Her senior year, Ruby was sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two other girls, in a high-rise that overlooked Washington Square Park. Ruby and her roommates had decided to keep the kitchen and the living room as common spaces, to share a communal wardrobe （they were all more or less the same size）， and to partition the bedroom into three private cubicles. Ruby had the cubicle on the left, a space she and Gabe had dubbed the sleep box, a narrow, windowless rectangle with barely enough room for a twin-sized bed and a three-drawer Ikea dresser.
For the first few months, living there had been an adventure, like crossing the Atlantic in steerage, or traversing the country in the sleeper car of a train. Having sex in the sleep box meant that your roommates and their partners all heard your business, and would occasionally cheer you on, or call out suggestions. Eating ramen, or black beans and rice, using her roommate’s parents’ account to watch premium cable, getting her hair cut by cosmetology students, and going to bars that offered cheap drinks and free food during happy hour—all of it felt fun, even romantic. Ruby understood that, unlike Molly, one of her roommates, unlike Gabe, she was cosplaying poverty, experiencing it with a safety net underneath her, which meant she wasn’t really experiencing it at all. She was lucky; she was privileged. She didn’t have to worry about student loans, or, once she’d graduated, about surviving on what she’d be earning as an entry-level stage manager without a union card. Nor did she have to worry when COVID happened and NYU had gone virtual.
Come home, her stepmom had said, her voice tight with fear, right after Two Weeks to Slow the Spread became Four Weeks to Stop the Spread, and it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that the spread was neither slowing nor stopping.
“I’m fine,” Ruby had insisted. Sarah was a hoverer, a worrier, always reminding Ruby to wear sunscreen and her retainers. Ruby was pretty sure Sarah also tracked her on her iPhone. It was annoying, but also obscurely comforting, to have someone who cared.
“I don’t think it’s safe, being on the subway or out on the streets,” Sarah had said.
“You can’t catch it from touching things,” said Ruby.
“They don’t know that,” Sarah said. “They don’t know how it spreads. And what if they stop letting people go in and out of the city? What if you get sick, and we can’t help you? Or if we get sick, and you can’t help us?”
Ruby had to admit that Sarah had a point. She also knew that the Brooklyn brownstone where she’d lived since she was eight years old had much to recommend it: an expansive kitchen, a fully stocked refrigerator and pantry, a washer and a dryer and a home theater, with a flat-screen TV that got all the premium channels, not to mention the fourth floor that was hers alone. No more schlepping her laundry to the wash-and-fold two blocks away; no more roommates who could hear her and Gabe through paper-thin walls.
Brooklyn was tempting. But Ruby wasn’t eager to relinquish her independence. Nor was she willing to give up her boyfriend. “What about Gabe?” she’d asked, assuming that would be a deal-breaker, but Sarah hadn’t even hesitated. “Gabe can come, too,” she said. “Except he can’t keep delivering food.”
“Mama,” Ruby said. After Sarah and her dad got married, Ruby and her father had decided that Sarah would be Mama and Annette would be Mom, although, for the first few years, Ruby never called Sarah anything at all. She’d also never guessed that when she was twelve, Annette would say, “How about you just call me Annette?” and that by then Sarah would feel like more of a mother than Annette had ever been. “Gabe has to work. He’s got loans.”
“I understand that,” said Sarah, whose usually low, melodious voice was getting high and slightly shrill. “But your dad and I don’t feel safe with him in and out of people’s apartment buildings, being around all those strangers, and then coming back home. How do we know that the people he’s delivering to aren’t sick? Or that the people working in the restaurants aren’t?”
Ruby opened her mouth to argue, then reconsidered. Put that way, Sarah had a point.
“Gabe has to work,” she repeated.
“I understand that,” Sarah said. “But he doesn’t have to deliver food. Let me make some calls.”
Ruby had agreed, and Sarah had gotten the music school where she worked to hire him to digitize their student performance archives. Ruby was almost certain that at least some of Gabe’s salary was coming out of Sarah’s own paycheck, which made her feel like crying; that Sarah would quietly make that kind of sacrifice and never say a word, so that Gabe could have his pride, and so that Ruby could have Gabe. She had been so excited to make the offer, to give Gabe the town house and, by extension, her family, like a peasant laying a gift at a king’s feet. He and Ruby had only been exclusive for about six weeks by then, and Ruby couldn’t wait to spend more time with him, to get to know everything there was to know about him. If COVID fast-forwarded them through months of dating, then God bless COVID, Ruby thought.