There he was.
Olive skin that hadn’t seen a clogged pore in two decades, copper eyes that tugged at the world’s heartstrings, trademark chiseled jawline that threatened to break into a million-dollar smile. There. He. Was. It wasn’t the photo of the first guy I ever loved that sent my body into a tailspin—I had grown accustomed to seeing his image everywhere. It was the headline. I hovered over my phone; eyes unblinking on the article: “Asher Reyes Set to Adapt On the Other Side.”
The headline punched like closed fists on my heart. I hadn’t spoken to Asher since I was seventeen years old, yet my first thought was: How could he not have told me? How could Asher Reyes not have called me with this information?
All at once, I was flooded with a memory that had been tucked away—lost amid eighteen years of navigating a sea of men that never held me the way Asher Reyes did. Years of awkward first dates, forgettable one-night stands, intense short-lived relationships, and unrequited pining. Long before my complicated relationship with love, Asher Reyes made me a promise. Yes, we were only teenagers, but the way he and I said things to each other…Asher Reyes and Maggie Vine made blood oaths look casual.
He promised. But instead of finding me before midnight on my thirty-fifth birthday, he was dangling the glittery parts of my adolescence in front of my face.
“Maggie? You still there?” asked Summer on the other end of the line.
“Yeah, give me a second.”
I silently reread the last line of the article: “‘We’ve got our lead, and the next step before production is to go out to a few different producers and songwriters for music—which is obviously one of the most important parts of this beautiful story,’ says Reyes.”
Obviously. I sat up farther and scooted to the tower of books chaotically stacked next to my bed. I bypassed the IVF pamphlet taunting me on my nightstand—a reminder of the baby I couldn’t afford and the time I didn’t have left to try. My fingers found the weathered copy of a book, On the Other Side. I hesitated, then delicately opened it, wet eyes blinking back the inscription in messy black-ink cursive, “To My Maggie, Love Daddio.” My father bought this book at an indie bookstore in Boston—a recommendation from the bookseller whose favorite aunt had written the novel. He gave it to me for my eleventh birthday solely because the main character was a singer. But she became more than that for me. She became fictional proof that you can do what you love and be loved.
I leafed through the dog-eared and underlined pages—the glitter gel pen notes written in the margins. The only person who this story was “obvious” to was me…and maybe six other people. I loved it that way.
When I was a kid, The New Yorker did a write-up about my mom’s favorite neighborhood hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Overnight, our quiet dinner spot became overcrowded. The food tasted the same, but the atmosphere was different. Fury swirled inside me at the thought of Asher doing this to my favorite book. I was an artsy gatekeeper: the things I loved that the masses didn’t yet have their fingers on felt like they were made for me. It was a false sense of ownership, a defense mechanism—like sticking your nose in the air and telling people you sobbed to “All Too Well” in 2012, or you saw Hamilton off-Broadway.
The pain inside me morphed into a raw energy. It was as if I could glean a hint of sunlight under a closed door. And like a moth who kept coming back for more fire and pain, I asked Summer for a favor.
“Can you get me to Asher Reyes?”
If Asher Reyes wasn’t going to find me, I would go find him.
11
FOURTEEN
I WAS AN ADULT TRAPPED in a kid’s body, and everything was the end of the world. I was intense and serious about one thing: music. There was no point in frivolous pursuits—such as the pursuit of friends or an active social life. My peers were lawless creatures who wanted to scratch every hormonal itch. I was a scholarship kid who navigated the oak halls of my Upper West Side prep school with my lungs sucked in and headphones around my ears. I could only exhale once I was behind the closed doors of my tiny childhood bedroom—guitar slung around my freckled neck, eyes shut inside my own little fantasyland. I had no real friends, unless I counted my English teacher, Mrs. Churchill, or my guitar teacher, Mr. Cunningham. They were the ones I spent my lunch periods with, where I ate vending machine candy and word-vomited to adults who recognized that I did not belong to the age group I was forced to walk with. I was misunderstood, and I didn’t want to overextend myself so that people I couldn’t care less about might understand me.
Not helping the end of my freshman year was the fact that my father had decided to offset his lack of in-person parenting by shelling out cash for me to go to sleepaway camp. Instead of spending the summer in Boston with him, he was sending me to an art-based sleepaway camp in the middle-of-nowhere Connecticut, where I could be among other weirdos. My father had moved from Queens to Boston when I was nine, so I spent summers with him to make up for the other three seasons. Unlike my mother and I, my dad and I got along like two peas in a pod. He taught me tricks on the guitar, let me jam in the living room until 1 a.m., took me to concerts, and made me cackle. I adored everything about him, when I was with him. When I wasn’t, I felt like there was a hole in my heart where a parent should be. He was always just an arm’s length away, but never in my company long enough for me to grip on to him with both hands. When he put me on the bus to camp, I was instantly homesick for the time we wouldn’t get together, and my chest ached with the possibility that he didn’t feel the same way.
I stepped off the bus into Buck’s Rock Camp with tears in my throat, but all at once, they disappeared. My wide eyes found lanky kids with guitars slung around their backs, with colorful paint under their nails, and cameras in their hands. Every part of me lit up—this was belonging. Instead of putting on headphones and walking with my head down, my body felt like it was outstretched: opened wide to the world. This was how Maggie Vine was meant to live.
* * *
MY COUNSELOR SAID IT WAS an unusual heat wave, but it was only the second day of camp, so I had almost nothing to compare it to. All I knew was that the June air was so stifling that the tiniest breeze did more harm than good, pooling winds of fresh-cut grass and wildflowers from the surrounding Connecticut fields into the back of my throat until my eyes stung. The heat soaked the front of my red floral dress and effortlessly upended my efforts at taming my untamable hair—beachy curls framing my face. I sat on the stage of the open-air arena, looking out at a grassy field surrounded by a purple lupine meadow. My bony legs swung back and forth as I aimlessly plucked my guitar. There was one song I hadn’t been able to stop singing, and goddamnit, it wasn’t mine. Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” had taken over my universe and frozen me in a state of writer’s block. I was unable to come up with anything better. I was jealous of every yearning verse and the sweeping melody. I longed to write a love song like it—one that tasted like dark chocolate. And then I found out it wasn’t actually a love song, which made me envy the words even more. Before leaving for camp that summer, I listened to an interview on the radio with Train’s lead singer, Pat Monahan. “Drops of Jupiter” was about his mother, who had died of cancer. He imagined her returning from all the joys of heaven, only to reveal that we shouldn’t take the little things on earth for granted. I was desperate to find someone else in my atmosphere to make this premonition come true. I wanted nothing more than to have feelings so strong that even the idea of heaven would feel “overrated.” I was tired of thinking of soulmates as a hypothetical.