And not cute crying. Ugly crying. The kind where your face gets red and your breathing gets all gaspy and you realize you’re precariously close to becoming a snot monster.
Tell me this isn’t happening!
I’m not just crying over spilled Diet Coke or a ruined notebook. Whenever I felt like I didn’t fit into the social scene at school perfectly, I’d imagine my alternate, fabulous life after graduation. I’d live in New York. I’d be a writer. People would get me. But now, here I am with this “opportunity of a lifetime,” as McKayla puts it, with the new clothes, job, apartment, and persona handed to me on a platinum platter, and somehow I still can’t make it work.
“Are you crying?”
But he isn’t asking me about the state of my tear ducts in an accusatory jerk way. The guy looks 100 percent freaked out.
And then he does something completely unexpected. Neanderthal Dog Walker stops pacing, crouches down between me and a totally over it Princess, and hugs me. Just wraps his arms around me and holds.
And I do something even more surprising. I let him.
His arms anchor me while my mind swirls. They have a strange calming effect, and it doesn’t take too long for my body to feel like it did after my mom’s Xanax kicked in on my cross-country flight, when I finally stopped focusing on keeping the plane at a steady altitude through force of will (okay, so maybe I have some control issues) and just let go.
Reapproaching reality, I lightly wriggle my arms out of his hold so that I can sweep my hands under my eyes. Even waterproof mascara can only handle so much. The movement startles him.
“Oh man, was that not okay?” He withdraws his arms. “I’m not used to crying. At all. I go to an all-boys school and the only emotion my parents show is disapproval, so I went with my first instinct. That wasn’t creepy, right?”
“Just one more thing to add to the police report,” I say, turning to face him, his arms firmly folded across his chest and eyes turned back to saucers. “Oh God, sorry, too soon. I’m totally kidding. No police reports and no on the ‘that not being okay’ thing. The hug was actually surprisingly helpful. I just can’t believe I lost it like that in front of someone I don’t even know.”
He smiles in a supremely goofy manner, as if nothing strange has transpired in the slightest, and extends a hand. “I’m Ben.”
“Harper.” His hands are rough. Maybe a casualty of the leash-holding.
“You okay, Harper?” He doesn’t let go of my hand or my eye contact.
“Yeah, I think so.” I never did well in staring contests. I look out the window and watch the sky transition into a deep orange as the sun begins to set over the park. New York sky en fuego. “Sorry again about being a total crazy person.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. I’m the one who came in here guns blazing,” Ben says. “I swear I’m not always that big of an asshole. I’ve had a really crappy week. Not that it’s an excuse.”
“Tell me about it. Besides, I wasn’t exactly a peach myself.”
Princess snorts. No one has been paying attention to her for at least five minutes.
“I think that’s my cue to do my job and walk the dog,” Ben says. But he doesn’t move. I don’t move. “Hey, want to come with me and get some air?”
Is this a pity invite? My first impulse is to think of an excuse. It’s not like I don’t have any. I need to start writing my premier post to the Shift audience; I need to memorize my fashion flash cards.
Then I realize that I don’t want an excuse to avoid Ben.
“Air sounds good.”
Princess is less hot to trot.
It’s hardly a surprise to learn that the pug, in all her roly-poly glory, is a part of Ben’s “remedial group” of reluctant and unruly walkers. As soon as the leash is attached to her bedazzled collar, Princess lies down on her stomach, stretches all four legs, sticks out her tongue, and plays dead. It takes coaxing (note: coaxing involves a lot of fake bacon) to revive her.
“Your building is full of dogs who don’t understand the concept of taking a walk,” Ben explains as he drags Princess to an apartment down the hall to pick up his next confused client. “Wagner lives here. If you’ve never seen a dachshund chase his tail before, brace yourself, because your world is about to be rocked.”
Apparently the longhaired, long-bodied Wagner hasn’t always been an obsessive tail pursuer. Ben confides that Wagner is at the center of a mega custody battle between his uber-high-profile art dealer owners.
“His therapist blames the tail chasing on stress from the divorce,” Ben says without a hint of irony. “They’re considering putting him on a low dose of Lexapro.”
“The dogs here are . . . medicated ?” That’s just the kind of anecdote I’d love to jot down in my notebook.
“Everyone here is medicated. You have no idea.”
Ben tells me the personal histories of the dogs and their owners as I accompany him door to door to his other stops—Pepe the Frenchie at 4C, Poncho the Pomeranian at 3F, and finally Atticus, my nemesis, at 2A. While Ben clinks through his enormous key chain to find the right key, it sounds like the giant Goldendoodle puppy is going to scratch through the door. He bounds out as soon as the door opens and runs directly into Ben’s leg.
“Atticus! Chill out!” Ben hands me the leashes as he tries to get ahold of Atticus, who is bouncing from the hallway’s right wall to its left wall through Ben’s legs and then directly into a not-having-it Princess.
“Are you sure that it was me who, how did you put it, ‘bulldozed’ maliciously into Atticus and not the other way around?” I can’t help laughing as he wrestles with Atticus, who’s now on a mission to lick the freckles off Ben’s face.
“I might be overly protective of my dog family.” Ben pushes Atticus off his face with one hand and deftly hooks him onto the leash with the other.
Ben practically drags the mismatched group of dogs out of the foyer and down the three stairs leading up to the building. We move from the air-conditioned lobby into the sticky heat of the New York City summer night. But I’m not complaining. There’s a buzz in the air, and it isn’t mosquitoes. The sun has set and sidewalks are teeming with people in suits heading home and joggers dashing toward the park and screaming “on your left” to meandering tourists staring at their guidebooks rather than the road ahead.
“I live a few avenues east,” Ben says. “Cheaper real estate.”
He’s been walking some of these dogs since freshman year, when his dad told him it was time to get a job and learn some responsibility.
“But now he’s pissed that I still do it. He says it’s a total waste of my Saint Agnes scholarship to spend the summer walking dogs instead of doing one of those corporate finance internships my high school hooks juniors and seniors up with. My dad’s all, ‘How are you going to get into Wharton next year if you don’t take your summers seriously?’ Like I’d ever consider going to Wharton.” He turns to me to explain, “Wharton is the business program at Penn—”
“I know what Wharton is,” I tell him. “Believe it or not, word of the Ivy League has spread all the way across the Sierra Nevada.”
“Anyway, I don’t care about finance,” Ben says. “I like the dogs, and the money people pay me to walk them is ridiculous.”
While our group slowly traverses Fifth Avenue toward Central Park (Pepe leads the pack; Atticus goes side to side sniffing people’s shoes; and Princess defiantly, repeatedly, sits down in the middle of the road), Ben begins peppering me with questions. He nods when I say that I’m also a rising senior and does an overly dramatic eyebrow raise when I tell him I’m Shift’s summer teen dating blogger.
“So you’re here for a writing internship? Oh man, I didn’t let Atticus chew up the next great American novel, did I?”
“Hardly,” I reply. “My notebook is mostly for, um, it’s like I’m recording little snapshots of the weird things happening around me. Like something funny someone asks in class.”
“I though
t there were no dumb questions.”
“Mary Taylor once asked if Shakespeare wrote Titanic. I think it’s because she knew Leonardo DiCaprio was in that and a remake of Romeo and Juliet.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’d show you proof, but Atticus ate it. Anyway, I record stuff like that. Weird observations. Snippets of conversations.”
“You record your eavesdropping?”
“Instead of eavesdropping, can we call it active observation? Very active. But that’s totally different from what I have to do at Shift. I’m actually going to have to write down the embarrassing things I do and say. Not just write down the highlights I hear from a first date crashing and burning at the table next to me at the coffee shop.” I head toward the entrance of the park, but Ben is walking in a different direction. “Aren’t we going into the park? Believe it or not, even though I’m living across the street, I haven’t been inside yet.”
“Nah, not yet. Let’s walk uptown just a little bit longer.” Ben directs the dogs north, and they follow behind like ducklings, realizing it’s easier to trudge along by will than by force.
The crowds condense as we approach the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are police on horseback and kids screaming to their mothers that they want a hot dog—no, two hot dogs. Caricaturists wearing headlamps are squinting in the dark at their canvases displaying sketches of women with pinched waists and accentuated breasts. But I just push past to take a look at the rows of stairs leading up to the Met, leaving Ben and the dogs behind.
I’m embarrassed to admit that the rush I feel is more credited to Gossip Girl than it is to the art. While the show was a big no-no at my house—“One of those kids will have an STD by the commercial!” my dad decreed. “Watch a musical with me and Mom instead!”—Kristina’s mom didn’t do television rules in elementary school. Those Monday nights are some of the few memories I actually have of sleeping over at Kristina’s. We would eat tiny peanut butter Ritz Bits crackers on the living room couch, her pining after Nate the jock and me pining after Dan the brainiac, and watch Blair scheme her way to the upper echelons of the Manhattan elite while she sat on these very steps.
I take a Snapchat and write the words “Wish you were here!” in big orange letters with my pointer finger.
“I was wondering where you went!” Ben says, dogs in tow. Princess takes one look up at the stairs and lies down, in case anyone was under the false impression that she would be climbing them. “Catch!”
My hand-eye coordination sucks, but my reflexes don’t. Before Atticus can get his teeth on it, I bend down and pick up . . . a new notebook.
“There’s always a kiosk set up around here,” Ben says. “I figured I owed you.”
Rather than my understated black Moleskine—a favorite of Hemingway, Picasso, and other intimidating geniuses who sometimes make me question if I should write in permanent pen—this notebook is a bright yellow.
“I thought you could use something a little flashier,” he says. Which I guess makes sense. This summer is all about doing rather than taking notes by the sidelines. Been there, done that.
“That’s really nice.” I notice that when Ben curls his lips into a half smile, a dimple appears in his left cheek. “And thanks. You really didn’t have—”
“Look!” Ben’s dimple quickly disappears, like a secret that’s meant to be kept hidden. He whips out his phone and points it down. “Wagner is chasing his tail! I’ve been trying to get a video of this for weeks. Can you turn on the flashlight on your phone so I get good lightning?”
Wagner starts slowly, making eyes at his tail like it’s a doe that’s about to run away into the forest. Then he slowly bends his long body around to creep up on it from behind. Pretty soon Wagner is spinning, in hot pursuit. But the difference between a dachshund chasing his tail versus just about every other breed of dog is that the dachshund actually stands a chance of catching it. And in a triumphant moment, Wagner does. But that doesn’t keep him from continuing to go round and round like a pinwheel, tail in mouth, in pure, unadulterated puppy bliss.
“I don’t get Wagner.” I watch him twirl under my temporary spotlight. A crowd has formed. “Isn’t the fun supposed to be in the chase?”
“No way. The fun is what comes after.”
I feel little baby butterflies leave their cocoon and start to flutter in my stomach.
“Got it. I’m definitely posting this on my dog Instagram.” Ben stops recording. Wagner is panting on the ground.
“Your what Instagram?”
“I have a separate account for funny dog stuff,” he says. “Anyway, as I was saying, games suck. My girlfriend wasn’t into making me do the whole chase thing at all and I liked her even more for it. I like things as uncomplicated as possible.”
Annnnnd the butterflies are dead. Smashed to smithereens. Stomped into oblivion.
Ben keeps talking, but all I hear is that one word.
Girlfriend.
Neanderthal Dog Walker, who might not be so much of a Neanderthal after all, has a girlfriend.
9
THE NEXT DAY I SPEND a lot of time sitting and staring at a blank Word document. I try to conjure the persona of a super-cool, confident, irresistible dating expert—snarky mentor and best friend to millions of girls across the country.
Nothing comes to mind.
Instead I try to estimate how many Shift readers should actually be giving me the dating pointers.
Conclusion: a lot.
And so I sit and stare some more. Writing and rewriting possible openings in my head, but rejecting them before I even type them out on the page. Is it possible to have commitment issues with sentences?
Fully aware that my head isn’t in the game, I allow myself to take a break from not-writing, and procrastinate by rewatching the first few episodes of Gossip Girl on Netflix and lightly stalking Ben’s relationship.
The girlfriend.
Her name is Delilah.
She goes to Ben’s sister school, Saint Clementine.
And she plays varsity soccer. Because of course she does.
They met six months ago at a party, Ben told me last night as he led the way back to Aunt Vee’s, cradling a wheezing and overexerted Princess in his arms. He explained that every month, a trust fund kid (“usually one who goes to Holland Prep”) rents out a club to host a party. Said trust fund kid then earns back the cost of rental fees and proceeds to make a killing by selling party tickets at fifty dollars a pop to other trust fund kids on the New York private school circuit.
“That’s so much more exciting than a keg in someone’s backyard,” I said to Ben.
“Are you kidding? Kegs in backyards sounds way better to me.”
“Well, that’s only because you don’t have backyards here. It’s a novelty.”
“Nah, these club things aren’t my scene. Too many pretentious douche bags.” He readjusted a slipping Princess while making sure to maintain full control of the leashes. “But I’m glad I went to this one. Because otherwise I wouldn’t have met Delilah.”
Ben’s left to his own devices this summer while Delilah—“the next Abby Wambach!”—is away at a prestigious soccer camp in New Hampshire. She left the morning we literally ran into each other, which explains his crappy mood.
I pause on an Instagram of Ben and Delilah playing flag football. Ben and Delilah celebrating a big lacrosse win. Ben and Delilah on a couples’ jog, aka my personal nightmare, through the Central Park Loop. And then it hits me.
I shouldn’t actually care that Ben has a girlfriend.
If I wanted to date someone like Ben, then I could have just stayed in Castalia. There are plenty of jocks there. Ben’s not my type and I’m not his—just look at his Kristina-esque girlfriend. (Minus the broad swimmer shoulders, plus the soccer girl calves, and with darker blond hair.)
Any fluttering I might have felt in my stomach must have been the product of phantom butterflies, not real ones. My status as dating blogger has made
me feel desperate to find a guy to write a dating blog about. Ben was just the first guy I met.
Besides, he’ll be way better as a friend—something that I’m severely lacking at the moment. A low-pressure friend, whom I don’t have to impress with encyclopedic knowledge of dating dos and don’ts, viral headlines, and designer names.
If I were an actual dating guru, I would tell myself that this summer isn’t about rushing toward romance with the first guy I meet. Besides, he’s going to be around walking Aunt Vee’s obese pug every day—that would be so awkward when things (inevitably) fell apart.
In fact, I’m lucky that I don’t have to worry about trying to find a lasting whatever with one guy. That’s way too much pressure.
I’ve been known to fixate. But this summer isn’t about a boy. It’s about boys. Or “dating escapades” as McKayla put it.
Suddenly I find my voice and start typing.
MEET SHIFT ’S SUMMER DATING BLOGGER!
Every week Harper’s going to be taking you with her on her road to finding the ideal summer fling . . . or should we say FLINGS?
Hey, Shift Girls! My name’s Harper and I’ve come from sunny California to the concrete jungle known as Manhattan to tell tales of my summer dating escapades. Like any girl who has rocked out to Grease’s “Summer Nights” during karaoke, you might be tempted to find a sizzling summer fling. And I’m here to tell you—DON’T DO IT!
Don’t worry, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t find a hot lifeguard on the beach to help you apply suntan lotion to that impossible-to-reach spot in the middle of your back. That would just be irresponsible! (Take it from a Californian, UV rays are no joke, ladies.) But why should you limit yourself to one lifeguard and one set of hands? Why have a summer fling when you can have summer flings?
The whole concept of a summer fling is that it’s no drama, no strings, no heartbreak when you call it quits come Labor Day weekend. But let’s be real, you’re just a little bit hoping that you’re going to find the Danny to your Sandy. But who wants to spend the summer agonizing about why the cute guy at your fro-yo shop hasn’t texted you back after your melt-worthy make-out sesh (you know he saw your iMessage; you know he was typing; you saw the “. . .”!!) when you should be getting smaller samples of all the different flavors?
Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies Page 6
