Her Fifty-third Street appeals of “Can I please just get around you?” evolve into Fifty-fifth Street commands to “Fucking move. MOVE!”
Someone’s cigarette singes the sleeve of the LaughRiot sweatshirt as she bobs and weaves around other people’s handbags and outstretched limbs.
On Fifty-seventh, away from the bars on Ninth Avenue, the throng starts to thin out. She picks up speed, taking full strides: arms pumping, knees high, shoes only slightly slipping on the frosty sidewalk.
By the time she reaches Columbus Circle, leaping over a slush-covered open grate, Ari feels like a goddamned gazelle. A few more blocks sprinting like this and she’ll reach the starting line in, like, seven minutes?
Four seconds later, she gets a stitch in her side.
Shit. Shitshitshit. She slows to a power walk down Central Park West, jamming her hand into her side.
It’s fine. Walk it off. It’s fourteen blocks between the location where she’s currently dry heaving and the spot where Josh is probably feeling personally affronted by fireworks, silly costumes, and effusive joy.
He’s probably mentally reviewing his running strategy right now.
Somehow sweating and freezing, she skip-walks into a jog, dodging clumps of pedestrians who are probably heading into the park to watch the fireworks.
This is fine. Keep moving. Gonna make it. Breathe in through the nose-two-three, out through the mouth-two-three. In through the nose, out through the—
Ooh…a pretzel stand that’s not mobbed.
It turns out that it’s possible to run really fast （okay, reasonably fast）， while inhaling a soft pretzel and clutching a slippery bottle of blue Powerade.
She checks the time on Gabe’s phone. 11:54. Shit.
It’s like someone turned over the little hourglass timer on a board game. It’s no longer just, how fast can I get there? It’s this is actually happening and my face must be the color of a cherry tomato and what the fuck is going to happen if I actually find him? and how, exactly, do you confess your love for someone?
And, most aggravatingly: What if he’s not alone?
There could be a Harper or a Lauren or a Maddie, and wow, the mind really has a knack for some perfectly timed self-sabotage. At least the pain in her tight calf muscles is a good distraction.
In the thick of the crowd at the Seventy-second Street entrance, she feels like a child sneaking into a wedding reception for grown-ups only. Everyone around her is part of a social group or a couple. They all have festive props to wave and selfies to take, and she’s alone and nervous and trying to un-fuck-up a fraught situation by ambushing someone whose feelings might be bordering on hostile.
Her heart’s racing—and not just because of the unprecedented amount of cardio. A series of waist-height metal barriers line the edges of the race route without an obvious entrance. Ari jogs along it, jumping up every so often to scan the crowd of runners.
It’s like a bizarro, life-sized edition of Where’s Waldo?, in which the object is to find the tree-sized emo man wearing all black running gear instead of a bug-eyed nerd in a striped sweater. “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” is booming through the sound system in the band shell, echoing eerily through the trees. Finding a tall, dark needle in a haystack is much more difficult when every racer is bopping around to ABBA.
Except—
There’s one head that’s not bopping: a man with a black knit hat, standing with his arms crossed, mouth turned slightly down, surrounded by a group of young, long-haired, heavily made-up women in matching logo shirts who are really feeling the second verse.
He couldn’t look more miserable if he tried—and it’s possible he did try. What kind of pretentious snob shows up to a giant fun run and puts in their earbuds before the race even starts?
My pretentious snob.
Hopefully.
* * *
AT FIRST, JOSH thinks all the visual stimulation must be playing tricks on his mind. Because sometimes he’ll be walking behind a woman with light brown hair in a messy topknot and wonder…
It never is.
But the girl leaning over the crowd-control barrier on the other side of the road could be Ari’s twin. She’s forty feet away—difficult to see details from this distance in the darkness punctured with flashing lights—but when he catches her glance, he swears her eyes grow large with recognition. At that moment, the race organizers force everyone in his starting group forward.
Fuck.
Josh takes some ineffective clearing breaths. He can’t find Briar in the mob of women surrounding him—all wearing Tshirts emblazoned with the ryan’s racers logo （it’s just an empty pair of gray sweatpants, running—which happens to be an apt description of Ryan himself）。 A whole universe of art and culture and food and a half-assed jogging club organized by a former reality star is the best entertainment this fucking city has to offer? Josh can’t even properly track his stats on an outdoor run where his progress will be impeded by amateur athletes.