Chapter 1
I
Marin
The sun streaks in through the slivers of window on either side of the air-conditioning unit, and it takes me a few waking moments to register the arm of my longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend draped across my chest.
As I gently lift her wrist, Georgie stirs with a devilish smile, bringing me right back to earth.
“It’s good luck to have sex on graduation day,” she hums, kissing my face, my neck, my hip as she shimmies under the covers, armed with the vibrator she left charging the night before.
I close my eyes and let my head fall back, trying to be present but feeling far away. Which is actually where I want to be.
When I finish and she comes up for air, I trace a constellation of freckles across her back. “I’ll miss this,” she says, rolling over into a sunspot on her pilled gray duvet.
“Me too,” I say, and I mean it. It’s hard to believe I came to the University of Iowa hoping people would think I was straight, worried being bisexual might be some kind of disappointment.
But once I settled in—once I got over the novelty of being someone other than the girl with the dead dad—it felt like space opened up for something else.
The one-hour-and-fifty-five-minute drive felt far enough away from home to try on an identity that I thought might fit.
Self-assured and up-for-anything Georgie, president of Chi Omega, social coordinator of the Pride Alliance Center, helped me find a rhythm, some kind of belonging.
But as I kiss her goodbye, I feel a relief, an acknowledgment that my time here is over and that my real life can start.
On campus, parents are at Hy-Vee purchasing black-and-gold “Class of 2017” balloons, cases of Coors, and flimsy greeting cards to stuff with cash. My personal celebration is going to look more like driving a thousand miles and never turning back.
As I step out into the morning sun, rolling my shoulders back into a big stretch, I hear the band tuning its instruments to Pomp and Circumstance on the still-dewy turf of Kinnick Stadium.
Beneath it, the sound of Sloane’s voice as she answers my phone call: “Why are you up?” She responds with a question.
Typical. I imagine her filling in the last of the Saturday crossword in pencil while sipping a responsible half cup of coffee.
“God, I see you walking from the Chi O house. You think you’re so original for getting laid our last morning of college.
” I wave to where I know my best friend is looking down from the living room we share.
She’s probably already dressed—like a future First Lady, as usual, a long brown ponytail hanging at the nape of her neck, as carefully constructed as the sculptures at the state fair butter-carving competition.
“Did Teddy confirm what time he could pick me up?” I ask as I cross the street.
“Yep, you’re all set to leave at five.”
“We can agree he’s only doing this because he’s desperately in love with you, right?”
She ignores me. “You don’t have a car. You’re both headed to New York.
It just makes sense. But I can agree that it is remarkable that he’s still willing to do this despite your unwillingness to just text him back directly to coordinate this whole thing.
But I am, as ever, happy to act as your admin.
I will sort of miss it when you have a real one.
” Ever logical, she has a way of finishing a sentence that annoys her opponents on the debate team and fills me with calm.
She’s the one part of my college experience I can’t bear to think about leaving.
Our plan is to reunite in the city eventually, but for now, we try to avoid the topic of our inevitable distance.
After our freshman year of dorm living, Sloane and I moved into a luxury building on the edge of campus. Though her parents assure me I pay half the rent, we all know my monthly check barely covers the co-op fee.
“Your gown is steamed in the bathroom,” she says as soon as I step through the door and kick off my loafers. “There’s extra turkey bacon in the oven. And when are you going to deal with your closet? You know, for someone who claims to love a plan . . .”
I reach for her shoulder, smiling, and pull her in for a hug. “I trust that you’ll still be micromanaging my life long-distance.”
I leave her to her own preparations and collapse, for the last time, onto my bed, a wrought-iron beauty I rescued from Craigslist and transformed with the aid of Sloane and a can of spray paint on the roof during finals. I only ruined one pair of pants.
I look around at everything that’s still left to pack.
Dad’s funeral program tucked into the frame of a pink-and-black Funny Face poster.
Macroeconomics textbooks I promised my Chi O little.
A row of blue and white button-ups, some thrifted blazers.
My beloved, pristine loafers, purchased after landing a competitive venture capital internship in New York.
My heart rate rises in excitement as I process the gravity of the moment, and I fan my arms like a kid making a snow angel.
The back of my throat goes dry, and I’m suddenly lightheaded from anticipation, hunger, or both.
Today is the start of the promise I made myself when I was fifteen: that someday I would leave all of Iowa behind.
I have two suitcases. Seven hours. And a triple espresso waiting for me in the kitchen.
Teddy
“Graduation sex”—I barely get the words out, watching Emilie, an ex from freshman year, pulling on a heel at the foot of my bed—“is good sex, I mean, good luck.” She smiles, grabs her keys off my dresser, and promises to add me on LinkedIn. I laugh to myself as I tug on my boxers.
After the door shuts, I know it’s time to face the inevitable: I am moving out and moving on, even if a not-insubstantial part of me wishes my life in Iowa City could last forever—the house parties, the group projects I carried mostly on my own, the late nights in the library that turned into early mornings.
When I got accepted into the NYU School of Law, I briefly but seriously considered staying at Iowa instead.
After working through a robust pros/cons chart on the whiteboard in my favorite study room in the business school, I knew what I had to do.
I’d go learn everything I possibly could from a new place and new people, then bring it all back home.
“We’ll always be here,” my mom reminded me. “Now’s the time to spread your wings.”
My eyes drift to a stack of cards sitting on top of my dresser: one for my sister Romy, one for my parents, and one for my childhood best friend and forever accomplice, Carter.
Notes thanking them for their support the past four years.
Proof that learning to shotgun a beer hadn’t murdered my manners.
I lean onto my elbow to open the disintegrating blinds, revealing crowds ambling toward the football field.
“Amateur hour,” I mutter. I’d reserved tickets for my and Carter’s families weeks ago and booked an eight-person reservation for late lunch in town.
Our combined family dinners used to be a weekly occurrence, most Sunday nights after football games or church, and the weight of this being the last time we’d all be together for a while was palpable.
It was a pressure on my chest that kept me from moving to my feet.
I check my phone, fully charged on the windowsill where I leave it every evening, to find a drunk voicemail I convinced Carter to record for posterity at Donnelly’s last night.
Nostalgic already, I download it for safekeeping and scroll back to a text from Sloane, confirming plans for me to take someone named Marin with me when I depart for my drive to New York this afternoon.
I hadn’t planned on company, but how could I say no to the gorgeous, divinely aloof Sloane Bachman?
Three knocks interrupt thoughts of my entirely unrequited crush.
Carter. “Decent!” I shout toward the door, and he enters, balancing two sweating iced coffees in his hands and a bag of bagels under his chin.
“Ran into a very adorable ghost on the way in,” he says, dropping the carbs at the foot of my bed with a tilt of his head.
“Emilie? From Econ 101?” Carter’s encyclopedic memory of my dating life is both endearing and creepy.
Plied with enough drinks, he could recite every single one of my love interests since first grade.
I reach for my coffee with an eye roll. “I plead the fifth?”
He laughs. “You ready?”
“One sec.” I text Sloane back—promptness equals points in her book—and finally bring my feet to the floor.
The ceremony is eternal, but not long enough.
Our parents are waving from row 5, zooming in with their ancient iPhones, dabbing tears.
A reminder that the moisture pooling in my own eyes is genetic hardwiring.
After lunch, Carter and I both continue to cry in the Joseph’s parking lot while our dads pretend to make small talk ten feet away and our moms hover, patting each other’s shoulders and digging in their purses for another pack of tissues.
Carter is headed to Reno for a top-secret engineering job, and we’ve spent the last four months trying to pretend like the cross-country moves we’re making aren’t terrifying.
That we have any idea how to navigate the world without each other.
We hand each other our letters. “We’re so cheesy,” Carter jokes, stuffing my note in his pocket.
“Obviously I can’t read this now. I’m really going to miss you.
Promise me you won’t fall in love with some Upper East Side snob and never come back? ”
I laugh and hug him hard. “It’s just for now. We’ll get married and have kids, and our kids will get married and have kids, and we’ll hardly remember this.” I say it in a joking tone, but he knows that I mean it. “Promise to save a spot for me on Fifty-First Street,” I add more earnestly.
The plan has always been simple: Carter would live at 441 Fifty-First Street, Des Moines, Iowa, his grandparents’ former address and the site of some of our best memories, and I would live in 443 Fifty-First Street next door.
But for now, it’s Nevada and New York and a shared commitment to call each other every Sunday.
I pull my late grandma’s 1998 LeSabre out of the parking lot. The gas light flicks on, and the check engine light follows in short order. It’s fine. What matters is getting to the meeting spot on time. In all likelihood, punctuality is Sloane’s love language.
When I make the turn in front of the main library, I see them: Sloane, somehow still stoic despite tears streaming down her face, hugging a woman almost a foot taller than her—dark blond, terrifying, with a cigarette dangling from her lip and an Annie Hall outfit hanging off her frame.
Sloane’s in chinos, ballet flats, and a navy-and-white striped boatneck.
Are those . . . printed-out directions in her hand?
Her friend looks familiar, maybe from an elective or Young Democrats or something.
I squint as I approach and pull the visor down.
Now that I have a better view, I can tell that the friend is beautiful—actually, stunning—with features that look like they could slice right through me, though a little too androgynous for my personal taste.
Sloane’s a gin and tonic after a long day of yard work.
This woman—Marin—is a Negroni after a big meeting.
Not that I’ve ever had a long day of yard work or a big meeting, I think.
She intimidates me even from a distance, and yet her high cheekbones and arched eyebrows make my stomach tighten in a way I recognize.
As I roll to a stop at the curb, I sit up straighter, checking for remnants of lunch in my teeth and tracking the way Marin’s weight shifts from her front foot to her back, how she lifts her chin while forcing a smile.
The two of them pull apart and walk toward the Buick, where I hand-crank the passenger window open. Sloane turns on a smile, a real one I think, as she angles her stretched-out arms in a sideways V like she’s unveiling a work of art. “Teddy, meet Marin.”
Sixteen hours. How bad could it be? I reach over to extend a hand out the window.
“Hi, Teddy,” she says, eyes narrowing. “Can you open the trunk?”