1. Dani #2
Brynn. No caps, no punctuation, the specific Brynn thing where she texted me right when I needed it without knowing why.
She'd been doing it since the spring of sophomore year, when she called me out of a dead sleep at three in the morning to make sure I was okay.
I'd been okay. I'd been brushing my teeth.
But the timing was close enough that I filed it, and I'd had a theory ever since that Brynn could feel the pressure change in my mood the way some people feel a storm coming in their knees.
I didn't call her.
I put the phone face down on the bedspread.
I sat with it.
The thing about Brynn was I'd have to tell her. About the firing. About the envelope. About the Ashley. But the thought of telling her everything made me feel nauseous. Even after all this time, I still wasn’t ready to open up to her fully.
I would just tell her about the firing, at least. She'd be unbearable about it in the best way.
Loud and loving. She'd offer to fly out, offer to put me on a plane, offer her couch and her mother and her coach with the spare bedroom and the whole city of Las Vegas.
Vegas.
I closed my eyes.
I hadn't set foot in Vegas in eight months.
Not since last March, the night Brynn's mother's hockey team won a championship the city wouldn't shut up about for months.
I'd sat in the owner's box with both hands locked on the railing and watched a hockey game with my eyes glued to the ice and a low hum of panic under my ribs for three straight hours.
He hadn't seen me.
The man I'd spent the last nine years running from.
Not my father. The other one. The one in Vegas, on Brynn's mother's team, the one I'd placed a year and a half ago, when Brynn was talking about him on the phone and the name finally dropped in my chest like a stone going down a well.
I'd been turning down every Vegas invite since.
The one time I didn't, the one time I sat in that building with him a few hundred feet below me on the ice, he never looked up.
The place was enormous. Thousands of people, me near the top, him down in a sea of identical jerseys.
I still spent all three periods sure he'd find my face in the crowd.
I made it through the game and the trophy and the confetti without being seen, flew out at six the next morning, and told Brynn I'd be back soon while I meant the exact opposite.
I meant it for eight months.
I'd had a lot of time in those eight months to think about how I pulled it off.
About the fact that I knew he was there for a full year and a half and went anyway.
About what it said that the one time Brynn asked me for something that cost me my own safety, I handed it over and never told her it cost anything.
I didn't know what I'd do the next time she asked.
But I knew I couldn't go back. Not for a visit, not a weekend, not for her, not for anybody.
I'd been telling myself that for eight months, and I'd been right.
Then this stupid envelope showed up on my mat.
I opened my eyes. Looked at the phone. Picked it up. Read it again.
i feel weird about you for some reason
She was never wrong about me. Eight years, and she'd never once been wrong about me.
I lay back on the bed in my coat with the phone on my chest and looked at the ceiling and tried to think about what I was supposed to do.
The math wasn't hard. No job. Six weeks of severance.
A Brooklyn lease through April, a credit card balance I'd been shuffling between cards for two years, and a father in Tennessee who'd just called me by the name he wasn't allowed to use for the first time in eight years.
Add it up and it said what any reasonable person's math would say: I needed to get out of New York.
It just didn't say where a person was supposed to go.
I let out a long sigh and headed back downstairs to get my boxes from the cab.
By the time I got everything back upstairs it was nine at night.
I'd been laid off ten hours ago. My career was over, my father was coming, and the only person on earth who'd noticed, from three thousand miles away, that something was wrong with me had texted thirty-five minutes ago and was probably staring at her phone, waiting.
I closed my eyes.
I stayed like that a long time.
Next thing I knew it was almost five in the morning.
The apartment was cold. I was still in my coat.
No light through the window yet, but the garbage trucks were starting up on Lafayette, and I felt the way you feel when you've slept hard in a way that did nothing for you. The phone was still on my chest.
I sat up.
Went to the kitchen. The clipping was where I'd left it. So was the bourbon glass. So was the envelope. I didn't look at any of them.
Made coffee.
Drank it standing at the counter, looking out at Brooklyn in the dark.
I thought about Vegas. About the man on the ice and the championship and the eight months of telling myself never.
I thought about my father. The handwriting. The Ashley. The line about she doesn't have much time, which was either a manipulation or the truth, and I wasn't going to know which without calling someone in that town, and there was no one in that town I could call and trust the answer.
I thought about Brynn.
I picked up the phone.
Almost six. Brynn would be up. Brynn was always up before six, some bartender thing about her body clock she'd explained to me once over wine, none of which I retained.
She answered on the second ring.
"Dani."
"Hey."
"Hold on." Sound of her moving. A door closing. A muffled apology to somebody, probably Colton. "Okay. Talk to me."
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
The silence ran long enough that she caught it. Her voice changed, the alert dropping over it, the one I'd been hearing on the phone for eight years whenever something was actually wrong with me.
"Dani."
"Yeah."
"What's going on."
I looked at the clipping. The blue circle around my face.
"I lost my job," I said.
Silence.
"That's not why you sound like that."
"No."
"What else, Dani."
I closed my eyes.
"I think I have to come stay with you for a while," I said.
Brynn didn't ask why. Didn't ask how long. Didn't ask anything.
She said, "When can you be on a plane."