Chapter 3
3
Natalia
senior year
The petri dishes clink on the counter with our samples freshly smeared on the agar plate, waiting to be grown into disgusting blobs of bacteria. We start stacking our plates, gently securing the lids and flipping them upside down like we were instructed to by Mr. Khan.
“So you already applied to NYU?”
I nod, my finger twirling around the tip of my fishtail braid draped over my shoulder.
“That’s great. Good luck.”
Hayden’s voice carries something else besides the standard well wishes. Something like a small twinge of disappointment that can only come from an undecided future as we both stand at the gateway to adulthood, a cap and gown in our hands as we dive headfirst. Or maybe that’s just how I feel about our future, no matter how prepared I think I may be.
“What about you?”
He looks at me, his brows raised as he waits for me to elaborate.
“College? Have you applied anywhere?”
“Penn State ’cause that’s where my dad wants me to go. And I put in an application to Ohio U as a backup.”
“To play football?”
It’s a question, but it’s more of an assumption. One that I don’t expect him to deny with his obvious love for the sport. He shakes his head, and his fingers curl into a loose fist on the table before he turns to face me.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you want to play football?”
“I don’t know if I even want to go to college.”
“It’s okay not to know,” I offer with an encouraging smile. “We’re only seventeen. We have at least seven and a half more years of mistakes before we finally know what we’re actually doing with our lives.”
His entire body turns to face me, his movements suddenly urgent. “But have you ever felt like if you were ever given the chance to find out what you wanted to do, it would change everything for you? Like you just need that door to open up so you can finally discover what you’re destined for?”
No, I haven’t , I think. Doors have always been open for me. Mainly because my parents don’t set limits when it comes to my, and my sisters’, future. Every opportunity I’ve wanted to venture into has been laid out for me to test the waters and see if the path I want to take is one I really want to dip my toes in.
“Do you feel like you know what you’re destined for?”
He shrugs, the urgency gone and replaced with the same uncertainty he had when I asked him what colleges he applied to. “It doesn’t even really matter,” he says, trying to hide his somber mood with disinterest.
“Why not?”
“Because whatever my dad wants, whatever he wants me to major in or whatever college he wants me to go to, that’ll be my life.” He sighs, the indifference seeping through his voice along with the blank look of resentment in his eyes. His fingers toy with the petri dishes, sliding them around before I place my hand on his, signaling him to stop before he pushes one off the edge of the table. He quirks a brow at me and pulls his hand away just as I tuck my hand back under my thigh.
“So if he wants you to go to clown college and major in balloon animal design, you’re going to do that?” I ask, unable to hide the sarcasm as I wait for him to deny it. But he doesn’t.
“That’s what it looks like.”
I study his features for a minute. I notice the tic of his jaw and the furrow of his brow causing a shadow to cast over his features. He tucks his head down toward his chest as he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoodie.
“For the record, you would look absolutely ridiculous in an orange fro wig and a red ball nose,” I say, my poor attempt to lighten the mood. “Not to mention those obnoxiously large feet. Like, who are they kidding?”
But it works, because he smirks, his amused eyes looking at me as he pulls his gaze away from his lap.
present
Lucy and I are pushing my love seat and coffee table against the wall to make more floor space for our party. Our tiny kitchen table is filled to the brim with bottles of hard liquor. Party-sized bags of chips and red Solo cups are stacked in a neat pile, waiting to be filled with various alcoholic concoctions.
As soon as we both slump on the soft cushions, our muscles tired from the unfamiliar laborious work, I hear the door click open to find a tired and frizzy-haired Carmen peek through the door in her wrinkled, royal blue medical scrubs.
“Carmen!” Lucy runs to greet Carmen with a warm hug, leaving me sprawled on the couch.
Lucy arrived in front of our building this afternoon, a yellow cab carrying her and her two suitcases for a three-night stay when I was the only one home. This is only the fourth time she’s seen Carmen since she graduated college and moved to Seattle three years ago, making the trek to the opposite coast before finally pursuing her graduate degree. The distance, plus Carmen’s demanding schedule at the hospital, has made it near impossible for the three of us to be in the same time zone.
Carmen squeals as her tired eyes light up, holding our baby sister tight to her chest and smiling warmly over Lucy’s shoulder.
“I missed you!” Lucy squeals.
“I missed you too, baby girl.” She reaches up to ruffle up Lucy’s hair, making her recoil and flinch.
“Ugh! You guys have to stop treating me like a baby!”
“But you are a baby, baby ,” I tease, moving a bottle of Ketel One from the table to the freezer.
“Says the person that’s literally eleven months and four days older than me,” she teases with a scrunched expression and her tongue poking out .
Carmen sets her bulky lunch cooler on the kitchen counter before she does a once-over on Lucy. “You lost weight,” Carmen states matter-of-factly, regaining Lucy’s attention.
“I know.” She smiles, proud that she’s withering away. “I started this no carb diet after Labor Day, and it’s doing wonders for my summer body.”
“Summer isn’t until next year.”
“So?” Lucy counters. “It doesn’t hurt to start now.”
Carmen rolls her eyes. “You should be glad that Mom doesn’t see you looking like this. She’d have a fit.”
Lucy waves her hand at her. “I look amazing though!”
“So what are the final plans for tonight?” Carmen asks, settling into a stool tucked under our mini breakfast bar.
“Natty said that you were going to ask your super hot and super sweet boyfriend if he had any friends he could invite tonight.”
“I said that David might have some friends he could invite,” I correct her from the small pantry and reappear with a roll of paper towels in my hand.
“So?” Lucy says to Carmen, oozing excitement.
“I’ll ask him,” Carmen answers with a small surrendering smile.
“Yay!” She hops, her hands clapping in front of her. “By the way, I put my luggage in your room. I figured since you have the California King, you wouldn’t mind sharing. Plus, Natty kicks in her sleep.”
“At least I don’t snore!” I call, walking into my room to get ready while letting my two sisters catch up.
I spend the next hour running a tornado through the bathroom, pulling out all of my makeup and hair care products while distracting myself from facing the reality of Matteo’s new relationship status. Just as I’m running a straight iron through my hair, I meet eyes with Carmen behind me. She’s leaning up against the doorjamb to the entrance of the bathroom dressed in fitted jeans and a thin gray cashmere sweater as she watches me with her arms folded in front of her. Before she says anything, I know she already knows.
“You want to talk about it?”
I play dumb. “About what?”
Her brows rise, telling me not to play her a fool. She took Lucy into her room to let her unpack while they caught up, so I know she already told Carmen everything.
I put down the flat iron and unplug it before sighing and turning to face her. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“So…you’re completely okay with the fact that the man who broke your heart after four years of your life has moved on and is engaged to a woman barely six months after you broke up?”
I visibly wince, eyes closed and forehead cinched. “You don’t have to paint it so vividly.”
Lucy only knew the details after a phone call with my mom, when she accidentally spilled the details from her own conversation with Matteo’s mom. They grew close over the course of our relationship, even referring to each other as their in-laws . When we broke up, I don’t know who took it harder: me or our moms.
“Apparently, Mom’s invited to the wedding?”
I scoff. “That’s nice of Matteo.”
Carmen steps up to my side and slinks her arm around my shoulders, leaning her head against mine. “You know you deserve better, right?”
I smile weakly at her through our reflection. “Maybe someday I’ll believe that.”
Carmen is the big sister that everyone wants. With there being an entire decade gap between us, she’s never treated me or Lucy as if we were a burden. She loves me and Lucy with a passion. The kind of love that carries the responsibilities of being the first child but without the resentment of those responsibilities. Mainly because my parents never placed the weight of being the eldest on her shoulders. They’ve always accepted whatever she’s able to give and never made her feel guilty for it. It’s probably why she’s such a good doctor. Her compassion doesn’t come with conditions. It’s one of the reasons her boyfriend loves her so much, almost as much as I do.
When Matteo and I broke up, I showed up at her door, a suitcase in hand and tears running down my cheeks. She welcomed me, clearing out her spare bedroom and telling me that I could move in. No questions asked. She watched as I picked up the pieces of my broken heart for the last six months, each day getting a little better at an excruciatingly slow rate. With the news I got today, I feel like I’ve reverted back to square one.
She slumps onto the closed toilet seat, drawing her knees up as she keeps a watchful eye on me. “Oh, by the way,” she says. “Starting next week, they want me to work the night shift.”
I drop the makeup brush in my hand and cross the narrow hallway to my room. “For how long?”
“Indefinitely,” she answers, following my steps out of the bathroom.
I’m at my closet, searching for the outfit I already planned out for tonight, when I swerve my head around to face her. “What! Why?”
I’ve hated when she works nights on the few occasions she’s had to work a double shift. It means I’ll spend a lot of nights alone, and being in an apartment that still feels slightly foreign to me, I’m not happy about it.
“There’s no one else. The senior specialist suddenly decided to retire, so I’m going to fill in until they find a replacement.” She crosses the length of my room and perches at the edge of my bed.
I harrumph, not even trying to hide my disapproval.
“I know,” she answers. “David isn’t too happy about it either.”
“Can I maybe come with you?” I plead. “I promise I’ll only take up a small bed, and I won’t even ask for snacks. Just that you check in on me every once in a while. ”
“Carmen!” We both turn our heads toward my open door, Lucy’s shrill cry demanding Carmen’s attention.
She stands and places a hand on my shoulder. “Nat, you’ll be fine,” she says with a reassuring voice, trying to soothe down the slight frown on my lips before she walks away and leaves me to mentally prepare for the loneliness I’ll have to sit through in an empty apartment for the coming weeks. Or maybe even months.
I huff as I get dressed, thankful that I already planned on what to wear since our doorbell is starting to ring nonstop.
The black pleather pants and matching corset I decided on cling to me, lining my curves and exposing a small sliver of my abdomen. My dark hair, shiny and pin-straight, billows down my bare shoulders as I apply a fresh layer of cherry-red lipstick in front of my floor-length mirror.
When I walk into the living room, I see Lucy, who’s dressed in an emerald-green silk dress barely covering her the way a medium-sized terry cloth towel would, pouring a drink for David. Carmen is going over a playlist on her phone with music playing over our Bluetooth speakers as a man, who I assume is one of David’s friends, hovers over her to approve of her music choices. I wave a quick greeting to David before the doorbell rings yet again.
When I hurry toward the door, I find Hayden on the other side.
There was an assembly during our senior year. It was during the sweltering heat of September and our principal, Mr. Walton, decided to start the school year with a bang by introducing all the teachers, counselors, and other essential staff, including a sophomore wearing a yellow-beaked falcon costume. Along with the staff, the entire varsity football roster joined them in the gymnasium. And when Hayden entered, the crowd went wild. He jogged across the shiny wooden floor, waving toward the pullout bleachers with a wide smile on his face as a dimple pressed into one side of his cheek. His chest puffed proudly as he stood tall, the large number eight on the center of his long torso on display for all of our peers. Meeting the end of the line, he stood along with the rest of his teammates, winking at the cheerleaders and fake punching other jersey-clad football players, basking in every glory day that high school had to offer him on a silver platter.
When I see Hayden now, dark, messy hair that curls at the roots only to flick outwards at the base of his neck and the same hazel eyes flecked with chocolatey specks around the pupils, I feel like I’ve been transported back to that gymnasium. How the smell of pubescent body odor and Victoria’s Secret’s Very Sexy Now body mist will always remind me of the look on Hayden’s face when we met eyes for a fleeting second across the sea of students.
“Hayden!” I greet him. He’s wearing a crooked smile, widened to expose his teeth, with eyes that light up when my own smile spreads across my face.
Seeing him, the warm sense of familiarity giving me the assurance that he isn’t just another acquaintance I’ll have to struggle through small talk with, brings a sense of calm I didn’t expect. The same calm that washes over me when he envelops me in a gentle bear hug.
Once Hayden pulls back, he steps aside to reveal a second guest beside him. “This is Dexter.”
Dexter steps forward, taking my extended hand. “Hi, nice to meet you,” he says with a voice that’s low and raspy in a sultry kind of way.
“Hi. I’m Natalia.” I wave them in, opening the door wider for them to enter.
Lucy comes bounding. She hugs Hayden, pulling him down to her while hanging on to his neck as he wraps a hand around her shoulder.
“Come in!” she squeals. “I’m making drinks.”
Hayden steps in, and Dexter follows. I close the door and walk into the kitchen to gather the rest of the chips and chicken wings that David brought with him .
Our small apartment begins to fill with people, followed by the low rumble of chatter and peppy music. People that I assume David invited, along with some friends of Carmen, mostly fellow doctors that don’t mind letting a little loose on tequila shots, which Lucy is passing around right about now, are scattered around in clusters. I didn’t even know Carmen invited any of her colleagues, but some look as if they’re coming off a long shift, dressed in the similar rumpled scrubs that Carmen comes home in.
I stay back, sipping on the vodka and cranberry drink I mixed together in an attempt to let the thoughts of Matteo drift away from me. When all I can see is the image of him sitting on our cream-colored couch that we purchased at Crate and Barrel, telling me he couldn’t handle the pressures that his mom and I were putting on him to settle down and get married, I need air.
I step out onto the fire escape from Carmen’s bedroom, bypassing a few scattered guests leisurely chatting over bottles of beer and glasses of wine on Carmen’s bedroom floor. I lean against the cold metal railing as I look down four stories onto the sidewalk, where I watch people passing by in hurried steps. The vodka is making its way into my bloodstream, warming me and finally fuzzing the memories of Matteo, when my thoughts are interrupted.
“Got room for one more out here?”
When I turn, I see Hayden climbing out of the window to the fire escape. His large body is barely able to squeeze through the frame.
“Sure,” I say, scooting to the left to make room for him. He has a half-empty beer bottle in his fingers, loosely holding the neck as he sidles up to me.
“Getting a little crowded in there for you?” he asks, pointing his thumb into my packed apartment.
“Something like that,” I answer softly. I tilt back the rest of my drink, the vodka that settled to the bottom of the cup burning as it trickles down my throat .
A slightly embarrassing silence lingers between us, Hayden filling it with a light tap of his nails against his beer bottle.
“So, do you still talk to anyone from high school?” Hayden asks, his shoulders slightly hunched and elbows braced against the railing as his posture mirrors mine.
I shrug, coming off more awkward than the blasé nonchalance I was going for. “Not really. The occasional congratulations or happy birthday on social media. That’s about it.” I turn my head toward him. Our eyes meet for a second before we both look away.
“Yeah, me too. Not much to keep up with now that we’re all so busy with our own lives.” He pauses to swig his beer. “Mmm,” he exclaims through his pursed lips as if suddenly remembering a bit of detail that I should be aware of. “Jenny Chen married my cousin. I guess they took a class together at Ohio State and started dating after. They just had a baby last year.”
My brows rise. “ Jenny , Jenny?” I insinuate, knowing the exact Jenny he’s talking about. The same Jenny that he had an on and off relationship with throughout most of our senior year, the two oftentimes blowing up in an argument in the crowded hallways.
“Yeah, yeah,” he answers with a defeated eye roll. “No need to rub it in.”
“I guess she kept it in the family,” I comment. He shakes his head as he moves closer to me and bumps his shoulder into mine.
“Oh!” I gasp, suddenly remembering my own hint of gossip as we share more news from our graduating class. “I heard Tina and Ben got married.” I grin, my smile turning sly, then amused, hoping he’ll remember what the couple was famous for in high school.
“Didn’t they hook up in the back of a car? And everyone saw?”
I nod a little too enthusiastically. “Mm-hmm.”
“Wow,” he answers softly as both of us take a small trip down memory lane to when the rumors spilled through the halls about the back seat hook-up that everyone was talking about, teachers included. “Well, good for them.”
I scoff, remembering another detail about Tina that’s left a sour taste in my mouth since senior year. “Yeah,” I say bitterly.
“No? They should burn in hell?”
“Let’s just say Tina wasn’t the nicest person to be around,” I say, not wanting to go into further detail about my buried hostility toward Tina and other members of her clique.
“Ben wasn’t that great either,” he offers. “The only thing he was good for was a joint and asking random people for a ride to the shadiest parts of town.”
“Hmm,” I hum.
With Hayden talking about high school and seeing him now as an adult beside me, I can’t believe how far we’ve come since those days in biology class. I thought I would only remember him as the playful, silly seventeen-year-old who managed to make our hour spent in Mr. Khan’s class fun. But looking at him now, I can’t help but notice how much he’s grown out of the teenage skin I was so accustomed to. He towers over me by more than a foot, and his shoulders and back have spread wider, bigger. When I avert my gaze, my eyes trail over the exposed area below his elbow where his tanned skin, noticeable even in the dark, flexes with each movement, somehow further reminding me that he’s a man now.
“It feels like just yesterday, doesn’t it?” he asks a little wistfully as he stares off into the open space in front of him. “Like high school was just last Wednesday, and now we’re almost thirty.”
I gawk. “Okay, Mr. Dramatic. We’re barely twenty-six. Thirty is still light years away.”
He chuckles. “So what have you been up to since those wonderful memories at Coolidge View High?” he jokes, lightening the mood.
“Nothing really,” I answer sincerely.
“Nothing?” he repeats my answer. “Nothing interesting has happened to you in the eight years since our graduation?”
My mind flashes back to Matteo, something I really don’t want to talk about tonight. “I mean, there isn’t much. I’ve just been living in the city since we graduated, and I work for a tech company downtown. That’s basically my life.”
“Wow, that’s it, huh?”
I poke his side with my elbow. “You don’t have to make my life seem so boring.”
“I’m sure you’ve got something exciting going on that you’re just keeping from me.”
I frown, thinking how far from the truth his assumption is and that this party is the most exciting thing to happen to me in years. And I’m not even enjoying it that much. “There really isn’t much going on with me,” I say softly, more to myself than to Hayden.
“Okay, then,” he says, tapping my arm with the back of his hand in an encouraging, supportive sort of way. “Tell me one exciting thing that happened to you this week. You gotta give me something.”
“Hmm.” My lips purse together while I consider his answer. “My coworker brought me these amazing lemon tarts from this French bistro off Broadway in the Tribeca area. And I haven’t been able to think of anything else since.”
“Pour Toujours?”
My eyes widen as my hand grips his forearm. “Yes! You’ve been there?”
“I work there,” he confesses.
I gasp. “Hayden, if you don’t tell me that you’re lying right this second, I’m going to have to prematurely apologize for the fact that you will never get rid of me.”
He laughs, the sound echoing off the opposite walls of the apartment building facing ours .
“So you’re, like, a cook there?” I ask, my hand still gripping his arm.
“A chef,” he corrects. Not to be rude, just to inform me of the accurate terminology in his line of work. “Actually, I’m the sous chef. Basically, I’m second in command.”
He brings the narrow opening of his beer to his lips, glugging the amber-yellow ale as he watches me over the bottle. I drop my hand back to my side, suddenly realizing that it’s been resting on his bare skin this whole time.
“How did you become a sous chef?” My body turns to face him, our arms no longer grazing against each other.
He does the same, gnawing on his lower lip while studying the label peeling off his beer bottle as if deciding to remove it completely or leave it alone.
“It’s a long story,” he says to the bottle with an air of hesitance, indicating that the problem with the story isn’t that it’s long but difficult to tell.
“We have all night.”
He smirks before letting out a long, drawn-out sigh. “I spent a year at Penn State to study finance, and I quit school after that year.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to France. Studied the art of le French cuisine in Montpellier.”
“Wow,” I respond, genuinely impressed with the journey his life has taken.
“Anyway, after about a year and a half, I came back and moved to Chicago, where I worked at a restaurant for five years before my uncle offered me a job at Pour Toujours, so I accepted.”
“Wow,” I say again, this time as more of an acknowledging whisper. “That sounds pretty impressive. Maybe we should have started with your story first so I could’ve made up a more exciting version of mine.”
“It’s really not that exciting,” he assures. “A lot of burn marks and getting yelled at.”
I clear my throat. “So you’ve only been here for, like, four, five months?”
He nods, swallowing the rest of his drink. “It’s been a bit of an adjustment. Hasn’t really felt like home yet.”
“I felt like that at first too,” I agree. “Kind of like a fish out of water. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem adjusting and meeting new people.” I playfully nudge him, poking the hard muscle of his forearm with my index finger.
A small smile lifts one side of his mouth while his eyes linger on the warm spot of skin that I just pressed, revealing the dimple that I’ve always remembered is there. The same one that only appears with certain smiles. Like the one he has on his face right now, not full but curved upward in one corner. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I smirk. “Just that if you’re anything like you were in high school, gaining the attention of those around you shouldn’t be that difficult.”
“You make me sound a little arrogant. Like I like being the center of attention.”
“Come on, Hayden. You were a pretty big deal on the football team. Even I know that. And you were the prom king to top it off.” I side-eye him with a smile that carries the knowledge full of the lasting details of “hot guy” gossip that seemed to center around Hayden and the other guys on the football team. But the funny thing is, even though he played the popular guy role at school, that facade was only surface deep. It’s as if there are two sides of Hayden that I remember. The one that sat by me in biology class and the one that I watched from afar in the hallways.
“Runner-up prom king,” he says, as if correcting this minor inaccuracy lessens the status he held. “Meaning I wasn’t popular enough to win.”
I roll my eyes, bringing my hands up in fake surrender with a sarcastically obvious my bad plastered on my forehead. He smiles shyly, his face lowered to the ground as he stuffs a hand into his pocket.
“It still gets a little lonely sometimes,” he claims, his gaze loosely settled on the railing in front of him before he looks up at me. “Those Final Destination marathons start to become all too real after watching them alone so many times with no one to tell me that it’s just a movie. I start to come up with a hundred different scenarios on how I would go.”
“Nothing can be worse than getting smashed by a large tree trunk,” I comment.
“I don’t know. I’m thinking getting burned to death in a tanning bed is worse.”
“Oh, so that’s how you get your skin that nice golden color. Here I was thinking you won the genetics jackpot.”
He chuckles, and his brows lift along with that amused smile before the corner of his eyes crinkle.
I tilt my head toward him and realize that as Hayden’s eyes stay fixed on mine, we’re both two lonely souls in the city of millions. And it seems like some big cosmic alignment that we’re here, hundreds of miles from home and almost a decade since our last goodbyes. Kismet really does work in mysterious ways.
“Well, you have me now,” I finally offer. “If you ever need a friend, I’m here.”