9
Christmas morning arrived screaming like someone who was being murdered but was surprisingly upbeat about it.
hello hello pineapple shut up hello pineapple love you hello hello
“Oh my God, Murph,” Stevie said, burying her face under one of the cushions.
Stevie had never had a Christmas morning without a Christmas—however much fighting, however weird the mood, it was always . . .
nice. She had unlocked a new level of loneliness that held her in place, drowning in this sofa, her eyes crusty and her mouth
dry. The pipes clanged, pumping more heat into the already overheated space. It was like sleeping in a dehydrator. She would
have stayed there and turned into jerky if Nate hadn’t emerged from the bedroom dressed in jeans and a green hoodie, sneakers
on, woolen hat on head.
“Where are you going?” Stevie asked, pulling herself up.
“Central Park,” he replied, grabbing his coat from one of the kitchen bar chairs.
“To do this thing. It’s like a meditation where you have your bare feet on the ground.
You root yourself and meditate and talk the book through and record it into your phone.
Elliot says it works. He did it. He wrote a book in two weeks. ”
“You’re going to go stand barefoot in Central Park?”
“Can you help me write this book?” he snapped.
Nate’s words hit like a whip across Stevie’s face. He looked as shocked as she did and immediately changed his tone.
“It just, it unlocks something, okay? And I have two more chapters to finish. Just two more.”
Christmas in Central Park didn’t sound so bad. They could walk around the city. See the big tree. Get hot chocolates.
“Okay,” she said. “Give me five minutes to get dressed. I won’t shower.”
“No,” he said, looking away. “I’m . . . Elliot’s going to go with me to show me how to do it.”
Something began to churn inside Stevie. Nate was all she had right now, and this was the moment he had decided to branch out and meet new people?
“I’ll be back later, okay? It’s not a big deal.”
“I never said it was a big deal.”
“You’re looking at me like it’s a big deal. I know it’s Christmas for you.”
Nate and his family were Jewish, so Christmas wasn’t something he did.
And it wasn’t that Stevie’s family was religious.
She had, in theory, been raised Episcopalian, because that was the closest church.
When Stevie was little, they would go every other week or so, and always on Easter, but that faded over the years.
Her parents still communicated a sense that it was very important, even if they couldn’t explain why they didn’t attend.
It just meant Something. Christmas, though, that was good, solid capitalism—and Stevie liked getting toys and eating cookies and putting up shiny things. It had always felt warm.
“It’s not a big deal,” Stevie said, maybe too firmly. “Go. It’s fine. I’m going to . . . watch that movie. All the President’s Men. So I’m ready for the exhibit.”
“Oh, good,” Nate said. “Good. Yeah. Okay . . .”
Nate was gone. It wasn’t even ten in the morning and there was nothing. There were no sounds of Christmas music, no artificial
pine smell from a scented grocery-store candle. No posing for pajama photos—a tradition started when she was two and continued
every year since. No visit from the neighbors with their butter cookies. No sitting on the sofa reading a new book. No family
dinner with a spiralized ham and an argument. Just Murph the bird losing his shit on the other side of the wall.
A sickening wave of loneliness hit her, almost knocking her breath out of her body. She had lost her parents and David, and
now she would lose everyone else when school ended. Then it would be Stevie alone in the world.
Alone. The most terrifying thing of all to be. Alone.
Stevie threw a sofa cushion at the wall and almost knocked over a tiny chair.
Her body felt like a bathtub that had just had its drain opened.
Everything was running down and the void was taking over.
She picked up her phone. Maybe she could call her parents now.
She could get a plane or a train, maybe.
There had to be a way you could get to Pittsburgh from New York City on Christmas. Maybe all would be forgiven . . .
PINEAPPLE ASSHOLE LOVE YOU LOVE YOU LOVE YOU LOVE YOU
Murph’s cries knifed through the wall. Stevie got up and opened the apartment door and stared at Helen’s, wondering if she
had the courage to knock. And ask what? Turn your bird down?
“He’s really wound up today.”
Stevie turned to see Benny coming toward her. While not meticulously tidy, she wasn’t the trash monster she had been the other
night. She didn’t smell of urine, for a start. She had on a shaggy green coat covered in pins from different causes, and her
red hair was tucked into a white-and-green hat. She looked festive and sort of adorable.
“I was coming down to see if you had any Christmas plans,” she said. “I’m headed to the shelter. All the animals get a toy
today. We need help opening packages and setting up. Do you want to come?”
“I haven’t showered yet,” Stevie said. “Are you going now?”
“The animals don’t care,” Benny said. “Put on some shoes. Let’s go. Do you think your friend would want to come too?”
“He’s out,” Stevie said.
Which meant that Stevie had no key. Nate had taken it. But he had to come back at some point, and when he did, she would get back inside. She put on her sneakers and grabbed her coat and phone.
“It’s in the West Village,” Benny said as they stepped out into the cold morning, “just past Union Square. Like a fifteen-minute
walk. That okay?”
“Sure.”
Benny was a fast walker, and Stevie had to work to keep up.
“What are you doing here over the holidays?” Benny asked.
“My parents are really into Edward King,” Stevie said. “So I didn’t go home over break.”
“Oh, shit.” A light of immediate understanding passed over Benny’s face. “So you’re hanging out here for a while?”
“Just until we go back to school,” Stevie said.
“Good for fucking you,” Benny said. “And your friend is here to write? That’s why you’re in Diana’s apartment?”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “I mean, he’s always writing. I don’t really know why he’s writing here, but it’s nice, you know, being
in the city.”
“I’d never be able to afford my place on a bookstore salary,” Benny said. “. . . and the word salary is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I sublet from my aunt’s sister-in-law. She moved to Switzerland for work. She lets
me have it for cheap because she knows what I do.”
“She’s into animals?”
“No,” Benny said, smiling. “She can’t stand Mitzi.
It was worth losing the extra money she could make on the apartment to install a filthy vegan ecowarrior next door to her.
As long as I annoy Mitzi, I earn my keep.
I’m a subsidized spite mission. I went to a lot of effort for that party the other night.
I picked up every puppy. I knelt in every piss puddle. Where did your friend go?”
“He’s working with Elliot today,” Stevie said. “To do some writing exercise thing.”
“Oh no,” Benny said, shaking her head and laughing.
“He said he wrote a book in two weeks?”
“Oh, I’m sure he did,” Benny said. “On mushrooms. Using AI. He always has a new thing he’s doing. His family has money. He
just graduated from Brown—how, I have no idea. That guy couldn’t find his own ass with a two-handed ass-finding machine. His
family got him the apartment as a graduation present. He just went to some retreat. I know because I stealth follow him and
I saw all the videos he was posting. It was all about primal energy—eating raw meat and sunning your balls, learning to create
by being barefoot all the time and connecting with the earth’s energy. Which is something I agree with, just not when these
assholes do it. Do you know what they call shoes? Foot prisons. Foot prisons.”
“Nate said something about being barefoot in Central Park to write,” Stevie said.
Benny shook her head as they entered Union Square.
“You have to keep him away from Elliot. Trust me. When he first moved in . . . I hooked up with him.”
Stevie had just met these people, and even she was shocked.
“I was going through a breakup,” Benny said. “I’d been with my girlfriend for three years and I was wrecked. And he’s kind of hot, even if he’s got actual flies buzzing around in his skull. You do stupid things when you’re going
through a breakup. . . .”
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “I get that.”
In the weeks since David, this was the first time Stevie had run into someone who wanted to talk about breakups. Who brought
them up. It wasn’t that it felt good to have the topic brought up, but it did feel warmer. There was a real, almost literal coldness in being so alone in her
pain.
“You too?” Benny asked. “When?”
“A few weeks ago. Helen knew right away when she read my cards. She said it was all over my face.”
“Oh God, Helen even read your cards? You guys are getting the full treatment. Arthur. The party. A day with Elliot. Helen.
Helen’s smart, though. She watches people. She’s good at reading them. Did she have any advice from the cards?”
“She pulled something called the Tower that says everything is about to fall apart.”
“Jesus. Okay, we’re going to make things better. The dogs will fix you. They fix everything. Here we are.”
Stevie hadn’t been paying attention to where they’d been going, and so was surprised when they stopped in front of a small store with a sign that read: HAPPY PAWS.
Benny punched a code into a keypad and a door buzzed open.
This looked too small to be a shelter—there was a modest lobby with a mural of cartoon dogs and cats and a few chairs.
Behind a baby gate and down a hallway, the space opened up to a cheerful room with soft rubberized tiles on the floor and rainbow-colored cubicles of supplies.
A cacophony of sound came up from below them, down a set of stairs.
“Most of our animals are in foster,” Benny said, indicating that Stevie should take off her coat and throw it on a chair.