It had started out slow—a few hours after you’d left, I wrote something like, Thanks for listening to me play my tiny violin. You didn’t respond right away, which sent me into a brief panic, but then around ten P.M. you’d texted, U are fucking awesome and I love ur violin—play you mine sometime? which had the approximate effect of six 5-hour Energy shots taken back to back.
Then it was on, kind of. Really it was on and off, over and over, like a little kid playing with a light switch. We never talked much at school, but walking to the subway after rehearsals had become pure torture. Neither of us could say anything without a teasing smile, and it had gotten to the point where I could barely look at you half the time, because being with you made me feel drunk, which was almost the same as feeling brave, which brought me dangerously close to telling you how I felt. I could restrain myself for the duration of the ride to 86th, at which point I usually texted you some stupid joke with a winking emoji just to keep it going. (There was always plausible deniability with the winking emoji—it was just silly, unless it wasn’t, and who could tell?) Then I’d wait for one of your middle-of-the-night missives, never bothering to wonder why you were always awake at two or three or even four A.M. They’d always wake me up because I deliberately turned the ringer volume to the loudest setting, just in case. I barely slept.
Valentine’s Day was a landmine. I didn’t see you all morning but couldn’t resist sending a text: Do you think Hallmark knows how gross-looking real hearts are? [wink]. Then, when I showed up at the fountain for lunch, you were holding a gigantic bouquet of roses and wearing a necklace Ethan had gotten you, a little heart pendant with cute penmanship spelling out the words FUCK OFF.
“It’s what you’ve been telling me for years,” he said with a self-satisfied grin, but instead of rolling your eyes like you usually did, you actually hopped up and kissed him on the cheek. I felt like someone had sucker punched me; I hadn’t really believed you were dating him until that second, and suddenly it was right in my face. FUCK OFF.
Dad says that when I was a kid and something didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I’d cross my arms defiantly and scream that the day was ruined. Of course it was bullshit, and the next second I’d be playing Legos and popping fruit snacks like it never happened. But that day, Valentine’s Day? That was ruined. I was a dick to everyone all afternoon. I took the message of the necklace literally. I blew off rehearsal, bought some weed from a guy in my English class, and went home to get baked. It felt great, not feeling anything. For once I didn’t wake up when your reply came at 3:46 A.M.: an animated gif of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sitting on the windowsill, one foot in her apartment and one on the fire escape, strumming her guitar. Wherever you’re going, the text on the photo said, I’m going your way.
After that things went back to normal, normal being a total mindfuck. Our scene work was better than ever, off the charts.
I felt bad that I was going to Staten Island because Ethan was so excited about it, and because I was basically just using it as a recon mission to see if I needed to feel bad about being infatuated with you and to find out if he had seen you naked. But apparently there was a guest bedroom, with a real mattress and (presumably) no old-man smell, so at least, I told myself, that was something.
? ? ?
I’d imagined that the boat ride might be kind of cool—the big city dwindling down to a speck in the distance, Lady Liberty looming large—but when we got there at 5:30 the ferry terminal was completely mobbed, so much so that I wondered briefly, as I filed onto the boat behind him, pressed so tight against his back by the crowd that some of his hair got in my mouth, if Ethan was giving me some kind of method lesson for the play about the immigrant experience.
“At rush hour on a Friday, it’s worse than the subway!” Ethan shouted.
We stumbled to the western side of the boat, where we stood shoulder to shoulder with businessmen in big-shouldered wool coats holding sloshing cups of foamy beer in their hands.
“I can’t believe you do this every day, man,” I said.
“I don’t,” Ethan said, rubbing his hands together. “I take a chartered bus.”
“Then why the hell—”
“The experience!” he said. “This is an experience. The bus is just a bus.”