“I already told you! Yes! Winter, spring, summer, or fall,” Melinda said, another one of her favorite phrases. “But I will tell you, in terms of a life plan, you don’t need one. That’s my advice. It’s real life. It’s your real life. Plans don’t work. Just go with it.”
Alice wanted to stay, to give Melinda a hug, to tell her what was happening, but the more people she told, the crazier she would sound. Melinda would （rightly） call Leonard and tell him what she’d said. In real life, in real time, Melinda was her friend, but right now, Melinda was an adult and Alice was sixteen. Someone squeaked on the wooden floor outside, and Alice turned to look. Sam had come to fetch her, and stood at the end of the hall, beckoning. “Okay,” Alice said. “I’ll be back.”
24
The test prep class was endless—Sam was hunched over her paper, scribbling as if it would make any difference. Alice ducked back into her chair and looked around. Tommy caught her eye and did his patented single chin raise, a move that never failed to make Alice’s heart rate double. The sheet was a page of multiple-choice math problems—trigonometry. Alice had barely passed trig in high school, and now the concepts of sines and cosines were as far away from her consciousness as Pluto. Which wasn’t a planet anymore. Except maybe it was now, again? Alice reached into her pocket for her phone, which of course wasn’t there, and then checked the watch on her wrist. The class was only half over. She tried to listen, but Jane’s voice was so monotonous and the gymnasium was so warm that Alice felt herself just getting sleepy. She rested her cheek on her palm and felt her eyelids begin to droop. Alice shook herself awake, worried that if she did fall asleep, she would vanish out of Belvedere in a puff of smoke and wake up forty again. It was what she wanted, she thought, but not like this—she needed to get back to her dad. She wanted to have Gray’s Papaya with him for dinner and make him quit smoking. She wanted to make him learn how to cook vegetables—she knew how! She could show him! Alice started making a list of things she knew how to cook on the back of her worksheet and before she knew it, chairs began to squeak against the floor and people were stuffing papers into their bags and Tommy was standing in front of her.
“Wanna smoke?” Tommy asked. He ran a hand through his hair and it all immediately bounced back into place. Everything in Alice’s brain was telling her to say no, to grab Sam and head back home as she’d told her dad she would, but the word that came out of her mouth was “Yeah.” Sam looked annoyed but Alice couldn’t stop herself. “I’ll beep you,” Alice called out as she and Tommy pushed open the door and stepped into the sunlight.
They ran across Central Park West, crossing against the light, Tommy reaching for Alice’s hand to pull her out of harm’s way. They walked up the path that led to a small playground, one with only a few dinky swings. Because it was a Saturday, there were parents with small children all around and a line of strollers parked just outside the heavy iron gate of the playground.
“Here,” Tommy said, pointing with his head farther down the path.
Belvedere used the park regularly, for the baseball diamonds on the Great Lawn and for annual winter outings to the Lasker ice-skating rink, and for gym classes when the weather was great and spring fever had felled them all and so if they were going to jump rope, they might as well do it outside. Several members of the faculty and staff used the park as a gym as well, carrying jogging clothes in their bags and going for runs before or after school. Not Alice.
Central Park wasn’t made for exercise. It was made for this, for tucking away into a shady grove of trees and sitting on a bench. It was made for low voices and secret affairs. The size of the park—840 acres, she’d had to memorize it for a middle school project—sounded antithetical to intimacy, but that’s what it was, intimate. There were hidden pockets at every turn, as many corners of privacy and quiet as there were of Rollerblading showboats and people breakdancing for tourists. Alice loved the park—loved that there was something so glorious, so seemingly endless, that belonged to her as much as it belonged to anyone else.
Tommy sank to the grass and leaned back against a tree. He pulled a pack of Parliaments out of his jacket pocket and started smacking them against his palm.
“Why are people always slapping something?” Alice said. “Cigarettes, Snapple bottles. It’s so weird.” She sat on the ground next to Tommy and hugged her knees to her chest. Alice’s body felt like it was made out of rubber, like she could kick her leg all the way over her head if she wanted to, or do a handstand. Alice hadn’t had her first orgasm until she was in college and had her first real boyfriend, but it didn’t matter, not when her body felt this good all day every day. Just looking at Tommy, sitting this close to Tommy, made her whole body feel like it was made out of an electrical current. She could still feel his hand in hers from when they ran across the street, even though he’d let go when they reached the other side. Alice had forgotten how much she’d been in contact with her friends’ bodies, how much she and Sam were always sitting in each other’s laps and touching each other’s faces.