Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Henry
“Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver is touching, intimate, and green. I was born and raised in North Carolina and this called me home.”
—Mina’s Staff Pick
Ella and I both had Sunday off. We’d been cooped up in Leo’s office, stressed as all get-out after discovering the events wouldn’t carry the weight we had expected them to.
I think we both needed a break from it all.
And Ella was very serious about keeping her promise to Charlie and showing me around the city.
We had obviously been spending plenty of time together in the store as she trained me and we sifted through her ideas binder, trying to find ways to save money in different places.
Ella wore every emotion on her face. It was easy to know who everyone else thought she was: driven, smart, and pure fun.
But I was getting to know who she was without everyone’s expectations.
In Leo’s office where we quietly studied his files and did research, she was serious and careful.
But at main info, when it was just the two of us, she’d throw out a quick quip that was funnier than anything I’d heard all day and pretend like it was nothing.
She was nice to have as a friend.
Ella and I were going up to Central Park today. I told her I could just meet her there, but she said, “I don’t want to get all the way up there, then have to come find you in the Times Square station and go back up. I’ll just meet you at Leo’s.”
Ella said she’d meet me outside at noon, but at eleven thirty she was hitting my apartment buzzer every two seconds.
Before I could slip my shoes on, I pressed the buzzer and said, “I still have thirty minutes.”
“Didn’t they teach you to hustle in football?”
I shook my head, smiling, and snatched my keys as I made my way outside. She was leaning against the brick outside the apartment, her finger holding down the buzzer.
“You said noon,” I said, shutting the door behind me with my boot.
Ella was wearing a long black skirt with a white tank top, her hair slicked back into a ponytail.
I rarely saw her hair like this and I loved it.
There was so much of it that sometimes I imagined my hands getting lost it.
But with her hair pulled back, I could see every bit of her face.
And a girl like her deserved to be seen.
There was too much to focus on right now. I couldn’t let my attention get drawn by Ella, but it was growing harder with each moment I spent with her.
She pulled her sunglasses over her eyes and said, “I’m melting.”
“If you told me eleven thirty, I would’ve come down then.”
She started walking toward the subway station and I trailed behind. “I thought perhaps you’d have intuition that I’d get there early.”
“Oh you know me, always reading your mind. That’s why we had just a great start.”
Ella’s laugh was better than any whiff of flowers, any ray of sunshine. “Okay, okay, let’s go.”
The 14th Street station 2 train wasn’t too far of a walk. We tapped our cards and made our way to the platform.
As we waited for the train to arrive, she looked up at me with an eager smile. “Should we reenact how we met?”
“No,” I said, reflexively holding my hands in front of my neck. Even though she was smaller than me, I still wasn’t willing to be on the receiving end of another of her attacks. My neck was tender for a week.
She laughed sheepishly. “I am sorry about that. Even though I grew up here, I still get a little nervous taking the train at night.”
“How long is your commute home?”
“Well, I was going to my parents’ place in Queens that night, which is about forty minutes. But I live in Hell’s Kitchen, so maybe fifteen minutes? It’s not terrible.”
I frowned as the subway came screeching into the station. Obviously, she could handle her own, but I hated the idea of her being scared. Of her having to take self-defense classes just to exist and go home. My chest tightened at the thought of anything happening to her on one of these trains.
We shuffled onto one of the cars with another small crowd of people, taking two available seats. I’d never really noticed how small these seats were until Ella and I were forced to sit next to each other.
I spent years working on farms when I stopped coming to the city for the summer and spent the better part of my adolescence in football training. I tried to pull my shoulders together, but I couldn’t stop my leg from pressing right against Ella’s.
She didn’t move away, but she didn’t press against me either. Our legs just rested gently against each other, as a secret sort of support. Quietly keeping each other steady.
“I don’t get why you’d want to live in a city where you feel so unsafe,” I whispered over to Ella. The train was so loud so I nearly pressed my mouth against her ear so she could hear. “If the station and train you have to take to get home seems sketchy to you, why stay? Why not just move?”
She tsked. “So simplistic.”
“It’s a genuine question,” I argued. “I never feel unsafe in Tennessee.”
“Well, I would. I think the quiet at night would freak me out. And aren’t there more serial killers in suburbia than urban cities?
Look.” She nodded across the car at the old lady, wrapped up in her crossword.
“Even though I get nervous sometimes, I just remind myself there’s always someone around.
She’s settling in for a long train ride.
If I were going to Queens, I know I’d be on the train with at least one other person.
In your town, I bet I’d be alone way more than I was around people. ”
“I don’t know about that,” I muttered. “It’s hard to meet people here.”
“Have you really tried?” she asked gently. “You won’t meet anyone inside your apartment.”
I knew Ella wasn’t trying to be mean, but embarrassment twisted inside me.
It was normal to adjust to a city like this, but my anxiety sent me into a spiral of thinking that I just wasn’t good enough.
I wasn’t interesting enough from the get-go for someone to want to take the time to get to know me.
I was a slow burn kind of person, but not everyone was interested in the slow burn.
And not a lot of people in their late twenties wanted to admit they were lonely.
“It’s hard,” I said after a moment. “Overwhelming, too. I’m not the kind of guy to approach someone randomly at a bar. I don’t even know where to start.”
She hesitated as she said, “But you grew up here.”
I shrugged, careful not to take up too much space and knock shoulders with the man sitting next to me. “I don’t think any of my friends from back then remember me. I’m just not that kind of person.”
Truthfully, I wasn’t very memorable. I often fell into the shadows, quiet and painfully desperate to jump into a conversation, but too shy. Too scared of being met with silence. Even when I would visit an office’s headquarters to help them out, I’d come in and leave without a fuss.
Ella whipped her hair to face me at that.
Her gaze met mine. “I think you would be very hard to forget,” she said matter-of-factly.
Maybe she said it just to be nice, but my heart lifted into my throat.
If someone as memorable and magnetic as Ella found me unforgettable, who cared what everyone else thought?
“Alright, prepare yourself,” Ella said as we approached the Times Square station. “Stick close and walk fast, country boy.”
I didn’t think Ella would be able to walk faster me since I had way longer legs than her, but she was able to slip through and around crowds, unlike me.
I struggled to keep up as we walked through the tunnels toward the RW.
All around the station were buskers, either singing or playing instruments.
It flowed through the station into a bittersweet melody of the city.
When we finally got on our train, it was a short ride up to Central Park. When we stepped out of the train, New York was a completely different city.
Downtown Manhattan was busy and crowded. There never seemed to be enough space on the sidewalk for everyone, but the streets around the park were wide. People walked leisurely, carrying picnic blankets, holding cold drinks.
“Whoa,” I said, as we stepped into the park.
“Yeah, I bet you don’t see this in Tennessee, huh?”
I side-eyed her. “I see this in Tennessee times ten.” We were surrounded by green and for the first time since I moved here, I felt … relieved. “But this is beautiful.”
As we walked through the park, I tried to take everything in at once. The people lying on the green in bathing suits or even having elaborate tea parties. There were structures within the park, too—a gazebo, a small house.
“See? There’s so much cool stuff in New York,” Ella said, smiling brightly up at me.
“I stand corrected, because this is gorgeous.”
“Just wait until we get to the fountain.”
“This was definitely worth the trip.”
“Oh, we haven’t even done the fun part yet!” Ella said, excitedly. “We’re taking the rowboats out on the pond.”
I was unable to contain my smile. For the first time in a long time, I felt like myself. “Charlie and I go kayaking every summer at a spot called The Cove. When we were kids, we’d celebrate the first day of summer by jumping in the water before I headed out to New York.”
“I can’t believe you never came up here during the summertime. You were missing out on all of this!” She spread her arms out and hit someone in the arm and muttered a quick, “Sorry.”
“I mostly explored downtown Manhattan. Those summers, I’d spend time walking around, trying to figure out what my parents loved about the city so much. Or guess the places they had been together.”
“Leo never told you?”
I shrugged. “He would’ve, and I guess I could’ve called my mom to ask. But it was a lot more fun to daydream and guess if I was drawn to the same things.”