“Isn’t that kind of the same thing, maybe?”
“I guess, if I think about it, tonight, I want to have a better time at this party than I did the first time. I want to figure out how to get back to my life. To my other life. I want to hang out with my dad.” It felt shameful to admit it so plainly. Kids at Belvedere were now open wounds of self-conscious vulnerability. They changed sexual orientations and genders, they experimented with pronouns. They were so evolved that they knew they were still evolving. When Alice was a teenager, the entire point of life had been to pretend that absolutely nothing had an effect on her. Technically, she still couldn’t quite bring herself to tell Sam the truth—that if she could, Alice wanted to make sure that Leonard didn’t end up where she’d left him. She wanted to save his life, simple as that. Just then, Alice heard the front door open and close, and Ursula leap off of some high-up place—the bookshelf, maybe, or the top of the refrigerator—to run to the door.
“Al? You home?” Leonard called out.
“Yeah! I’m here! With Sam!” Alice shouted back. She watched Sam flip pages in the magazine—all the pastel-colored ads for Maybelline Great Lash mascara and Swatch watches and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers and Caboodles jewelry boxes. Alice had truly believed that magazines were preparing her for the future, that Beverly Hills, 90210 was a mirror, only with shorter dresses and more hats worn at school. Everything that she consumed told her that she was grown. She wanted to shake Sam by the shoulders and tell her that they were both still children and no one around them knew, like they were standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat and everyone believed it. But Sam already knew, because Sam got in trouble when she stayed out late. Sam got grounded when her mother found the roach of a joint in her room. Sam got her beeper taken away for two weeks after Lorraine got a call from Belvedere saying that Sam had been caught kissing a boy—Noah Carmello—in the back stairs during class. One of the worst parts about being a teenager was realizing that life wasn’t the same for everyone—Alice knew that at the time. What had taken decades was realizing that so many things that she had thought were advantages to her own life were the opposite.
“Are you going to go home before the party?” Alice asked.
“No, why? I’ll just wear something you have,” Sam said. Alice had forgotten about the transient nature of the clothing of teenage girls, about no longer being able to tell which item belonged to whom. She and Sam wore the same size, more or less, close enough to share almost everything.
In the photos Sam had given her for her birthday, they were wearing tiaras and slips, like beauty queens forced to hold a pageant in the middle of the night. “Let’s wear regular clothes,” Alice said. “Nothing fancy.”
Sam shrugged. “It’s your birthday.”
The phone began to trill. It took Alice a minute to find it, underneath a pile of clothing.
“Hello?” she said.
“Happy birthday, Allie,” said her mother, using a nickname that Alice had never liked. It was as if Serena were talking to someone else, which in a way she was. Serena was always talking to a version of Alice that she thought wanted to hear from her, or would be satisfied with irregular phone calls and irregular care. “I sent some things, did they arrive?”
“Hi, Mom,” Alice said, and Sam went back to her magazine.
“You girls want lunch?” Leonard called, and they both called back, “Yes!”
27
Gray’s Papaya was the greatest restaurant in New York City, because it served only one thing: hot dogs. Hot dogs with ketchup, hot dogs with mustard, hot dogs with sauerkraut, hot dogs with relish. Behind the counter, there were large churning vats of brightly colored juices, but if you ordered something other than papaya, you were a narc. There were no places to sit, only high tables along the windows facing both Broadway and 72nd Street, perfect for people-watching. Alice and Sam jockeyed for a spot at the counter overlooking Broadway while Leonard went to order.
“Have you told him?” Sam whispered.
Alice shook her head.
“But he, like, knows stuff,” Sam said. “About this.”
“What do you mean? Like, Time Brothers? Sam. That’s a book. It’s fiction. And, like, goofy fiction. It’s literally about brothers who time-travel and solve low-level crimes.”
“But maybe that, like, made it happen? Do you have a rusty car somewhere?” Sam’s eyes got wide. “Maybe the car is disguised as, like, your bathroom.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“Oh, now I’m the one saying something crazy, sure,” Sam said, and rolled her eyes. Leonard squeezed past the people lined up behind them and set down four hot dogs, two with ketchup and mustard and two with sauerkraut and onions. “My favorite vegetables,” he said.
“Dad, I have never seen you eat something green that wasn’t, like, Blue No. 5 and Yellow No. 8 mixed together,” Alice said. Leonard swiveled back to the counter to pick up their drinks.
“Just ask him,” Sam said through gritted teeth.
“Not yet,” Alice said, and then smiled at her dad as he set his elbows on the counter on her other side. She took a bite of her hot dog and it tasted exactly the same as it always had, like heaven. Leonard closed his eyes as he ate, clearly enjoying his lunch as much as she was enjoying hers. Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.
* * *
? ? ?
When they were finished, they walked up Amsterdam toward Emack & Bolio’s for ice cream, dodging other clumps of families and tourists coming from the Museum of Natural History up the block. It was a birthday celebration Alice could have had at five years old or ten years old or as an adult. Taxis swerved to collect passengers from the corners, and all the other cars honked in great choruses of displeasure, as if they didn’t understand how things worked. Everyone on the sidewalk looked straight ahead, or at their friends, or at the clouds of pigeons descending to feast on some particularly delicious garbage in the crosswalk, someone’s dropped lunch.
Inside the empty ice cream shop, Alice and Sam peered into the glass cases and chose elaborate concoctions—scoops of mint chip and double chocolate with hot fudge and rainbow sprinkles for Alice, scoops of pistachio and strawberry with whipped cream for Sam, and a large cup of cookie dough for Leonard. They sat at a small round table, their knees crowded together underneath.
“What do you write, at night?” Alice asked her dad. She dug her spoon into the massive heap of sugar in front of her. The sound of her father working—guitars wailing through the speakers, his slippered feet shuffling down the hall, his fingers punching away at the keyboard—was as comforting to her as a white noise machine. It meant he was there, he was writing, and that he was happy, in his way.
“Who, me?” Leonard asked.
“Yes, you,” Alice said. The hot fudge had hardened into very slow lava, and it clung to the weak plastic spoon.
“Stories. Ideas. Different things.”
Alice nodded. This was where she had always left it, before Leonard began to bristle, before she began prying. “So why not publish it? Obviously, any publisher in New York would buy it. Even if it was garbage.”
Leonard put a hand on his heart. “You wound me.”