I place the dictionary beside Fitz and unzip my pocket. He watches me pull out my phone, then looks away while I reply to Matt, telling him I’ll find him later.
“Hey,” Fitz says, his voice tentative but even. “Do you think a guy who dreads forgetting the past and a girl who’s focused on the future could, you know, be friends?”
I sit up, pulling my knees to my chest, and look out on the view. Providence glitters brightly, undimmed. A guy who dreads forgetting the past and a girl who’s focused on the future. We’re an improbable coincidence, he’s not wrong there. Two perfectly unlikely people to collide in cities like the one before us, buildings and boulevards bustling with people in motion. “I don’t know,” I say. “But no matter what, I won’t forget tonight. Or you.”
Fitz props himself on his elbows behind me and lets out an audible sigh. “High praise from the girl who remembers everything.”
I blush but throw him a don’t push it glance. “Okay, well, I won’t be completely annoyed when I remember the night a boy I barely knew brought me onto a rooftop in the freezing cold. Better?”
Fitz smiles, his gaze traveling off the roof and toward the city.
“Better.”
Fitz
IT WAS HER idea. While we sat on the rooftop, Juniper took the dictionary from where she’d put it down between us and flipped the book open. I turned to her, questioning. “Lissome,” she read, then let the word sit in the empty night. “I think that’s a good one,” she commented.
Then she dropped the book on my chest. “Your turn.”
We read each other our spontaneous favorites for I don’t know how long. Halcyon. Referring to times of idyllic happiness and tranquility. Bucolic. In a pleasant, often rural place. Propinquity. The property of being close to someone. I feel her shoulder edging nearer to mine, and whether it’s conscious or unconscious, it’s hard not to hope she’ll close the distance. Shoulders brushing through three layers of clothing is practically nothing, but it’s a nothing I really, really want.
I underline one of my early favorites with the pen I keep with me, which I got from the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Juniper notices. From then on, we exchange the pen with every entry, each underlining our choices.
Hours pass. We only head inside when the temperature inches into the bitterly uncomfortable and we fumble to note our entries with numb fingers. While I follow her down the fire escape, Juniper checks her phone. She’s texted a couple times while we’ve flipped through the dictionary, presumably with Matt.
The party is still going strong when we get inside. The hallway is empty except for one obviously miserable student walking into the bathroom in pajamas. It’s whiplash, the contrast of this poorly lit, utterly normal hallway with the intimate vastness of the rooftop. Whatever I had with Juniper up there, it’s a firmly closed book now.
Right before we head downstairs—to the party, to Lewis, to Matt, to diverging roads and different colleges—I pause. “Maybe we’ll see each other again on this trip,” I offer.
“Impossible to say,” she replies without a second’s pause. She smiles, and I know she knows she’s repeating my words from our first conversation, yesterday in Boston.
I watch her walk downstairs—her hips swaying with each step, her brown curls shimmering bronze in the light—committing every detail of her to memory. Memory is likely the only thing she’ll ever be to me.
In an explosion of clarity, I realize I get girls. I understand Lewis’s infatuation with Prisha, with the girls he dated before her, with the girls he’s wanted to date but couldn’t. I even fucking understand the Nicole Kepler thing. If having a girlfriend means nights like this one, conversations in moonlight, quirks and family histories exchanged—not to mention the holy hell rush of her chest brushing my arm and the shampoo-plus-indefinable-girl-ether scent of her body beside me—I definitely understand wanting a girlfriend. I’m ready to go downstairs, find my brother, and admit I’ve been an idiot.
It’s strange, this feeling of understanding a piece of Lewis, of maybe even having something in common with him.
I head down to the basement, searching for signs of him. He isn’t in the hallway of significantly sweatier and sloppier guys clustered around the Ping-Pong tables where I left him. Even if Lewis isn’t exactly the most attentive brother in the universe, I don’t figure he would have left without me. Unless he got very drunk.
On second thought, it’s entirely possible he left without me.
But when I pass by the taproom, I see him. Immediately, I wish he had left me. He’s on the dance floor, swaying side to side with a tall girl in a crop top and tight jeans. They’re pressed together, facing each other, Lewis’s hand resting so low on her back that it’s arguably her butt. He whispers something in her ear, and she laughs. I notice her fingers trailing down his chest.
My stomach turns. I don’t know how I could have thought he and I had anything in common.
It’s classic Lewis. I should’ve known his feelings on girls and relationships would be the furthest thing from the perfect night I had with Juniper. Instead, he’s found one more way to avoid his commitments and forget his life. He has a girlfriend. Yet here he is, in this random fraternity, his hands practically in the jeans of a girl he doesn’t even know. He couldn’t care less about having a connection. For him, it’s nothing except drinking and dancing and hooking up. It’s the curdled-milk version of what I felt on the rooftop, the unpleasant aftertaste.
I’m suddenly sick of it. I liked Prisha. Despite his carefree manner, I even got the feeling Lewis does too. I won’t watch him openly disrespecting her. Disrespecting the entire institution of romance and rooftops and exchanging favorite words in starlight.
I walk right up to them. “Time to leave,” I tell Lewis, pulling him by the arm. “You seem nice,” I say apologetically to the girl. “He has a girlfriend, though.” I haul my incoherently protesting brother from the room, Lewis fumbling over his feet the whole way.
I usher him out the front door. Finally, he pushes me off when we’re crossing the quad.
“I’m fine,” he spits. “Fuck.”
“You’re not fine,” I reply, reaching for him. He fends me off with both hands.
“I was just drying,” he slurs, breathing hard. His brows furrow, like he knows that last word wasn’t the one he meant. “With the music . . . and the songs.”
“You mean dancing.”
“Fitz,” Lewis declares. “You always have the big words.”
Rolling my eyes, I direct us through the campus and toward the hill back to the bed-and-breakfast. It’s a miracle I hold Lewis upright the entire trip, but the miracle doesn’t extend to him holding on to the contents of his stomach. Three bushes bear the consequences.
By the time we’ve returned to the room, I’m thoroughly through with this night. In the doorway, Lewis awkwardly shoves me off. “I’m good,” he says heatedly, his words heavy. “I can take care of myself.”
“Really?” I snap. I don’t know why I don’t hold in my resentment the way I usually do. I guess Lewis’s drunken lack of inhibition is rubbing off on me, or maybe I just know he won’t remember this in the morning. “Did you not notice me carrying you here?” I drop my jacket on the bed. “Thanks for a wonderful first taste of college.”
“No problem.” He waves emptily in my direction and stumbles toward the bathroom. I shake my head, blood pounding in my face. I don’t know what I expected him to say. I don’t know why I expected him to care. If he’d cared, we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.
Lewis clumsily half closes the bathroom door. “Just one night. I just wanted one night,” I hear him mumble under his breath.
One night for what? I kick off my shoes, not caring where they fall. One night to forget his girlfriend? One night to force me to watch his total drunken thoughtlessness? One night to ignore the problems that weigh me d
own whenever I don’t have the wherewithal to distract myself? That’s every night for Lewis. He does whatever he wants, no matter who it hurts.
I lie on the bed and try to tune out the sound of Lewis retching over the toilet. Willing myself to fall asleep, I close my eyes and wish. If I had Juniper’s memory, it wouldn’t just be me in this unfamiliar hotel with my inebriated brother. I’d be recalling every word we exchanged on the rooftop over Providence.
But I do my best. Halcyon. Bucolic. Propinquity. I hold on to every syllable, hoping they turn into dreams.
Fitz
WHEN I WAKE up, I’m alone in the room. On the pillow next to me, I find a note written on the bed-and-breakfast’s stationery. In hasty handwriting Lewis has explained he’s gone to grab food. I’m stunned he’s awake, what with his penchant for sleeping in late and his extended stay in the bathroom last night.
I lie in bed, squinting in the uncomfortable sunlight. I don’t want to heave myself out from under the covers. Really, I don’t want to face the fact that last night is over.
It feels like a dream, close enough to impossible, like I really could have just conjured the entire evening with Juniper in my head. In the morning light, the wonder of the night feels nearly unreachable. Fugacious. Fleeting, with the tendency to disappear. I know with every passing minute and mile, it’ll be harder to imagine it was ever real.
I remember the dictionary—trading the book back and forth, underlining the words we read to each other. I reach over to the nightstand where I left the Dictionary of Unusual Usages before I went to bed, feeling a rush of gratitude I have the pages and the ink to tie me tangibly to the night with Juniper. Proof it was real.
I thumb open the book, reading the underlines. Lissome. Desuetude. Embrocate, which we only underlined because Juniper found it funny that the stately, flowery word means “rubbing on lotion.” I’m close to the end of the dictionary when my fingers catch on something. My breath catches with them.
There’s a dog-eared page. I never dog-ear pages. I kind of resent the practice, and in other circumstances, the defacement of my dictionary would piss me off. Not this time. With the heady tingle of nervous excitement, I open precisely to the folded page.
I immediately narrow in on the underlined word. It’s not one I remember either of us reading out loud, though. Serendipity. Fortunate coincidence. Finding what one did not know one needed. The word is underlined in one of Juniper’s unmistakably neat strokes.
Next to it, I find ten digits. It’s a phone number.
It’s her phone number.
I do not know how to process this realization. I feel myself blushing goofily, elated yet reminding myself to be cool, to not read into the gesture, to remember she’s probably only being friendly. She must have written the number down when I wasn’t paying attention, when I was looking the other way, or—I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It deeply doesn’t matter.
I’m staring at the ten perfect little numbers when the door handle rattles and Lewis pushes his way in. He’s holding a Dunkin’ Donuts bag and a tray with two coffees. In no way does he look like he spent the night hunched over the toilet. He’s showered and freshly shaven, his eyes clear.
Oddly, it reminds me how wrecked I feel. Under the elation of finding Juniper’s phone number, I’m severely tired. It’s only been two full days of this trip, one in Boston and yesterday in Providence. But it feels like weeks since I took the bus—the buses—into South Station. Traveling is exhausting.
My stomach growls, like it’s hearing my thoughts. Lewis drops the paper bag in my lap. If he thinks this makes up for having to listen to him puke for hours, he’s . . . on the right track.
He stands over his open suitcase, sipping his coffee. For a second, he studies me, and I wonder if he’s going to say something about last night. About the girl he danced with or how I got his stumbling ass back to the room. About what I said to him.
He doesn’t. I don’t either. Serious conversations aren’t something I know how to have with my brother. Maybe it’s because we’re not close enough, or maybe it’s because Lewis isn’t capable of being serious about anything. Probably both.
“So,” he says, watching me with keen interest despite his utterly relaxed posture, “are we heading home?”
I glance at the dictionary. At Juniper’s phone number. Impossible to say.
She wasn’t just repeating my words. She knew she’d left her number and was hinting there’d be a way to ensure we saw each other again.
But I won’t see her if I go home now.
I return my gaze to Lewis. “No,” I say, a grin slipping across my face.
Juniper
I’M WAITING FOR an unknown number to light up my phone screen. I waited while we ate croissants out of paper bags in the campus Starbucks this morning. I waited while we drove out of Providence onto US-6, and while we headed in the direction of the University of Connecticut, passing exits for Hartford and Silver Lake, brick buildings and greenery going by in the window.
While we drove, Matt described every detail of the party. I chimed in now and then, listening to him recount his beer pong wins and how he and Carter found this old Nintendo in one downstairs room.
The conversation felt off, though, like we were only carpooling instead of dating. What Matt found hilarious, I found familiar. What I found confusing, Matt found normal. I felt the same unpleasant current I experienced when he wanted to hang with Carter and I wanted to leave the party, an undertow dragging against my feet and the course I’d chosen. One wrong step, and I could slip downstream. I couldn’t help continually checking my phone in the cup holder too, which I know Matt noticed. He said nothing, and if he wondered why, he hid his curiosity impeccably.
I think he felt the same weirdness in the conversation I did, because by the time we reach the Middle Turnpike heading toward UConn, we’re driving in silence. We pull off the turnpike and head toward campus, passing honest-to-goodness red barns and stone walls like we’re in a photo calendar of the idyllic Northeast. The hour we’re on the road feels like eternity. I focus on what’s coming up on our itinerary to pass the minutes. Rationally, I should feel exhausted from the party and today’s early start, but going over the five days of visits we have left invigorates me, from Connecticut to New York to D.C. to Virginia. I guess I like traveling.
It’s nearly ten when photogenic provinciality gives way to collegiate Gothic campus buildings. I take in the brick towers, the granite-rimmed windows, trying to distract myself from uncomfortable questions by examining the architecture.
Matt springs out of the car when we park. He gives me a feeble grin, and I truly can’t tell if he’s sensed the current at our feet or if I’m the only one. He calls his mom while we find our way to the admissions building.
Waiting for the tour to begin, I check my phone once more. Nothing.
Hiding my disappointment, I start to worry. I thought dog-earing the page of Fitz’s dictionary would work. None of the other pages was dog-eared—I figured the message I left should be impossible to overlook. But Fitz either didn’t notice my number scrawled on the page or he’s ignoring me. Both possibilities preoccupy my thoughts for reasons I don’t fully understand. I try to focus on the tour, but I’m distracted, my mind snagging on Fitz like a loose thread while we’re led to the student union, the mascot statue, the campus bookstore.
Which is where I’m halfheartedly perusing sweatshirts with Matt when my phone finally vibrates. Unable to control the tiny thrill tugging up the corners of my mouth, I turn from Matt to read the text.
It’s from an unknown number: +1 and ten inscrutable digits. Foreign inscriptions. I know the translation without recognizing the content.
Fitz.
Then, the message.
So, Juniper. Where will you be making memories today?
The typing bubble forms below. I wait.
I won’t follow you if you tell me. We’ve established I’m not a stalker.
I bite back a laugh. Matt follows a saleswoman into the T-shirt section, and I turn into an empty aisle of license plate frames to reply.
UConn. I definitely don’t condone stalking, but I wouldn’t hate it if we ran into each other again . . . As friends, of course.
As friends. Did I ever suggest otherwise?
Do you really want me to answer that, Fitz?
Hey, you hardly know me, remember? I could have some amazing girlfriend in New Hampshire.
I quickly recall our conversations in the North End and on the rooftop. There’s no way he has a girlfriend. If he does, that means he deliberately chose not to tell me, which would make him somewhat shady. I may hardly know him, but there isn’t a part of me that thinks he’s capable of such dishonesty. He’s a good guy.
A good guy who I definitely wouldn’t begrudge having a girlfriend.
Do you have an amazing girlfriend in New Hampshire? The way we talked on the rooftop would suggest otherwise.
What way? (And fine. No, I don’t currently have a girlfriend.)
You know what way. I have a boyfriend, remember?
It takes him a couple of minutes to reply. I watch the typing bubble appear and disappear, possible conversations erased.
I do remember. Unrelatedly, why did you give me your number, Juniper?
I hesitate. The truth is . . . I don’t know why. I didn’t let myself overthink it. There was one moment last night when I looked over at him, the unruly flip of his hair and the straight incline of his nose illuminated in profile under the moonlight. He was staring up at the expanding universe suspended above us, and I realized I could determine whether I went the rest of my life without saying another word to him. I don’t know what I expected or wanted, except to ensure our universe continued expanding.
Time of Our Lives Page 11
