Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
When Allie said she wanted to walk home by herself, for the first time, Ryan didn’t offer to walk with her. It was a relief. She absolutely could not handle him being nice to her at that moment. If she was going to effectively salvage their friendship, she needed time and space to reset her brain.
Anisha loaned her a black sweater that was nicer than anything Allie had ever owned. With Ren’s leopard-print pants back on, it almost felt like a fresh outfit. She bundled into her winter coat and boots, and left the warm apartment for the cold streets, trying to forget about the worried looks Anisha and Ren were giving her as she closed the door.
Technically, she and Ren both had the day off, but Allie knew if she checked in at the café, there would be plenty for her to do. She was still avoiding thoughts about Mindy and the potential café sale. Usually, she found herself daydreaming about Ryan when she wanted to avoid thoughts of the future of Mindy’s. But now she wanted to avoid thoughts of him as well.
What the fuck is happening to my life?
She took a sharp detour to avoid the café and, instead, found herself standing under a tree beside a bookstore, pulling out her phone.
She selected Ayla’s number, took a deep breath and hit Call. Her heart beat faster as the phone started to ring.
“ Hey, hey, you’ve reached Ayla! I’m screening your call. Leave a message. ”
“Hey, um, Ayla? It’s Allie. Allie Andrews, like, from the band. I got your number from a friend of a friend, and I was wondering if we could get together sometime. Call me back. If you want. If not, I get that, too. Uh…bye.”
She put her phone back in the pocket of her coat and kept walking, looking for somewhere to get a coffee that wasn’t the place she’d worked at for a decade.
Just as the barista at the poorly named Bean There Done That Coffee handed her an admittedly delicious-looking latte, Allie felt her phone vibrate. Instantly flustered, she fled the café, juggling her take-out cup as she attempted to answer her phone. She stepped over to one side of the sidewalk and leaned her shoulder against a building.
“Hello?”
“Allie? Is this Allie?”
Ayla’s unmistakable cackle rang through the phone.
“Ayla! I’m so glad you called me!”
“Allie! Oh my god, it really is you. Girl! I can’t believe it! Where are you right now?”
Allie squinted at a street sign and gave Ayla her approximate location. “I just got a coffee at this place called Bean There Done That.” She wasn’t sure why she was offering Ayla that information. She had no idea what to say now that they were actually talking to each other after so long. It felt like a dream sequence or a weird play.
“Oh, I’m not far from you! Stay there! I’ll be there in about half an hour. Does that work?”
After Ayla hung up, Allie stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, wondering how to react. She felt like crying, kind of. Also like laughing. She zeroed in on the café she’d just left and walked back in and sat down, as if she’d always been intending to step out for a moment to answer the phone.
True to her word, Ayla crashed through the café door twenty-seven minutes later. Allie recognized her immediately.
Ayla’s hair was still long and dark and curly. Her glasses were still the black square-framed Ray-Bans she’d always worn. Her lipstick was still a dark-plum color. Her clothes were still all black. Allie wasn’t prepared for how comforting it was to see her friend after such a long period of time. A jittery warmth poured through her.
“Allie!” Ayla shrieked upon spotting her, causing everyone in the café to look at them. Allie didn’t care. She opened her arms and accepted Ayla’s hug, squeezing her friend with a ferocity that felt long overdue.
When they parted, Allie saw that Ayla had tears in her eyes. Both of them were smiling and sniffling.
“Oh my god.” Ayla pulled a chair out from the table where Allie had been sitting. They both collapsed into their seats and stared at each other, periodically giggling. “You look so good, Allie! Holy shit.”
Allie ran her hand over her head self-consciously. “Oh no, I don’t! I’ve been up all night.”
A quick memory of what she’d been doing to keep herself up passed through her head, and she could feel herself blushing. She tried to shake it off. “My friends had a party, and it went really late. I haven’t even been home yet to change. I feel greasy.” She was babbling. Her time with Ayla felt limited. She couldn’t figure out why. Then it dawned on her.
I’m waiting for her to remember that she hates me.
“You look great, too! You look exactly the same!”
Ayla grinned and rolled her eyes behind her thick glasses. “Oh, thanks!”
“It’s a compliment!” Allie laughed. “A total compliment.”
“I’m going to get a coffee.” Ayla stood up again. “You good?”
“I’m good.” Allie held up the coffee she already had.
Ayla was back quickly, her hands wrapped around a cup of unadorned black coffee. She sat down, leaned back in her seat and smiled at Allie.
“So, I’m super curious, not only about why you called but also about who gave you my number in the first place.”
“It was a woman named Flora. Her boyfriend is Jonah Dale. From that podcast? He works with my…” Allie’s mind was again involuntarily full of an image of Ryan’s naked body under hers. “My friend Ryan. Jonah and Flora were at this party last night, and Ryan mentioned that I was in the Jetskis and”—she watched as Ayla started nodding—“turns out she knew you. What are the odds?”
“The weird small-town Brooklyn phenomenon.” Ayla was smiling. She looked past Allie for a moment. “It’s wild that she’s dating that guy.”
“He seemed to really like her.”
“She is very, very likable.” Ayla sighed heavily but then laughed. “Anyway, enough about my weird romantic failures. How did you end up hanging out with a bunch of podcasters? Do you have a podcast now?”
“Oh no, not at all!” Allie found this thought unfathomable. “I work in a café. My aunt Mindy owns it. I deliver coffee to the podcast studio sometimes.”
“You work in a café?” Ayla leaned forward, brow furrowed. “How’s that?”
“It’s uh…kind of weird right now, actually.” Allie took a deep breath and gave Ayla a brief explanation of the situation with Mindy and the offer on the café.
“And do you think you want it? The café? Do you want to be the owner?”
Allie shrugged. “I guess I do? I can’t really think of anything else that I would do at this point. I’ve been working at the café for ten years. Ever since—” She stopped, unwilling to bring up the last time she and Ayla had seen each other.
Ayla finished the sentence. “Since the band broke up.”
Allie nodded. “Yeah. Since then.”
Ayla leaned back and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m pretty surprised, I gotta admit. If you’d asked me What do you think Allie is doing? I definitely wouldn’t have said Managing a café in Brooklyn .”
“Really?”
Ayla looked at her with disbelief in her eyes. “Yeah, Allie. Of all of us, it’s you who I always thought would actually be a musician.”
Allie felt as if she’d been hit over the head with a blunt object. “A musician?”
Ayla looked at her with a disbelieving squint. “Yeah, of course! You were the only one of us who was serious about it. And you had the most talent and wrote the best songs. I used to look you up online every few years just to see if you had an album out yet. I wanted to be able to say I’d been in a band with you when you were first starting out.” Ayla laughed. She held Allie’s gaze as she raised her coffee cup to her lips. “So, what about music? Are you playing music now? Like, even for fun?”
“Kind of.” Allie felt a whoosh of shame. The idea that Ayla had been looking her up, expecting her to have actually been successful with music made her feel as if she’d let everyone down. “I mean, I’ve been working on this little project, just for me, doing covers of songs from the ’80s. From all these tapes that my dad and I used to listen to.”
“That sounds…cool?” The way Ayla said it betrayed her belief that it was actually not particularly cool. “What about writing, though? You were such a good songwriter.”
“Uh, a little bit.” Allie definitely did not want to tell Ayla that she had written exactly half a song in the past ten years, and that it was a song about a guy she was currently very confused about. “So, wait, what about you? We’re only talking about me. What do you do now?”
Ayla smirked and struck an exaggerated glamour pose. “Senior Librarian, New York Public Library.”
“Wow!” Allie was legitimately impressed. “All those hours of reading novels in the van really paid off.”
“Well, that and the master’s of library and information studies I got after the band broke up.” Ayla nodded. “It’s really my calling. It sounds dorky, but I fucking love being a librarian.”
Allie could tell from the expression on Ayla’s face that she was being sincere. It was nice to see someone who loved their job that much.
“That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you!”
“Thanks, Allie.” Ayla drained the last sips of her coffee and set the mug down gently on the table. “It’s so good to see you. I can’t believe we haven’t found each other before now.”
“I actually sent you a Facebook message a while ago, but you never answered.”
Ayla looked at Allie, eyes soft with regret. “Aw, damn. I never check my Facebook. I don’t even know if I have the password anymore. I’m on LinkedIn, though.”
Allie grinned. “How profesh!” It was a silly abbreviation left over from their band days. The clubs they played at and the places where they stayed were always such shitholes, any sign of comfort or organization was always a total surprise. That club actually had a mirror in the ladies room , Allie could hear Jessi saying. How profesh!
Ayla giggled. “Yeah, well, I guess fancy library careers don’t build themselves. Please don’t disown me for joining the mainstream. Anyway, you still haven’t told me why you wanted to see me. Why now? I’m so happy to see you, but I’m also really curious.”
Allie took a moment to look over Ayla’s shoulder out the large front window of the café. Outside, she could see a lady who was walking her dog reach down and pick up the tiny creature, tucking it under her arm before continuing up the street.
Maybe I should get a dog. Humans seem to be making everything into a giant, awkward mess.
Allie took a deep breath. “I guess the short answer is that I’m trying to find Jessi.”
“Trying to find Jessi?” Ayla’s echo was incredulous. “Why?”
“Uh.” Allie laughed nervously. “Not one hundred percent sure on that one, but something like… closure, I guess?”
“You two really haven’t talked? Since…that day?”
Allie nodded. “And my, uh, friend thought that if I saw Jessi again, we could maybe talk about it, or something? Then I might feel less bad about starting to do music again.”
“Ah, so you do want to play music again.”
Allie looked at Ayla. “I never stopped wanting to play music.”
Ayla smiled in a way that made Allie feel uncomfortably pitied. “Allie, people join new bands after their old bands break up. Even if the circumstances of the first breakup were bad. And lots of people do better in their second—or third or fourth—band. It’s not, like, a sin to want to keep playing music. You could be the Jetskis’ Dave Grohl.”
Allie snorted with laughter at that and relaxed slightly in her chair. “I didn’t think I could do it without you all. Without Jessi.”
Ayla put her hand over Allie’s hand on the table. “Allie, I’m not sure what you’re remembering, but I can confirm that the Jetskis was never going to be a career for any of us. Jessi didn’t want to be in a touring band. She wanted to get married and live in New Jersey.”
“She never told me that.”
“She wouldn’t have! You were so serious about the band. None of us wanted to tell you when we were tired of it. But we should have. That was on us. I’m sure that’s why we had that big fight. We’d all been keeping it in instead of being honest with you.”
Allie could hardly breathe. “None of you wanted to be in the band?”
“We did at first!” Ayla rushed to console her. “We absolutely did! I loved making that first record, and our first tour was a blast. But we were just ridiculous teenagers. Once the band became an actual job that we had to, like, keep showing up for, we lost our enthusiasm. It’s rare that people get a job when they’re eighteen and it turns out to be a job they love and want to keep doing.”
“I thought we were lucky .” Allie was unsure how to process this.
Ayla nodded again. “I know. And we were. But not in a way that the rest of us wanted to be.”
Allie exhaled. “Wow.”
“I always felt bad about it. We wrecked this thing that was so important to you, and then we all just disappeared.”
“So, you don’t see them anymore, either? Jessi and Mimi?”
Ayla shrugged. “Not really, no. I think we all just felt kind of worn out and guilty after the band was done. I didn’t want to see anyone who was going to remind me about this cool thing I’d given up on. I just threw myself into library school, and that turned out to be the right thing for me.”
“Mimi’s doing well in Portland, though.”
Ayla smiled, her eyes tender. “Is she? I haven’t heard from her in years.”
Allie pulled out her phone to show Ayla the Instagram chicken photos.
Ayla, confessing that she’d never really understood the appeal of Instagram, nonetheless studied the photos in Mimi’s feed with immense interest.
When she’d scrolled through a few posts, she set the phone down in front of Allie.
“It’s great that we all used to tease her about being a secret hippie, like that was the worst thing anyone could ever be. And now there she is sewing her own clothes and raising happy chickens and having this great life. Why was being a hippie so bad, again? Man, for a bunch of people who considered ourselves nonconformists, we sure wanted everyone to be exactly the same. Remember when Jessi drew peace signs on Mimi’s backpack, and we all thought it was such a burn?”
Allie smiled. Her heart beat faster as she drummed up the courage to ask the question she was really wondering about.
“Do you know where Jessi is? What she’s doing?”
Ayla shrugged. “Got married and lives in New Jersey.”
Allie was stunned. She opened and closed her mouth twice before she was able to push some sound out.
“What?”
“Yep. Like I said. That was what she wanted. She and Jasmine have a bunch of kids. I ran into them once in Central Park, probably two years ago.”
Allie’s eyes widened.
“She married Jasmine ?”
Ayla laughed. “I know, right? As if she met the actual love of her life when she was a twenty-two-year-old punk singer.”
Allie sat still, staring down at the tabletop. She had an urge to bid Ayla a quick goodbye and flee. She forced herself to take a deep breath and act as normal as possible.
“Wow. All of this is…a lot.” Suddenly, Ayla’s mention of the meeting in Central Park sank in. “So, you aren’t in contact with Jessi anymore?”
Ayla shook her head. “Naw. You know how she is. No social media, no online activity. She isn’t sending anyone any Christmas cards. Looks like she’s doing great, though. They all looked really happy when I ran into them in the park that time. She said they were living in Jersey. It was kind of hard to talk—the kids were just crawling all over her. And I was in a rush. Sorry I can’t really help you find her.”
“No, you’ve been helpful, for sure! I was running around thinking she was booking bands for a club or playing in some group that was about to get super famous.”
“Naw.” Ayla shook her head. “She’s not doing any of that. She never wanted to.”
They sat for a bit longer, drinking their coffees and getting caught up on the less dramatic details of their lives. When her cup was empty, Ayla reached for her coat and said she needed to get home.
“Thanks, Ayla. It was really good to see you.”
“It was good to see you, too. Give me the name of your café, and I’ll come in sometime.” She smiled warmly. “I bet it’s great.”
“It is great.” Allie opened her phone and texted a link to Ayla. “I’d love it if you came.”
“And you and this guy who you keep calling your friend in a weird way should totally come to my New Year’s party.”
Allie should have remembered that Ayla rarely missed any kind of conversational subtlety. She blushed. “Thanks. I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but it’s a whole other story. We’re not at the New Year’s party stage, anyway.”
Allie stood to hug Ayla again before they parted ways, and held on a little longer than she usually would have.