“Wouldn’t that be nicer than reality,” she says back. You like her right away because she says what’s on her mind. She’s wearing a white T-shirt that’s just a little see-through. You can make out the sunburn on her chest and the faint gray of her bra. Her shirt’s tucked into a black skirt with a tight waistband. The black skirt is long, all the way to her calves, like she’s Amish or Hasidic. But then she’s wearing these cute little red shoes on her feet and you know she’s just weird in the broader sense. Her left hand has four gold rings on it. She sees you staring and puts it in her pocket. Then she sighs a little, and you have to stop yourself from moving closer to breathe her air.
“Look, I’m obviously not wanting to talk about it,” she says.
“I don’t know about that. Otherwise you would have left already. But it’s cool. I understand.” Beads of sweat appear on her lip and she blinks. “My apartment’s just there.” You beckon vaguely in the direction of Prince Street. “If you want some water.”
“The bodega’s just there,” she goes. She waves in the opposite direction, toward a green-and-white-striped awning down the block off Houston, where the quieter streets wind away from the chaos of Broadway-Lafayette house boutiques and cafés and stores. Sassy.
“But my water doesn’t cost four dollars.”
“You’re not some creep, are you?”
“Nope. Just a guy with free water who has a quick break in between Comparative Lit and Nichomachean Ethics,” you say. You know that’ll get her, the school thing. You know it’ll make you sound safe. (Because you’re not.) You shake your head hard.
“You okay?” she wants to know.
“Let’s go,” you say. “Where else do you have to be?”
“I was going to get a cab,” she says. “To nowhere. I’m moving my stuff out of my boyfriend’s dorm. I was living with him all summer. We just broke up.”
“You have nowhere to go?”
“I have nowhere to go. Nowhere to be, either.”
“Good thing I found you, then.” You grab the other suitcase and start walking. You don’t look back because you can feel her behind you. You feel like, This is it. This is the new reality. And a surge of ecstasy goes through you, just because it’s even possible to create a new reality in the space of a set of stairs.
Turns out Aubrey’s parents have no idea she was living with the boyfriend. He’s a freshman at NYU and she normally lives in Illinois, but she got an unpaid internship in New York City to be with him. She’s about to start her senior year in high school. The ex-boyfriend was from high school, a year ahead. He threw her cell phone at the wall when he broke up with her, approximately forty-seven minutes before you offered to help with her bags. Her parents think she’s been living at her friend Rae’s, but she can’t even go there because Rae has a boyfriend, a little sister in town, and a dog Aubrey’s allergic to.
She tells you all this while you’re sitting in your studio. (You have an East Village studio because your parents still wipe your ass for you.) You keep your studio blank, like a canvas, aside from some furniture that was there when you moved in. You do it on purpose because who knows who you’ll feel like being when you wake up? Say you wake up to a poster of the Knicks and you just fucking hate the New York Knicks that day? So you keep it all blank, zen. Plus you’re in town for, like, six weeks. It’s just not enough time to commit.
“You can stay in my bed and I can stay on my blowup mattress,” you tell her. “Till you get a place.” You’re not going to kiss her yet. She’s not that kind of girl. You want to be the kind of guy that’s right for her kind of girl.
“No way,” she says. “I don’t do spontaneity.” She means it, you can tell. She pokes her pinky through the handle of the yellow coffee mug you’ve given her, filled to the brim with iced coffee, the Stumptown brand they sell in glass bottles at the bodega. She pokes her finger in, she pokes it out. You wonder if she’s teasing you. (She’s not; you’re just being an asshole.) You want to kiss her. Her eyelashes are so long, they rest against her cheeks even when she’s just looking down. She’s thinking.
“I think I’ll probably just go home,” she says. “The internship was at Condé Nast, and I wasn’t getting paid anyway. It was just a front for getting out here. It’s not like I want to get into publishing. I was only out here for Kevin.”