“Nah, I think my mom blocks those channels,” Diego joked.
“Anyway,” Ethan continued, ignoring our snickering, “Catherine doesn’t do it because she’s crazy, she just realizes she can never have him, or the kind of life she wants. It’s about the choices you make when you feel desperate and trapped.”
“I felt trapped watching that,” you said, rolling your eyes and jiggling your jaw from side to side. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.”
“You have to see it,” Ethan said, turning to me as you scampered off, clutching your bag. “I think you could really use it for Rodolpho’s motivation at the end.”
“Hold up, does your play end with murder-suicide, too?” Joy asked. “Because I thought ballets were depressing, but damn. This was worse than Swan Lake.”
“It’s . . . more nuanced,” I said, mostly for Ethan’s benefit. Really I wasn’t sure I understood how someone could hurl themselves off a bridge just from wanting someone. I mean, I wanted you, but not that badly. Yet. Maybe Ethan was right, and I needed to study some unstable types, although people watching was more my speed than movie watching. It had always been a habit of mine, since I was little, to pick someone out of a crowd and try to imagine what it would be like to be them, sort of a Choose Your Own Adventure—I’d start with the shoes or the walk or some other detail and then let my imagination spin out from there. There were a dozen people standing around me in the lobby at that moment who I could use: The middle-aged man with the pleated jeans and slight limp, who would go home to Queens to care for his disabled brother; the twentysomething hipster couple with matching asymmetrical pixie cuts who might get into a fight on the train, and then, back on the sidewalk, she’d walk ahead of him, fighting tears, while he silently smoked a hand-rolled cigarette. Most of my made-up stories had depressing trajectories, which was something my therapist in L.A. would have called “worth exploring.”
“Hey, Roth, you coming or what?” Ethan called.
I hadn’t noticed that everyone had started walking without me and were almost at the exit. Diego, who had put on Joy’s earmuffs, seemed to be doing some kind of impression of her, and she was snatching at them while Ethan laughed.
I felt you next to me before you said anything—as you pulled your hood up, the fur brushed my cheek, soft and prickly at the same time. I almost jumped.
“Think they’ll ever do it?” you asked, looking up at me with eyes that seemed anime-wide all of a sudden.
My cheeks lit up with heat. “What?” I sputtered.
“Joy and Diego,” you said. “I mean, it’s so obvious.”
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling my hat on. “He’s taking his time, I think. Waiting for the right moment.”
“Waiting is overrated,” you said with a smile.
“Jesus Christ, come on, you need a formal invitation?” Ethan yelled. He was already holding the door, and a gust of frigid February air snaked into the lobby. We started down the carpet.
“For future reference,” you whispered, “if you’re ever planning a jailbreak, you could at least take me with you.”
“Yeah well . . .” I shrugged apologetically. “Every man for himself, I guess.”
You scrunched up your nose in playful indignation as we reached Ethan and he cut in, taking your arm as you stepped gingerly out onto the ice of West Houston Street in your high-heeled boots. I felt my spirits lift in a way that felt like both a relief and a warning.
I couldn’t make the feelings I had for you disappear, but I could leash them temporarily. At least until the play was over, I told myself.
It’s hard to think back to when it all felt like such a game. I didn’t realize then that you were right—that waiting wasn’t always a virtue.
Sometimes, waiting is just the difference between being able to save someone, and being too late.
Chapter Eleven
February 12
90 days left
“LAST-SECOND CLUB SWITCH there by Mickelson . . . he’s got the ball below his feet, an awkward stance in this fairway bunker . . .”
We were in the living room the next morning, Dad, Pop-Pop, and me, watching golf on ESPN despite the fact that I would literally have preferred to do anything else, including my art history homework or bringing dirty boxer shorts to the building’s basement laundry room, which could have been used as a location for one of the Saw movies with zero set decoration.