by Rachel Cohn
“And how do I look?”
“Not miserable. Just a little lost.”
“Did you know that Lily was coming? She surprised me, and I think maybe a little preparation would have helped things go smoother.”
Sofia shook her head. “None of us see Lily very much anymore. Partly because we’re in school and she isn’t. But that’s not the only reason. I think she’s been keeping her distance, too. She spends much more time with dogs than she does with people, Dash. I’ll text her to try to make plans, and I always end up talking to her while she’s walking a dog in the NYU area. She looks a little lost too.”
“She’s very successful, you know. As a dog-walker.”
“I’ve seen. But I don’t think that’s the only thing she wants, Dash. It can’t be.”
We’d now caught up to Boomer in the Great Fire of London room, which featured a model of 1666 London. It all looked normal … until the voice-over intoned that the Great Fire started at Thomas Farriner’s bakery on (no lie) Pudding Lane. From there, it spread—and so it spread over the model as the walls around us simulated flames and the voice-over provided further facts.
“They should’ve never let a cow in the bakery,” Boomer said, shaking his head as the inferno destroyed the city. “Any word from Lily?”
Sofia and I checked our phones again. No word.
“Their reunion didn’t go quite as planned,” Sofia explained to Boomer.
“Like ours?” Boomer asked.
“No, not like ours,” Sofia said tersely. “That went wrong in a different way.”
“What happened with yours?” I asked.
“I told her I was flying into LaGuardia from school, but it was really JFK,” Boomer said. “Then I went to LaGuardia to meet her, but she’d already gotten an Uber to JFK. We kept missing each other! I thought it was funny. She didn’t think it was as funny.”
“I may have been angry when we finally both got to the same place.”
“I thought she was going to break up with me!”
“And honestly? I almost did. Because he didn’t seem to see what was wrong with what had just happened.”
“But I got her to laugh about it.”
“Not really. Instead he made me realize I had a choice: spend the rest of the night angry, or put that aside to have a good time.”
“I would’ve probably spent the night angry,” I confessed.
“Naw, you wouldn’t have,” Boomer said. “Not with me all in your face about having a good time.”
The simulation ended with all of London in flames. Then the flames retreated, the lights went back to normal, and the whole installation reset.
“We should try to warn them this time,” Boomer said.
I shot Sofia a look.
She shot me a look.
Both of the looks meant: Well, that’s silly.
But then the fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery, and we were right there beside Boomer, yelling, “Fire! Fire! Get out!” to all the other houses in the model, until a less-than-amused guard chased us away.
The next gallery covered the Expanding City—basically, London rebuilding after the fire and making its way slowly toward the Downton Abbey years. Boomer particularly enjoyed the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, where various mannequins were dolled up into their most high-society selves.
“Ooh, I like that look,” Boomer told one mannequin in a top hat. Overhead, the museum’s PA told us politely to exit because the museum was closing.
“I miss hanging out,” I told Sofia. “You know, when it’s not an effort. When it’s just friends. I didn’t have that in Oxford.”
“Azra says you haven’t tried very hard.”
“Well, Azra probably learned her Oxford hanging-out skills at boarding school,” I said. “I was thrown into the pool while most of the people there seemed to have been born swimming in it.”
“Doesn’t matter, as long as you know how to swim,” Sofia pointed out. “And you, my friend, know how to swim.”
“I swim better in New York,” I said. “The water’s nicer there.”
“A statement that’s never been made before, ever. Unless you’re talking about what comes out of the tap.”
“You get my point, though. I want to go home.”
“So go home.”
A guard came up and told us the museum was now closed and it was time to egress.
“I guess we’ll have to go straight to the present!” Boomer said, heading straight for the door.
Outside, it was complete darkness, December having made away with all the daylight while we were inside. Sofia checked her phone for the time, then typed out a quick text.
“Just because she’s mad at you, it doesn’t mean she shouldn’t respond to me,” she grumbled.
“Do we have time for Bad Egg?” Boomer asked.
Sofia checked her phone. “Yes. But we need to be in a cab in an hour if we’re going to catch our plane. And since our luggage is going to be on it, we really should catch our plane. It’s the last flight of the night.”
“Can’t let your family think I’m a flight-skipper,” Boomer said as Sofia led us on, checking her phone the whole time.
“How are you feeling about meeting her family for the first time?” I asked.
“I’m terrified … in a good way.” Boomer grinned. “But that’s love, isn’t it?”
I thought about it for a second before concluding, “Yeah, maybe it is.”
Bad Egg was a brunch place that stayed opened well into the night. It felt incongruous to order huevos rancheros in the heart of London, but that didn’t deter Boomer.
“The stomach wants what it wants,” he said. Then, in addition to his huevos, he ordered a Christmas Pudding Sundae, which involved brandy-soaked fruit and something mysteriously referred to as Christmas pudding pieces.
I got a shakshuka and Sofia got a burger, and after our server left, I looked at the two of them sitting across from me, and it just got to me … in a good way. This was what I’d stepped away from when I was at Oxford, and what I’d tried to put out of my mind, because it made my loneliness that much more pronounced. I’d thought, for my higher education, that I’d wanted scholarship and erudition. But really, I’d just wanted to have people to sit across from at a diner, to talk about whatever was on our minds, Brontë sisters or Jonas brothers, Carl Van Vechten or Carly Rae Jepsen.
“Are you getting misty?” Boomer asked. Then he put his arm around Sofia. “Look—he’s really getting misty.”
“I just … I’ve missed you guys,” I said, wiping my eyes. Which felt far too mundane an expression of what I was really feeling, which was that I’d jumped too far from the bedrock of my life, and now I was lucky enough that it had come to me rather than waiting for me to return to it.
“We’ve missed you too,” Boomer said.
“Like the deserts miss the rain,” Sofia chimed in.
I couldn’t help myself. “Hasn’t that line always bothered you?” I had to ask. “Why can’t the desert just be a desert?”
Boomer backed me up. “He has a point.”
“Fine,” Sofia said. “Like the polar ice caps miss the cold?”
“Topical,” I said.
“Timely,” Boomer agreed. “Or like my stomach misses the sundae that isn’t here yet …”
Thus began a metaphoricalympics among the three of us, which lasted a few minutes until I sighed.
Reading my mind, or maybe just being of the same mind as me, Boomer said, “She should be here with us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She should be here.”
“Agreed,” Sofia said. “Let’s all tell her that at the same time.”
We got out our phones and typed out the text: You should be here. On the count of three, we hit send. Then we did it three more times.
No response.
We talked and laughed and bantered over that non-response. Sofia was starting to get nervous about getting to Heathrow, so we got the check and paid it.
Sofia had a surprised expression on her face as she read the text that had come in.
“Is it Lily?” Boomer and I asked at the same time.
Sofia shook her head. “No, it’s Azra. And you’re not going to believe where she and Lily are right now.”
eleven
December 22nd
You’ve ruined Christmas, Lily.
When I finally had the courage to look at my phone, this was the first text I saw, from my brother. But it wasn’t entirely a disheartening message. Next, he’d written:
Mom is so mad at you that she says she’s canceling Christmas this year. No present exchange, no lounging in PJs all day, no Christmas brunch. Hurrah, I say! It’s one stupid day of the year! It’s ridiculous we spend so much energy and money on it. I’ve had it with the crass consumerism and awful sweaters. I’ve been waiting my whole life for Christmas to be canceled, although I certainly never expected our family’s #1 Christmas nerd would be the reason why. Now I can spend the day with Benny’s family without Mom’s guilt trip about me splitting my time between my boyfriend’s family and ours. Because Mom’s the one who canceled Christmas—her idea!
Truly, Lily. You’re a genius. And TBH, the food at Puerto Rican Christmas is better than ours. But your cookies still rule. (I still think you should go to college. Even if it’s not Barnard. Let’s talk?)
As I walked from the Tube to Mark and Julia’s apartment to get my stuff, I ignored the text from Dash—What just happened?!?!?—and only glanced at the angry texts from my mother, as if I was taking mental screenshots of only her most vehement points.
If you think you’re not going to college you’re …
Pick up the phone, Lily!
Four generations of women in our family have gone to Barnard. You will not be the first who …
But it was the text I’d snuck a peek at half an hour earlier, when I was still on the boat with Dash, that had prompted me to make a run for it. It was from Dad.
You’ve broken your mother’s heart, Lily.
I didn’t know what I’d been thinking, jumping off that boat. It was a sudden, jerk move, like baiting Dash into a fight had been. I just felt so overwhelmed and lost. How had a day that had started so promisingly, with me taking a step into independence and seriously considering forging that independence in this exotic new place, gone so awry, so quickly?
Because I was a coward, that’s how.
I was a coward who knew all along she didn’t want to go to Barnard but let her mother think she did. I was a coward who let her mother know via email that she wasn’t fulfilling her mother’s college dream for her—and with a cc: email at that. (Coward and schmuck.)
I was a coward who surprised her boyfriend at Christmas when she knew he really needed the holiday break for introspection and decompression from Oxford. I was a coward who hadn’t considered that she’d be a distraction to her boyfriend establishing his own roots in England if she also moved there, to be closer to him.
I was a coward who flirted with the idea of going to an obscure dog school in Twickenham, England, which would require her to give up the lovely and loyal dog-walking clients who counted on her in Manhattan, and to move away from her own beloved dog, Boris.
Coward coward coward. Jerk jerk jerk.
In the moment, when I sent that email to Professor Garvey, it seemed like a good idea. An act of defiance but also, what’s the word everyone uses now, agency? I was owning my power to make my own decisions and choose my own destiny. But in that moment, I didn’t think about the consequences. The collateral damage.
I couldn’t wait to be in a hotel room alone that night. I needed the introspection and decompression time just as much as Dash. I hoped Mark and Julia wouldn’t be home when I returned to their place, so I could get my stuff and make a stealth exit, like the coward I was. But when I went inside Mark and Julia’s apartment, I found Mark lying on their dreadful sofa, reading a Martin Amis novel (Mark’s love for this author being yet another reason Dash distrusted my cousin). When he saw me, Mark folded the book shut and sat up.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said.
“I know. I got Christmas canceled back home. I’m a monster,” I said as I made a mental inventory of my stuff. I’d left my toothbrush and toiletries bag in the bathroom. My clothes were all within an arm’s-length radius by my backpack, shoved behind the sofa to be out of the way of my hosts. At least I’d had the foresight to travel light. I could be packed and gone in five minutes—maybe ten, max, if Mark really gave me a hard time about daring to vacate his crappy apartment for a luxurious hotel because family stays with family.
Mark said, “Family crisis back in New York. They’re trying to blame me for luring you to London. But don’t worry. I made sure your parents understood that Dash is to blame, not me.”
“I am to blame! This is all me. Dash had nothing to do with it.”
“Sure,” Mark said, disbelieving. “The Daunt bibliophile challenge was also canceled. Too many people dropped out. Julia is devastated. I blame Dash for that, too. He started the attrition.”
I said, “Blame timing it at Christmas! People are too busy! She should do it in January, when the Christmas lights are gone and people are bummed by winter and really looking for something to do.” Like, basic common sense. “And stop blaming Dash for everything.”
“You used to be so sweet before you met him. So easy.”
“I’m still sweet and perhaps you mistook polite for easy.”
Mark stood up from the sofa. “I liked tween Lily better.”
How nice of Mark to make such a nice opening for me. I said, “Tween Lily could fit on your sofa for a night’s sleep. Adult Lily cannot. I’ve come to get my stuff and then I’m going to a hotel.”
Mark gasped. “Traitor!” Before I could defend myself, Mark’s TV rang with a Skype call. The caller ID said: grandpa.
“Please, Mark,” I pleaded. “Wait to answer till after I go.”
“Absolutely not, traitor,” said Mark. “I texted them when I heard your key in the door. Seems everyone is trying to reach you but you’re not answering calls. Not a problem here.” He pressed a remote to answer the call. “Hi, Grandpa!” he called to the screen, as suddenly, my grandfather and my brother, Langston, appeared on it. They were in Grandpa’s room at the assisted-living facility in Morningside Heights.
The biggest proof of my cowardice?
I had seriously considered leaving my grandpa! My dearest grandpa, who counted on my almost-daily visits to take him for walks around the neighborhood when he was up for it, or to sit by his side and read to him when he wasn’t. My grandpa, who loved all his children and grandchildren, but me the most. Then there were his fellow residents, who counted on me to bring Boris around to their rooms for companionship. My fearsome-looking dog had a surprising knack as a therapy animal. He’s a simple dude and it turns out the three loves of Boris’s life are peanut butter treats, me, and old people.
I started to bolt but Mark muttered, “Sit!” As if I were Boris, I immediately heeded the command and sat. I practically fell into the middle of the lumpy sofa as Grandpa’s and Langston’s faces looked at me accusingly.
Grandpa said, “So I hear you’ve gotten Christmas canceled, Lily Bear?” I tried to look away from Grandpa’s face, but all I saw were all the family photos surrounding him—at least half of which were photos of me at previous years’ Christmases. What a jerk, that cute Lily of Christmases past.
“Where’s Mrs. Basil E.?” I asked. It was her day at the home, not Langston’s.
Langston said, “She asked me to cover for her today since I’m already in the city. She’s also canceling her annual Christmas party this year. Those of us who appreciate her sharing her superior champers collection are hoping for another opportunity on New Year’s Eve, or we will be very angry with you indeed.”
“Where’d she go?” My heart hurt even more.
My great-aunt’s Christmas Night party was the annual highlight of our family gatherings. Canceling that felt much more dire than canceling presents.
Grandpa said, “Who knows with my sister? She likes to disappear. Now listen, Lily. We can handle your mother canceling Christmas.” He stood up from his bed and stepped into his walker, as if to remind me of his fragility. Then he shook his fist at me. “BUT I WILL NOT TOLERATE YOU ABDICATING COLLEGE!”
Langston moved to Grandpa’s side. “Seriously, Lily. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t want to go to Barnard.” Finally, I’d said it, aloud and not just a million times in my own head.
From behind me, Mark said, “God forbid she slum it at that prestigious dump.”
It pained me how right Dash was about Mark. My cousin really was awful. He was my family and I loved him no matter what. But he was kind of the worst.
“And what would you presume to do instead?” Grandpa asked.
There was no use being anything other than honest about my intentions. No matter how I answered, they wouldn’t like it, so I choose to tell the truth. “There’s a dog training school I got into. Here in England.”
Dead silence.
Then Langston said, “What’s it called?”
“Pembroke Canine Facilitator Institute,” I said.
Mark said, “You’ve got to be kidding me with that name. Is Barbara Cartland the headmistress?”
“No, Jane Douglas is,” I said.
“How’d you find out about it?” Langston asked. “One of your dog-walking clients?”
Quietly, I said, “On Reddit.”
Not quietly enough. Langston, who had been sipping water, actually choked on his sip. Then he said, “Lily. Come on. I can understand if Barnard isn’t the college for you, despite the convenience of it for everyone else and, um, wait, oh, right—and that it’s an amazing school with, like, a seventeen percent admission rate according to Google. That would indicate a lot of outstanding people really want to go there.” Shut up, Google. I didn’t say anything, so Langston added, “But wanting to go deeper on your dog skills is NOT A REASON NOT TO GO TO COLLEGE AT ALL.”
