Chapter 2
I’ve always believed in love at first sight.
It was my favorite beat of any romantic movie—the crowds parting, the couple seeing each other, both people falling at the same time. That undeniable, ineffable spark, the feeling of knowing someone you just met. A look of shared destiny, of sudden understanding.
Whenever it was my turn to pick for movie club, I always went for romances. I didn’t care if they were tragic and doomed, or earnest and sappy, or dramas, or comedies. As long as there was love in it—love that was never in doubt—I was in. Katy and Didi complained about this, since Didi always chose horror and Katy liked action and animated films—but I endured their haunted dolls and rat chefs and Tom Cruise endlessly running. When it was my choice, I wanted longing glances and dancing and banter and kissing in the rain. I wanted autumnal walks through Central Park, and racing through the airport, and shattering realizations in Paris. But mostly, I wanted that first moment.
And though I would have never shared this with Didi or Katy, I had always held tight to the feeling that someday it would happen for me, too. One day, I’d see someone and just know. Everything would be clear and simple.
I went to every middle-school dance hopeful for my own crowds-parting moment. (According to Didi, both Romeo + Juliet and West Side Story had a lot to answer for when it came to this particular idea. Which made sense, since they were from the same IP.) I’d come home from all these dances disappointed but still believing that at some point—at the right point—it would happen for me. It had to, right? That’s what all the stories had told me.
And I kept on believing this despite the fact it had never come close to happening for myself. There was Brent Perkins, my first kiss at the slightly embarrassing age of fifteen. And then I’d dated Alex Petrosyan, my chem lab partner, for a month last fall before we both realized that we were better as friends. (“There was just no… chemistry,” I explained to Katy and Didi, who groaned and yelled at me about puns.) There had been guys I’d kissed in the dark of backyard parties, slightly buzzed on warm beer, and guys I’d crushed on from afar, waiting for the moment in which they would finally notice me (a moment which, sadly, never seemed to arrive).
And while I’d had fun with guys, I had never slept with anyone, and I was more than fine with that. I wanted what I’d been promised—the fairy tale. Running to meet your true love across windswept moors. Eyes locking across a crowded room (or high school gym, or resort in the Catskills, or illegal underground dance club).
I wanted weak knees. I wanted the feeling of being swept off my feet. I wanted to know, from the first moment, that it was love. Meant to be.
I wanted that one perfect night.
And so I’d decided years ago that I would just hold out for that—knowing that at some point, it was bound to show up.
All of which to say, the first time I really saw this guy, and my heart temporarily forgot how to work, it seemed like the moment I’d been waiting for my whole life had—when I’d least expected it—shown up at last.
I was annoyed at myself that it had taken me so by surprise—how had I not been on guard for this possibility? But then a second later, I realized that this was exactly how it was supposed to work.
The guy standing in front of me was seriously cute. He was maybe an inch or two taller than my 5”7”, and wiry. He had curly brown hair, sharply parted and pushed back, like he was a forties movie star, or Tom Holland. He had light blue-green eyes and cheekbones that honestly should have been illegal. He was wearing white Chucks, jeans, and a black T-shirt that fitted him perfectly. His ears stuck out the tiniest bit, which I was actually grateful for, since they were keeping him from being too intimidatingly perfect. He was smiling politely at me—he clearly had no idea that my stomach had started doing somersaults.
Pull yourself together, Milligan!my inner Didi yelled.
“Right,” I said, trying to gather my wits and focus. “Sorry. What?” I cringed. That was what I was leading with? My moment of destiny arrived, and that was the best I could do?!
“Uh.” The guy, looking politely confused, pointed at the couple with their tablet. “They said you were looking for me?”
I nodded as I tried to get it together and act like a reasonable human being.
But why start now?the Didi in my head chimed in unhelpfully.
“Yes.” I knew my face was probably the color of a strawberry, but I also knew there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “They mentioned that you have an iPhone?”
He shot a wary look at the couple, like he was suddenly worried they had been casing his belongings. “I… do.”
“I just needed to borrow a charger,” I explained. “I asked them, but they’re androids.”
His eyes widened in comedic horror. “They are?”
I laughed. “Android people.”
“That’s the most dangerous type of android,” he said knowledgeably. “I’ve seen the movies. When robots can walk among us undetected, that’s when we’re in big trouble.”
“But if they’re undetected, how will we ever spot them? They could be here right now and we’d never know.”
He looked at me for a moment, his eyes widening. “Well, I didn’t really need to sleep tonight anyway. No big deal.”
I laughed. “But um—do you have a charger that I could borrow? Just for a little bit. My phone’s about to die.” I pulled it out of my pocket just in time to see the little white dash-circle light up once before the screen went black—the iPhone death rattle. “And… it’s dead.”
The guy’s smile dropped quickly, like he understood the gravity of my situation. “Oh man. I’m really sorry—I don’t have a charger.”
“Ah.” I wasn’t sure how this guy had gotten through three days at a festival without one, but he was probably wondering the same thing about me. Maybe he’d also attended with a flaky gym-class acquaintance who’d made off with his stuff. “I guess you lost yours too, huh?”
“I had been borrowing someone else’s. And I just thought I could charge on the bus.”
“Wait, is the bus still here?”
He shook his head. “They towed it.”
“Oh.”
He pulled out his own phone and looked down at it. “But mine’s nearly dead too. So we’re about to be in the same boat.”
“It’s not a good boat. I’d prefer not to be in this boat.”
“There have been worse boats, though. Like the Titanic.”
“The one in Life of Pi.”
“I’m unfamiliar with that boat.”
“There was a tiger in it.”
“That is a bad boat.”
I laughed again. It felt like something was bubbling up inside my chest, making me feel buoyant, like my feet could start to leave the ground and I might not even notice. I didn’t even really care that I was down one person who might have a charger. “What do you think?” I nodded toward the sleeping man sprawled on the bench. “Should we ask him?”
“You mean… wake the stranger up and ask for a favor?”
“Uh… kind of?”
The guy took a tiny step toward me, causing my heart to start pounding triple-time. Not in a bad way—in an excited way. It suddenly seemed to me that there should be another option for adrenaline besides fight or flight. A more positive one, for good exciting things. Like dance party. Fight or flight or dance party.
“I just don’t know if he’s going to be in a good mood if we wake him up. He has a sunburn on his head.”
I burst out laughing, then clapped my hand over my mouth. The guy was smiling—and it was a great smile, too, taking over his whole face and revealing perfectly straight, impossibly white teeth. “And how did that even happen? Like, if you don’t have hair, how do you not at least have a hat?”
“These are all questions I’m sure he’s asking himself right now.”
“I mean, they were selling them all over the festival. He could have picked one up for the reasonable price of thirty bucks.” I waited for him to chime in about how expensive everything at Silverspun had been—I had a rant about how a twenty-dollar burrito was contrary to the very spirit of what a burrito was supposed to be all ready to go—but he just nodded.
“Right, totally.” He took a step closer to the guy. “I think what we need to do first is a recon mission.”
“See what we’re dealing with.”
“Exactly. We should assess the situation.”
I thrilled at the we. “I’m Darcy, by the way. Darcy Milligan.”
He startled a little at that. “Darcy?”
“Yeah. Like the song.” He just stared at me, his expression blank. “The Nighthawks song?” I was aware not everyone my age knew the band, but they had been the closing act of the festival.
He nodded, like he was trying to call the song to mind. “I think I’ve heard it.”
“It’s total dad music,” I said with a laugh. “But—my dad was the one who named me, so…” I looked at him, expectant, and after a second he seemed to realize he was supposed to say something.
“Sorry! Right. I’m Russell.”
“Russell,” I echoed, tasting the name in my mouth. It was a great name. It somehow evoked autumn and guitar solos and road trips under wide-open skies. And best of all, I’d never met another one before, which meant he was minting this name in real time. My first Russell.
“Russell. Henrion,” he added after a moment. He pronounced it with a slight accent—En-ri-on.
“Is that French?”
“Do you speak it?” He then said something in French, very quickly, and I nearly fainted. Katy, who had what could only be described as a shrine to Timothée Chalamet in her room, would have burst into flames on the spot. A cute guy was speaking French to me. It was almost too much to take. I cursed the fact that I’d taken Spanish and—for reasons passing understanding—Latin, all throughout school. What good were they to me now?
“Oh, um, no. I mean, non.”
He smiled. “My mom’s French. I wasn’t going to be able to get away with not speaking it.”
“Well—nice to meet you, Russell.”
“Et vous aussi. That is—you too. Darcy.” He held eye contact with me for a moment, and suddenly I wished that we were in a more formal environment, so that we could have shaken hands without it being weird. I wished we were in a Jane Austen ballroom, about to do the… pavane, or whatever. I had a feeling that if we touched, there would be an actual spark.
His mouth curled up in a smile on one side—god, I couldn’t stop staring at his mouth—and as we kept looking at each other, I let myself wonder if maybe he was feeling the same thing I was. Maybe all he wanted was to reach out and touch my hand as well. Maybe the world had spun the first time he’d seen me, too.
Was it possible?
“Right.” He tore his eyes away from mine and cleared his throat. “So. Our recon mission. I say we do a lap, see what we can see.”
“Look out for any evidence of an iPhone.”
“And if that fails, we can try to make noise or something so that he wakes up, and then we take advantage of the moment to ask him about chargers.”
“Solid plan.”
“Why, thank you.”
He grinned at me and we crept toward the sleeping man. I saw the girl look up from her tablet and give me a small, understanding smile as I passed her.
We approached the sunburned guy, who was sleeping on his side. His head was even worse up close—a dark, mottled red, with patches that were already peeling. Russell looked at me and mouthed Yikes and I had to press my lips together tightly to prevent myself from laughing.
The guy’s possessions were tucked under the bench he was sleeping on—a tent bag like I had and a large hiking-style backpack. Unfortunately, the backpack was zipped up tightly, and I wasn’t about to go rifling through a stranger’s possessions. It was one thing to assess the situation; it was quite another to cross that line. I met Russell’s eye and shook my head, and I could see that he’d come to the same conclusion. Just as I’d started to take a step away, though, the guy let out a giant, rumbling snore. He rolled over on his back, and his arm flung over the side of the bench, his hand grazing the floor. His hand that had a phone in it.
An Android phone.
I pointed at it, and Russell nodded. We walked back to the other end of the bus station, near my stuff, out of earshot of the sleeping, sunburned, snoring, non–Apple user. Russell shook his head. “That’s a bummer. What’s with all the Androids in this bus station?”
“Thanks for trying to help, though.”
“It might have been purely selfish. My phone’s about to die too.”
I nodded. Silence fell, and I realized I didn’t know what happened now. My stomach plunged at the thought that this might be over. Were we going to go back to our separate corners now, after the banter and the French and the sparks? Was this just… done? It couldn’t be, right? Not if this was what I was hoping it was.
“Okay,” Russell said. “So I saw a few places in town as we were driving in. Not a ton, but it might be worth trying. Maybe we’ll find someone who has a charger they can lend us, or a place we can buy one.”
Relief flooded through me, like a cool drink on a hot day. This wasn’t over. It was—possibly—just beginning.
“What do you think, Darcy? Want to explore?”
I nodded. In that moment, what I really wanted was a time-out so I somehow could have pulled Didi and Katy into a huddle and told them everything that had happened and was currently, right now, still happening. How did all the love-at-first-sight people in movies and books do it? How did they not have to grab their friends to fill them in? I wanted a pause in the adventure just to acknowledge that an adventure was happening.
Because something was happening. I could feel it in my bones. It felt like the curtain had just risen on a play I’d been waiting my whole life to perform, lines memorized and blocking down pat.
So even though I couldn’t talk to Didi and Katy about this, I’d just have to save everything up to tell them all about it later. Suddenly, the stories from this weekend would not be about how Romy had screwed me—they would be about Russell. Romy’s role in this whole thing had diminished—just like that, she’d gone from villain to footnote.
“I do,” I said, then felt myself blush. “I mean, yeah. Exploring. Let’s go for it.” I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder, then picked up my duffel and the tent bag. Once I was carrying all of it, I could feel just how weighed down I was. “Oof.”
“Maybe—” Russell started to reach for my tent bag, then paused and drew his hand back. “May I?” I nodded, and he took the tent bag from me. “?‘Meredith,’?” he read.
“I borrowed it from my best friends. It’s their parents’ tent.”
“Your best friends are siblings?”
I nodded. Occasionally, people had commented on this over the years. Was it strange/Was I closer to one of them than the other/Did I ever feel left out? And I never knew how to explain that it had always just worked, from the very first seventh-grade lunch period. And knowing Didi and Katy as I now did, I could see how it worked for them, too. That they were so close that someone who was only friends with one of them would have fractured them in some fundamental way. “They’re twins. Identical.”
“That must be fun.”
“It really is.” He gave me a smile and I drew in a breath, like I was preparing for all the questions I wanted to ask him. Because I wanted to know it all. Where he was from, and what his middle name was, and what his go-to pizza topping was, and what he’d wanted to be when he was five, and what he wanted to be now. I wanted to know everything. I got a sudden flash of a huge undiscovered country in the distance, just waiting to be explored, beckoning me.
Russell lifted the tent bag and crossed to the first bench, then slid it underneath. “What do you think? Feel safe enough?”
I nodded, and pushed my duffel underneath as well. After all, there were only three people here, and I couldn’t imagine any of them stealing my stuff. And even if they did—they had no place to go with it. That was what had landed us all here in the first place. I slung my canvas bag over my shoulder—practically empty except for my Nighthawks sweatshirt, my sunglasses, half a granola bar, and my tiny toiletry bag.
“Do you want to put your stuff here too?” I asked. I looked around, but the only thing where he’d been sitting was a small black backpack
“I’m okay,” Russell said as he crossed over to it and slung it on his back. As he did, his black T-shirt rose up a little, giving me a flash of his stomach, making my mouth go suddenly dry.
“That’s really all you have?” I was trying to make the backpack make sense. I’d packed as lightly as I could—despite Romy bugging me about what I was packing in the run-up to the festival, texting me constantly about what I was bringing—but I still hadn’t been able to do anything smaller than my duffel bag.
“Yeah. I… um…” He dropped his eyes to the tile floor and took a breath. “I had a fight with the guy I came to Silverspun with. I didn’t want to head back with him, so I just took my bag and got on the bus.”
“I had a similar thing! Romy, the girl I was at the festival with, headed off to Palm Springs with some people she’d met to ‘keep the party going.’?” Russell made a face at that, which reflected pretty much the way I’d felt when I heard Romy say it, and I laughed. It was kind of crazy that we had both washed up here in similar circumstances. It felt like it was more than a coincidence. Was it a sign?
It’s totally a sign!Katy enthused.
A sign of what?Didi asked skeptically. Maybe Sunburn Head was also ditched by his friends. Want to go hang out with him?
Ignore her,Katy said. It means something. It totally does.
“Sorry about your friend.”
Russell took a breath, like he was going to say something, but then let it out and just smiled at me. “It’s okay,” he said, his eyes finding mine and holding them. “In fact, right now I’m kind of grateful to him.”
Heat crept into my cheeks, but I made myself keep looking right at him. “Me too,” I said, then realized that didn’t make any sense. “I mean, I’m grateful to my person. At the festival… who left…” My voice trailed off. “Anyway. Ready to go?”
He nodded and crossed to the door of the bus station and held it open for me. “After you.”
I tried not to swoon at that—Didi was always talking about how straight girls were far too impressed by things that should just be baseline manners—but I also couldn’t help noticing how nice his arms were, his biceps and forearms and large hands holding the door open. I glanced back for just a second at the bus station—my stuff stashed under the bench, the bald guy still snoring, the couple and their movie. The girl gave me a look that clearly said Go for it! and I smiled at her.
I tried to freeze the moment for just a second, pause it for posterity. Because I was pretty sure this was when everything started happening. This was Jesse and Céline getting off the train together, Tony and Maria ducking under the bleachers, Jack and Rose taking a turn around the deck. The moment that everything started to change.
I took a breath. And then I stepped forward, out of the bus station, into the Nevada afternoon—ready for our story to begin.