if they’ll have the answer. When she doesn’t find it there, she says, “Well, I can wait.”
The woman nods almost imperceptibly and picks up the phone again. Tillie crosses her arms and taps her foot, and when the woman does the thing where she half turns again, Tillie looks to the floor.
The woman hangs up the phone. “I’m sorry, but your father is wrapped up today. It’s not a good day for this. He says he’ll see you at home tonight.”
Tillie’s throat constricts. Her shoulders sag. “Okay,” she says. “I guess we won’t wait, then.”
She quietly and slowly walks out of the reception area, back toward the elevators, Amir and Molly in tow.
“People get busy,” Molly says. “I know you want to talk to him now, but you’ll get him later. We’ll take you home, okay?”
Tillie says nothing. There’s nothing much to say.
And then she thinks about the reality of the situation.
How her mother freaked out when she walked out of the office.
How she dropped her phone, and how her mother must have figured that out.
How her mother must be going crazy, actually, a little crazy, with fear.
How of course her father must know this. They talk all the time. They’re her parents. Of course she’s called him. So he knows she’s MIA.
And he just said he didn’t have time for her.
Something delicate inside her tattered body, a piece she’d always kept safe, even in the moment when she stood there with one leg over the railing, looking at that boy, shatters.
She feels two hands simultaneously reach for her. One lands on her right shoulder blade. The other on her left elbow.
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