Chapter 3 Both Back in the Day
Cara and Lydia have no plans. And Nellie is jealous. Jealous like a sixteen-year-old afraid to miss out on even the least promising social interaction. In truth, Nellie exists in a constant state of FOMO, though the acronym for it does not yet exist.
It’s spring in New York City. Warmer but not warm. The breeze smells fresh and damp, stirring with new beginnings. Pink magnolia and white cherry blossoms explode from fragile branches, embarrassing the surrounding dogwood trees—still naked and thorny.
Thorny like Lydia, who Nellie doesn’t even like.
Lydia is Cara’s leftover from nursery school—a kind of obligatory-family-friend-appendage who Nellie would prefer to exorcise.
She doesn’t go to school with any of them and yet, somehow, she constantly pops up, her curly red hair and freckled skin accented by bright-red lipstick.
And, whether it’s because she sees Nellie as a threat to her childhood friendship with Cara or just can’t suppress her snark, she throws relentless barbs.
“I’ve been looking for a sweater exactly like this!
” Cara exclaims, fingering the soft sleeve of Nellie’s oversized black cashmere V-neck as they walk downtown on Broadway.
They lug matching JanSport backpacks, heavy with textbooks and in various states of disrepair, cluttered with quippy pins or tagged with Sharpies.
“Yeah, it’s kinda fly,” Lydia allows. “Is it, like, vintage?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Nellie says, looking down to examine it. “It was my brother’s, actually.”
“Oh, yeah,” Lydia nods. “That makes sense. ’Cause it looks kind of old and worn out.”
Fucking Lydia. Nellie just rolls her eyes.
Nellie may act cavalier about her outfit, but there is nothing left to chance about the distressed sweater over the white V-neck Hanes T-shirt, tight black stretchy miniskirt, and requisite late nineties blue six-hole Doc Martens.
She cares what she wears maybe even more than the average teen.
Actually, she cares about aesthetics and design in general—all things visual.
Which is why instead of having no plans like Lydia and Cara, she is headed to her weekly drawing class right now.
“Do we have to walk her all the way?” Lydia asks Cara like Nellie isn’t standing right there. Like she can’t hear every word. “I’m tired.”
“Lydia!” Cara giggles, lagging a couple steps behind, so she can playfully place her hands on her friend’s back and push her forward. Lydia leans back into Cara’s palms until she almost trust-falls backward. They both dissolve into laughter.
Very funny. They’re going to make Nellie late.
“You guys…”
“Coming, coming!” Lydia says, rolling her eyes, like Nellie is such a buzzkill.
“Let me just get a cigarette.” And, while Nellie taps her foot, impatience strumming through her, Lydia takes her sweet-ass time flipping her bag off one shoulder, unzipping a front pocket, then a side one, sliding a Newport Light 100 out, and then rummaging for a lighter.
She finally lights the thing and takes a heavy drag, her red lipstick leaving a ring around the filter like the mark of the devil.
If any of the adults walking past disapprove, they don’t show it. Pedestrians rush down the sidewalk on either side of the girls, headed toward meetings and appointments scrawled in Filofax organizers. The tech-savvy among them return pages via pay phones. People actually look where they’re going.
This pre-Y2K world is a simpler place than it will be soon.
“I can just walk myself,” Nellie blurts out finally, working to keep the irritation out of her voice. “Really. I’m a big girl. I’m all good. Bye!”
She’s not bluffing. She really wants to leave. She edges away down the street.
“No way, Nells!” Cara says. “We want to walk you! Otherwise, we have to go back and start our homework.”
“We don’t have to start our homework,” Lydia quips, dragging on her cigarette and blowing an ineffectual ring—more like a blob of smoke. “We could go to the Meadow. I heard the cast of The Real World has been chilling there. They, like, rollerblade on the bike path nearby.”
But if she thinks she can distract Cara from her schoolwork, she doesn’t know her old friend as well as she imagines. Cara is up for a party—but only after her calculus is done.
Nellie relates to this. The need for vigilance.
The threesome turns the corner onto Seventy-Fourth Street, east in the direction of Central Park on a mostly residential block, and stumbles into an optimistic stretch of sunlight. Cara tilts her head toward the sun and sighs. Heaven.
New York winter was long. Had lost its charm ages ago.
The snow had yellowed—with the help of enthusiastic neighborhood dogs—and the last vestiges, small patches of ice, still cling to the dark soil of sporadic tree wells.
It isn’t that Nellie doesn’t appreciate the warmth.
She does. It is a balm as it warms the top of her head.
But nothing is icier than arriving late to drawing.
That means being on the receiving end of a disappointed look—through horn-rimmed glasses—from the teacher, Sharon, a bony frustrated artist with limited patience.
“Guys…” Nellie says, preparing to say goodbye and run ahead no matter how Cara resists, “thanks for walking me, but I’m just going to…”
But then she stops midsentence, her mouth dropping open slightly. Because, through the glare of afternoon sunlight, she sees a trio of boys walking toward them like a hormonal mirage. And she recognizes them instantly, as if from her imagination.
The boys from the party.
The tall one. The short one. The one she saw only from afar, but who—since she spotted him—she’s been thinking about nightly in bed as she waits under her too-heavy comforter for sleep to turn her thoughts to dreams. Who she has endowed with an imaginary personality that probably bears no resemblance to the actual flesh-and-blood boy.
Who she feels like she knows because of how much he has occupied her thoughts.
She has looked for him at other parties since that first one—desperately, pathetically. No dice.
She’s looked around the neighborhood too.
Because even though she doesn’t know these boys really, she knows them vaguely as one of the other groups of kids from this corner of the city.
She never paid them much mind before. But she knows they think they own the Upper West Side just like she, Cara, and Sabrina do.
No doubt, they also eat Gray’s Papaya hot dogs with tangy mustard and sauerkraut over a greasy orange counter, also suck tart striped candy sticks down to fine points from the Broadway Nut Shop, where nothing ever tastes quite as good as the store smells.
They too order whatever is still hot—crusty on the outside and pliable on the inside—from H a power play. Like he’s too cool to have fully engaged. They’d hung out that whole night at the party—drinking, dancing, shouting above the din, repeat. Now, he looks from Nellie to Cara for recognition.
Cara nods, overcome by quiet. She shifts on her feet, bites her nails. That’s how she rolls with new people. How she clams up.
Nellie has no choice but to speak for them both. “Yeah,” she humors him. “We met at that club.”
“No doubt,” he says, bobbing his head. Which sort of makes no sense. But then he laughs. At himself maybe? At them? It’s hard to tell.
Which Nellie also thinks is by design.
It’s all a little obnoxious.
“I remember!” the short boy chimes in, shooting them an untempered smile—open for business.
He seems unapologetically sweet in his striped orange, white, and yellow Hang Ten T-shirt. Like human candy corn.
Lydia clears her throat. Like, hello?
“That’s Lydia,” Nellie says, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. “You guys didn’t meet her at the party. Because she wasn’t there.”
Oh, blessed night.
“I wasn’t there.” Lydia drags on her cigarette and lowers her lashes, like she’s some screen siren and not a seventeen-year-old in a Champion sweatshirt with a small pimple on her forehead.