The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  Can I fake you out

  With a fake moral stand?

  Or do you know me

  Like the palm of your beautiful hand?

  That’s the chorus, she guesses, and he stops singing and he looks at the ground as if he’s having a moment, but the thing is, he isn’t. It’s an approximation of a moment. It’s like he wants her to think he means it, but she doesn’t believe he’s ever had such a moment with a guy. She’s sure of it, actually. It’s not a real moment at all, and she wants to reach out and tell him it’s okay.

  When the music fades, she claps enthusiastically. An elderly couple, the only other people on the deck, clap as well. She goes to him and for the first time she hugs him. She feels his body melt a little into hers.

  “Oh my god,” she says. “That was so … real.”

  “Real,” he repeats into her shoulder.

  “Well, yeah. Like real to life. Relatable.”

  “It needs work,” he says.

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. You can work on anything and make it better. But … thanks, Aaron. Thanks for sharing that with me. I—loved it.”

  And she’s not lying, exactly. She loved something. If not the song, what she loved was him putting himself out there. This is a boy who has no defenses, and yeah, the last boy who took his defenses down messed her up, but this is a different boy, and there’s something about that that makes her glad she’s standing on the top of Belvedere Castle on a Friday morning with him.

  While Tillie hugs Aaron after he sings his song, he goes over every single moment of the performance. Did he go flat when he sang the You watch as I write line? Sometimes he does that. Did the feeling come through in the refrain? He’s not thinking about a specific person when he sings it. More a general idea of a potential connection. That moment when you hope someone gets you, hope someone hears your song and sees inside your soul, but they might only have an idea of you, and it might not even be correct. Kind of like this moment right now.

  Does Tillie really get it? The hug feels like she does. The word real that she used to describe it, too. But she didn’t say anything about his voice. Did she like it? Does he have what it takes to be a singer, professionally?

  He needs to have it. Because without it, he has nothing.

  It turns out the tuba is superfluous to the visit to Central Park, as Aaron’s and Tillie’s musical skills are not a match. Aaron shows himself to have just enough ability on Guitar Pro to be dangerous, just well versed enough to create songs using keyboard, drums, and vocals. Tillie has a loose sense of harmony, but she tends to find the harmonies moments or two after the notes have come and gone.

  So they walk to Tillie’s place and leave her tuba in the lobby—she’s supposed to be at school, so a drop-off is all she can get away with—and then they head south on Lexington Avenue, unsure of what is next but knowing they have to keep going with whatever it is they’re doing. A new way of living, kind of.

  As they walk, Aaron talks about his dreams of being a musician.

  “I think the vibe is kind of Ed Sheeran meets Julien Baker?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Or like Rufus Wainwright, if you’ve heard of him? Like it’s all about the lyrics and the feelings, and I’m not going to, I don’t know. Dumb it down.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  “Maybe in college I’ll study composition? Or at least singing. I took some singing lessons but that was a couple years ago. I think I kind of figured out singing on my own. I know I’m not like Sam Smith or something. But people like Bob Dylan, too.”

  “Right.”

  “I think what people really want is what you said about real, anyway.”

  Tillie doesn’t say anything now, though she has two things that she really feels like she ought to say. One is that real is good, and she tries to deliver the real, too. But the thing about real is that people are cruel. And when you’re really real, and people critique that real, it cuts too deep. The other is that real is best when combined with craft, and what would be really good is if he put in the time to get more than just “dangerous on Guitar Pro.” Because what she loved about the song wasn’t the craft but the vulnerability, but she’s special, she’s different, she gets it. The world will eat Aaron alive. But she can’t say that, because who says to a boy they met on a bridge, a boy who almost jumped two days earlier, “I need to be honest. That song is sweet but needs work.” No.

  They subway down to Grand Central on the 6 line. It’s midmorning and the train is half-full, and when it stops at Fifty-First Street, the door opens and there, standing like a passenger reading a newspaper and waiting for the express, is not a person but a rat.

  “Do you ever just want to get out of New York?” Aaron asks once the doors close without the rat boarding. “Like run off to somewhere warm and pretty and clean and never look back?”

  “Not really,” Tillie says.

  The train squeaks as it goes around a bend, like it needs some oil and hasn’t been tended to in a century. Aaron grabs the bar that a million other people have probably touched—in the last week. “Yeah, me neither,” he says.

  They take the 7 train west and wind up on the High Line—Aaron’s idea—sitting and doing nothing, which is Tillie’s, because she’s tired and it’s already been a lot.

  They enter on Thirty-Third and wander south along the narrow paths of the former elevated rail line that is now a gorgeous public park, a narrow greenway with paths featuring pristine gardens and eclectic artwork.

  Aaron is about to ask where they ought to sit when a balding guy with a big gut wearing an Empire State Building T-shirt says, “Would you mind?” He sticks out his phone. Aaron takes it and happily obliges by taking a few snaps with the Hudson River as the backdrop.

  They wander past an enclosed amphitheater of gray wooden steps and seats and a small enclosed garden of purple flowers that remind Tillie of little lavender Christmas trees. Aaron spots a bench facing the water and as he turns to ask Tillie if that would work, he nearly runs into two women trying to maneuver a selfie stick.

  “Most sorry,” one of them says. She has an accent, maybe Russian.

  Tillie motions awkwardly in a way that she hopes indicates that she’d be willing to divest them of their gadget and take a picture for them, and they look confused until she pulls out her phone and pantomimes taking a photo. This brings smiles and nods, and soon Tillie is snapping shots of them from various angles.

  “Does anyone from New York actually come here?” Aaron asks, just as a middle-aged Chinese woman taps Tillie on the shoulder, smiles, and hands her a camera.

  “Unclear,” Tillie says before obliging the woman.

  Once they’ve fulfilled their duties as emissaries for their city, Tillie lies fully down on the closest bench and stares up at the blue sky. Aaron lies down the other direction, with the top of his head inches from hers. The two of them fill one bench just about perfectly.

  “You know, I actually don’t feel that depressed right now,” Aaron says.

  “Me neither.”

  “So maybe there’s a lesson there?”

  “Sure,” Tillie says. “Next time I’m about to jump off a bridge, I’ll make sure to take a photo of a tourist.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant,” Aaron says.

  They catch their breath and study the sky for a few minutes.

  “So,” Aaron says. “It’s another time.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said yesterday you’d tell me what’s up with you another time.”

  “Ugh. I’d rather not.”

  “Really?”

  Tillie thinks about this for a bit. She scratches her scalp, the backs of her fingers grazing Aaron’s forearm along the way. She thinks: No. Not really. I kind of do want to talk about it. And she feels still short of breath but now also jittery in her throat. This is a dangerous place to be. If he leaves, if he ends up ghosting me, I might not be able to take it.

  She sits up, and so does he. Sh
e tentatively starts to tell him about Amir, and as she does, she feels his energy to her right, and occasionally she glances over and she watches him take it in, and she watches his face change, his expression. He gets it, he totally gets it. And watching him understand what it’s like to be that open and have a boy just disappear on you emboldens her, and she starts telling him more details, which is very not her. Like how alone in this world she feels, and how Amir seemed to get that and it gave her just a tiny bit of hope, and then it was pulled away. Suddenly she’s sharing her innermost secrets and feelings with this still near stranger, and she feels the tears there, on the insides of her eyelids, but she won’t let them fall, no, she won’t, and she tenses her chin and talks about the video, and what it feels like to have a skinny girl put a pillow under her shirt to imitate you and call you a cow, and have other girls laughing in the video, and then all the online comments about how hysterical it is, and watching him get it makes her relive it a little, and damn it, the first tear breaks out, from the outside of her right eye, and she wants to push it back in but she can’t, and once the first one is out, others come, and she realizes where all that moisture came from inside him yesterday, because she’s crying more tears than she knew she had. He reaches out to touch her shoulder, and she flinches away. He puts his arm back, away from her, and she tells him more about Amir, about Molly. Not her dad, though. It’s like when she gets close to there, she’s just so exhausted that she can’t.

  Aaron finds himself crying because she’s crying, and he wonders if this is the first time strangers have ever cried together on this particular bench along the High Line. Probably not. It just intrinsically feels like the place this happens sometimes.

  When she’s done telling him all that she’s going to tell him, they sit in silence for a while, which feels right. Tillie then turns and looks into Aaron’s eyes and says something that surprises him. And her, a little, too.

  “So not to be too whatever, but if you ghost me after this, I will either come and kill you, or I will kill myself and haunt your dreams forever. No joke. Do you get that?”

  He’s like, Whoa. And also like, Yep. Got it. He nods.

  “Just saying,” she says.

  “Just hearing” is his response.

  Tillie angles for a lunch of savory crepes at La Bergamote on Ninth Avenue and Twenty-First Street. Aaron doesn’t want her pity and is about to make up an excuse involving an aversion to French foods when Tillie saves him.

  “It’s on me,” she says.

  The feeling is relief and shame, balled into one. Aaron hates being a charity case in general, but the way Tillie is so breezy about things with money puts him at ease.

  “Thanks,” he says, deciding later he’ll take her for hot dogs at Papaya King, which is more his speed and budget.

  After, Tillie and Aaron wander down Ninth Avenue, with its odd combination of old tenements and posh eateries, and then Hudson Street, where the efficient grid of Manhattan breaks down into the chaos of Greenwich Village and its cobblestoned, catawampus lanes barely wide enough for one-way car traffic. Sometimes Aaron takes the subway down to the Village and aimlessly wanders these small, tree-lined backstreets and alleys, imagining himself as a famous singer living in one of those multimillion-dollar brownstones. This time, he’s thinking about Tillie’s story, and how, when she told him what was up in her life, he felt his heart break a bit. He gets that he doesn’t really know how it would be to feel so alone in your own house. To fall for a guy and then have him ghost you when you’re at your most open and vulnerable. If somebody at school made a video lampooning him and everyone watched it—okay, that humiliation is something he gets completely.

  When the school day is over, they descend into the subway station at West Fourth, where the plan is for Tillie to take the E to the Upper East Side, while Aaron will take the C up to Central Park West. As it gets closer to the time to say goodbye, Tillie feels this twinge of sorrow enter her chest. As they stand on the platform, they hear a thunderous cacophony down the track, a booming, reverberating melody that sounds like it’s coming from a grand piano. Which it cannot be, Tillie realizes, as it would be nearly impossible to get a grand piano down into the subway.

  But lo and behold, that’s exactly what it is. They approach and see a young Black guy playing what sounds like a Bach concerto, and the melody hits her in the heart, and she looks over and sees that Aaron, too, seems moved by the odd juxtaposition of classical music and subway station, and they are not alone. A crowd of disparate New Yorkers has gathered to watch and listen, and Aaron and Tillie look at each other and smile. Aaron loops his arm through Tillie’s and they lock elbows, and in that moment their friendship is solidified. They both know, Tillie can tell that this is a story they will share forever, and that forever might actually last more than a couple more days. Somehow their connection has lengthened forever for both of them.

  The crowd bursts into applause as the pianist finishes the concerto, and trains come and go, and somehow Aaron and Tillie don’t board any uptown trains. They are content to hear more music. And then Tillie watches Aaron fiddle around in his pocket, and she’s glad because he’s going to give the guy a tip, which he deserves, not only for the playing but for the effort of bringing an actual grand piano into the subway station.

  Aaron approaches and kneels down to murmur something to the pianist, who is preparing to start his next song. The guy says something back, raising an eyebrow, and a conversation ensues, and Tillie gets this uncomfortable feeling in her gut, and her instinct is to go and pull her new friend back.

  The guy stands up, and Aaron sits down, and Tillie thinks, Don’t do this.

  Aaron shouts to those watching that he’d like to play a song he wrote. He says that he’s been sad, but that he’s not sad today, and he points to Tillie, who tentatively waves. He says that it was meeting her that helped make him un-sad. A few people clap at this, but there’s a runaway-train feeling in Tillie’s chest and she just wants to grab him out of there, protect him, but she cannot move.

  He starts to play his un-nuanced, clunky chords, which, coming after the gorgeous concerto, sounds particularly underwhelming. Then he adds his scratchy young Bob Dylan voice, and the lyrics warble and wiggle and fall essentially flat in the cavernous subway station.

  I called you yesterday

  And let the phone ring

  Though I knew

  You couldn’t answer

  I must remind myself

  Constantly

  I have to make do

  With a memory of you

  The crowd starts to disperse. Some people walk away. Not scoffing, exactly. More like they have places to go, and this is not worthy of their time in the same way the concerto was. And Tillie’s heart breaks for Aaron, and she can see that he’s aware of the people moving away, and that he soldiers on anyway, raising his voice as if maybe they can’t hear him, which is so brave. She tries to send that message to him telepathically, that he’s damn courageous.

  When he’s done, there’s a smattering of polite applause that is drowned out by an arriving uptown E train. No way is Tillie getting on that train. She shouts and whistles and woos for her friend, doing everything she can to sound like many, many people, and it feels absurd but she’ll do it again and she’ll do it longer if it means Aaron won’t be sad.

  But he will be, she realizes. This seems like just the kind of thing that would make him really, really sad.

  He skulks over, his head bent down, his posture defeated.

  As much as she doesn’t love hugging, she wraps her arms around his midsection and squeezes.

  She feels his body disengaging.

  “I just …” he says.

  “You were great,” she says as the piano music starts thundering up again.

  He sits down in the center of the chaotic platform and puts his head in his hands, and despite the people rushing this way and that, she has no choice but to sit down on the filthy subway floor, too, though reall
y she wants to pull his arm and take him somewhere—anywhere—else. To Belvedere Castle. To the High Line. Someplace with air and relative quiet. She feels his deflation and the extent of the feeling surprises her. It’s heavy and it’s a lot.

  He sits in the same spot, unmoving, his head not down, just staring at what would be the train tracks, but she’s pretty sure he isn’t seeing anything. She wants to shake him, take him out of whatever this is. But she also somehow knows that won’t work.

  She gently puts her hand on his back but yells the words over the cacophony of piano and subway sounds. “Is this like what happened in physics?”

  He ever so slightly nods.

  “Can you move?”

  He doesn’t move.

  She inhales deeply. “So what do we do?”

  He takes so long to answer that when he does, what he says is drowned out by an express train coming into the station. So she asks again, and she hears him say, monotone, “Take me home, please.”

  Which she does. She helps him stand, she takes his bag, and she holds his hand. They grab the next C train, and they hold on to a pole and jostle and jangle into strangers, and she watches his increasingly vacant eyes and knows: He’s not here. Aaron is missing. It scares the shit out of her.