I felt a set of bony fingers crawl down my back. When I turned around, there was a pencil-thin party boy in a sleeveless Sex Pistols T-shirt and skinny jeans pushing me forward, his hands on my hips.
“Dude.”
I slapped his probing hands from my body. “What is your
problem
?”
I don’t even think he heard me as he slid past. But when I turned back around, Andy was gone.
“Andy?” I called out, spinning in place. “Andy?” The bodies were cutting deeper into my personal space. There was nowhere to put my hands without touching some guy’s sweaty back. Nowhere to breathe without inhaling some girl’s Chanel-drenched neck. I crossed my arms over my chest and buried my fingers between my underarms, feeling sweat start to trickle down my elbows.
“Andy
. . .
?”
“Theo! Theo, look up!”
He was tall enough that I could see his backpack. He pointed above us and mouthed, “Bar. Meet me at the bar.”
By the time I
got upstairs, I felt like a used punching bag. I’d lost track of Andy again, but I was sure he’d find me. I pushed through two more layers of thirsty club kids and miraculously found an available stool. I set my elbows down on the glowing blue Lucite bar and buried my head under my hands. I knew it made me look like one of those psycho drunk chicks who’d had one too many lemon drops and a screaming fight with her boyfriend. But maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it made me invisible—
“Rough night?” a boy’s voice asked, close to my ear.
I jerked away and became the Terminator, scanning the boy and assessing the threat level:
Casual gray sport coat over a spanking new white T-shirt. Even whiter teeth in a perma-smile. Close-cropped, wavy red hair with no product. Bud Light Lime on the napkin in front of him. A flat pug nose that probably left him begging for his frat brothers’ sexual table scraps in college.
Yes, undoubtedly a frat boy, but one of those kinder, all-inclusive frats that real frats made fun of.
Conclusion: Douchey but harmless.
“Do you need a drink?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I didn’t come here to drink.”
“Oh, right on.” He smirked. “Booze isn’t your thing, then?”
“Right,” I said.
“How about a water?”
I glanced over my shoulder for signs of Andy. He should have made it to the bar already. Now he had me talking to strangers again. “Okay, a water,” I said flatly.
Douchey-but-Harmless raised his hand to the bartender. “Ray-Ray! A bottle of water for the lady!”
“Coming up!” Ray-Ray shouted back.
Clearly Douchey and the bartender were friends, and clearly Douchey wanted me to know this. The hordes were clamoring for Ray-Ray’s attention, hollering drink orders, thrusting fifty-dollar bills between the beer taps, but Ray-Ray ignored them like the bouncer had ignored Andy.
Aha. Andy was a genius. He wanted us at the bar because that’s where all the regulars hung out. The regulars were more likely to know Sarah if she partied here, and I was pretty sure I’d just found the Magic Garden’s resident junior barfly. Time to unleash Theo Lane, P.I.
I turned to Douchey. “So do you come here a lot?” I demanded.
Douchey frowned. I shut my eyes, mortified. I’d just asked him a variation of the world’s most clichéd pickup line by complete accident.
“Yeah,” Douchey said cautiously. “I live just around the corner.”
I mustered the courage to open my eyes.
“One water for the lady!” Ray-Ray slid up to our spot and poured half a bottle of Voss water into a floral-print glass. He had a square actor’s face, annoyingly perfect jet-black hair, and overly manicured black stubble. “Who’s this, Tim? Your little sister?”
I was relieved that Tim’s real name was even more harmless than Douchey.
“No, this is my friend . . .” Tim looked to me to finish his sentence.
“Emma,” I said.
“Well it’s very nice to meet you, Emma.” Ray-Ray reached over the bar, I assumed to shake hands. But when I reached for his hairy bear paw, he snatched my wrist. In a flash, he expertly fastened a thin strip of orange paper around it. “Welcome to the Magic Garden, Emma. You can have all the water and soda you want. It’s on me.”
Once free, I scowled and massaged my wrist.
underage
was printed on my orange bracelet.
I needed to find Andy, and I needed to get out of here as soon as possible. “Listen, Tim, I was supposed to meet my friend Sarah here, but I haven’t been able to spot her yet. Maybe you know her? Sarah? She comes here all the time. She’s blonde and . . . she’s ridiculously pretty.”
“I know at least twenty ridiculously pretty blonde Sarahs who hang here,” Tim said.
“Right. She’s, uh . . . God, I don’t know how to describe her. She was just here on Saturday with our friend Andy.”
“Andy . . . ?” He was waiting for a last name.
“Andy Reese,” I said. “But you probably don’t know him—”
“Andy Reese?” Tim interrupted, dropping his voice to a whisper. He glanced over his shoulder and leaned close, hammering me with his cinnamon skunk breath. “Of course I know Andy. He’s here almost every night. In the men’s room.”
“The men’s room?”
“Yeah, I bet he’s there now. Should we pay him a visit?”
I blinked, feeling vaguely sick. “Andy Reese? Is here every night? In the men’s room?”
“Pretty much,” Tim said, sliding off his stool and smoothing down his jacket.
“Like, since when? Since Saturday?”
“My boy Andy?” Tim laughed. “Nah, the kid’s a year-round staple. He’s what makes the Garden magic.” He offered his hand, and I flashed back to the Harbor Café—to Andy reaching across our table for a supposedly innocent handshake. I wanted to tell Tim he was full of shit, that he had the wrong Andy Reese, that he had no idea what he was talking about. But one thing kept getting in the way: Andy had disappeared. Did he head straight to the men’s room? Was he conducting “business” in there? What was he carrying in that overstuffed backpack that never left his side? Was the bouncer just pretending to ignore him? Just giving his pal Andy shit for hanging out with an underage girl?
No, this is ridiculous. Douchey is messing with your head because you’re the ugly newbie at the bar. You know Andy. He couldn’t even remember the name of this place until you helped him remember it.
But I’d known Andy Reese for less than twenty-four hours.
I knew him about as well as he knew Sarah No-Last-Name.
“Show me the men’s room,” I said to Tim.
“Oh, Andyyyyyy?” No one
seemed to care that Tim was cutting the long line to the men’s room and ushering a clearly branded underage girl through the door. “Paging Andy Reese. I have a friend of yours who wants to say hello-ohhhh.”
All the things that should have made my skin crawl didn’t matter right now. Not Tim’s increasingly annoying, singsong-y children’s theater voice. Not the fact that I was entering a men’s room, something I’d never done before, not even in an emergency. It was lined wall-to-wall with backs hunched drunkenly over shiny white urinals. I willed the symphony of zippers and pee and who-knows-what-else into the background because I needed to see him. I needed to see the real Andy Reese.
“Andyyyyy?” Tim called again. He smiled, showing those white teeth. “He’s usually at the back.” He led me down to the handicapped stall at the end of the room and tapped on the metal door. It was unlocked. “Mr. Reese?”
I barged in, ready to confront Andy, but praying I’d find what I found: the stall was empty. But then Tim stepped in behind me and locked the door.
I spun around in my clunky heels. “What are you doing?”
Tim giggled. “Just wait for it.” He reached down the front of his pants and pulled out an old-model Samsung flip phone, then snapped open the battery compartment and pulled out a small plastic baggie filled with white powder. “Ta-daaa!”
My stomach dropped. “Okay, let me out.”
Tim was blocking the door. He was stockier than I’d realized. “Oh, come on, Em. I’m not going to charge you.”
“
‘Em’?
We’re not on a nickname basis, Tim.
You said Andy was back here.”
“And that wasn’t code? Come on, you told me booze wasn’t your thing.”
“Just let me out!” My heart was thumping. “Open the goddamn
door.
” I tried to shove him aside, and the plastic baggie fell from his fingers, sprinkling a cloud of white dust all over the black tiles like confectioners’ sugar.
“What the fuck?” he growled. He dropped down on his knee and tried to sweep the mess of powder back into the tiny bag. I lurched forward and got my hands on the lock, but he snatched my wrist and tugged me backward. “No, don’t
open that door.”
That’s when I screamed. I screamed from some well in my gut that I didn’t even know existed.
“Get off of me!”
I broke out of his grip and slammed my fists against the stall’s metal door. “Help me, Andy! Somebody help!”
Men started gathering around the stall, shouting. Maybe Tim shouted something back at them. Maybe he just sat there frozen on the floor, gawking at the spectacle of a screaming girl trapped in a tiny cage.
“Out!” a deep voice bellowed, silencing everything. “Everybody out!”
And then the stall door was swinging open, and a massive man with a corded earpiece and a shaved head was grabbing my arms, crossing them over my chest like a human straitjacket, lifting me off the floor, and carrying me out of the bathroom into the roaring music.
“Stay calm,” the man breathed as the crowd cleared a path for us. I kept trying to wriggle free, but my feet weren’t touching the ground. “Calm down. It hurts less if you stay still.”
“Where are you taking me?” I moaned. “My boyfriend is still in there. I need my boyfriend.”
“He’ll find you outside. They always do.” He used his shoulder to slam open an emergency exit and then placed me down on the sidewalk. “Thank you. Come again.”
He slammed the door behind him.
I was alone.
The roaring beat was suddenly a muffled thump behind the door of the Magic Garden.
I stumbled two steps in my heels and nearly fell over. I could hear people chattering and laughing. I smelled cigarette smoke all around me, but the street was a dim and soggy blur, the stinging combo of pretty makeup and tears that I didn’t even know were there.
I swiped at my eyes as they stared—all the other club rejects who’d stuck around this dingy back lot because they had no place better to go. All I wanted was Andy. The
real
Andy, not the Magic Garden’s fictional drug dealer.
That’s when I saw him. He rounded the corner and jogged toward me.
“Where
were
you?” I cried. My hands balled up into fists again, and I swung at his chest. “Where the hell did you go? Why did you leave me alone in there?”
The club rejects burst into laughter. I couldn’t blame them.
But Andy was too quick for my punches. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” He laughed nervously, eyes wide, dodging every swing like a pro. “Calm down, Theo, calm down!” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know which way was north in there. It was nothing like that on Saturday. I mean, it was crowded, but not . . . I should have stuck next to you. I thought I made it up to the bar pretty fast, but you were already gone.”
“Yeah, that’s my bad,” I admitted, trying to catch my breath. I sat down on the curb. “This whole thing was my bad.”
I felt sick again, at myself. I did know Andy; why did I let the world’s douchiest cokehead convince me otherwise? If I’d just given him three more minutes to make it up to the bar, then everything would have been fine. We could have kept looking for Sarah.
“You should go back in,” I said. “I’m the one who should be sorry. Go back in. You can still find her.”
“No, I am not leaving you out here,” he said. “No way.”
“Don’t worry about me. She’s the only reason we’re here. Go back in and find her.”
“Theo. Hey.” He crouched down beside me. “Let’s be real. We were never going to find her in there.” I saw an ocean of disappointment well up behind his eyes, but he tried to hide it with that familiar resolute half-smile. “Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.”
I hid under my hair curtain. I wasn’t ready to accept that. “Andy? Will you please take me home?”
“I’m way ahead of you,” he said, standing to flag a cab. But we didn’t have any luck until I finally found us one on Essex Street.
Chapter Seven
The Fates had been utter bitches to us tonight, but they at least did us one small favor: Andy was able to enter my building without being seen. Emilio’s shift ended at eleven, sparing Andy ten excruciating minutes of faux-fatherly cross-examination. More importantly, no one would be calling up to my mom to announce Andy’s arrival.
Not that it had ever been much of a problem. I could count the number of boys who’d come to my room on one finger, and that finger’s name was Max. But it still took Mom more than three months to adjust to our tutoring sessions. I’d tried to reason with her:
Max is just my student—we’re barely even friends.
(Only true for the first month.)
He’s like my goofy older brother.
(We were the same age.)
He’s not the kind of guy that sleeps around with girls.
(Untrue.)
None of it worked. Like most phobias, it was the repeated exposure that finally got Mom used to Max, and gave him clearance to my bedroom without an entrance or exit interview. But Mom still tended toward hourly bed checks, however thinly veiled.
Knock, knock. Max, I’ve just made some bergamot tea. Would you like a cup? Knock, knock. Max, Todd is about to watch the World Bocce Ball Championship. Perhaps you’d like to join him? Knock, knock. Theo, we’re in the kitchen discussing Hawthorne’s excessive use of symbolism. Thought you and Max might want to get in on that. We’ve broken out the hummus.
As I dug through my old-lady purse for the keys, I jabbered in a hushed whisper to Andy about Mom’s archaic visitor policies. I then raced through a description of next steps. We would take the maintenance stairs to the third floor, enter my apartment through the back door in the kitchen, and tiptoe like professional burglars to my room.
And it worked. At least something had gone according to plan tonight.
I locked my bedroom
door. Andy collapsed between two piles of newspapers on my couch. I flopped onto the bed, finally yanking the cruel shoes off my blistered feet. I wanted to change into a sweatshirt and jeans, but the thought of having him so close to the bathroom door while I changed felt too weird. I stayed bound in the funeral smock.
I did manage a quick check of my makeup in the bathroom mirror. The raccoon eyes were horrifying. I had to use the extreme close-up method to wipe them clean with some Swisspers. But I was still so shaky that my eyes drifted off target and I caught a glimpse of Andy’s reflection. He thought my back was turned, so he gave his optimistic smile a rest. I could see it: his heroic five-day quest for Sarah was a total bust.
I popped an extra Lexapro, hoping it would help tamp down my racing thoughts and numb all the exposed nerves.
When I stepped back into my room, Andy flipped the smile back on. “You okay?”
I put my finger to my lips, reminding him to stay quiet. I almost sat next to him on the couch, but opted for the wooden armrest instead. “You know, it’s not over,” I said. “There’s still, like, a thousand other things we can try. We can go online and search for—”
“Theo, stop. Just stop.” We sat in silence for a moment, and I tried to use the time to quiet my mind. “You know what I think?” he asked.
“Uh-uh,” I replied, focusing on the cracks in my dilapidated Japanese coffee table.
“I think I’ve just been putting her in the wrong category.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe she’s not supposed to be the love of my life. Maybe she’s just supposed to be the best day of my life. Maybe she doesn’t belong in my future. You know, she’ll be that person. The one you never really fall out of love with, but you have to kind of lock them away in a story box in the back of your mind. So you can dig up the memory twenty years later—like when you’re fishing on the lake with your kid and you need to tell him the story of the one that got away. You know what I mean?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.” But I had no idea what he meant. I’d never met anyone who fit that description. I’d never met “the one that got away” because I’d never met “the one.”
I did know this much. When I finally fell in love, I sure as hell wouldn’t bury him in some “story box” in the back of my mind. He would be standing right next to me, my ever-present soul mate and lawfully wedded husband—
“Theodore?” The urgent knock gave us both a start. “Theodore, I can hear you in there.” Mom twisted and tugged at the doorknob. Thank God I’d locked it—it gave us a few extra seconds for evasive maneuvers. “Can you open this door, please? Where on earth have you been?”
“Shit, shit, shit,”
I whispered. I had to hide Andy. The bathroom shower was too risky. Under the bed was too ’80s movie. “Closet,” I whispered.
“On it,” he whispered back, springing up from the couch. “It’s not the first time I’ve hid in a girl’s closet.”
“Theodore!” Mom shouted. “I can hear you whispering. Open the door!”
I guided Andy to the clearing between two tall stacks of
Times
wedding sections. “What’s with all the papers?” he mouthed.
I slid the closet shut before he could ask any more questions and dove for my bedroom door, swinging it open. “Sorry, Mom. Didn’t realize I’d locked it.”
She took in my dress and the faded remains of my lipstick and rouge. Her eyes were simmering. “Who were you talking to?” she demanded. “I heard you talking.” She was so angry, she hadn’t even used the proper
whom
. It was that bad.
“I was talking to Lou,” I said. I grabbed the purse from my dresser, whipped out my phone, and held it up as if that somehow backed up my story.
“Where on earth were you tonight? Why are you so dressed up?”
“Lou had a recital, remember? I told you about it last week.”
“I don’t remember that. I would have remembered.”
“Maybe your September stress has you a little frazzled? Oh, wait.” I slapped my head. “Maybe I told Todd. Todd might not have told you.”
“But how did you come in? We didn’t even hear you come in.”
“Through the kitchen like always. I told you, it’s a faster route to my bed, and I am super-
duper
tired. The recital was epic—Brahms, your favorite. I think I just need to call it a night.”
“Well, you can’t call it a night, because you have a visitor.”
“What visitor?”
Max stepped out of the dark hallway and raised his hand. “What up?” he mumbled.
I gripped the door
tightly. My knees were in danger of giving out from under me.
“Max!” I cried with a stupid grin. He was my human lie detector, the last thing I needed with Andy balled up in the closet. “What’s up?” I asked, just to maintain the illusion of normalcy for Mom.
But it was a cruel insult to Max. He’d been begging for an emergency session since seven o’clock. He shrugged by way of response. I tried to find his ice-blue eyes in the dark recesses of his practice hoodie.
“I’ll tell you what’s up,” Mom interjected. “Max has been sitting with us in the dining room for over an
hour
trying to reach you—”
“Max, don’t hate me,” I interrupted. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t have my phone on during the recital.”
He pulled off his hood and turned to my mother. “Mrs. Lane, do you think I could speak with Theo alone for just a few minutes? I know it’s late.”
Mom’s lips tightened. “Of course,” she said with a labored smile. “But just a few minutes, yes?”
Max took the liberty of closing the door in her face. I wanted to hug him.
“Okay,” he whispered, turning back to me. “A recital? Seriously? Like I wouldn’t know if Lou had a recital tonight? She’s texted me about fifty times.”
“Okay, no, sorry,” I whispered. “It was a leftover lie.”
“So then why? Why do you look like a . . . ?” He scowled, gesturing at various parts of my body. “You know, a . . .”
“Like a girl, Max? Is that what you’re trying to say? Why do I look like a girl?”
“Yes.” He crossed his arms. “Yes, you look eerily similar to a girl.”
“Eerily similar? Nice. It’s just a dress, Max. I’m wearing a dress.”
“Just
a dress? Theo, you own exactly two dresses—the one you’re wearing, which your mom made you buy for Todd’s Distinguished Teaching Award ceremony, and the wedding dress buried in your Glory Box, waiting for that magical prince to come along and unlock your—”
“God, will you shut
up
?” I glanced at the closet. Andy Reese now knew about my Glory Box. I took hold of Max’s shoulders and tried to spin him toward the door. “Can we please just have this conversation tomorrow? I’m super-
duper
tired.”
Max planted his feet. He wouldn’t budge. “What, like you’re going to go to bed now? You don’t even go to sleep till four
a.m
.”
“Yeah, why do you think I’m so super-duper tired?”
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I don’t know what’s freaking me out more—that you’re still lying to me or that you’re trying to get rid of me.” He peeled my hands from his shoulders. “What is this?” He lifted my left wrist. I still had the orange bracelet Ray-Ray had forced on me like a handcuff. “Did you go to a
club
tonight?”
I couldn’t answer. My mouth moved, but nothing came out.
I saw the lightbulb go on in his eyes. “Jesus, do you have a guy in here?” He began to survey my room.
“Oh, come on.” My knees began to wobble again.
“You picked up a Random at a club and brought him back home, didn’t you? That’s why you didn’t text me back all night. That’s why you keep disappearing all week.”
“No.”
“Jesus, Thee, what ever happened to saving yourself for Mr. Right? I mean, I know everyone’s going completely A.B.O. bat shit today, but I think you’re overshooting. It’s supposed to be someone in school—someone you had your eye on for years, not some bar stool with a silk shirt and a pocket full of Trojans.”
“Max, I am seriously going to throw up if you keep talking like that.”
“Where is he?” He stepped into my bathroom and reached for the shower curtain. “No, shower’s too risky,” he mumbled, stepping back.
“Max, come on, stop.”
He crouched halfway down to the floor next to my bed. “No, too ’80s movie.”
“Max . . .”
“Closet.”
His eyes zeroed in on the sliding wooden doors. “You never close your closet door.”
My heart leaped into my throat, and my mouth went into overdrive. “Max-you’re-being-ridiculous-this-is-totally-ridiculous-I-don’t-even-know-what-the-problem-is-right-now-I-said-I-was-sorry-I-didn’t-text-you-back.” The babble floated past him like vapor as he stepped to the closet and slid the door open with a rusty screech. I bit down on my tongue. This was it.
But the Fates did me one last favor.
He’d opened the wrong side of the closet. He’d opened the
left-hand
side. Nothing to see but the usual mass of dirty laundry, cellophane-wrapped dry cleaning that I hadn’t touched in a year, and more towering stacks of
The
New York Times
,
all of which helped to keep Andy hidden away on the other side.
“Max,” I said quietly. “I really think you need to chill.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, turning to face me. “I told you how bad I needed a session. We haven’t even talked about—”
“Tomorrow,” I interrupted. I couldn’t let him spew any more embarrassing details for Andy’s entertainment. “A full two-hour session after school tomorrow, I promise. Right now, I think we could both use some sleep, don’t you?” I grabbed his arm and ushered him to the front door of my apartment as he tossed off some quick goodbyes to Mom and Todd. I locked the door behind him and rushed back toward my room.
“Theodore?” Mom called to me as I passed. “Our talk is not finished.”
“In a minute!” I called back. “I’ve got to get out of this dress.”
I had no idea
if Andy would be laughing in my face about the Glory Box, or pissed at me for shoving him into the closet for so long, or twice as depressed after ending his miserable night cooped up in a high school senior’s bedroom. But when I opened the right-hand door, I found him crouched over a stack of my newspapers, grinning from ear to ear.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing’s funny.” He was staring at the “Weddings and Celebrations”
section at the top of the pile, the most recent edition from this past Sunday.
“This,”
he said, jabbing excitedly at one of the announcement photos. “
This
is the wedding.”
“What wedding?”
“Remember? I told you Sarah wanted me to go with her to a wedding this Sunday. Theo, this is her friend.”
I looked down at the two-inch square photo: a solo pic of a young woman, one of the few solo pics in a long column of ecstatic newlywed couples. She looked pert and lively, with a blonde bob and kind eyes—not a sex goddess, but the less cute friend of the sex goddess. “Are you sure?”
“I told you. Right before Sarah and I met, I saw her with her friend outside that Battery Green place.”
“Battery Gardens.”
“Battery Gardens, right. She was coming from Battery Gardens when she walked into the café, and that’s the woman she was with. I saw them hugging through the window. I’m telling you, Theo, that’s her in the picture.
That’s Sarah’s friend, Emma—”
“Renaux.” I finished his sentence. A cold rash of goose bumps rose on my arms and neck. Emma Renaux. I’d been using her name as my alias all day. I didn’t even need to read her blurb because I knew it by heart. I’d read it the very first morning I saw Andy. Sunday, September 1, page ST15 . . .
Emma J. Renaux, 30, daughter of James and Sally Renaux of Charleston, S.C., will marry Lester A. Wyatt, 30, son of George and Leona Wyatt of Dallas, Tex., on Sunday. The couple officially met as 15-year-old sophomores at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy, but unknown to Mr. Wyatt, they had in fact met a year earlier.
“We’d shared one dance to R. Kelly’s ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ at the freshman Winter Formal,” Ms. Renaux confessed sheepishly, “but my hair was so different that he didn’t recognize me. It took me 10 years to admit that I’d watched him across a crowded room for hours before we ever spoke. I knew before I’d even asked him to dance. I knew I was going to marry him.”