Chapter 2
JAY-Z WAS RIGHT ABOUT NEW YORK
I took a vacation alone to New York City last May. My sister was going to come, but she got stupid sick the night before. Food poisoning from the seafood buffet at the wedding she’d gone to that day, and really, what did she expect?
We’d already bought tickets to a bunch of places and most of them were nonrefundable, so she convinced me to go alone. In this, Kate is way more benevolent than I could ever be. I probably would have told her not to go, under any circumstances, without me on that trip.
I thought New York City was supposed to be pure magic.
Parts of it were, but it wasn’t all-around the shiny, golden thing I expected it to be.
I was overwhelmed by all the buildings and sounds and smells so packed together, thousands of people moving around in their own worlds.
The subways had a vague stink and felt like mazes to me.
I was deeply bad at navigating them. I yelped when I saw a cat-sized rat pulling behind it half of an open meatball sub, and none of the people around me even startled.
The city had a tangible pulse. I thought it was a living thing, like an organism on a map. It had its own timetables and rules that people must follow, but no two people’s days looked the same. I saw how everyone could feel like the main character in a place like that.
I had a lot of time to wax poetic about New York in my hotel room because I was the one in charge of our evening plans and, true to form, had not planned them.
The first two nights I was exhausted from Kate’s itinerary—what kind of maniac schedules two museums and a stroll through Central Park all before dinner and somehow another museum the next day?
I was selfishly a little relieved that Kate couldn’t come because I was the one who was supposed to get us the Broadway tickets, but I waited too long and by the time I was about to buy them I had just been fired and the ones to the show about chess she wanted were very pricy.
Kate might have known this would happen, though, and planned accordingly with a list of “Could Do’s!” in the night portion of every day. On night three, one of the “Could Do’s!” was a comedy show.
The show, unlike most of the other options, was free and titled “Santa’s Not Real, God Brings My Present and It’s Always a Cheese Ball.
” Incredible show title, but the comedy was uninspired.
It was supremely self-deprecating and hypercritical to random audience members, but I had to remind myself that I don’t know shit about comedy and maybe he was actually really good.
What did I know about what made a joke inspired or not?
After all, he was on stage and I was drinking the cheapest beer on the menu (eight dollars for a literal Bud Light, kill me now).
I was halfway through my order of onion rings at a table in the back when a man took the seat across from me as if I’d invited him to. I would have told him “wrong table”, but my mouth was full of deep-fried onion. Plus, he was hot, so I was inclined to listen to what he had to say.
“I’ll pay you twenty dollars if you pretend you’re here with me.” His voice was low and pleading, but his face was all smiles.
I tried to chew faster, taking a gulp of beer to wash it down, and winced because no big gulp of Bud Light is good.
“Was that a line?” I asked.
“No.” He reached for a smaller onion ring and popped it in his mouth before I could say anything.
He was wearing seventy-five percent of a suit—shirt and tie, no blazer—and it was a really nice one at that.
The pale purple fabric looked smooth and barely wrinkled though it was after nine at night.
I peeked at his shoes under the table, too.
Leather, no doubt. He looked expensive. Like he most certainly could have paid for his own onion rings, and I was about to say as much when he leaned in a little closer across the table.
“Forty dollars,” he said, and I nodded.
“Done.” I pushed the plate toward him and smiled too, like we were indeed just two friends meeting at a comedy show, smiling at each other.
This is exactly the sort of thing that Kate wanted me not to do—I could hear her voice, don’t talk to strange men, Han, you never know what they’ll do—but I was freshly out of a job and would not be thinking too much about this. Forty dollars was forty dollars.
“I’m Barry,” he nodded toward the stage. “Do you know the guy performing?”
“God no,” I said, and he snorted. “You?”
“Unfortunately, yes. My little brother.”
“Oh, shit.”
“No, it’s okay, his comedy is bad.” A laugh bubbled out of me at this, not quietly. It wasn’t a time in which anyone else in the audience was laughing, so I had to do one of those actually-I-was-just-choking fake coughs when the people around me turned to look.
“He has this bit that’s like”—Barry made his voice weird—“God, my handsome, athletic older brother is here, everyone clap for him, he may be our parents’ pride and joy but he’s chronically single, blah, blah, blah. It goes on for minutes.”
“Minutes,” I echoed.
Barry nodded solemnly.
The bit sounded mortifying and awesome, and I took a moment to hope that his brother would do it, just so I could experience the second-hand embarrassment for everyone involved.
“I bet him forty bucks that I would have a real date tonight.”
“And to think I was about to accept twenty.”
“You were?”
“Yeah, you probably could have had me with twelve,” I admitted, and now it was Barry’s turn to laugh like I’d surprised him. “Okay, maybe fifteen, enough at least to cover this very sad meal.”
Barry’s eyes were bright as they moved across my face, as if getting to know every feature and pleased to be able to do so.
His brother’s voice droned on from the stage, scattered laughter around us.
I worried about what Barry saw when he looked at me.
I didn’t even try wearing makeup because it would dissolve in the city’s unseasonably warm May heat, my hair was flat and probably dried to my forehead from how sweaty I’d been during the day, and my face and neck always get really red when I’m nervous, and he was making me nervous.
Good nervous, but still nervous.
“Do you want to go somewhere with me after this?” he said.
“Like to make out?” My jaw was agape. “You don’t even know my name, oh my God, is that even your brother?”
Barry laughed again, and I couldn’t not grin because I had hardly talked to another human being in three days and now I was making one laugh in a big scary city.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Hannah.”
Barry took another onion ring. “Good to meet you, Hannah.”
“Never have I ever broken a bone,” I said.
Barry took a drink from his bottle of Gatorade. I’d wanted to get wine, but he argued that we should pace ourselves if we were going to get kebabs after one a.m., when they tasted the best.
I felt like I was fourteen at my first house party, when the parents still made all the snacks and the closest thing we had to alcohol was the two cinnamon flavored shooters that someone poured into a liter of SunnyD.
Instead, we were sitting on a bench at the Promenade, looking out over a pitch-black river, the water gently lapping at the dock’s legs.
My insides felt just as fizzy as they did back then—new crush, a whole night of possibility. Only this time, I had no curfew.
“I’ve broken many, many bones. First one was my wrist when I was eleven, playing hockey, and some fingers when I was fifteen. Same reason. My nose a couple times. And my ankle when I was in high school,” Barry said. “I wasn’t even playing hockey that time, I just stepped wrong.”
“You stepped wrong?”
“Yeah, you know, you miss a curb and suddenly things are very dangerous.”
“You have a complicated relationship with your joints. You should start wearing elbow pads just in case,” I said. I was trying to be charming, and I will dare say that he was falling for every bit of it.
The comedian was indeed his brother, his name was Scotty, and he did not look thrilled to see me after the show.
He wanted to know where we met (I said Hinge), if this was really a date or just some sort of weird arrangement, and told me to blink twice if I was in danger.
The last part was funny and redeemed him slightly in my eyes.
“Never have I ever broken up with someone,” Barry said. I looked to make sure he wasn’t lying before taking a drink from my bottle.
“Scotty was right that I am, in his words, chronically single, but in my defense the last woman I was really with, Monica, I had been with for five years, and she dumped me because I proposed.”
I gasped. Could literally not help it.
“Yeah, it was bad.” Barry took another sip of his neon green drink.
“She said she thought we were on the same page about being untethered, no kids, no need to bring the government into it, etcetera. I was twenty-eight and very sad, and now I am thirty-one and not even really mad at her anymore. She had to do her thing, you know?”
“Sure, but ouch.”
“Yeah,” he agreed and looked at me expectantly.
I hadn’t wanted to get into it, but he’d just been so vulnerable with me and what is Never Have I Ever at midnight with a stranger other than free therapy and a chance to spill your guts?
Plus, Barry looked like someone you want to tell your secrets to because he’d never do anything nasty with them.
“I’ve been the breaker-upper a few times,” I shrugged. “Okay, most of the time. High school and college relationships are funny and sweet and stupid, and I think I was worried that they would break up with me first, so I always ended things.”
“Makes sense,” he said.