by Adi Alsaid
“Suspend your disbelief, Lu. That’s the fourth time by my count.”
I sighed. Pete was probably sick of hearing about Leo. That made sense to me. I was sick of thinking about him. I picked up a couple of new arrivals, flipped through them absently, nothing catching my eye. I ran my fingers over the covers, looking around at the other shoppers.
“Pete?”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you think Leo left me?”
Pete stopped reading for a second. He brushed his black hair out of his eyes, closing the pages of the book around his finger to keep his place. He looked at me with those intense green eyes of his. I feel like Pete could force people to do his bidding with a single look. “We know why he left you,” he said in his faint Irish brogue. “He didn’t love you as much as you loved him.” He turned his attention back to the graphic novel. “I’m gonna finish reading. I’ll see you at work.”
I sighed and made my way downstairs. Starla, our favorite bookseller, was at the help desk and waved hello. She’s tattooed and in her thirties, and never treated us in that eye-rolling “damn teenagers” way that so many adults adopt as their general attitude toward people our age. I waved back, wanting to go talk to her, in no real rush to get to work. But she was busy with a customer, so I just ambled around the bottom floor trying to eavesdrop on people.
Work-space drama; the half conversations of people on cell phones; high school gossip. It’d turned into a compulsion after everything had happened with me and Leo and all my own words dried up.
I used to write my column once a week, and I posted almost daily on my personal blog, wrote in a journal, jotted down novel ideas, the occasional poem, and—more than I cared to admit—little entries into my phone’s note function in which I either came up with how to cure all the world’s ills or jotted down ideas for animated TV shows.
Since the breakup, I hadn’t been able to write anything which my editor, Hafsah, wasn’t loving, to say the least. I’d been a columnist for Misnomer, one of the most highly trafficked online teen magazines, for a year now. The day Hafsah called me to say I’d been hired as the love and dating columnist was probably the happiest day of my life. I’d always suffered from this idea that I wasn’t a writer unless I had readers. And suddenly the world called and said, “Okay, we’re on board. You are, in fact, this thing you’ve always felt yourself to be.”
Now, instead of writing, I eavesdropped. I hadn’t sent Hafsah anything since the breakup, which was three weeks ago, and even through her emails I could feel her intense eyes narrowing with impatience, her neatly manicured nails tap-tap-tapping on her desk.
I don’t know why I turned to eavesdropping. Sometimes I felt like I was chronicling life, or the city, the connections between people. Sometimes I felt like I was addicted to stories, and I was giving normal people a chance to get theirs out there, even if it was just a fraction of them, even if it was just a snippet in a notebook that would never make it into the world at large.
That was probably bullshit. All that was happening was that I had writer’s block and I was stealing other people’s words. Or I was just nosy.
I scanned the crowd for potential subjects. A middle-aged dude bugging the employee at customer service for books with yellow covers. Two women scanning the self-help aisle talking about auras. A bunch of people on their own, eyes on the shelves, giving nothing away.
Then, I spotted her. Full-bodied Latina, pretty, two perfect mascara streaks running down her cheeks to her pinup-model-red lips. She was on the phone, near Thrillers, W–Z. If it weren’t for the tears, she might have looked older, but the kind of sadness on her face resonated with me. Teenage heartbreak. Scurrying to the aisle behind hers, I picked out a random novel, trying to keep my eyes on her through the space I’d made on the shelf, straining to hear her over the hum of the store.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, okay?” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her cheek. I reached into my bag, grabbed the notebook I always kept on me for just this occasion, scrawled her question onto the page, thinking about how it would go on my blog later, the story I could shape from it. The girl clutched at the fabric of her dress as if it were responsible for her tears. “No. No. I don’t know how to tell him, that’s what I’m saying.” She brought a finger up to her mouth, nibbled at the nail, chipped with long-faded red polish. “Yeah, I know I have to.”
I held my breath, wanting her to say more, needing it.
“I have to go. Yeah. He’s here.” She gave a sniffle, another back-of-the-hand swipe across her cheeks, a smudge of mascara by her temple. “Okay, bye.”
Then I watched her hang up the phone and slip it into the pocket of her dress. She sighed, made a few more attempts to clean up her appearance, her eyes locked ahead. I didn’t want to look away from her, wanted to soak her in, write all of her, because she looked the way I felt. Then I watched her walk down the aisle and across the store toward the entrance to meet the boy I’d talked to on the bench.
2
THINGS HAVE CHANGED
Bench Boy and Crying Girl left the store together, and I rushed after them, almost knocking down a display of new arrivals on my way out the door. The sidewalk was crowded and a fire truck was wailing loudly on its way down Broadway; for a moment, I looked left and right, worried they had disappeared into the ether.
But life is not a spy movie: they were only a few feet away, heading in the opposite direction of the movie theater where my shift was starting in ten minutes. I probably shouldn’t have cared enough to follow them, should have shrugged and sighed a brief lament to myself that I’d miss out on hearing their conversation, then gone on to work. Instead, I immediately followed behind.
The thing with eavesdropping is that it’s rarely interesting, and if this was the only thing I could write about now, I sure as hell wanted to follow the one good lead I’d come across.
I texted Pete, asking him to cover for me if I was late for my shift, then I opened my notebook and got a little closer to the couple, ears cocked, ready to eavesdrop to my little heart’s content. I was only a few steps behind, confident that New York’s crowded sidewalks would shroud me in anonymity. Even if they turned around, I’d be just another one of the millions of people who stormed up and down the streets every day.
They crossed Thirteenth Street, expertly maneuvering around an onslaught of oncoming fellow pedestrians. A woman in a green T-shirt wearing big headphones passed by, and a few steps behind me I could hear a girl on her cell phone, saying “literally” way too often. There was a constant whir of tires on pavement, of footsteps on the sidewalk, the chatter of millions.
Bench Boy and Crying Girl weren’t talking to each other. His hands were shoved in his pockets, she was picking at the hem of her dress. They walked slowly, and I waited in anticipation for their conversation to begin. I thought about what the boy had told me on the bench, about being on an undefeated two-person paintball team. It had sounded a little nonsensical and perplexing at the time, but now, with their body language and the space in between them, I thought I understood a little more.
“Look, Cal,” the girl finally said, just loud enough for me to make it out over the honking taxis making their way down Broadway. But she seemed to run out of steam. Her hands dropped to her sides, clutched at her hemline again.
“What, Iris?”
“I don’t know,” Iris said.
“I think you do,” Cal responded, his voice like cracked glass.
She wiped at her eyes again, took a deep breath. I readied my pen. “I’ve been thinking and...I don’t think I can do long distance. Four years only touching in the summers? Four years of wondering where I am if I don’t text you back right away? Four years of our lives growing in different directions?”
The words nearly froze me. Leo had said almost the exact same thing to me. After months of lobbing L-bombs at each other, mont
hs of ever-increasing intimacy, sometimes in waves and leaps (like the first entire day we’d spent in each other’s company, all twenty-four hours, on the subway and eating pizza and watching a movie, sleeping, talking), and sometimes in inches (one handhold at a time, one little confession at a time)—after months of enjoying each other’s company, making plans to continue doing just that, Leo looked into my eyes and told me he didn’t think our love could survive four years apart.
My hands shook as I tried to write the scene down in my notebook while keeping pace with them.
“Love,” Cal said. The word left him like a whimper. “We have love. What else matters?”
The girl was crying again. I caught the shimmer of light reflecting off her wet cheeks. A honk from a cab driver drowned out something she said, and I got a little closer, almost at their heels. They were moving forward at such a glacial pace that I had to actively think about walking so that I wouldn’t run into them. “We’re eighteen. Of course we’re going to think it can last forever. But it’s not that easy.”
“That’s not true, Iris. I’ve never once said it will be.”
“That’s how you talk about us though. Like we’re the greatest romance of our time or something. Like we can overcome all these things that everyone else fails at, like we’re somehow different.” We reached Union Square, and they waited at the stoplight to cross the street. Traffic was sparse and they easily could have crossed, but they weren’t paying enough attention to notice.
“You used to talk like that too,” Cal said.
I was almost torn apart by that line. I could hear all the heartbreak that I felt for Leo in Cal’s voice. But Iris shrugged it off easily. “Yes, but things have changed, Cal. You have to adapt to the world, to life.”
“So now I’m being punished for being a romantic?”
Iris groaned, raising her hands in frustration. Someone pushed past me and then in between them, calling us idiots under his breath as he crossed the street. Cal and Iris didn’t notice that either.
I was probably late for work by now, but I couldn’t pull myself away. I kept listening, kept writing it all down.
“I’m not punishing you. I’m just saying that there’s a difference between our relationship in theory and what happens when we’re faced with reality. You want to stay in the city. I want to go to California. I am going to California.”
“So we’ll do long distance,” Cal exclaimed. “I thought that was the plan.”
I’d said the same thing to Leo three weeks ago, only more tearfully. I could imagine exactly how the rest of the breakup would go, based on my own experience. The shock of the words spoken. The immediate quiet afterward. The person who’d been dumped scampering away.
Usually, in these eavesdropped conversations, I was rooting for drama, for the stuff that makes good stories. But I felt myself dreading what would come next, how they would follow the same steps Leo and I took.
“No,” Iris said simply. The light turned green, a throng of people surrounded us, little bumps and shoves to the three of us, everyone as unaware of the fight as Cal and Iris were of them.
The scene unfolded exactly how I didn’t want it to. Cal pulling out his phone, in my opinion to keep himself from crying. Then silence, which was probably only meant for the two of them but somehow pulled me into it, so that the sounds of the city fell away as if they’d been physically removed from the world. Iris glanced at Cal, fraught with worry, as if she knew she’d broken him.
Then Cal shoved his hands in his pockets and turned around brusquely. As he stormed off, his shoulder bumped mine, and he mumbled a “sorry” as he sped past me, no recognition in his eyes.
Iris turned around too, watching him go. She didn’t immediately call out for him, just watched, tears welling in her eyes. I realized the light was still green and I was the only one standing next to them, which was a total amateur spy move. As much as I wanted to stick around, whatever part of my brain that experienced social awkwardness was buzzing like crazy, so I crossed over toward Union Square. I wrote down everything that happened, the look on Cal’s face when he was fleeing the scene, Iris’s silence. For the first time in weeks I felt moved to write my own words. But I didn’t have a grasp on them, so the only thing I could write down was this gut-wrenching déjà vu moment of the event that had caused my writer’s block to begin with.
I wondered how many teens go through the same thing every summer, how many times that conversation is repeated with every end of another school year. I wondered how many survive, not just as a couple in the long term, but the conversation itself. How many people can maneuver through its hidden land mines and invisible walls and crawl out the other end intact?
When I reached the park, I turned back around so I could make my way to work. At the street corner where we’d stood, something caught my eye. On the ground near where Cal had been standing. It was a wallet, cheap and plastic, the design looked like one of those airplane safety cards they put on the back of the seat. I leaned down to pick it up, a little amazed that it hadn’t been spotted by anyone else yet, though I guess it did look a little bit like spilled trash.
Even before I opened it, I knew it was his.
* * *
“Pete?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think they broke up?”
“Jesus, Lu. Is this going to be the driving question of your life from now on?”
“Would you rather I go back to ‘why did Leo leave me?’”
We were sitting at the box office, each logged in to adjacent computers. It was our favorite spot to work because it faced the street and provided the best opportunities for people watching. But at that moment I couldn’t care less. I was fumbling with Cal’s wallet, studying its contents. One school ID (some prep school in Brooklyn), one well-worn Metro card, a receipt for dinner at an Indian restaurant dated almost two years earlier. A sticky note curling at the edges, neat block letters on it: “I like you. Quite a bit.”
And, most important, a half-filled-out raffle ticket from a YMCA. On it, in smooshed, scrawled handwriting, was Iris’s full name, address, phone number, and email.
“Debatable,” Pete said with a sigh. “What game are we going to play today? How about What Would You Do with That Weirdo? Count the Moles? I Would Bone That Person?”
“You never want to bone anyone,” I said, turning the raffle ticket over in my hands. Pete leaned back in his chair, eyes focused on the people passing by the theater. It was the usual array of Lower East Siders that might be wandering around on a weekday morning: some young professionals heading out for an early lunch, the NYU students that stuck around for the summer, the smattering of unclassifiables that are at every New York City street corner, their entire lives a mystery. I kept looking for Cal and Iris to walk past the window, somehow longing to rewatch their breakup happen in real time, even if it felt like watching my own breakup.
“We could play I Would Cuddle That Person,” Pete offered. “Dibs on Alice.”
“You can’t call dibs on Alice. We share Alice.” Alice was this adorable old lady who came in without fail once a week to watch a movie. She got a box of Milk Duds, and snuck in a flask of what we were pretty sure was straight-up whiskey. “But I’m not ready to change the subject yet. I want to talk about the couple. I want to know if they’re still together.”
Pete gave me a little side-eye. “Clearly they broke up.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, though I have no idea what made me so defiant. They had almost certainly broken up.
He turned his attention to a couple of guys in their twenties who’d approached his window. I looked down at my phone. Every day, dozens of times, I’d check that screen, hoping to see Leo’s name in it, hoping he was going to offer some sort of apology, or beg for a reconciliation, or even just check in and say hi. Just like that, no capitalization or punctuation or anything. The minim
al amount of care one can show electronically, that’s all I wanted. Just:
LEO
hi.
* * *
He hadn’t even apologized for missing our meeting that morning. Next to my phone was my notebook, open to the day’s writing, Iris and Cal’s fight. Without their names in there and a few other details, it could have been about me and Leo, the only thing I would have written about us since breaking up.
I pictured how my night would go after work: my little brother, Jase, playing video games on the couch, his shouts ringing out through our little apartment. Mom would be cooking some sort of Italian food. I’d sit with my laptop on my knees, typing up what I’d eavesdropped, failing to come up with anything of my own. I’d watch for Leo’s name to pop up on my notifications. I’d stumble about on the internet, reaching for something that would make me feel okay.
I read the last few lines I’d written in the notebook. Iris’s “no.” Cal’s departure.
Pete slid the customers their change, then looked over at me. I could see something in his eyes. Pity or concern or frustration, who the hell knows? “What’s on your mind, Lu?”
I put Cal’s things back in his wallet. “I need to know...” I trailed off.
A guy appeared at my window. In his forties, velvet tracksuit, mustard stain on the shirt beneath. He was looking over my head at where the showtimes were displayed. I smiled like I was supposed to, then gestured to Pete to add the guy to our running tally of tracksuits we’d seen since we started working (543 so far). He bought one ticket for the matinee of Shit Blowing Up or something like that.
Pete was still studying me, those clever eyes of his boring into me and reading all my thoughts. “I should probably return the wallet,” I said, pointing lamely at it. “Her address is in here. I could take it to her.”
Pete’s kind of like my wise, old uncle. He asks poignant questions, and delivers poignant answers. He’s like Bilbo Baggins. Wait, is Bilbo Baggins the wise, old uncle? Like, he has a beard which he strokes before saying wise, old things? I haven’t read those books, but I picture him as having a great beard.