Imaginary Lines (3 page)

It was probably long gone by now. Eight years was a long time to keep hold of a sentimental trinket.

When I’d graduated two years ago, I’d sailed out of college with bright eyes and bushy hair, and the absolute certainty that I was going to make it. I’d earned good grades and I’d been marginally active in two clubs—culinary and band. I’d been editor of my school newspaper.

I’d grown up watching
Gilmore Girls.
The world was supposed to be my oyster.

Then I graduated in a recession and moved back home with my parents. That was not an oyster. All my friends seemed to be doing productive things with their lives, by which I meant going to grad school or getting unpaid internships. Gabi had swung a production assistant position in L.A., while our other best friend, Cindy, was getting her education master’s.

I didn’t get any of the jobs I applied for. And I didn’t get into J-school. And I started to realize that I wasn’t such a special snowflake, after all.

The moment you realized that you weren’t going to be the best of the best was one of the strangest in the world. I mean, I knew there wasn’t room at the top for everyone.

But I thought there would be room for me.

Mostly, I stayed at home and taught SAT classes at the local high school and worked part-time at the local newspaper. I freelanced a bit and applied to other things, but searching for jobs was exhausting when you already had one. I applied for the dream jobs, the one I’d give my right arm to have, but never expected to hear back from.

Like the one I’d just landed in New York.

Conglomerates like the Today Media network didn’t usually hire journalists with small-town clippings, no matter how many college awards they’d won. I used to think being the managing editor at the Berkley newspaper meant something, but that was before I realized most writers had journalism school credentials or had unpaid interned their way in.

But I lucked out; I freelanced a piece on withdrawing the salaries of coaches that got picked up by one of the major online news sites, and within two weeks garnered hundreds of comments. Okay, most of them were angry with me, but it still looked impressive in my résumé.

In a second serendipitous stroke, Tanya Jones, editor of
Sports Today
, received my application, read my piece and lost one of her writers to
New Today
, the media group’s mainstream news source, all on the same day. She had her assistant call me up and asked where I lived. I lied and said New York, giving my aunt’s address. They asked me to come in for an interview; after some wrangling, I got it scheduled for a week later, when I’d be in town for my aunt’s birthday. Twenty-four hours after the interview, they offered me the position with a low salary and few benefits. I jumped at it.

I’d pushed off starting the job until Rosh Hashanah, but it seemed silly to ask them to let me have an additional week for Yom Kippur, especially when we really just went to some Temple friends’ house and chilled. I’d start on the twenty-fifth, and arrive on the twenty-second, giving me several days to get used to the city and unpack before jumping straight into a new job.

Mrs. Krasner leaned forward and caught my hand, her own warm and papery. “Give him another chance, Tamar.”

“He’s not even interested.”

She shook her head and didn’t let go. “When he realizes he is. Promise to give him another chance.”

And how could I refuse, despite knowing full well how uninterested her grandson was in me? “Of course.”

New York

My plane circled JFK five times before landing due to storm winds. When we finally plowed through the clouds, the turbulence caused the three children behind me to burst into a high-pitched rendition of Mozart’s “Haffner Serenade.” The eight-month-old did a particularly impressive tribute to the violin solo. Beside me, the fifty-something man cursed quietly as he continued to play solitaire on his iPhone.

I gazed at the gray-black clouds with uneasy contemplation. I’d been nervous when the plane climbed to altitude but fine after it leveled out. Now, though, I was uneasy again, ready for the plane to fall out of the sky any second. I didn’t like when the plane dipped dramatically in one direction, one wing to the ground and one slicing into the sky. It made my stomach swoop and my feet tingle, and my hands clung to the armrests with a slippery grasp.

The entire descent, I breathed shakily and held my body tense, but we finally landed in one piece. Yet then we had to sit on the runway for an extra hour, and then it turned out my luggage had gone to Amsterdam—I swear, my luggage was better traveled than I was—so all in all, it wasn’t the most auspicious arrival to the city where I’d centered all my dreams.

The minute I stepped into the New York air, I could feel moisture percolating through my face to lie in a fine sheen of perspiration upon my skin. My hair lifted away from my head as each follicle seemed to expand and become more susceptible to tangling, forming a massive cloud that hovered on either side of my head.

Ah, humidity.

I’d never actually been to the apartment I was moving into, which I’d acquired through word of mouth. I’d never even been to Astoria, though I’d heard of the neighborhood plenty of times. When I arrived at the three-story building, conveniently located across from a bodega and above a delicious-smelling Greek taverna, I texted the number I’d been given. Jasmine Rivas buzzed me up within seconds. She was small and athletic, her dark hair thrown up in a ponytail. “Hey. How was your trip?”

“Good, thanks.” I tried to shove my frizzing curls off my forehead. How was it possible for my hair to be sticky and frizzy at the same time? “I’m Tamar.” Which she knew, of course, since we’d been emailing and texting, but it still felt weird to act like we’d met when we never had.

“Jasmine. Come on in.” She led me into the narrow hallways beyond the door. “So you’re Kari’s friend’s cousin?”

“Uh, Kari’s cousin’s friend.”

She shrugged, unconcerned by the particulars. “Well, we’re glad you’re here. You wouldn’t believe some of the crazies we’ve had from subletting through Craigslist. One girl did PX-90 like every night. We were like, just join a gym like a normal person.”

I had no idea what PX-90 was. Also, I had no plans to join a gym. Especially after climbing to the fifth floor.

“Okay, so here’s the grand tour.” She walked down the long hall, banging and gesturing on rooms to the left. “Sabeen’s room. She’s from Iraq, just moved in two months ago. Kitchen. Bathroom.”

The kitchen wasn’t bad; maybe five by five, with a tiny window facing into the apartment across the air draft. It fit a full fridge and stove. As we reached the bathroom, the door swung inward and a cloud of steam poured out, along with a tall girl wrapped in a towel. Jasmine gestured at her. “This is Lucy.” The girl waved before ducking into the next room down. “She’s an actress.”

As if on cue, Lucy started belting something from
The Last Five Years
behind her closed door.

The hallway opened up into the dining room/living room setup, where a table for six was pushed against a wall. A red couch and two chairs took up the rest of the room, and a bookcase filled with novels and textbooks fit in one corner. Light poured in from long windows and streamed across the wooden floorboards. While three of the walls were white, the one with windows had been painted a pale, summery green.

“It looks great.”

Jasmine nodded in acknowledgment. “Thanks. We just repainted the walls last month. Makes it look surprisingly less shitty.” She gestured across the living room at two doors. “I’m on the left, you’re on the right.”

And that concluded the tour. “Great. Thanks. Anything else I should know?”

She shrugged. “There’s some guys on the third floor who smokes a ton so the stairwell always smell like pot, but it’s not that big a deal. I mean, obviously, there’s all the normal stuff—like take the trash out, and we sort of have a twenty-four-hours dirty dishes rule. Um...there might occasionally be strange guys in the morning from Luce, but she’s pretty good about texting us if she’s bringing anyone home. And like only on weekends, because we all work or study. Oh, and technically we’re not allowed on the roof, but you can get up there via fire escape.”

I nodded, trying to take that all in. Drugs, dishes, dudes. Got it. “Okay, great.”

She leaned casually against my door frame. “So what do you do?”

I smiled. “I just got a job at
Sports Today.
”

She tilted her head. “That’s a Today Media blog?”

“It’s also a magazine. It’s, uh, both.”

“Cool. You play anything?”

I shrugged. “Not really. Mostly I just report.”

She nodded and left me, and I collapsed in my new room, staring around. I’d bought the furniture from the last roommate, who had been subletting her furnished room for the last six months. She’d sold me a queen-sized bed, an IKEA dresser and nightstand and a desk with a wheelie-chair. The space itself was pretty decent.

Crazy monkeys. I was in New York.

I let out a mostly silent squeal and flailed my arms and legs about in an impromptu jig. So what if it was cold and wet and I only knew one person in the city? I had a job! I was a continent away from my parents! I was in a thriving, exciting city, where no one knew me and I didn’t have to be good, quiet Tamar Rosenfeld. I could be crazy party girl if I wanted to be!

And, okay, I didn’t particularly want to be, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I could be
anything
here.

And, sure, I probably had to make friends first.

I stared out the sizeable window at the busy street below. I could feel it in my bones, like the solid trunks of trees and the mist rolling off the hills and the tingle in my feet. Magic. I could find magic here.

Almost absently, I scrolled the word on a piece of paper from my purse in light and sketchy lines.

1) Find magic.

What else had I wanted? What else
did
I want in life?

2) Do something crazy.

3) Be independent.

4) Be brave.

5) Stop being scared about things I can’t control.

I stared up at the ceiling. My lines were becoming more defined, the letters smaller and darker and more certain.

6) Write something I’m proud of.

7) Fall in love.

8) Be happy.

That was what I was going to do here in New York, in this new city of metal and gray and magic. I was going to do everything.

Everything was going to be perfect.

Chapter Three

When I woke, I relished in stretching slowly and twisting in my blankets. Sun spread across me, panels of light that warmed my skin. From outside came the gentle hum of construction and kids and traffic.

I pulled myself out of bed in time to meet up with my cousin Shoshi for brunch. Apparently brunch was a
thing
here in New York, the kind of thing you planned for days in advance and got reservations for or waited in line. I mean, I was no stranger to being a foodie. San Francisco housed one of the best restaurant scenes in America—or the planet, if I didn’t feel like being modest. We had the French Laundry and Gary Danko and Alice Waters.

And so maybe I hadn’t actually been to any of those places, and they weren’t all actually
in
San Francisco. Point was, I
could
, and they were close.

I met Shoshi at Alice’s Tea Cup on the Upper East (that was how she said it—the Upper East, like it was its own continent), which appeared to be an entire restaurant based off Wonderland. I liked it despite myself. The clientele was made up of what Shoshi snootily referred to as Park Avenue princesses (as though growing up one block over was oh-so-different) and young women who looked exactly like me. I watched them in anthropological fascination. Well-dressed and well-mannered, they bent toward each other over French toast stuffed with berries and topped by Chantilly (which was, apparently, whipped cream) and had intense discussions about topics I’d read about that morning on the feminist blog Today Media ran.

Shoshi had sleek, perfect curls and a cute nose I would’ve killed for, and also an ease around people I doubted I’d ever cultivate. She threw her arms around me as soon as I arrived, smelling richly of roses. “So who are these people you moved in with?”

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “The lease-holder’s a grad student, and she told me what she studied, but it was one of those things that didn’t make sense to me, so it didn’t stay in my head.”

“So how do we know she’s not an ax murderer?”

I slowly sipped my mocha. Heaven. “I looked her up online and she won some scholarship and her hometown newspaper did a story on her. Sounds legit.”

“Well, if you wake up and she’s wielding an ax you can come stay at my place. As long as it’s not for more than three nights. Apartment rule.”

I laughed. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Besides, the commute’s a straight shot to the Flatiron District, and I figure it’s worth a funny situation in return for a good commute.”

For half an hour, we gossiped about our family and what I should do here and what she’d been up to, and I decided she wasn’t going to bring up the one topic I wanted to avoid. Until she returned from the bathroom. I opened my mouth to comment on the conversation I’d been eavesdropping on while she was gone, only she beat me to it as she dropped back into her chair. “Okay. So I have a thing for you.”

I tore myself away from the debate next door, which had something to do with American Girl dolls. I’d had Molly, which I was sure said something about my personality (that I was a nerd? Was Molly a nerd simply because of her glasses? Causation or correlation), and I’d carried her around so much that her arm had fallen off—or, more accurately, the rest of her had fallen off, leaving her arm clutched in my tiny hand. “A thing?”