Then I texted Lily. Where are you?
And I received the response: If she hadn’t left her phone behind, do you really think I’d be texting you?
Which is how I realized that Lily was, like, gone.
Ordinarily, it would be no big deal if a teenager missed her curfew. It’s practically a rite of passage. But Lily had never exhibited even a sprig of rumspringa, especially since she knew how much it would worry her grandfather if she didn’t return home one night.
So we were worried.
I called around to our friends, but nobody had seen her. Langston gave me periodic updates, and said his family phone tree had been activated.
Eleven o’clock, and still no word from her.
Midnight, and still no word from her.
Who’s Edgar Thibaud? Langston texted.
Some jerk, I replied. Then added, Why?
Just wondering if he would know where Lily was.
Why?
No reason.
That seemed weird. I had no idea that Edgar Thibaud and Lily were still in contact—but that was certainly what Langston’s question implied.
I filed that away.
12:30—no word.
1:00—no word.
It was hard to sleep. I dozed on and off, waking up every hour to get word from Langston.
2:00—no word.
3:00—police notified.
4:00—calling around to hospitals.
5:00—no word.
6:00—A sighting! Staten Island.
6:01—I text to Langston: So we’re going to Staten Island, right?
6:01:30—Right.
—
As I got dressed—as I explained to my sleeping mother why I had to skip school today, as I left the apartment and headed downtown to catch the ferry—all I could think was, This has to be my fault. A better boyfriend would have prevented his girlfriend from disappearing. A better boyfriend wouldn’t have given his girlfriend any reason to disappear. He wouldn’t have burned down her Christmas party. He would’ve known how to read her even if she was acting unreadable.
Where are you, Lily? I kept thinking.
—
“It’s all my fault.”
Langston did not look happy to be telling me this. He also looked like he felt he had to.
“Why do you say that?” I asked. We were standing on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, even though it was really too cold and too early to be standing on the deck. The boat was pushing away from the dock, and our own batteries were just starting to get out of park. While there were plenty of people who’d gotten off in Manhattan to head to their skyscraper jobs, there weren’t that many people heading toward Staten Island at this hour. We were getting everything backwards.
At first, I didn’t think Langston was going to answer me—enough time went by that I started to wonder if we’d actually said anything at all, or if it was just my Lily-is-gone delirium that was inducing imaginary conversations. But then Langston lifted his right hand and showed me a gold ring he was wearing on his pinky.
“Benny and I decided to start taking what we have seriously. Which means moving in together. And moving in together means moving out of the building I’ve been living in most of my life. I told Lily about it yesterday, and she didn’t take it well. I knew she wouldn’t…but I guess I’d hoped that I’d be wrong. That she’d understand. But why would she understand?”
“Are you saying that she couldn’t understand because she isn’t, you know, in the kind of lasting relationship that, say, you and Benny are in?”
Langston shook his head. “Not everything I say is a rebuke to you, you know.”
“No. Maybe it’s just a buke. And then when you repeat it in twenty minutes, that will be the rebuke.”
Langston whistled a note and looked out over the water, as if maybe the Statue of Liberty was going to sympathize with him for being stuck with me.
“The funny thing,” he said, still facing the bay, “is that Lily’s the only person I know who’s as high-strung as you are. Thinking is your favorite thing to do, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s endearing but sometimes it’s completely exhausting.”
It wasn’t like Langston to concede that Lily and I had anything in common. So I decided to take this as a compliment. And at the same time, I decided not to press the point.
I followed Langston’s glance and stared out at the water, too. At Ellis Island. At the receding giants sitting on the downtown shore. Anyone who’s lived in Manhattan all his life always feels torn whenever he leaves it. There’s the satisfaction of breaking free, for a time. But that’s balanced heavily by the feeling of leaving your whole life behind, and to see it from a distance.