Chapter 9 Both Back in the Day
There are evening calls. Late-night calls.
You hang up. No you hang up.
My mom says I have to hang up.
There are group hangs at monuments in Riverside Park, at people’s somehow empty apartments, at a local Burger King, where the teens all order nothing and sit for hours at orange tables that glisten with grease.
When Nellie and Noah are around the group, there’s awkwardness between them despite how much they have shared over the phone about his absent father and her challenging brother and baseball pressure and art portfolios.
About TV shows they like (Friends and Twin Peaks reruns), TV shows they love to hate (Beverly Hills 90210—except she still watches all the time).
In person, sometimes they acknowledge each other. Sometimes they don’t. Most often, they circle each other, feeling their shared presence—stealing glances, talking loudly, trying to pull each other’s focus—but rarely actually interacting.
In person, they act like they don’t care.
They have not told their friends about what’s happening between them.
What is happening between them?
For no good reason, this thing they’re doing feels like a secret, something that isn’t ready to survive out in the daylight under the gaze of their meddling social circle.
Until one day, they’re hanging in separate groups side by side at Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park, awash in late spring’s rediscovered warmth.
Their arms and legs bared, the crew is blissfully unaware that they’re smoking joints, sunbathing, and cracking jokes where actual sheep once roamed or that, in an amusing twist, they are also sheep in a way, following each other’s lead.
As if at a seventh-grade dance, they are split by gender. Girls in one group. Boys in the other. The only exception is the occasional girlfriend or hookup, an outsider the Upper West Side girls don’t really know, lodged carelessly in the grass between her boyfriend’s bent legs.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Cara and Ben have somehow discovered each other and solidified into a real couple—something about a shared love of Star Trek—even as Nellie and Noah have remained vague.
Today, Cara has a disposable camera and they’re posing for shots. As usual, it’s Nellie behind the lens. She is a believer in documentation. Also, the girls just like the thrill of picking the photos up from the twenty-four-hour photo shop and seeing how they were captured.
So, Nellie has taken her eye off Noah, forgotten to notice him for a minute, when she feels a tap on her shoulder. And she squints up from her crouched position to find him hovering over her, the sun beaming behind his head. He squats down to her level.
Two frogs.
“Wanna go hang out?” he asks.
“Just us?” Adrenaline rockets through her.
“Yeah.”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“Um. Sure.”
Nerves. Excitement. Rinse. Repeat.
She pushes herself to standing, brushing imaginary dust from the back of her sundress.
Grabs her prized black Agnès B. Lolita mini backpack.
Kisses her friends on the cheeks, studiously ignoring their raised brows.
He gives his friends pounds—ignoring their hoots and hollers, ignoring Damien’s Nellie and Noah sitting in a tree.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Which is not something they have done.
Noah gives the group the finger—in a good-natured way—as the duo starts toward the gate at the exit.
Perhaps this is why Noah and Nellie have kept this a secret.
And then they are alone. With eight million people.
In New York City. Set free to explore manicured streets and dingy corners, upscale shops and downscale delis.
And that’s what they do. They wander and soon start to talk like they do on the phone, laughing and disclosing in an uncensored way they don’t do with anyone else.
Like the calls were a warm-up for this big game.
They knock into each other playfully, giddily, pretending not to notice the tension building between them. Feigning indifference to the reverberations from even that fleeting touch.
Something. Is. Happening.
The park spits them out on the Upper East Side. The Met appears before them like a welcome surprise, its grand steps an offer they can’t refuse.
“Should we go in?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he nods. “For sure.”
Inside it is cool. In all ways. Dope in these days.
Maybe bomb. Their shoes click and squeal against the marble floors as they continue to meander without a plan.
It’s an adult kind of thing and a childlike thing, being in this museum without supervision with its mummies and paintings and suits of armor.
No teachers. No parents. No project partners.
Eventually, they explode into the brightness of the Temple of Dendur, blinding sun falling through its contemporary windows onto ancient ruins.
They sit on a bench, make wishes while tossing pennies in the reflecting pool.
Usually, when he’s hoping for something, he wishes for a pro career. She wishes for art school acceptance.
Not today.
The hours slip by like instants. And in no time Noah and Nellie are back outside in the softer afternoon warmth, perched on an enormous park boulder they have managed to scale with iced coffee for her and lemonade for him.
They’re contentedly surveying their surroundings when he turns to her, a bit hesitantly, and says, “Can I tell you something?”
The way he says it, she thinks he’s about to break bad news to her. Like the truth is, I don’t like you. Or the truth is, I already have a girlfriend.
I am too good to be true.
Instead he says: “I like to draw, too.”
Like it’s an admission.
“You do?” She’s surprised. Mostly that he hasn’t mentioned this before. But, to his relief, she doesn’t seem to find it funny or strange.
People keep telling them they’re opposites. But maybe they’re not as different as they think.
“Yeah,” he says, eyes downcast. “I love comics. And I sometimes draw my own.”
“That’s cool!” She is touched by how shy he suddenly seems. “How come you never talk about it?”
“I feel like people are more interested in the baseball,” he says with a shrug. “Even my mom is more interested in the baseball.”
Nellie looks at him, hard, in the eyes. “Well, I’m not more interested in the baseball. In fact, I’m kind of relieved! I assumed you were just humoring me in European paintings. And when I freaked out over that Degas photography show.”
“Well, I was,” he says. “But only because I prefer dumb girls.”
“Prefer dumb girls… for what?” she challenges.
It is the unspoken thing he has acknowledged. The why in why they’re here.
She gives his arm a light shove. He grabs her hand before she can fully retreat. Something flutters in her chest as he weaves his fingers through hers, examines her palm.
“Damn,” she teases. “I guess maybe I need to give Sebastian another chance after all. Maybe he likes artsy girls.”
Noah frowns. Doesn’t like the joke.
“I’m pretty sure your friend Lydia beat you to it.”
Nellie’s eyes narrow. “Friend is a loose term. Did she really?”
“Yup. By the time I got back to Ben’s house that day, they were in a corner…” He shrugs like, doing you know what. They both know what. And it hangs in the air between them. “I don’t like that idea anyway. You with Sebastian. Bad call.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nellie says, tilting her head to peer playfully up into Noah’s face. “Why not?”
“Because. I’ve got a better plan.”
And then he leans in and, as she braces herself against the jagged surface of the rock with her free hand, he slides his palm to the small of her back and presses his full lips to hers.
Softly first. Tentatively. Until she’s kissing him back harder, her hands slipping around his neck as she edges closer to him.
He tastes like lemonade, smells like the mowed grass of a thousand baseball diamonds.
Heat rises between them. And she has never been so outside her body and in it at the same time as she sinks into him.
Thinks, Oh this is what this is supposed to feel like, as he pulls her closer and, without realizing what she’s even doing, she climbs on top of him, straddling him.
Their wishes from the fountain—the same silent prayers—have come true.
They have both been waiting for this for months.
Been thinking about this moment for what feels like eons, especially in teen years—when a week is a month and a month is a year.
Have wasted countless hours imagining a scenario just like this one, when, all the time, it was theirs for the taking.
And now they can’t hide their impatience. They are zero to sixty.
Under Noah’s shirt, his skin is warm as Nellie slides her hand up his back, then down the hard planes of his stomach, until he inhales sharply.
And finally, he loses his balance a bit as his arm slips just slightly against the boulder.
And she yelps as they teeter and threaten to fall.
And then they’re both laughing against each other’s mouths, self-consciously, suddenly remembering where they are.
Their hair, their clothing, their expressions—it’s all askew.
Noah glances around. No one is watching except a single chunky gray squirrel, casing their drinks. This is New York City after all. And two teens making out barely registers.
Noah turns back to face Nellie. Her hair that smells like Creamsicles. Those wild gray eyes. He wipes a small smudge of eyeliner from below her lower lid with the edge of his thumb.
Her cheeks are pink. Her lips are the tiniest bit swollen.
“Can we do this again?” she whispers.
And he doesn’t know if she means now or later or the walk or the museum or the hangout or the make-out. But the answer to all of it is yes.