I let my eyes wander toward Cecily’s friends. I recognized this group as her high school buddies from Taft. I met them at a dive bar during Cecily and Garrett’s first year of dating, a group of women in their midtwenties who Clorox-wiped the bar’s counter before they sat down. The Taft group had all survived a prestigious boarding school together and then filtered off to separate Ivy Leagues before landing back in New York like a terrifying pack of preppy wolves dressed in Ralph Lauren linen dresses. There was a baseline of three carats on their respective ring fingers and bouncy blowouts atop their very minimal laugh lines. Cecily was the last of the women to acquire a diamond on her left hand—thanks to her fiancé taking roughly four years to get down on one knee.
“It was Raya. I knew it,” Cecily said, believing that my silence was an admission of guilt.
“Oh, Asher? No, we know each other from forever ago. I’m not dating him. Also, I’m not cool enough for Raya.”
“Yes, you are—well, now you are.”
“I’ve already fucked enough DJs to last a lifetime,” I mused.
Cecily laughed with her entire body and slapped my arm, hard.
“You’re so funny. How are you always this funny?”
Years of rejection. Comedy is tragedy plus time.
“God, you and Garrett have this way of just saying things. Your brains! I wish I was like you,” she said.
I pursed my lips together, fighting a sardonic laugh. Cecily wished she were like me, and a part of myself longed to be her—standing in her shoes with that ring on my finger and that gorgeous man impatiently waiting to wrap his arms around me on the dance floor. Hating Cecily would make it harder for me to hate myself, and I had tried. Her cheery demeanor was completely disingenuous—no one could be this happy for mere acquaintances. But her bubbly attitude and words of affirmation were wildly infectious to those basking in her rays of positivity. In conclusion: I hated her, and I liked her. And I hated myself during these wretched moments when I wanted to be her.
“So, I have a favor to ask,” Cecily said, interrupting my green-eyed-monster dilemma. “Can you perform a song tonight?”
I stared at her blankly, until I realized she was serious. I couldn’t sing at my unrequited love’s engagement party. I couldn’t.
“Cecily, I—I don’t want to take the spotlight away from you guys tonight. I don’t even have my guitar.”
She clasped her fingers together and bent her knees toward me, like a child spotting an ice cream truck in front of her daddy.
“C’mon! Pleeease? I’m sure someone from the band will let you borrow a guitar, or a ukulele, or a tambourine or something.”
“Those are three very different instruments—”
“And my friends are dying over you. Dy-ing. They’ve been listening to your songs on your Insta for a week and are obsessed. Honestly, you’re half the reason they even came tonight—they hardly ever leave Westchester.”
“They’re obsessed with me because they saw some photo of me with Asher Reyes?”
She gripped both of my wrists. “Maggie, nothing happens in Scarsdale. This is all they have.”
“Let’s…let’s just see how the night goes,” I said, deflecting and saving my “fuck no” for later in the night.
“Yay!” Cecily tugged me into a swift hug and spun toward her friends with a squeal.
“That was a hard maybe,” I called after her, but Little Miss Sunshine was already across the room, disappearing into her elite friendship huddle.
In the distance, Garrett turned away from the bar and snuck a glance in my direction. He looked away the millisecond my eyes caught his.
“What just happened?” Summer asked, sidling up to me with two full glasses of rosé.
I grabbed one glass out of Summer’s hand, taking a large sip.
“Nothing good.”
29
TWENTY-NINE
IF I HAD KNOWN THAT breaking up with Drew Reddy would gift me a hit song, I would have done it sooner. To be transparent, he dumped me two months into our New York love-bubble. While I had left that night at the bar knowing Drew and I were temporary, I wasn’t yet tired of his companionship. Or the sex. It was the kind of sex almost worth living a mediocre life for. Almost. When our fundamental differences hit the fan, I was relieved to let Drew be the bad guy. My entire body exhaled when he tearfully and melodramatically cried, “New York is killing me, Maggie. I have to go home.” I patted his head, telling him to go back to Los Angeles—where I knew he would find things that killed him just the same. I didn’t miss Drew nearly as much as I should have. But one early morning, when I should have been sleeping, I thought about the way he ran his hand down my spine, and how nice it was to have someone who touched me like that night after night, and a song came swinging inside my brain. It was a yearning, folksy ballad, called “When I Can’t Close My Eyes,” and now a preteen was going to make it a hit.
Garrett tilted his glass of Veuve toward mine in a dark, swanky bar high atop Columbus Circle.
“To Maggie Vine, and her first of many hit songs.”
“Fuck yeah,” Summer echoed, bumping against my shoulder with a proud smile.
“Why are we making this about me? I thought these were goodbye drinks,” I said, eyeing Garrett.
Garrett was temporarily moving to San Francisco tomorrow, leaving us for nine months. He was going to fully immerse himself into his father’s company, starting with the West Coast branch. The only reason I hadn’t let it fully break me was because I knew he was coming back.
“It’s not a goodbye, it’s a ‘see you later,’” corrected Garrett.
He smiled at me, and under that Cheshire cat smile, there was a shift, his lips coming together into something apologetic. Garrett knew it wasn’t his leaving that was a letdown, it was his reasons for leaving. When you love someone and you’ve seen the way their heart beats when they’re doing what they love, it kills you to watch them extinguish the fire from their chest. He was officially becoming his father. He would come back to New York City in nine months, be promoted to SVP of his dad’s company, and fold into a life he knew deep down he didn’t want.
“Can we get drunk already?” Summer asked, her glass dangling in the air, waiting for Garrett and me to stop reading each other’s minds. “Congrats, you superstar,” she said, eyes beaming on mine.
All three of our glasses clinked as Central Park hummed outside the window.
Two months prior, a music producer had stumbled across “When I Can’t Close My Eyes” on YouTube, and I had just received a nice fat check in exchange for allowing a prepubescent male heartthrob to have my song. He turned my angsty words into a candy-coated pop ballad, and I didn’t mind one bit. I could feel myself inching closer to daylight. The world finally felt like my goddamn oyster. And with my ego thumping the way she was born to thump, I decided to take matters into my own fingers, starting with loosening the tie strangling Garrett’s pulsing neck.
His eyes widened to the ceiling as he let my fingers unknot the thick silk. I undid the top pearl button of his collar, exposing the lump in his throat that I was aching to run my lips over. Instead, I practiced restraint, tapping my hand on his chest.