He grinned at the checkout lady.
“One check.”
“Two checks,” I said gently.
I smiled at Garrett, my heart-shaped face saying, I appreciate the gesture, but not necessary. He raised his hands in the air, backing down.
I was uncomfortable with the idea of being indebted to anyone, except Summer—and it took me years to ask to borrow her white T-shirt. My mother had a spot-on way of making me feel guilty for being born. Every tiny thing I accomplished or failed to accomplish either shined a light on her achievements in spite of me, or her lack of achievements because of me. At my college graduation, my mom tucked my hair behind my ears and adjusted the cap on my head, musing, “I never got to walk at my college graduation. If only you hadn’t decided to come four weeks early.” My existence was one giant favor owed. And this is why I paid for four-dollar beer instead of letting a nice guy do a nice thing for me.
Nice Guy and I pushed our bodies outside onto Fourteenth Street, the balmy August night hitting my cheeks as I turned to meet him. Garrett had just finished redistributing his purchases among his four bags—probably so he could perform evenly weighted bicep curls with his groceries on his walk home. The orange sunset cast a glow on his wicked smile, a smile that was impossible not to match.
“I’m that way,” Garrett said, nodding behind me.
“I’m that way,” I said, pointing behind him.
He stepped forward, his blue eyes just inches from my face. My heart fluttered as he took my free hand in his and set the handle of a brown paper bag onto my open palm. He closed my fingers around it.
“Good night, Maggie May.”
Before I had the chance to find words, he curved past my body and disappeared into the packed street. I slowly peered down at the bag. Inside was the nice bottle of red wine and the box of s’mores. A stunning swirling sensation fluttered to every inch of my skin—neon glitter exploding in my chest. This wasn’t the discomfort of being indebted to someone—not even close.
You know the moment you realize the person across from you could be the person who fills the blanks inside your soul? I’d felt this once before—but at fourteen I didn’t understand how rare it was.
For the first time in nearly a decade, I was drunk on the possibility of someone else.
I glanced down at the time on my phone: 7:15. I would come back to Trader Joe’s next Monday at 7 p.m. I would wait for him by the eclectic beer. I could only hope he would do the same.
And he did.
6
THIRTY-FIVE
IT WAS MY THIRTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, and I had just been told that I was as fertile as someone approaching menopause. I tried to remember how to pretend that I wasn’t dying inside, which was hard for the woman who wore her heart on her sleeve.
I couldn’t escape the incoming demise of my unrealized dreams, but I could get drunk and high. I was crushing both of those things, swaying against the summer heat on the Great Lawn in Central Park, surrounded by fifty-five thousand strangers as the Dave Matthews Band jammed onstage. Concerts in the Park had been my favorite thing. They were free, they made the park come to life with a melody, and they were absent of New Yorkers who were too good for summers in the city. The loyal lot of us got to party inside my favorite park in the world, while lamenting about how we almost suffocated underground waiting for the C train. Beginning Memorial Day weekend, affluent New Yorkers fled the city’s humidity, camping out in the Hamptons for the summer like absolute assholes. I wanted very much to be an asshole. It was hashtag goals. Summer was a rich asshole who owned a home in East Hampton, but she had stayed behind to embrace the heat and celebrate me amid a sea of Dave Matthews Band bros, like a true best friend and masochist.
I stood on an oversized towel, swaying drunkenly with a charcuterie board, Summer and Valeria below me. Summer’s eyes were the size of saucers as she scanned the crowd, experiencing a specific kind of culture shock: her first Dave Matthews Band concert.
“I’ve never been more of a lesbian than I am right now,” Summer announced to Valeria. Valeria held her tighter, as if physically shielding her lover from a sea of straight white men in cargo shorts.
“Let’s donate to feminist causes when we get home,” Valeria said.
I smirked at the grown men in the crowd. Dave had reduced them to mere teenagers: dudes fumbling over lyrics that housed the emotions of their easy-breezy nineties childhoods. They were booze-soaked and high, clutching their koozies, reliving the memories of their first few Dave concerts. None of these guys had attended just one DMB concert. Seven, minimum. This Dave Matthews concert was an attempt for forty-year-old men to recapture the magic of their long-lost youth.
I let my cheeks find the violet sky, and I closed my eyes, promising the music gods that I would go home and cry to some Phoebe Bridgers to offset my secret bro-ey heart. I couldn’t fake it, or fight it: I was a product of nineties music.
I looked down, seeing Summer’s body wrapped around Valeria’s. No one had held me like that in public since I was seventeen. Men had held me, with passion and lust on their fingertips, but not in a way where I could exhale into their chests—not in a way that felt permanent. The lawn was lit up by the neon spotlights on the band stage, and the glow of the city’s skyline surrounded the stretch of freshly cut grass as the bass and saxophone plucked through the air. The dusty purple clouds gave way to the dark night as I swayed to my favorite Dave song. I’d had a lot of sex to this song. A lot of sex with my first boyfriend, Asher Reyes, to this entire album, which is why I defended Before These Crowded Streets with an ache. It was like I was defending my fragile teenage heart. Young love had a qualifier for a reason: it was made to get smaller in the rearview. But our love felt too big to fade—and the strange ache inside me was a reminder that it had done just that. I breathed in the epic yearning inside the lyrics.
“God, I want you so badly.”
I was right there with Dave—I wanted It All, so badly: the American dream, the road less traveled, the blue skies, the fireworks. Summer was not swayed, as evidenced by her pursed red lips.
“C’mon, you can’t not like this song.”
“Stop trying to make me fall in love with Dave Matthews!” she yelled, rather viciously.
I raised my hands to the sky, backing off. Suddenly, I tilted my head, seeing Valeria own an expression I had never seen from her: a wistful smile. I followed her eyes across the lawn, toward a woman swaying with a BabyBj?rn strapped to her body—her infant asleep against her chest. Valeria smiled at Summer, nodding to the infant. Summer smiled back, but as Valeria brought her focus back to the child, Summer swallowed hard, the smile fading into a straight line.
My eyes widened in alarm, just as Summer looked my way. I had caught a glimpse of something I wasn’t supposed to see, as evidenced by how quickly Summer stitched on a pointed grin. She grabbed her phone, using the screen as an emotional shield to hide behind.
I turned away to study the crowd, and my body froze.
There he was. Standing on the other side of the fence, curiously, his eyes were dead set on mine. My expression brightened, as I realized Garrett looked like a version of his old after-hours self. Tight white V-neck that his biceps wore too well. Thick, untamed blond hair. Garrett hadn’t looked this ways in years. Usually, he was loosening the tie strangling his neck, with his hair combed neatly out of his eyes. He’d stepped down as lead singer of the band a handful of years ago and traded in his sweaty rock and roll nights for midnight finance deals and IPOs. But here he was, looking ready to grip a mic and unleash his soul onstage. His eyes were drawing me in, but with a hardness that I did not recognize.