I Have Lost My Way

by Gayle Forman

  “I’m famished,” Freya announces when she returns to the boys, even though she’s not remotely hungry. “Where should we eat?”

  She uses her imperious voice in the hope that it makes it sound like lunch has been on the books for weeks. She’s trying to hide the fact that if these two strangers say no, Freya, who has millions of friends, won’t have a single soul to keep her company today.

  She looks at Harun. He’s been her ally so far today. Will he come along?

  “There’s a diner nearby,” he says, and Freya wants to hug him. “I’ve been there before. It’s not too expensive, not that you . . .” He stumbles and reddens. “The food’s good, and they don’t care if you stay a while.”

  “Perfect,” Freya says. Harun stands up. Nathaniel remains seated.

  “Are you coming?” Freya asks. Part of being a good vocalist is making your voice project feelings you don’t necessarily possess, so Freya makes her voice sound authoritative even though she is sick at the prospect that Nathaniel will say no and her whole flimsy plan will collapse and they’ll go their separate ways, leaving Freya all alone.

  “Unless you’re not hungry?” Harun says when Nathaniel doesn’t answer. Freya wants to smack him for even giving Nathaniel the opening of an out. Doesn’t he see how hard she’s trying? How much she needs this?

  “No, I’m hungry,” Nathaniel admits.

  * * *

  — — —

  Nathaniel is not hungry. He is ravenous. He hasn’t eaten a hot meal in more than two weeks. More than that, he hasn’t shared a meal with another person in two weeks.

  But that’s not the kind of thing you say. Not out loud. Not when the going is, at least temporarily, good.

  * * *

  — — —

  Nathaniel is hungry. Freya is ridiculously relieved. “Cool,” she says, toning down her enthusiasm now that agreement has been reached. “Let’s go eat.”

  * * *

  — — —

  The waiter at the diner is a crabby old Greek whose rudeness never wavers, whether you order a cup of tea or a steak dinner (which James did one time for them to share—a mistake, in retrospect—it had the consistency of rope), who administers a fish eye whether you eat and go within a half hour or stay for hours. For this reason, it was one of their favorite spots.

  James would flirt with the waiter, even though it never made a dent. Still, he was determined. “I can win anyone over,” he said, giving Harun a look to show just which anyone he was referring to.

  There’s no reason to think he might be here. Even though it’s a Thursday. James probably didn’t come downtown today. Why would he? But if he had, if he were here . . . Harun imagines it. Walking in with Freya. Delivering James this gift. He would not be able to refuse it. They would kiss. The crabby waiter would finally smile.

  James isn’t here. The waiter is frowning.

  The place is mostly empty. One old guy who’s always at the counter. A booth full of girls. The table in the corner—the one they sat at because it was next to the bathroom and seemed the least desirable and therefore the least objectionable to commandeer for whole afternoons of ordering only soup—is empty.

  They sit down in a booth. The cranky waiter delivers the menus with a long-suffering sigh and slaps down three waters, sloshing them all over the Manhattan-map placemats.

  The menu is a species typical of New York diners, which is to say pages and pages long with laminated pictures of food that are always much more appetizing than the real-life offerings. Harun normally gets the soup. There is only so wrong you can go with soup. Also, a bowl of soup costs five dollars and the cranky waiter is oddly generous with the crackers.

  Nathaniel stares at the smudged pictures of omelets and burgers and skyscraper sandwiches with deep concentration. Freya, who claimed to be so hungry, hasn’t even looked at the menu. She’s frowning at her phone.

  “Order?” the waiter asks, tapping his pen against the pad as if he has dozens of other places to be, dozens of other tables to service.

  “I’ll have the minestrone soup,” Harun says.

  “Cup or bowl?”

  “Cup.”

  The waiter grunts. “You?” he asks Nathaniel.

  Nathaniel is looking at the menu with a bewildered expression. “Uhh, the same, I guess.”

  Ammi sometimes talked about what it was like when she moved to America to marry Abu. She’d studied English in school, but it turned out to be completely insufficient for carrying on actual conversations. She learned by parroting what the natives said. When Harun realizes that’s exactly what Nathaniel just did, he deeply regrets ordering the soup.

  “I’ll have a Cobb salad, no bacon, no egg, dressing on the side,” Freya says, looking about as pleased with her order as Harun is with his.

  “Two cups of minestrone and a dry Cobb,” the waiter repeats, already starting to leave.

  He’s halfway back to the kitchen when Freya calls out, “Wait. I changed my mind.”

  Harun braces for the waiter’s ire. And sure enough, he returns with a murderous expression on his face.

  “Sorry,” Freya says, smiling at him, as if trying the “kill ’em with kindness” strategy. It doesn’t work for her either.

  “I’d like a grilled cheese on rye bread with tomatoes.” She licks her lips. “And American cheese. It has to be American.”

  “Salad or fries?” the waiter asks.

  Freya hesitates for a second. “Fuck it,” she decides. “Fries. Extra crispy.”

  “Extra crispy?” the waiter asks.

  “Yeah, put them through the deep fryer twice.”

  The waiter appears horrified by this.

  “And a side of honey.”

  “Honey?”

  “For the fries.”

  The waiter looks even more horrified.

  Freya smiles.

  Harun looks at Nathaniel, gaunt Nathaniel, and feels his hunger as if it were his own, though his appetite vanished when James told him to get the fuck out his life. Knowing the risks, he calls the waiter back. By the look on his face, Harun is fairly certain one of them is going to have their meal adorned with a healthy side of spit.

  “I would like the same as her,” Harun says.

  “You want what she’s having?” The waiter is incredulous, as if he knows that Harun doesn’t even like grilled cheese sandwiches.

  “Exactly. Fries extra crispy.”

  “You want honey too?”

  “Sure,” Harun says. He looks at Nathaniel, thinks of Ammi doing as the natives do. “Should we just make it three?”

  There’s a look on Nathaniel’s face—relief, gratitude—and Harun wonders why it fills him with shame.

  * * *

  — — —

  When the food comes, Nathaniel is overcome by the force of his appetite. His last meal was six bags of airplane pretzels stolen off the cart and hastily eaten in the tiny lavatory.

  He’s nearly undone by the tastes of the food. The ooze of melting cheese on his tongue, the tiny caraway seeds that explode under the force of his molars, the delightful sweetness of honey with french fries, which Freya has insisted both he and Harun try, holding the fry so close to Nathaniel’s mouth that it is a minor miracle he doesn’t eat her finger too.

  It’s only when he looks up and sees Freya and Harun staring at him with similarly peculiar expressions that he understands he has done something wrong, revealed the wild man within him (Don’t tell your mother). He looks down at his barren plate. He’s devoured everything: the sandwich, the fries, the pickle, even the wilted lettuce that he realizes was meant for garnish. Meanwhile, neither Freya nor Harun has eaten even half of their sandwiches.

  He is mortified. He’s been too long out of this world. He’s become uncivilized.

  Just us, buddy.

  Wordlessly, Har
un takes half of his sandwich and puts it on Nathaniel’s plate. Freya does the same.

  Nathaniel protests, but they cut him off.

  “I’m not hungry,” Harun says.

  “Neither am I,” Freya admits.

  Nathaniel stares at his magically replenished plate. “If you weren’t hungry, why did you order all this food?” he asks.

  There’s a pause as Freya and Harun glance at each other. Then they look at him. “Because you were,” they say.

  * * *

  — — —

  Nathaniel excuses himself to use the bathroom.

  There, in a stall no bigger than the one on the airplane where he consumed his last meal, he pinches the skin above his nose to keep the tears from coming.

  Then he pulls out his phone and calls his father.

  * * *

  — — —

  When he comes out, something is different.

  For one, a cluster of girls surrounds the table. But the thing that’s really changed is Freya. He doesn’t know how to explain it, only that she looks like a different person. He steps tentatively closer and hears the girls squealing, recalling how the girls at school used to cheer like that when he hit a fly ball deep into left field, back when he was at least half a human.

  “Oh my god, it is you!” one of the girls is saying. “I told you so! I told you it was her,” she tells her friends.

  “I know. But, like, what is Freya doing in our diner?”

  “Can we get your autograph?” the third girl asks, brandishing a pen.

  “Sure,” Freya says.

  A piece of binder paper is produced. “Can you do one to Violet. One to McKenzie, capital M, capital K, and no a. And one to Gia. That’s me.”

  “Her real name is Gina.”

  “Shut up!” Gia/Gina turns to Freya. “Gia is my stage name.”

  Freya nods.

  “Is Freya a stage name?” Gia asks.

  “Nope,” she says.

  “You’re so lucky to have such a good name.”

  Freya smiles a tight smile, hands the paper back.

  “I’m going to get this framed,” Gia says.

  “Put it somewhere safe,” McKenzie says. “It’s going to be worth money when she becomes huge.”

  To this, Freya frowns.

  “Not that I’ll sell your autograph,” McKenzie quickly corrects.

  When the autographs are done, the girls ask for a selfie. Freya has to get out of the booth to arrange herself with them. Nathaniel takes the opportunity to sit down next to Harun.

  “What’s happening?” he asks.

  “They’re fans.”

  “Fans of what?”

  “Freya.”

  Nathaniel is also a fan of Freya. He’s become quite a big fan in the past few hours, but he still doesn’t understand who these girls are.

  “Have you not heard of Freya?” Harun asks.

  Nathaniel shakes his head.

  Harun shows Nathaniel a video on his phone. There, on the tiny screen, but somehow larger than life, is Freya.

  “It’s an older song,” Harun says. “It’s James’s . . .” he stops. “It’s my favorite.”

  Nathaniel glances at Harun’s phone, back at Freya, back at the girl on the screen.

  “That’s her?” he asks Harun.

  “I know. Of all the people to fall on you.”

  But that’s not what he means. He doesn’t know how to reconcile this person on the screen with the person in the park who whispered his name, who knew things about him.

  According to Harun, though, Freya is apparently some sort of singer, known, beloved. He only half hears this because he’s fixated on the person on the screen. How is she the same person he’s been with all afternoon? And why does this song sound familiar? Where would he have heard it?

  As if the on-screen Freya has registered his disbelief, she stops playing piano and turns toward the camera. As she taps out a beat on the piano bench, singing without accompaniment, she once again becomes the Freya Nathaniel recognizes. In a warm, husky voice that sounds like the one that whispered into Nathaniel’s ear before, she sings:

  If you can’t see

  Turn to me.

  I see well enough

  For the both of us.

  Everything around him goes quiet, and for a second, Nathaniel is back in the forest, blindfolded, and when he returns to the diner, he is certain that this song was written for him. Obviously, it wasn’t. He’s never met Freya before, and why would she, or anyone, write a song for him? But for that one fleeting second, he’s as sure of this as he is of anything in his life.

  The girls, having procured their autographs and photographs, begin to depart, but after a brief whispered conference they are back.

  “Okay, you can totally say no,” Gia says, “but we usually come here with our friend Sasha. Like, every day. It’s our spot. So normally Sasha would be with us today. But she’s sick, so she didn’t come to school.”

  “And it’s her birthday,” Violet adds.

  “That’s too bad,” Freya says, “to be sick on your birthday.”

  “I know, right? She’s going to die when she hears what she missed.”

  Freya nods, commiserating.

  “Could you, like, record her a message?”

  “Please!” McKenzie says.

  “Sure.”

  Gia aims the phone at Freya. “Hi, Sasha. Hope you feel better and have a happy birthday.”

  The girls exchange a look. “Could you maybe sing for her?” Gia asks.

  Nathaniel feels it, a lurch in his gut, before he looks up and sees that Freya, who has been good-natured and generous, suddenly looks pained.

  “I don’t think so,” she is saying.

  “Nothing major. Just sing ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  Freya hesitates, the look on her face traveling from discomfort to despair, a route Nathaniel knows so well he could traverse it blindfolded.

  “And we wouldn’t post it on social media or anything,” Violet promises.

  “Umm, I really don’t think I should,” Freya says.

  Nathaniel hears the song again. It’s already familiar, something he’s always known.

  * * *

  — — —

  “Well, that was very rude,” Harun says after the girls leave. “You were so nice to them, and they just kept asking for more.”

  He sounds like James, who would sometimes monitor how people were reacting to Freya as if he were her personal protector. Which, to his mind, he was. He’d discovered Freya singing “I Will Survive” the day his father kicked him out of the house, and he felt like she was singing to him. He’d posted something in the comments, not something he’d ever done before or since: Not sure I WILL survive. And Freya herself had replied: Yes, you will. You might not believe it, but I do. And from that moment on, James was all in.

  “And asking you to sing. Do you even think there is a Sasha?” Harun continues. “I mean, you’re not some performing monkey, are you?” he adds, even though forty minutes ago, he had imagined James being in the diner and Freya singing one of her songs for him and James forgiving him. “That must get so tiresome. Sometimes you must wish for everyone to leave you alone.”

  * * *

  — — —

  This is not what she wishes. It’s what she fears.

  Your numbers will drop. Your fans will forget you.

  And then what? Who’s left?

  Freya looks down and begins to cry.

  * * *

  — — —

  Nathaniel reaches out and brushes the tear from Freya’s cheek.

  I see well enough

  For the both of us.

  And at that moment, Nathaniel hears well enough for the both of them.

  “You can�
�t sing,” Nathaniel says.

  * * *

  — — —

  Freya has been ordered not to tell anyone about her current issues. Hayden has warned her that it alters the narrative they’ve worked so hard to create for Freya. Freya is tough. Freya is unstoppable. Freya is destiny. “Don’t tell anyone. Not your fans or your friends,” Hayden warned.

  What friends? Her fans are her friends.

  She looks at Nathaniel and Harun, staring at her with a mix of terror and tenderness. Staring at her not like strangers but something like friends.

  “I can’t sing,” she says.

  * * *

  — — —

  “What do you mean you can’t sing?” Harun is distraught. If Freya can’t sing, everything falls apart. If she can’t sing, how will he get James back?

  “I mean I can’t sing,” she says. “When I try, when I even think about trying, my voice gets all strangled.”

  “Maybe you’re fatigued from being in the studio and recording your album.”

  “I haven’t been in the studio for three weeks,” she replies.

  “But the photos . . .” Not one week ago, he and James had seen photos of her accompanied by updates about how well everything was going.

  “They were taken before,” she says. “Posted to keep up the facade. Until I got my voice back.”

  “But you will get it back? And finish?”

  She shakes her head. “Maybe not.”

  Harun imagines James finding out about Freya and the incomplete album, and though he only just met her and clearly has nothing to do with it, it feels like his fault, somehow.

  Tears spring to his eyes. As a child he wept so often that his older brothers teased him and Ammi scolded him. “Why do you cry so much? Not even your sister cries so much.” Without anyone telling him, he knew the tears carried his secret the way blood carries DNA. He learned not to cry. Even with James, he did not cry. Not even when James did and he thought it would kill him.