Time of Our Lives

by Emily Wibberley

  It’s unusual, his thing with words, but not in a bad way. Knowing the repertoire he has at his disposal gives everything he says to me a deliberateness it’s difficult to find in casual conversation. He speaks to me like he’s reading dialogue from a novel, each word chosen with care and precision. The effect is . . . disarming.

  We’re in the same city today. I could find him, laugh at his jokes—be disarmed. He’d make me feel better. Less alone.

  But I want to feel alone right now. To stand with nothing but my dreams at my side, in the shadows of buildings that have towered over people just like me and people completely unlike me. The Empire State Building reaches higher than everything around it, but it doesn’t appear lonely.

  I reply, knowing he’ll pick up on my terseness and not minding.

  Yeah. It is. Full schedule today.

  Being alone and without Matt—or Fitz—I feel more keenly the non-interruption of my family. Normally, they’d be bombarding my phone with texts. I know Tía’s resentful I hung up on her. My dad’s working today. My mom’s probably still dealing with the fallout from Marisa’s night out. The quiet is weird, and I have to admit, a little unpleasant. Not that I don’t appreciate the peace. I’m just unexpectedly aware of it.

  I’m particularly aware I haven’t talked to Marisa in days. Impulsively, I take a picture of the Empire State Building, even though I can’t fit the entire structure in the frame, and pull a moment from my head into a message.

  Remember when Mom took us here when you were three? You were NOT into it.

  I don’t get a response.

  I continue on from the Empire State Building, covering this city properly explored on foot. Every crossing, every hot-dog cart, every flock of pigeons pecking crumbs from sidewalk corners resonates with what I remember from when I was younger. The energy of the city is unforgettable, not only in my recollections, but in the instinctual rhythm I feel walking the curbs and corners among inescapable crowds.

  Rockefeller Center is next on my itinerary. Couples and children crowd the ice rink in front of the iconic Prometheus sculpture. The enormous Christmas tree points toward the sky, looming over the pedestrians like an emperor over his subjects, bedecked in fineries of multicolored lights and a massive shining star.

  On the road, it’s easy to forget Christmas is only a week and a half away. In my house, the days before Christmas come with constant competing family obligations and traditions. While I’m sad not to be home for Callie’s cookie-decorating party, I don’t regret skipping some of the chaos of the holiday. I’ll have nearly a week once I return to host cousins and aunts and uncles, to help Tía dig out Christmas dinner recipes, to be a Ramírez for a holiday synonymous in our house with family.

  Right now, I’m on my own, exploring my old city with new eyes. It’s been ten years since we moved to Springfield, and I’ll be back there before long. I circumvent the rink and head to the foot of the Rockefeller, where I gaze upward, examining the façade’s perfect intricacy.

  I snap a selfie with Prometheus in the background and send it to Marisa.

  Your first crush.

  He really was. It was honestly adorable when she announced he was her husband. She was six.

  I’m undeterred when there’s no reply. I decide I’ll text her with every new building until I wear her down.

  I pause in front of the ice rink. I swear I fall in love with art deco every time I see design like this. It’s the very idea of the style, the philosophy—art deco is devoted to progress, to relentlessly emulating every future its creators could envision. To imagining tomorrow into today.

  Fitz continues texting me. The boy is sensitive, I’ll give him that. He gives me time in between replies, he jokes gently and not often, and he asks me what I’m doing without pressing me for details on the rest of my itinerary this week. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong, which I appreciate indescribably. He’s definitely intelligent enough to know I’m not acting totally normal, yet he apparently understands that getting me to divulge the details will do more harm than good. I feel myself opening up during these off-and-on conversations, describing my day and hearing what he’s doing with his.

  I visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral, its skeletal stone in imposing defiance of the silver and steel surrounding it, where I send Marisa a reminder of the day she threw a tantrum because Dad wouldn’t let her bring ice cream into the church. When my stomach growls, I grab a quick lunch from a nearby deli. Finally, I head to the Guggenheim.

  It’s a long walk, and I’ve unzipped my parka and taken off my scarf by the time I reach the museum. At first, I can’t tell if I like Frank Lloyd Wright’s pairing of unconventional spirals and sharp angles, but the more I walk around the building, the more I appreciate it. Wright was a master of architecture emerging organically and harmoniously from its surroundings. The Guggenheim is a perfect example. The concrete walls flow up from the sidewalk into shapes reminiscent of the modern art the museum was designed to house.

  In front, I find a sign advertising a special Kandinsky exhibit. I take a photo for Marisa, who famously detests art museums. She says they’re just excuses for people to pretend they’re cultured.

  I pay the eighteen-dollar student rate and enter the museum. While I’m wandering up the curved walkways, my phone buzzes with a text. I assume it’s Fitz, who hasn’t replied to me in an hour. Admittedly, I’m curious about whatever is distracting him. But when I unlock my phone, I find a text from Marisa.

  Do you know how much of a dork you are?

  I smile, stopping to lean against the railing overlooking the interior.

  I’ve never claimed otherwise.

  I’m still mad at you for getting me grounded.

  She follows up the message with a string of emojis—the frowning cat—and I know her anger is fading.

  Be mad at yourself. You know I didn’t have a choice.

  She replies immediately with a new row of emojis. Flames and the purple devil face.

  I wait. I have a pretty good feeling the conversation’s not over, and I’m not surprised when the typing bubble pops up. It disappears, and I gaze over the railing into the museum while tourists examine the artwork opposite me. The typing bubble reappears, and finally my phone vibrates.

  How’s your trip?

  The question is whiplash. I’m immediately grateful to my sister for her effortless reconciliation. The very next instant comes the nasty yank of remembering she doesn’t know Matt and I broke up. I can’t tell her, either. I know what would happen if I did. The news would reach my parents, who would definitely try to convince me to come home, and then Tía.

  Tía, who would turn my heartache into a tactic. Who would feed my loneliness to the arguments never far from her reach. Who would hint and imply and eventually remind me outright I wouldn’t be hurting on my own if I were home in the comfort of my family. To her, my breakup would just be proof that I’m not mature, that I still need my family.

  I won’t give her the chance.

  Really amazing. You’d love the campuses.

  Don’t worry, I’ll invite you to visit me next year.

  I hate the forced cheeriness of my replies. This is the one time I don’t want to talk about college. I want to talk about my boyfriend—ex-boyfriend. Instead, I have to pretend everything is wonderful and I’m enjoying my trip exactly the way I’d planned.

  I could really use sisterly commiseration right now, which is unlike me. We’ve never been the type of siblings who braid each other’s hair, who share every secret and every detail of our lives. But this is one time it’d be nice to open up to her. The fact that I can’t doesn’t just frustrate me. It frightens me.

  Because I’m beginning to recognize this feeling. I don’t want this to be the rest of my relationship with my family, this dynamic of their constricting tendencies forcing me to push and
push until I no longer remember wanting to be close to them. I don’t want to not reach out to my sister when I need her. Or dread coming home from school on holidays because of the lectures and judgment I know will be waiting. And I don’t want to move far from home and never return, not even when I get married, not even when I have kids, not until it’s one of my own parents who is ill or dying.

  I explore the museum for half an hour, but my heart’s not in it. As I walk out the front I check my phone, hoping for a text from Fitz. I can’t confide in my sister, but there are eight million people in this city. It’s nice to know I could confide in one of them.

  Fitz

  OKAY, I UNDERSTAND why my mom loves this book.

  I lift my head from the final page, gazing out the window of the café where I holed up when the temperature dropped in the park. I spent the remainder of the day reading, and the sun is lower in the sky. The streets glow with golden light breaking through the buildings. Walking out into the park, I rub my hands in front of my face while I watch the passersby, The Great Gatsby’s final words echoing in my head.

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. My chest loosened when I read them. I sat up straighter, feeling lightened.

  I don’t fully understand the effect the ending has on me. Hoping to figure the question out, I walk through the park, holding my trusted companion Gatsby to my side. I pass couples hand in hand and evening dog walks, circling the park three times before I’ve organized my thoughts.

  Gatsby spent his entire life trying to recapture the past. He failed. Time worked against him like it does everyone. Everything he accomplished, every piece of his meticulous planning, was in the pursuit of something already behind him, something receding in a rearview mirror he mistook for a windshield. And for what? Gatsby lived a half-life, the warped reflection of human existence.

  I won’t repeat his mistake.

  I lift my head to the road ahead and pull out my phone.

  Juniper

  FOR A MOMENT, I wonder if I’ve wandered into a fairy tale. Except not one of the fairy tales Mom would read to me and Marisa and Callie from her hardcover anthology with the pastel-painted cover, with stories of princesses and witches and occasionally dragons. No, this is the kind of fairy tale Juniper Ramírez would live, if magic whisked her from the college tour she was enjoying in the present day and transported her to this incredible, impossible wonderland between buildings.

  I’ve just come up the grimy bolted-metal stairs from street level. What spreads out in front of me is a walkway—or park—or both. Sheets of rough concrete stretch in either direction, with smaller pavement pathways and wooden decks interspersed. Plants entwine the paths, the trees brittle and the bushes brushed with snow. The walkway hangs high over the streets, cutting through the skyscrapers rising up on both sides.

  The High Line, Fitz called this place. When he texted with nothing but an invitation—no dictionary words, no college questions—I didn’t recognize the name. I promptly found the place on my phone and hopped on the subway.

  I stare over the edge, watching the churn of cars below and the colors of the sunset. Turning back, I imagine the High Line in spring and summer, the foliage green, the trees waving in the breeze like guests enjoying a party to which they have no idea they weren’t invited.

  I’m envisioning the vivid vein this place would cut through the city when Fitz walks up the stairs. His eyes meet mine, and he smiles.

  The effect is instantaneous. I notice he’s different, somehow. There’s an easiness to his motion, or even his momentum, like he’s headed in a new direction. I haven’t known Fitz for long, but he’s definitely never had momentum. He walks over while I take in the unusual freedom to him.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” he says.

  It strikes me as a funny expression. Thanks for meeting me on the High Line tonight? Or, thanks for meeting me for the first time days ago? For unconsciously organizing your life to bump into mine?

  I smile back softly, wanting to thank him for meeting me too, though I know it’s not the meaning he intends. He confuses me. Or, rather, the feeling I get when I’m with him confuses me, especially now. The undeniable tug of my heart toward him is wrapped up in the pain of breaking up with Matt. I don’t know what’s genuine connection and what’s simply the shock of being without the person I expected to be with. I do know his invitation lit up my phone right when I needed someone to talk to and someplace to go besides my empty hotel room.

  “This place is unbelievable,” I say finally, the one non-confusing thing I can get out. “I didn’t even know it existed.”

  “I thought you’d like it.” He nods in the direction of the path, and we walk. We enter a stretch of thin-limbed trees, branches dusted with snow, the city on one side and the river on the other. It’s perfect, dreamlike, this out-of-context winter wonderland. “I sort of had an epiphany today.”

  I watch his profile out of the corner of my eye. With the wind blowing in our faces, his hair is swept back on his forehead. His gaze bounces around like he’s taking in everything around him, continually caught on something new—the couple kissing on one of the modern lounge chairs, the lit-up interior of an apartment’s opulent dining room overlooking our path, the violin player busking under the bridge.

  “I know that in the dictionary sense of the word, we are hardly more than strangers . . .” Fitz begins.

  “Matt and I broke up,” I say abruptly, cutting him off. Fitz skips a step, then stops and blinks at me with those piercing blue eyes. I don’t know why I blurted out my romantic status in the middle of his speech, but I realize it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. Maybe part of me just had to tell someone. Or maybe part of me had to tell Fitz.

  Fitz’s stunned expression drifts into a grin, which he immediately flattens. But he fails, and I can’t help rolling my eyes.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I tell him.

  “No, you don’t,” he replies hastily. “I know you think I’m into you—”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I repeat, “because I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought it myself.”

  This shuts him up.

  “Now, did you want to finish that denial, or do you want me to continue?” I ask.

  “I’m good,” he says.

  “There’s something between us,” I start. “Which I do not get, because you’re honestly kind of annoying and you’re not really my type and I don’t even know you, which I keep forgetting.”

  Fitz’s face glows, like he didn’t hear anything after “something between us.” In hindsight, I probably should have predicted he wouldn’t.

  “I feel it too,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Pulled to you,” he replies, his eyes full of emotions written on top of each other until they’ve become indecipherable. Hope and hesitation and dread and doubt and certainty. I swallow, fearful of how quickly this conversation is careening toward an edge, and of what waits below.

  “But Matt and I broke up because we didn’t see our lives going in the same direction,” I say decisively. “I want to explore, learn what’s out there, and find out who I am in the process. Matt didn’t want anything to change. Do you see what I’m saying? I can’t just pick up with someone who’s exactly the same. Go through that again only for it to end when one of us is brave enough to admit it can’t work.”

  Fitz nods. “I read The Great Gatsby today,” he says simply, like this is a logical reply to what I said.

  I’m thrown. “Okay . . .”

  “I don’t want to always be looking back,” Fitz goes on. “I don’t know how much time my mom has, but I don’t know how much time I have either. I can’t live my life wishing things were as they’d been, missing a home that’s no longer there.”

  Hiraeth. I remember the word from the conversation we had while dri
ving into New York City yesterday. Yesterday, which feels like a lifetime ago.

  He steps closer to me. “Because if I spend every minute wishing everything would stay the same, I’ll lose so much more than the past.”

  His declaration strikes a harmony with the noise in my head and my heart, the dull roar I’ve found impossible to drown out this entire day. The pain of Matt leaving is awful, but right now, it begins to fade. I study Fitz, the gentle narrowness of his face, the unreadable line of his thin lips, the features it’s hard to believe I’ve only known for five days. There’s a look in his eyes, a characteristic exactness to his words, an undeniable spark between us. They quiet the whole world.

  “I’m not asking anything of you, Juniper,” Fitz starts again.

  I pull myself together enough to glance pointedly at how close together our feet are. “No?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to ask,” he clarifies. “I definitely do. It’s only, you just got out of a relationship, and we don’t exactly make any sense. The only thing I want is to tell you I’m not going to waste the rest of this trip. I have four days of this college tour left. I’m going to see more schools, and if I fall in love with some of them, I’ll apply. All I’m asking is if you’ll see them with me.”

  The harmony narrows to a single note, pure and perfect. In the echo, I’m left recognizing I didn’t expect this from Fitz. He’s stepped enormously far from his comfort zone, into territory he wouldn’t have dared even last week. He’s facing huge, frightening things, and he’s staring them down the way not everybody would. “I think that’s really brave,” I tell him truthfully. His expression softens.