Chapter 16 Both Back in the Day
There are awkward family introductions and school breaks and movies and sushi dinners and parties with friends.
There are teenage arguments and petty jealousies—that result in a couple of very short-lived breakups—and failed attempts to teach Nellie baseball.
There are Hamptons weekends and her rotator cuff injury—damn that baguette!
—and professions of love that flush them both from head to toe.
So, when the time comes for the next stage of their lives, they have a plan. A different path. So they won’t wind up broken like all the rest.
It’s inevitable, everyone tells them. Long distance won’t work.
He has nearly committed to playing Division One baseball at a college in Southern California; she has applied to three colleges there too—a safety, a target, and a reach.
They will go together to the West Coast. To the land of palm trees and neon billboards and an abundance of avocado and lemon trees.
They won’t fall victim to crossed calls, tonally confusing voicemails, Jell-O-shot-fueled dorm room temptations, the slow stretching in opposite directions toward separate lives.
They will stay together.
Until one day, a glitch in their plan. A hiccup of gargantuan proportions. One of life’s before and afters.
A stolen base that steals a future. A massively torn ACL, a pop in his knee that sends shockwaves of pain. A trajectory forever altered.
Nellie isn’t at the field watching the game when it happens. She’s at home, studying for her midterms. Midterms that Noah keeps insisting don’t even matter because it’s spring semester of senior year.
He doesn’t understand why she cares. Because academics have never mattered to him. Nothing has mattered—except baseball.
So, he’s mad at her already for not showing up. Even though she tried to explain that she can’t leave a project unfinished. It’s just not how she’s built.
And, maybe, Nellie reasons later, that is part of the reason why Noah’s anger seems directed largely at her after the accident happens—after he is taken to a hospital and the doctors tell him, with kind but unyielding faces, that he’s facing surgery, a long recovery, may never return to the same level of play.
He will miss key years in the development of his game.
If he was further along in his career, this might have been surmountable. But now, in this nascent stage, it’s catastrophic.
And when Nellie tries to tell Noah it will be okay—he is more than baseball.
So much more. That he will still have a remarkable life.
They can still go to California together and have their adventure, he looks at her like, how dare you.
He looks at her like he never has before.
Like she doesn’t know him—or maybe anything at all.
Noah sulks and droops, and she exchanges meaningful looks behind his back with his mother and sister, Henny. Her own parents raise their eyebrows, observing from a distance. He stops returning her calls promptly. Stops making plans to hang out.
And then, one day, he finally agrees to meet up with her—at the foot of their Central Park boulder, since he can’t currently climb—after an unprecedented two-week hiatus in which she tries to be understanding and reason that his world has been rocked.
And he breaks down, actual tears streaming from bloodshot eyes she barely recognizes as he asks her not to go.
To give up their dream. To make a new one.
California will only remind him of what he’s lost.
And she considers what he’s saying, though she has just that day received the big envelope saying she’s been admitted to her reach school in LA. Her dream school. With the design program she has always imagined.
Nellie feels pulled in all directions. Her heart will break either way.
But she reasons that maybe she could be just as happy here.
On the East Coast. At home. Near her father and mother—and everything she knows.
Near the grocery salad bars and Tasti D-Lite ice cream shops and Dr. Zizmor subway ads; in muggy summers that smell like rot and crisp autumns that smell like the passage of time.
So, she agrees. “Thank you,” Noah says, burying his face in her neck as Nellie runs a soothing hand over his warm head and neck. Down the back of his hoodie, over his shuddering back.
And she almost says, “You’re welcome”—but is he? To this great sacrifice on the altar of desperation?
She can already hear her parents questioning why she’s changed her mind. Why no California? Why not this program—it’s all that she has talked about for years?
And weeks later, as Nellie slumps on a couch watching Noah stumble drunkenly through a friend’s house party—in a way that is so unlike the Noah she first knew but she fears is exactly like this new post-baseball incarnation—she is not at all sure she has made the right call.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s why she still hasn’t informed the LA school that she will not be accepting admission. Maybe that’s why she has not informed the East Coast university that she will be joining their first-year class.
She’s not ready to remove the safety net. She is unsure of their staying power.
She feels someone plop heavily down beside her, unsettling the cushions, and she turns toward the disruption.
“Whattup, Nellie?” Damien says.
“Not much,” she sighs, crossing her arms over her chest in a self-hug.
He follows her gaze to Noah, who is placing some sort of pill on his tongue. Some girl Nellie doesn’t know is giggling and holding his chin shut like he’s a dog taking roundworm medication. The girl’s hands are on Noah’s body and he’s laughing.
“My man’s a wreck.” Damien gazes unblinking from below blond lashes.
And, though it’s disconcerting that he has so aptly read what is in Nellie’s mind, though she doesn’t want to betray Noah, it’s hard for her to deny the obvious.
“It’s not great,” she admits.
“He says you’re staying in New York for him,” Damien says, rotating his baseball cap sideways on his head and looking down at her. “That true?”
She nods. Bites her lip.
He leans on his thighs, facing forward, then turns to examine her again. “If anyone asks, I never said this, but let’s just say he’s not considering you on the same level. You deserve to hear that.”
She knows she shouldn’t take the bait, but how can she not?
She can see the shift in Noah like night and day.
He has started returning her calls again since they agreed to forgo their California plans, but still sometimes it feels like he’s avoiding her—and she has heard rustlings about him and other girls.
What she is watching now from across the room doesn’t help. And that’s happening in her presence. What goes on when she’s not around?
“What does that mean, Damien?” she asks, working to keep her voice even, empty of desperation.
He laughs lightly. “You’re the only one who calls me Damien,” he says. “You know that?”
She really doesn’t care. Not right now.
“What are you trying to tell me?” This time, her voice catches in her throat.
She is appealing to Damien’s best self, which she knows even then barely exists. But she has already been sensing what he is implying and some part of her needs confirmation.
“Look,” he says, leaning in. “That’s my boy. I’d do anything for that kid. And he’s hurting right now. But you’re too good for him. You could do better.”
Is Damien dropping wisdom or fucking with her?
Unbeknownst to her, her boyfriend has wondered the same thing when Damien has suggested that Noah should let Nellie go, too—what’s the fun of college with the same old girlfriend? And if Nellie stays for him, isn’t that just pressure? Damien keeps asking. Won’t he feel trapped?
“D! I need you!” Some drunken girl calls from across the room, bangled arm outstretched. Damien jumps to standing. “Catch you later,” he says to Nellie.
Alone on the couch again, Nellie tries to catch her breath, but she can’t. She wishes her girls were here. But they’re not. Cara and Ben are off planning their future at Stanford together. Sabrina is hanging with Chloe and her new art world friends, dating girls openly for the first time.
Nellie wouldn’t want to bother them anyway.
But she has been dragged to this party to be ignored. Which only compounds what Damien is suggesting.
She watches Noah, who is leaning on his crutches, laughing too loud at that same girl’s joke. He never used to drink, really. He never used to be like the other neighborhood boys.
He doesn’t feel her eyes on him this time or, if he does, he doesn’t turn to look. She has become an appendage.
She can feel it like a fact.
And in that moment, Nellie knows, she is done with all of this. Has already mentally moved on to the next thing. Ready for her new life to start, now.
Will she be able to move forward here with Noah? To find that new life in New York? Will he even want her to?
“I’ll Be Missing You” plays on the stereo like a sick joke.
And, as she watches her boyfriend, she wonders if they are both already gone.