Tonight the Streets Are Ours

And in my head, I thought of Romeo and Juliet: She speaks! O speak again, bright angel! But I didn’t say that aloud. Because maybe I had already said too much.

Instead I said, “I was quoting one of the sonnets. From there.” I pointed at the book she was holding.

She smiled. She smiled at me. “You’re an Elizabeth Barrett Browning fan?” she asked.

“I’m a poetry fan.”

“I don’t know very much about her work,” she admitted.

“Well, if there’s anything you want to know,” I said, “I’m happy to teach you.”

She opened her mouth to reply. And then Leo showed up.

“Hey, man!” Leo said. He seemed glad to see me. “So I guess you already met Bianca?” And he put his arm around her. Around her, that gorgeous girl.

So this was Bianca. Bianca, whom we’d been hearing so much about for the past six weeks, but whom we’d never seen, to the point where I’d started to wonder if maybe Leo had just made her up to sound cool. Yet here she was. In the flesh. In the smooth, tanned flesh.

Leo had mentioned some things about her before. She’s my age. She lives on the Upper West Side. Stuff like that; practical stuff. He didn’t mention that she was more beautiful than the sun, and I hated him for that—had he never noticed? How dare he never notice what he had in front of him?

“Bianca,” I said. “Hey. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“All good things, I hope.” She looked up at me through lowered eyelashes.

I locked eyes with her. “Of course. What else could there be?”

“I thought we’d come by to surprise you,” Leo said.

“You succeeded,” I said, not looking away from her.

“When do you get off work?” he asked. “Maybe we could all get iced coffee or something after.”

The thing I most want to do is go out for coffee with this girl. The thing I least want to do is go out for coffee with this girl and her boyfriend.

“I’m here for another few hours,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Bummer. We’ll look around then. Maybe buy some books. You’ll hook us up with your employee discount, right?” Leo asked.

“I’ll hook you up with anything you want,” I said. To Bianca.

I walked away and returned to my stupid cash register. Once she wasn’t directly in front of me, I started berating myself. Dude, she’s Leo’s girlfriend, you don’t know anything about her, lay off.

But those arguments only make sense if you don’t believe in fate, or things that are meant to be. And I can’t make myself not believe in that.

Twenty minutes later, she came to the cash register. Leo was hanging out a little ways behind her, doing something on his phone.

“Hi again.” She set a book down on the counter in front of me.

“So you decided to buy the sonnets after all, huh?” I asked as I rang her up.

“Yeah,” she said, leaning forward on the counter, like she wanted to get just a little closer to me. “Did you know it’s called Sonnets from the Portuguese, but it has nothing to do with Portugal? Elizabeth Barrett Browning just claimed that her poems were translations of traditional Portuguese sonnets because she was too shy to claim credit for writing them.” Bianca paused, then added, “I read that on the back flap.”

“I always wondered why it was called that,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

While she was looking into her purse, fussing with her wallet, I quick wrote on the back of her receipt:

Let me know what you think of the book.

Call me.

—Peter

And I added my phone number. I stuck the receipt in her book, stuck the book in a paper bag, and handed it to her.

If Leo found that note, I could play it off, I think. Like, Oh, just little old bookish Peter, looking for someone to talk about sonnets with. Anyway, what are the odds that Leo’s going to open a book of poetry?

“Thanks!” she said. “Have a good day.” Then she smoothed the lace over her chest, pulled on her shades, and headed outside into the blinding sunshine.

That’s what happened today. Like I said, it could be nothing at all. Or it could be the start of the rest of my life. Ball’s in your court, Fate.