Layover

by Amy Andelson

  I don’t realize how much I’ve missed it here until the elevator doors open into the apartment, and I smell Rosie’s stew simmering in the kitchen, and I hear Poppy watching TV in the den. Life here is just as I left it. They’re certainly surprised to see me. “My boy! Hurry it up, and I’ll set another place at the table,” Rosie says when she finally releases me from her embrace. Sure, I could have called on my way in, but the look of sheer joy on Poppy’s face is pretty priceless. And I guess that’s not the only reason. I head to my room, and as I walk down the hall, I see the light on in Flynn’s room, the door just barely cracked open. I pause to try to hear what music she’s playing—the Velvet Underground. On vinyl. Interesting.

  I throw my duffel down on my bed, noting the crisp new sheets and comforter. Louisa does love her projects. I study the walls, wondering if they are a slightly lighter shade of beige than before I left. Or maybe they’re darker. Whatever it is, they’re different. Not like I care either way. Let Louisa have her fifty shades of beige. No one loves beige more than my mother. No one.

  I can’t help but feel like my room has gotten smaller. Everything in it suddenly looks so sterile, so tidy. Of course, Louisa left the Brown pennant hanging above my desk (another one of her cherished Abernathy traditions), but the lacrosse trophies, the concert ticket stubs, and all the other random paraphernalia that come with adolescence have evaporated. And it seems that my record collection has found a new home across the hall.

  I’ve been gone for four months—the longest I’ve ever been away from home. I could have come back for Thanksgiving, but instead I told my mom that a bunch of the guys from my hall were going to a friend’s house in Vermont. She wasn’t thrilled that I wasn’t coming back to the city, but with winter break just a few weeks away, she acquiesced pretty quickly.

  And please, it’s not like Louisa was slaving away over a twenty-pound turkey and mashing potatoes herself. Thanksgiving in the Abernathy-Barlow house plays out just like the rest of Louisa’s famed dinner parties—a carefully choreographed exercise in avant-garde snobbery. Louisa does her best to play the part of the perfect hostess for the awkward gathering of extended family we never see, while Flynn, Poppy, and I push the professionally prepared food around on our Hermès patterned plates. By the time it’s dessert, the kids are excused, and we sneak into the kitchen, where Rosie has stored a good old-fashioned pumpkin pie from the diner around the corner, which we eat straight out of the box.

  So, as thrilling as all of that sounds, I decided that this year I’d be thankful for my solitude. The Vermont story was total BS. The truth is, I stayed on campus with the international kids, scholarship students, and weirdos like me who for one reason or another didn’t want to or couldn’t go home. We all just let each other be—we didn’t need to pretend to be each other’s stand-in family. I just wasn’t ready to go home yet. But I couldn’t stay away forever.

  I walk through the apartment, still sweaty and trying to catch my breath, and suddenly I’m nervous to be in my own home. I pass my room—where I accidentally left the lights on and Amos’s record player turning—and stand in his doorway. I watch him unpack his duffel. He looks different—the way that boys can become just, like, older overnight. Amos has always had a strong jaw and a distinct nose, but now it’s like the bones of his face are even more chiseled. Or maybe it’s just that his hair is longer, but somehow he looks less like the boy who left, and more like a man I’m not sure I know.

  “I thought you were meeting us at the airport?” I say, feigning nonchalance. He turns around and smiles.

  “I don’t even get a hello?”

  “Hello,” I say. I look down at the parquet floor; I look up at the arched doorway. I look anywhere but straight at him.

  “Madigan’s having people over, so I figured I’d come in early. And this way I can just ride to JFK with you guys tomorrow. Where are we going again? Barbados?”

  “A boat in Bora Bora,” I say as I tentatively take a step into his room.

  “And I’m assuming the parentals are already there?”

  “There was some museum opening in Hong Kong, so they left last week,” I reply.

  “Obviously,” Amos says as he throws an Andover sweatshirt at me. “Merry Christmas.”

  I look at the sweatshirt—I can’t tell if it’s a gift or laundry. “So can I go with you to Madigan’s party?” I take another step.

  “Sorry, Flynn. Not tonight.”

  I immediately take two steps back, and practically topple onto Poppy, who apparently has been standing behind me, unnoticed. She’s so stealthy sometimes it’s scary.

  “You’re going out, Amos?” she asks, already knowing the answer. “But you just got here. Can’t we spend some time together? The usual?” And in this moment, I love Poppy more than anyone else on the planet. For being so irresistibly vulnerable that even Amos, despite all his attempted bravado, can’t say no to her. I don’t need to turn and look at him to confirm the concession, and instead get my coat, knowing that Amos’s entrance at Madigan’s party has been postponed, at least for a little while. Sorry, Rosie. You’ll have to save the stew for another night. For now, it will be just the three of us. Thank you, Poppy.

  We go around the corner to the Carlyle Hotel and fall into the leather booth of our usual table in Bemelmans Bar. Mac, our waiter, who has known me since I was in diapers, and who reminds me of that each and every time I see him, happily comes over. We order “the usual”—a hot fudge sundae, no nuts, extra sauce, three cherries. Not exactly the most nutritious dinner, but it hits most of the food groups.

  Amos lets me pick out his cocktail. I read the names on the drink menu like it’s an adventure novel—names that sound like faraway places or long-ago times. I’ve got my eye on the Jamaican Firefly, maybe because of our vacation, but change my mind and decide to go with something called the Midnight Express. Amos orders me my signature drink, a Shirley Temple in a martini glass, extra cherries.

  I love that Amos knows to order my Shirley Temple in a grown-up glass to match his own. He asks Flynn if she wants hers the same way, and she shoots him a look that says, F off. I love that she didn’t actually say the f-word. Not that I haven’t heard it before. I hear it all the time. From people on the street (this is New York City), from the popular girls at school, from the rated-R movies my parents don’t care if I watch, from eavesdropping on Flynn’s phone conversations, and, especially lately, from Mom and Dad—that is, when they’re home. But there’s something about the fact that my brother and sister try not to swear in front of me that makes me feel…I don’t know…loved. Still, I can tell that something is off with them. Even before Amos offended Flynn by offering her a kiddie drink. Which is exactly why I knew it was so important that we do this—that we come here. Tonight.

  I love absolutely everything about hotels. I steal keys and snatch stationery and matchbooks from everywhere we stay—they’re the only things I collect, besides books and movie quotes. Stickers and American Girl dolls never really interested me. I’ve tried, believe me, to care about the things that the other girls my age do. If only to save my mom from stressing in a way she says gives her wrinkles, and Rosie from killing so much time up at my therapist’s office on the corner of First and far away. But it’s useless.

  Susan, my therapist, once asked me what I love so much about hotels. But I mean, where else can an almost-ten-year-old spend a Friday night in a bar? Normally, it would be inappropriate, or even against the law, for a child to be in a bar. But in a hotel anything goes: a kid has almost as much freedom as an adult (just look at Eloise). So take that, Tatiana—while your mom’s tucking you and all the other girls from our class into bed at your stupid sleepover party tonight, I’m tucked into a booth at the bar in the Carlyle Hotel with my older brother and sister. Not that it bothers me that I wasn’t invited—I just wish that they hadn’t all brought their sleepover bags to school for the teache
rs and everyone else to see. Mom says girls are mean at this age, but Flynn says that’s a lie—girls are mean at every age.

  “Wife, mistress, or daughter?” Amos asks us as he gestures to the older man in a business suit accompanied by a pretty girl in the booth next to us.

  “Daughter. Definitely daughter,” Flynn declares. “He’s in town for business. Lives in Chicago, keeps a place in New York. She’s finishing up at Columbia. English major.”

  Just then the older man puts his hand on the girl’s knee.

  “Mistress!” we all say at the same time, and laugh. We play this game wherever we go—making up stories about people we see on the street, on the subway, even the people who come in and out of our apartment. Everyone’s got a story.

  Mac returns with our hot fudge sundae and three silver spoons too quickly. I do not want to rush this. But Amos hands me a spoon and says, “Dig in,” so we do. Eventually Flynn stops pretending she doesn’t want any, uncrosses her arms, and joins us. I take the tiniest bites possible—trying to see how long I can make this last. Wishing that it could be forever. I take out my vintage Polaroid camera, the one Flynn and Amos got me for my last birthday, my most prized possession, and snap a photo of the bar. I want to freeze this one moment in time so I can always remember it. Because who knows how much longer we’ll have together?

  I stare at the large maritime clock on the mantel in Madigan’s parents’ library, willing the hands to move. They don’t. They haven’t all night. Or at least not since I began studying them, which was about the time that I started tuning Madigan out. And that has to have been at least ten minutes ago. But I wouldn’t know, because the clock’s stopped.

  Madigan’s midway through telling me what I’ve missed this semester at Collegiate. I sense that he’s trying to make me regret transferring to boarding school, but his egregious retelling of the fall’s non-events only reminds me of one of the reasons I wanted to leave in the first place.

  “I dumped that bitch,” he brutishly brags in relation to a certain Spence sophomore he was dopily chasing all last year. “I haven’t cracked a book for the SATs,” he asserts. Both of which, I know for a fact, are wildly untrue.

  I know he’s bullshitting me, because the Spence sophomore in question happens to have a sister in my Spanish class at Andover. She regaled me with stories about her wild little sister, until she heard I came from Collegiate, and made me promise not to tell Madigan that while he was building houses in Costa Rica last summer, her little sister hooked up with half of Manhattan’s private-school scene in the Hamptons. She dumped him via text before Labor Day. As to the second count, Madigan’s mom called Louisa for the name of my SAT tutor when his score went down two hundred points after his practice test. I know Madigan’s been seeing Tom the tutor for two hours Tuesdays and Thursdays ever since.

  He asks me how many girls I’ve banged at boarding school, and I roll my eyes in response. I’m not really in the mood to get into it with him right now, so I’ll let him think what he wants.

  “Seriously, dude? No one?” he asks, grinning.

  The fact that Madigan lost his virginity two months before I did will go down as one of his all-time proudest achievements. Not that I’ve ever felt particularly competitive about that kind of stuff. I guess I’ve always been relatively lucky when it comes to girls. I’ve never really had to try too hard—the irony of somehow being labeled “hard to get.” I’ve slept with one girl in my seventeen years, but I know people assume there have been more. Unlike Madigan, I’ve always been pretty private about these things.

  Maybe coming home was a bad idea. I’ve only been back a few hours, and already my brain just feels…crowded. That’s another reason I went away. I needed space to think. To be somewhere else. You spend your whole life in this city, and you think it’s normal to never see the stars. And just as I’m trying to remember why I decided on this detour to the city in the first place, she walks in.

  He just looks at me blankly, and I can’t tell if he’s mad or indifferent that I showed up even though he told me not to come. Is it strange that I’d rather have him be mad than indifferent? Because there’s nothing worse than indifference. He takes a swig of his beer, turns back to Madigan, with his stupid popped collar, who I’m sure is boring Amos to death, and proceeds to not talk to me for the rest of the night. Cool, Amos.

  I mean, he can’t actually be mad that I’m here—Madigan’s a sophomore like me, after all. And for the record, this whole party is basically populated by my friends. Or people I know. So maybe I called Sabrina and Aisha after Amos left the apartment and told them about the party. But it was only a matter of time before Madigan would text Oliver, who would then text Bennett, who would then text Sabrina, since he’ll do anything to spend like five minutes alone with her. And what’s Amos so mad about anyway? He’s the one who left me—I mean, us, or New York, or whatever.

  As predicted, Bennett and Sabrina dip out to hook up in a guest bedroom. I catch Amos clocking their exit, too, and he at least rolls his eyes sympathetically, because he knows that now I’m stranded with Aisha. She pours us some champagne. “To sweet sixteen,” she says, even though my birthday isn’t until the twenty-ninth. I’m not really in the mood to celebrate, but I’m also not in the mood to stand here, awkwardly not talking to Amos, so I drink the whole cup in one gulp. I feel warm and slightly claustrophobic in my cashmere sweater, but I can’t take it off, since all I’ve got on underneath is a grimy white camisole. Sometimes I really question my life choices. And then there’s Aisha, in a little dress, just like every other girl here. They all seem pretty happy—and at the right body temperature.

  “I’m so into Amos’s longer hair. Is he going out with anyone at Andover? I mean, of course he is, right?” Aisha asks me in a way that doesn’t really sound like a question. And since I don’t know the answer, I just shrug and pour myself another round. I don’t really drink much—losing control isn’t exactly my thing. But lately, I’m starting to think that losing control may be exactly what I need.

  Before I know it, all the edges seem a little blurred, and I realize I’m dancing with Will Dixon. I’ve never really cared much for dancing. The way all the girls try so hard to not seem self-conscious, while desperately attempting to get everyone’s attention. It’s all so forced it makes me queasy. I can feel Will’s breath on my neck, and smell the Captain Morgan emanating off him—even over his aggressive cologne situation. And then I remember the other reason I hate dancing: I’m terrified of boys.

  I’m about to throw Will off me, when I catch Amos’s eye over Will’s shoulder. And maybe because of that—because I know Amos is watching—when Will tries to pull me closer, I let him.

  It’s a little after midnight when I finally make my way home from Madigan’s. I didn’t want to walk home with Flynn, so I waited her out. That invariably meant waiting for her lame-o friend Sabrina to emerge from a back bedroom with that dud of a boyfriend, Bennett. Then all three girls paraded out together—two of them in dumb skimpy dresses, and Flynn in that old cable-knit sweater of Jack’s, her thumbs sticking out of the holes she’s made in the cuffs. I’ve always liked that sweater on her.

  It then ended up taking another half hour to extricate myself from an inane debate with a bunch of douches from Dalton about which Soho House is the best. Now I’m finally outside, and even though the air is frigid, it feels amazing. Like I can breathe again. I bury my hands in my pockets and trust my feet to find their way home. Having grown up in Manhattan, I have a certain proprietary possessiveness over these streets: my deli, my corner, my bodega, my bench in the park, my table at 21. But that’s bullshit, because it’s not my city—or anyone else’s, for that matter. That’s the thing about being away and coming back. You realize that on some level, everything has gone on without you. Which is, in its own way, comforting. It’s not my this or that, any more than it is any other city kid’s.

 
Except, who am I kidding? I’m not just any city kid. I’m an Abernathy. Even if my father is that lowlife Abernathy. This is a fact that, despite the dissolution of her marriage to my dad, Louisa seems intent on preserving. Frankly, she reminds me of my privileged pedigree a little too often. It’s kind of gross. Like she gets off on it in some way. She appreciates the association with the fabled family way too much, if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong—I’m certainly thankful that I had a great-great-grandfather who was at the right place at the right time when it came to real estate, publishing, women, and who knows what else. And there are certain benefits to walking around with the same last name as libraries and hospital wings. But as any Vanderbilt or Rockefeller will tell you, there’s a burden to bear as well.

  It’s funny: while I was gone, I didn’t miss the city all that much. When I left, it was all so suffocating. And I’m not just talking about the sweltering late-summer heat wave. But now that I’m back, I have the frenzy of an addict who has fallen off the wagon. I want to drink in the entire island. I feel like I could walk all night—clear down to Battery Park, up to Harlem and back. All the way till the sun rises.

  And isn’t this how it was always supposed to be? New York and me. Just the two of us. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d been wandering the streets alone, until there was someone wandering them with me. When Flynn and I started hanging out, everything changed—being with her felt like listening to a new song.

  I cross Fifty-Seventh Street, remembering the time last summer when she dragged me down here for Manhattanhenge. Tourist shit like that never really interested me. The sun sets on the city every day—how could this really be such an astrophysical phenomenon? But Flynn insisted that we take part. So we stood there, and looked up at the sky, and watched the sun sink as it aligned perfectly with the east-west street. If it weren’t for Flynn, I’d still be sitting in my room, texting some bullshit to Madigan.