The Ballad of Darcy and Russell

Chapter 25

I pulled into a space in the Jesse Bus Terminal lot and shifted the Prius into park.

As I’d gotten closer to Jesse, and the temperature had dropped, I’d seen that the mountains that surrounded the town were now snow-capped and stunningly beautiful—making it both familiar and completely different.

The lot wasn’t hugely full—a smattering of cars and trucks, the occasional van, and a motorcycle parked right by the entrance. I looked around for the Bronco, before I realized a second later that of course Russell wouldn’t have been driving it. But I actually had no idea what he would be driving.

I tilted the rearview mirror down and ran a brush through my bangs. Chloe had been right—they worked on my face, and I really liked them a lot—but it was the highest-maintenance haircut I’d ever had, something I was still getting used to. But Didi and Katy both loved it—I’d FaceTimed them right after I’d left Visible Changes, the salon in Stanwich that Gillian had recommended.

In the first few days after I’d gotten to the Stanwich campus and met Mirabella, my very flaky roommate (she would go on to drop out after twenty days, leaving me with the enviable position of being a freshman with a single, even though I was assured by the housing office that this would not be the case second semester), I found myself checking my phone a little too often, always hoping to see a message from Russell, that he’d decided to forgo our agreement and reach out. And at first, the silence did bother me, in a low-hum kind of way, in the background but still present. But this really didn’t last long—because there was a lot going on.

I had to get my class schedule and navigate the campus and try to make friends and sort out the dining hall etiquette and get a handle on my hair, which was encountering sustained humidity for the first time ever.

And more than anything else—I was figuring out what a relationship with my mother looked like. For the first time since I was quite tiny, we were in the same place at the same time. And it wasn’t like things had been easy—the ride when she’d picked me up from JFK had not been a great start. I’d been exhausted from barely sleeping on the plane, in addition to my emotional hangover from the previous twenty-four hours with Russell. We were stilted and awkward with each other until, unprompted, Gillian pulled off the highway and into a McDonald’s drive-thru. I got a sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin, she got a McGriddle, and we both got hash browns and coffee. We drove the rest of the way with the bag on the seat between us, eating in silence. But not super-strained silence. More like we were just getting our bearings.

We started with a once-a-week coffee date on campus that then grew to include a standing Sunday dinner at her house. “That’s so Gilmore Girls,” Didi had groaned. “You’re even in Connecticut! On the nose much?”

These dinners meant I was also getting to know my half-siblings, and even Anthony a little (though he still seemed to travel a lot for work, going back to the UK pretty frequently, so he was only there around half the time). It was a strange concept, essentially meeting three people that I was related to. We were easing into what our relationship could look like—so far, it involved watching a lot of animated movies and playing a needlessly complicated board game about building railroads. We didn’t yet have the kind of relationship that Russell had had with his half-siblings. But it was a start—and for now, that was enough.

I knew what Gillian and I had didn’t look like a traditional mother-daughter relationship, and maybe it never would. But we were finding out what it looked like for us, and maybe that was all that was needed. We were just taking it one coffee date, one dinner, one conversation and text exchange at a time. Rebuilding our bridge slowly, so that it would be strong enough to withstand a storm if the weather got rough again.

And it wasn’t like my dad had been absent from all of this. My first day on campus, we’d had a very long conversation in which I told him everything—the bus station and Russell and the helicopter and Wylie Sanders and staying in the guesthouse and the road trip home.

He had not been happy about this, to say the least. But he did seem somewhat mollified when a huge box of Nighthawks merchandise had shown up at the house—including a note from Wylie that was addressed To Ted. My dad wrote him back a thank-you—which led, in a twist I truly hadn’t seen coming, to my dad and Wylie becoming friends. They’d started hanging out whenever Wylie was in California, going on hikes and to baseball games, and there was talk of my dad going out to see him at the Wynn.

I heard from Montana occasionally—she was always sending me Connecticut recommendations and funny memes. She was supportive of our dads becoming buddies, telling me that her dad needed a friend his own age. And when I pointed out that my dad was twenty years younger than Wylie, she’d waved this off, calling it “rock-star math.”

And not only did my dad have a new, burgeoning friendship with Wylie—he was also no longer alone in our house.

He’d sent me a picture in late September, him holding up a yellow-white puppy with a squashed face and huge paws. It turned out the dog had been a rescue hired for one of my dad’s ad campaigns, and he’d fallen in love with him on set, especially when the dog refused to take any sort of direction and ended up toppling the craft services table, then joyfully eating the spoils that hit the ground.

He’d taken the dog home that night, just calling him the name of the product as a stopgap, even though I’d told my dad in no uncertain terms not to do this, in case the dog got attached to it. Which of course he did, so now we were stuck with it. And while my first instinct was to be mad about the fact that I hadn’t had a dog my whole childhood, and that my dad got one basically the second I was out of the house, I was just so won over by his cute face and high-pitched bark and whappy tail, it was impossible to be mad. The dog was so cute that with all the updates and pictures I was getting, it had taken all my self-control not to clean out my savings and book a flight home immediately to cuddle him. But my dad assured me that he would be there waiting for me when I came home for Christmas. And when I’d finally met him three days earlier, Zyrtec the dog had more than lived up to expectations.

I gave my bangs one last brush, then dropped the brush into my purse. My heart was starting to beat a low, steady pulse in my throat. I wasn’t nervous—I was excited.

Because unless something had gone very wrong in the last few hours, I knew Russell would be there.

I had thought, as we’d moved into October and I got my first glimpse of the wonder that is fall in New England, that this would just be it. That we would keep to the terms of our agreement and have no communication until December. And Russell had faded out, slightly, from the forefront of my mind. I made friends, I took weekend trips into New York City, I found that I loved my sociology professor and hated everything about Statistics, I fell hard for East Coast bagels, and I inadvertently got into a feud with my RA when I left a note on their whiteboard that accidentally led their girlfriend to figure out they were cheating. So there was a lot going on. And when, on a random Tuesday, I opened my inbox, I wasn’t at all expecting to see an email from Russell—with the subject line THE BALLAD OF DARCY RUSSELL.

It was lyrics to a song. A song about two people finding each other against the odds, connecting over one night, going their separate ways, but always thinking of each other—usually at the same time, though they didn’t realize it, thousands of miles apart.

It was beautiful. Even without being able to hear the music, just reading the lyrics, I felt tears spring to my eyes.

I called Russell immediately, and he answered on the second ring. And I hadn’t realized until that moment just how much I’d missed hearing his voice.

And we started a marathon phone call that lasted all that afternoon (I decided I didn’t really need to go to Statistics) and into the evening, talking on the phone, headphones in, curled up on my bed as it got later and later—and I was beyond grateful, once again, that Mirabella was gone and I didn’t have to do this while pacing around the quad or in one of the soundproof cubbies in the library. It turned out that Russell had deferred Michigan after all—he was bouncing between LA with his mom and Nevada with his dad as he worked on his musical adaptation of Theseus’s Sailboat. But the Darcy and Russell song was a one-off—he told me he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it until he got it down on paper.

I told him about my friends, and my classes, and the escalating feud with my RA. And it was like we were picking up where we’d left off—we could have been walking around Jesse, or driving in his dad’s Bronco, or sitting with bags of well-done fries in front of us.

Finally, I had to hang up to go to sleep, but as we said goodbye, I knew this wouldn’t be the end of things. And I was right—as October moved into November, we fell into a routine. We would have long conversations on the phone, usually at night. We had an open text thread that we just kept going—the perfect place to drop in an observation, or a meme, or a picture of Tidbit and Andy.

And as we shared stories and observations and our daily minutia, I actually got to know him—got to know him in a way that you can’t in twenty-four hours, no matter how jam-packed they are. I knew which emojis he liked, which Spider-Man meme he would inevitably send, how his voice sounded at night when he was sleepy and talking to me with his eyes closed. I got to learn about his day-to-day, and he did the same with me. And as we moved into the middle of November, it was crazy to realize that I thought I’d known him back in August. Because while I’d gotten a sense of him, it was still just the outline. But we were filling in the rest now, one late-night conversation, one text exchange, one FaceTime chat at a time.

So it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise when Russell mentioned that his dad was going to be back in New York in November. And maybe…?

But what did surprise me was how quickly I said no. Even though we’d broken every other part of our arrangement, I wanted to keep our December meeting as it was.

“You want us both to drive, separately, to Nevada? All the way from California? And meet at a bus station?” Russell had asked me, incredulous, when I’d put the kibosh on a November meeting.

“You’re going to be coming from your dad’s,” I pointed out. “You only have to drive three hours. I’m the one who has to drive seven hours.”

“But neither of us has to drive any hours! We can just meet in LA.”

And while I knew that made a lot of sense, I held the line. I liked the romance of it—even though I knew that he would be there waiting for me, I wanted the road trip to meet the boy I’d been separated from. The drive across the desert as night started to fall. The reconnecting in the place we’d first met.

Russell finally agreed, and November continued apace. My dad flew out for Thanksgiving—he stayed in a hotel, but we had Thanksgiving dinner at Gillian and Anthony’s. It was something that I wouldn’t have believed could even be possible a few months ago—but there we all were, sitting around a table, passing the gravy and arguing over whether marshmallows belonged in sweet potatoes (I was a resounding yes).

And before the month was over, I got another equally ground-shaking surprise. Russell sent me a link to a song—the Darcy and Russell song. With Wylie singing it. It was a little pre-holiday present, just for me. There weren’t any plans to release it, and it was just for the three of us—which made it all the more special. And ever since he’d sent it, I’d been listening to it pretty much nonstop.

So it felt like things were working out as I’d flown home to California three days earlier. Well—despite the small wrinkle that Romy Andreoni was going to be my roommate come January. She emailed to tell me that she was “like, so over California” and had applied to transfer to Stanwich from UC Santa Cruz. And when she’d mentioned she knew me—and the housing office saw the vacancy that they weren’t thrilled about to begin with—it must have been a done deal. So I was preparing myself to lose my single room and have to share it with one of the most chaotic people I knew. And while Katy and Didi were horrified, I also figured that if Romy and I could survive sharing a tent together at a music festival, we would probably be okay in a dorm room.

I checked the time, then my teeth in the rearview mirror. In a few minutes—just a handful of seconds—I would be seeing Russell again. We hadn’t made any plans beyond this—I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen. I’d promised my dad I’d be back home on the twenty-third, but that was the closest I’d come to planning. Maybe we’d stay at the Silver Standard, or drive to Wylie’s house, or get a room somewhere in Vegas.

But it was okay that we didn’t have a plan. I was going to see him again soon, for the first time in months, and that was all that mattered. And I knew we’d figure everything else out from there.

I’d changed into a nicer outfit at a rest stop on 93 North—I was no longer in the cutoffs and T-shirt from my drive. Not only because they’d gotten slightly sweaty and ketchup-stained, but they were really not going to work with the weather—it was in the high forties, with the temperature dropping. So I was now wearing my favorite short blue knit dress with a gray cardigan over it. I gave myself one last look in the mirror, then got out of the car.

The bus station, I was surprised to see, was different than I remembered.

It seemed smaller, somehow. The flickering light in the vending machine had been fixed. But most of all, there were now other people in it. There were people working behind the ticket windows, and sitting on the benches killing time, and waiting in line for the bathroom. The Sunday-night quiet that we’d found when we’d washed up here was gone, replaced by the bustle of pre-Christmas travel.

Russell wasn’t anywhere in the bus station, but that was okay. I knew he’d be here soon. I walked over to the spot where I’d camped out—the one under the WHEN YOU’RE HERE—YOU’RE HOME mirror. For just a second, I flashed back to the girl I’d been back in August. Trying to pretend I didn’t care about Gillian, dreading the future, scared to go up and ask strangers for a phone charger. And I realized, with a kind of wonder, just how much can change in a few months. Even though I was in the same place, it seemed like a million years ago.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned around—and there he was.

Russell.

MyRussell.

He was wearing a light-blue button-down, dark jeans, sneakers, and his hair was a little longer. He was so handsome, he made it hard to breathe for a second. “Hi,” he said, his eyes steady on mine. “I heard you were looking for me?”

I smiled, simultaneously wanting to laugh and to cry. But instead, I just nodded. “I sure am.” I practically threw myself at him as he swept me into his arms and gave me a kiss that let me know he’d been missing me these last few months just as much as I’d been missing him.

We broke apart and I hugged him tightly, realizing that the mirror, of all things, was right. I was home. I was with him.

“Hey,” I whispered into his ear. “Fun fact.” Russell drew back slightly to look at me, one eyebrow raised, expectant. I took a deep breath and made myself say it. “I think I’m in love with you.”

Russell was smiling at me with his eyes, his lips—with his entire face. “That is a fun fact,” he said, “because I know I’m in love with you.”

And we kissed again, a little less frenzied, because I knew we had time. We had all night, and the next few days, and then whatever came after that. Maybe Russell would get into NYU, and we’d be just a train ride apart. Maybe he’d go to USC, or Temple, or Michigan, and we’d continue to figure it out. Maybe this was all going to fall apart next week. Maybe it never would. The only way to find out, I’d finally realized, was to jump in.

“So,” Russell said, when we stepped away. He took my hand in his and raised it to his lips. “What comes next?”

I smiled at him. “Whatever we want. We get to write our own story.”

He grinned. “Can I pick the genre?”

I laughed at that as he swung our hands between us and we started walking across the bus station, toward the doors.

I knew that our love story—the story of Darcy and Russell—wasn’t anything like the love stories I’d seen in the movies.

It was better.

It was ours.

Russell squeezed my hand in his, and then held open the door for me.

And we walked out, into the December twilight, together.