Chapter Twenty-Three James
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
James
“Tell me the truth—how many attractiveness points did I lose when you saw me in sneakers instead of my boots?”
“One million.”
“Dammit!”
“Honestly, I’m cured.” Madison sips her coffee and smiles over at me, Central Park buzzing around us. “You’re basically a dork now.”
“You’re not into dorks?”
“Nope. I’m very basic. My type is tall with dark hair. Muscular and suntanned.”
The exact description of me settles between us, and somehow our joking moment turns serious. She pivots away from it. “And boots cemented to his feet that never come off.”
“Niche.”
“I’m nothing if not specific.”
We continue to walk for a bit, and I wait for her caffeine high to kick in.
Everything is green. The trees are big and beautiful, and everywhere you look someone’s doing something interesting.
That guy has an easel set up, painting a portrait of his nondescript, fuzzy gray dog lying on a picnic blanket.
There’s a woman rollerblading in an all-pink spandex outfit.
“Look over there,” I say after we visit Bethesda Fountain. “If you lived here, you could do yoga in the park.”
Her gaze follows mine to the twenty or so people moving through a downward dog pose.
“Do I want to do yoga?” she asks, giving it serious thought.
“I don’t know—do you?”
She squints and then says, “No. I prefer to be tricked into exercise.”
“How do you do that?”
“Go outside on a windy day holding a very important piece of paper, then spend thirty minutes sprinting after it when it gets ripped from your hand.”
I bump her shoulder lightly. “Your spaghetti noodle arms are making more sense now.”
She bumps my shoulder back. “Hey. By the way, I noticed you ordered decaf coffee.”
I grunt. “Might as well have gotten water.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?” Oh my god, there’s a person walking a cat on a leash.
“Taking care of yourself,” she says, and I have to look down at her because I’m not sure anyone has ever thanked me for choosing myself before. Thanked me for sacrifice, yes. Thanked me for all the ways I’ve helped them, absolutely. But never for the things I’ve done to help myself.
I’m at a loss for how to respond, so I say a very pathetic, “Sure thing.”
3:45 P.M.
We catch a quick ride from Central Park to Times Square. Madison tells me this is an unnecessary stop because she’s already been.
“Yes, but have you tried to get a street performer painted like a statue to break character before?”
Her expression says I’ve made a fair point. We go on a hunt for a statue person, looking like jungle tourists na?vely hoping for a chance encounter with a tiger.
“Hey, so I’ve been thinking about your predicament,” she says casually.
“Do I want to know what you think my predicament is?”
“Your relationship with Tommy.”
“Ah.”
“I think you should text him.”
I imagine I look horrified. “About what?”
She shrugs. “About nothing. Anything. Something.”
She tosses her empty coffee cup in the trash as we pass one, then realizes mine is empty too, takes it, and doubles back to toss it out.
“Here, look at my texts with my siblings.”
Madison unlocks her phone (passcode: 1234) and hands it over to me, open to a long string of messages between the four of them.
MADISON: I had a bad dream last night.
EMILY: About what?
NOAH: I don’t want to hear about your dream. They’re always too long and don’t make sense.
MADISON: THEY’RE IMPORTANT EVERY TIME. Especially this one.
ANNIE: I’m intrigued.
MADISON: I went to the salon to get a haircut, and when she turned the chair around, I was a gorilla wearing a pink dress!
But the weird part is, I loved it. So then I got in my truck to drive home, and it turned into an airplane and left the ground.
That’s when I realized I didn’t know how to fly a plane.
So it crashed. But I didn’t die because it crashed into an alternate world where the ground was cotton candy.
NOAH: I can’t believe I read that whole thing. Two minutes of my day I’ll never get back.
EMILY: Noah . . . it took you two minutes to read that?????
ANNIE: I like the bit about cotton candy.
MADISON: But what does it mean?!
NOAH: That you ate too close to bedtime.
Laughing, I hand the phone back to Madison. “So you think randomly texting Tommy about my dreams is going to bring us closer together after thirty years of not getting along?”
“It’s a start. You guys don’t even know each other now. Maybe if you get to know him little by little, you’ll find something you like or relate to. Something that sticks out more than the negative.”
“I’ll think about it.”
We’re quiet for a few minutes as we push through the crowd.
“And obviously, your dream means you’re craving something new in life and transforming old habits . . . except during it all, you feel you have no idea what you’re doing—scared you’re going to crash.”
She turns to me sharply, eyes bright. “Exactly what I thought! But what’s the cotton candy mean?”
“Maybe deep down, you have hope that if you do crash, it’ll be okay.”
“Maybe . . .” she says thoughtfully.
Then her eyes catch something beyond my shoulder. “Oh! Over there. I found one!”
Madison spends the next ten minutes telling the limestone-green man-statue knock-knock jokes and embarrassing stories and making absurd faces at him.
The man does flawless work—doesn’t move so much as a centimeter.
And that’s when a woman carrying a big-ass tote bag comes over and tells us, in a tone that screams hey idiots, that this is not a street performer. It’s a literal statue.
I’m now the proud owner of at least a hundred photos of Madison trying to make a rock laugh.
4:32 P.M.
“Best and worst thing about running the farm—go,” says Madison as we walk away from the hotdog stand, a glob of napkins pinched between her elbow and side.
“Best: the open air and getting to literally watch my efforts pay off when the crops come in. Worst: sunburns.”
“Really? I thought for sure you’d say the early mornings.”
“Nah, I love those. Being up before the world is my drug.”
I see her grimace from the corner of my eye.
“You disagree?”
“I mean, yes. But that’s not what my look meant. I made a bad decision with my order. How’s yours?”
“Amazing.”
I pluck her hotdog covered in relish from her hands and replace it with mine—chili, cheese, and mustard topping it.
“No, no, no. I didn’t mean for you to give me your hotdog,” she says, trying to take hers back, but I turn away and hold mine above my head.
“James! Keep your delicious hotdog for yourself.”
“Quit saying ‘hotdog’ so salaciously!”
“James!”
“Madison. Try that hotdog and tell me you don’t want to keep it.”
She gives me a look before finally taking a bite, and then her shoulders melt and her telltale moan escapes.
“Told you.”
She chews and swallows, then rips the drippy dog in half and extends part of it to me.
I raise my brows. “You’re going to share?”
She shrugs like it’s no big deal and not actually the biggest gesture in the world, coming from her.
“What’s next on the agenda?”
I look around, hoping for inspiration to strike, since this whole thing was my idea, but I’m at a loss.
Madison uses my moment of indecision to walk over to a guy in mini sunglasses (they can’t actually be doing anything against the sun), a vest sans shirt, and a pair of cream wide-leg slacks.
He doesn’t look happy that she’s interrupted his reading time.
But after a minute of talking, he’s laughing and showing her something on his phone.
And that’s how we end up at the Color Factory. We snagged two tickets an hour before closing.
The place is a literal explosion of color. I imagine this is what the inside of Madison’s mind looks like.
She disappears behind a curtain labeled CONFETTI ACCUMULATION ZONE, and when she steps out again she’s grinning like a five-year-old, bits of pastel paper stuck in her hair and clinging to her lashes.
“I fought bravely, and I lost,” she says, holding her hands up in surrender.
I brush confetti off her shoulder, pluck a few pieces from her hair, only for more to rain down from a ceiling chute, dousing us in color.
We wander through the scratch-and-sniff wall (sensory overload), then Madison drags me into a room with a giant ball pit that looks like someone on a sugar high designed it.
“Nope,” I say, backing away, drawing the line. “Do you know how many bodies have been in that thing?”
She lifts a brow, already toeing off her shoes. “You’re the one telling me to live it up.”
“I didn’t mean run off and contract hand, foot and mouth disease, though.”
Barefoot, she walks up to me and takes both of my hands. “Please.”
I turn to putty.
And just like that I’m tumbling in after her, embracing god only knows how many germs, surrounded by a sea of bright blue plastic balls and the scent of gummy bears.
It’s chaos. It’s ridiculous. And for the first time in a long time, I feel light as air.
This was supposed to be for her, but I think I’m gaining the most from it.
She swims over to me and makes a big show of getting yanked under into the plastic abyss by an imaginary monster. She’s shrieking and flailing, pretending to drown. People are staring. She doesn’t care—and neither do I.
Grinning, I rescue her, tugging her to the surface. She’s happy and out of breath as she loops her arms around my neck. Her eyes meet mine and her wild smile softens.
The current of attraction grips me—grips her too, I think—and even though I want to kiss her again more than anything, I remember my vow.
“They’re about to close. Should we race through the rest of this place?”
“Give me a head start,” she says, making her way out. “You have much longer legs.”
7:15 P.M.
Madison is wearing a veil and hopping from her left to her right foot over and over, hips jutting out with each sway as she belts “I Feel Like a Woman” into the microphone. The fruity pink drink in her other hand keeps sloshing over the rim, but she’s too absorbed in the song to notice.