by Meg Leder
I was charmed at how chivalrous he was. This would not be a terrible day.
We transferred to the F at Rockefeller Center, and after a much more peaceable ride this time, got out at Second Avenue.
“Let’s get coffee,” Keats said.
I followed him along past a string of bodegas and restaurants and a hardware store and a Starbucks and a bagel store. I liked the way he held my hand and told me things: the time Beckett snuck him into a punk rock show, how his parents met at a fraternity party, how I should read Richard Brautigan after On the Road (okay, maybe not that one). We turned on Seventh Street and, somewhere between First Avenue and Avenue A, stopped in front of a small divey storefront labeled HELVETICA, a place I never would have noticed on my own. Maybe, I thought, it was like something from Harry Potter and only existed today, right now, just for us.
When we walked through the door, a small bell tinkled, and from behind the counter a tattooed, pierced girl with blue pigtails gazed up disinterestedly. “The back open?” Keats asked, and she grunted and returned to her Village Voice.
Keats led me between cluttered old thrift-shop tables with mismatched chairs. Lamps with kitschy shades threw light warmly around the room. If this coffee shop were a person, it’d be a little old lady with lots of secrets—like a spinster aunt who used to be a dancer in the circus.
As soon as I saw the back room, I gasped. It was covered with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Hundreds of used books filled the space: old leather spines, cheap paperbacks.
“I love this place,” I said to myself, but maybe I said it out loud because Keats said, “I figured you would.”
He gave me that Keats smile. “What do you want? The usual?”
I raised my eyebrow.
“You know, hot chocolate, skim milk, no whip?” he offered.
Ahhh! Keats knew my “usual.” “Yes, please . . .”
As soon as he left the room, I plopped down on a couch in the corner. Everything around me smelled musty, like when you open an old book and it smells like words. I rested my boots against the coffee table, watched halfhearted sunlight filter in from the one window, tiny dust specks lazily floating around me, and heard Keats talking with the coffee girl, heard her laugh—Keats could charm surly tattooed girls—and then the whistle of the coffee steamer. Old Depeche Mode started playing over the speakers. Keats must have talked her into turning on something.
I studied the books on the shelf behind me.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was an old pulpy paperback festooned with red roses and a sultry, cleavagey woman with lips parted, as if she were breathless. Lady Chatterley, I assumed. I flipped through the wavy pages—the book had clearly been dropped in water—and found a folded slip of paper tucked in the back.
I unfolded it, read the cursive script: Sometimes I miss her more than I can stand.
“You find one of the notes?”
Keats carefully placed our two mugs on the coffee table and settled right next to me on the couch. Thanks to the broken cushions he sank in perfectly close to me.
“The notes?” I took a small sip of the hot chocolate. It was unsweetened, and the roof of my mouth would again totally be raw after this, but I didn’t care too much as the warmth trickled down into my belly.
“Yeah, people leave notes in the books here.” He read the one in my hand. “Damn,” he said, wincing. “That’s hard-core.”
I thought back to the photo from his room—the one of him and evil ex Emily—and I returned the note to the book and shoved the whole thing back on the shelf. “So there could be more notes in here?”
“Yep, most definitely.”
I pulled out a copy of Wuthering Heights, held it up excitedly. “This is one of my absolute favorites. Have you read it? God, it’s so terrible and romantic at the same time.”
“Eh, lady writers, not really my thing.”
“What?” Surely he didn’t mean that. Surely I misunderstood him. But before I could ask him to explain, he triumphantly held up a brightly colored hardcover of Love in the Time of Cholera in one hand and a note in the other.
“Score.”
He sat back on the couch, pulling me into the curve of his side as he unfolded the note.
He was warm. And he smelled like a Christmas tree. And I thought to myself: I am with Keats, a beautiful boy, in a coffee shop filled with books. Don’t freak out, Pen. This is a big deal.
He handed me the note, nuzzled his head against mine.
I blew on the chipped edge of my hot chocolate mug as I read.
Oatmeal. Rosemary. Cat food. Arcade Fire. Heartbeats. Tulips.
“Grocery list, you think?” he asked.
“Hmm. Heartbeats on a grocery list?”
“Good point,” Keats said.
I chewed on my lip, thought about the Bearded Lady and my NYC subway token, giving me luck even though it was currently residing at the bottom of my purse with the lint and a stray aspirin. “Maybe it’s some secret coded message, from spies, you know? They’re on opposite sides, but they met—in Paris—before they knew they were spies, and they fell in love, and now they have to meet secretly, all Romeo and Juliet like. So they write grocery notes with code words in them and leave them here.”
Keats was watching me with an amused expression. “What does the list mean?”
“Well, she wrote it—you can tell by the handwriting. And she wants to meet him after breakfast—oatmeal—by the Shakespeare garden in Central Park. Rosemary.”
“The cat food?”
“Um, he has to bring some, in case there are stray cats there.”
“Arcade Fire?”
“That’s how he knows it’s not some regular old grocery list. They first saw each other when an Arcade Fire song was playing, and her heart beat so fiercely, she said it was like tulips were blooming . . .”
I stopped talking, feeling a little dorky, but when I looked at Keats, he was watching me intently. His eyes were different—not amused, but soft and serious. He put his arm behind me and brought his lips to mine.
I closed my eyes, ready for dinosaurs to roar.
Instead I got Keats’s chapped lips.
I pulled back, not sure what to do next, and Keats gave me a half-lidded sleepy smile, and he kissed me again, more insistent this time. It wasn’t like when Eph kissed me, mint and salt and lightning and wonder.
This time it was chapped lips and a boy with a dimple as deep as a well, a boy who seemingly didn’t like lady writers, a boy with his hand pressed against the small of my back.
Thoughts flashed through my mind: This is different—this is for real—maybe I’m not doing it right? But Keats’s tongue slid into my mouth, and mine moved into his, and it was better then, my body relaxing into it, taking care of things for me.
At some point I felt myself crumple the secret spy grocery list in my hand and shove it in my pocket.
No one else came into the cafe, and the girl from the counter didn’t bother us, so we stayed there for the next hour, occasionally talking but mostly kissing.
I thought about Eph only once, when Keats went to the bathroom. I stood up, stretching, and browsed the shelves. In a corner so high I had to stand on my tiptoes, I found an old, wrinkled copy of The Hobbit, its pages yellowed and rippled, like someone had spilled something on it. It didn’t have any notes in it.
Without thinking twice, I pulled a scrap of paper from my purse and wrote Eph, the letters hard, leaving an imprint on the other side. But then I didn’t know what to say after that—words not exactly working.
I heard the murmur of Keats’s voice from the next room, talking with the girl at the counter, so I dropped the scrap of paper in the pages of the book, and then shoved the book back in its impossible spot on the shelf, where all the other forgotten secrets lived.
Keats came in, paused, looking at me, taking me in from top to bottom, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands, felt them useless next to me. But then he stepped forward, strong and decisiv
e and pulling me into a kiss, and both of us sank back down onto the couch like an exhale, like things held back and then released.
• • •
After a bit, when my lips started to feel bruised and puffy, we left, nodding at the waitress on the way out, shuffling on coats and walking into the cold air. Keats took my hand, and we walked through the East Village to Washington Square Park, watching skateboarders maneuver around, and I thought, This boy. This boy, not anyone else. This one, holding my hand.
We listened to a man play old ragtime tunes on a standup piano, right under the arch. We stopped at a food cart to get hot dogs and ate them outside, sitting on a wood bench, watching pigeons and kids flutter around, and we nestled together, and I thought, This is the boy I pick.
I couldn’t calm my beating heart, couldn’t stop my mind from racing through the possibilities.
Oatmeal.
Rosemary.
Cat food.
Arcade Fire.
Heartbeats.
Tulips.
“Wonder Wheel,” short story
“Wonder Wheel,” fabula
Saint Bartholomew’s Academy
New York, New York
Cat. No. 201X-16
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I WAS in a full-fledged Keats Haze, my lips puffy from consecutive days of near-uninterrupted make-out sessions.
He had surprised me the day after our Helvetica outing, offering to walk me home after school. On our way there, he made me laugh to the point of tears, his Mrs. Carroll imitation scarily perfect. He played the new National song for me, sharing one of his earbuds, his head nodding next to mine, in sync with the music. When we got to my stoop, the cool of the concrete steps passing through my jeans, we made out, entwined as scarlet leaves drifted magically in the air around us.
On Thursday, between watching teenagers break-dancing, some guy drawing caricatures, tourists getting lost, and locals walking their dogs, we sat on a wooden bench near Strawberry Fields in Central Park and made out some more, the trees bowing down around us like we were holy.
That Saturday, we walked from Keats’s house to Battery Park City, the river glinting bright alongside us, and went to the Poets House library. I rested my head on his shoulder as he read me Jack Kerouac poems, the late-afternoon sunlight making me drowsy enough that I was able to tune out Kerouac and just listen to Keats’s voice. It was a miracle, Keats next to me, the very fact of him liking me.
And Sunday we went to the Cloisters, orange leaves falling outside, holding hands inside while we studied the unicorn tapestries, my heart dreamy with the drug of pure like.
Keats was waiting for me at my locker Monday morning. He promised we’d go to the Strand after school. I spent the morning giddily imagining him pushing me gently against a shelf, his lips on mine, words around me, and by the time lunch rolled around, I could barely spell my name, already lost in the headiness of the afternoon’s potential.
“Pen!” Grace called to me from down the hallway, and I blinked twice, rubbing my neck.
“Hey!” I said, sunshine spilling lazily out of me.
“Hey, you,” she said, giving me an admiring look. “You are totally blissed out. Keats?”
I smiled, big and dopey.
She wrapped an arm around my shoulder, pulling me down the hall. “You’re late for Nevermore. For that matter, so am I. Turns out we have a little more space to fill for the next issue, but it needed to go to the printer like yesterday. So we’re getting pizza and reading. Unless you have plans with your Prince Charming?”
I shook my head.
“Follow me.”
When we entered the room, May waved cheerily.
“No Emily Dickinsons or Walt Whitmans yet,” she said. “But we’ll find them!”
Miles was bent over a pile of paper, his Mohawk uncharacteristically and ominously flattened down, scowling. “Be warned, there are a lot of vampire short stories and poems with thorns and dark tears and bleeding roses today.”
“Have you guys read Twilight?” Oscar asked.
Miles shot him a withering look, and Oscar shrugged. “It’s really well done.”
“I can’t even,” Miles replied, turning toward the wall and scowling.
I was just about to launch into questions about what Oscar could possibly find redeeming about Twilight when he winked at me.
“Man, you’re good,” I whispered under my breath as I sat between him and Miles.
He shrugged, settling back with a submission, stretching out his legs.
“Soooo . . . how’s it going with Starbucks Guy?” I quietly asked Miles.
He snatched a submission from the pile in front of us, in the process scattering the remaining entries across the table. May frowned and reached over, straightening them into a neat pile.
“Gracie told you?” His voice was petulant.
“I told Pen what?” she asked, sliding into the seat on the other side of Miles.
“About my date?”
“I told her the beginning but not the end,” Grace answered.
Miles sighed unhappily and loudly, pretending not to notice the way May glared across the table at the noise.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
“Nothing happened,” Grace said. “Someone’s being dramatic.”
“I’m not talking to you.” He gave Grace the hand and turned to me. “His breath smelled terrible.”
“Oh?” I said, not sure how to respond.
Grace rolled her eyes behind him.
“And he talked nonstop about his training at Starbucks and didn’t ask me any questions, and at one point there was actually a ten-minute soliloquy about the best pork chops he’d ever had. Turns out he hates E. E. Cummings—was only reading him that one time because he had to. It was awful and boring and not at all romantic. Total nuclear disaster.”
“Oh no,” I said, immediately thinking of my encounter with the dirty hot guy at Grey Dog. “Maybe he was nervous?”
“Exactly what I suggested. I don’t think he’s giving him enough of a chance,” Grace said under her breath.
“What kind of romantic story is that?” Miles practically yelled. “ ‘When your dad and I met, he couldn’t stop talking about pork chops’? That’s terrible!”
May made a harsh “shhhh” noise, and Miles gave her the finger.
“Classy,” she muttered.
“I want sweeping romance; I want a kiss that takes me to other worlds. Is that asking for too much?” Miles asked.
“Settle for nothing less,” I murmured, thinking of Vivien and Delphine’s vow, worrying faintly for the first time that maybe it was impossible to keep. But this wasn’t me and Keats we were talking about.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Grace said to Miles patiently. “I just think you should give him another chance. When I first met Kieran, I thought he was so boring, but—”
“That’s because he is boring!” Miles said.
Grace’s face froze.
Oscar raised his head from the manuscript, watching Miles, and May started twisting a ring on and off her finger.
“You think Kieran is boring?” Grace asked, her voice cracking.
“The only thing he can talk about for an extended period of time is Game of Thrones,” Miles said.
“I like Game of Thrones,” Oscar offered.
“He never wants to go out,” Miles said, ignoring Oscar. “He only eats hamburgers.”
Grace’s eyes were watering up, but Miles was on a tear, not even looking at her.
“He likes college basketball, for God’s sake!”
“Hey,” Oscar said to Miles, tapping him on the shoulder.
Miles shrugged him off. “What did he give you for your birthday this year again? A Best Buy gift card?” He wrinkled his nose. “If that’s real romance, no thank you.”
Grace was crying now, her face red and stricken. She grabbed her bag and headed toward the door, looking back at us before she left. “Screw you, Miles,” she said, the
door slamming behind her.
Miles flinched, the color draining from his face, his furious energy disappearing with it.
Oscar stood up then, his chair screeching across the linoleum, and pointed firmly at Miles, then at the door. “Out.”
May shot me a panicked glance.
Miles looked at Oscar, confused. “You’re kidding again, right?”
Oscar continued to point at the door.
Miles turned toward May and me. “You guys know I didn’t mean it. I’m just stressed. I’ll find Grace and apologize, okay?”
“You need to go,” Oscar said firmly.
Miles waited for one of us to say something, but I couldn’t stop thinking of the look on Grace’s face, how we shouldn’t have seen it, how we were trespassing on the secret parts of her heart.
Miles snatched his bag, furious again, and stormed out.
Oscar and May and I sat in silence for a few minutes, until she stood suddenly. “I’m going to look for Grace. You guys should keep reading—we need to find something by tomorrow if the issue’s coming out on time.”
Oscar sighed and handed me the next submission on the stack, grabbing one for himself too, as May left.
The short story I was reading—“Wonder Wheel”—started with a guy riding the Coney Island Wonder Wheel at night, making out with a girl named Jena.
Even though I wasn’t very hungry, I leaned over for a slice of pizza, blotted the grease off with a paper-thin napkin, and folded the thin triangle in half.
The narrator was angsty, spending a lot of time moodily staring at the rain through cafe windows, drinking his coffee black while he lamented the fact that he was attracted to Jena—that even though he found her “mean and shallow as a teenage girl’s eye shadow dreams” (sexist much?), he kept returning to her “like a hardened moth to a passionate and cruel flame” (clichéd much?).
Irritated, I flipped to the last page.
The final scene featured the narrator riding the Wonder Wheel, alone this time, smoking a cigarette and staring poignantly out over the sea. He had broken things off with Jena, her cruelty “a dark blot of cancer seeping into him like mold,” but once he’d lost her, he realized that he loved her.
