1148 PM Mia
Outside the air was cold. Sitting on the top stair of the building’s stoop, Mia held a cigarette between her lips and searched through her purse for her lighter.
Strangers passed in front of her on the sidewalk, three men and one woman, all of them laughing.
Their breaths clouded in front of them, and they had their arms folded across their chests.
The woman’s legs were bare and pink; her heels clacked against the pavement as she walked.
Mia lit her cigarette, pulling her knees to her chest. In the window of a store across the street, a neon sign advertising dumplings blinked on and off; next to it, a metal grate was pulled over the door of a hair salon.
Music and voices rang out from the windows above her, and farther north, toward Houston, a siren whined.
The end of Mia’s cigarette glowed red, then orange.
A set of footsteps grew louder behind her, and a moment later the building’s door swung open.
As Mia leaned to her left to make room for a pair of legs, she heard a voice say, “Hey.”
Marco stood over her. He had put on a black coat and a pair of gloves, and a wool cap covered the tops of his ears. A streetlamp stood directly above them. Mia squinted into its light.
“Yeah,” she said. “Hey.”
“What are you doing out here?”
She held up the cigarette, pinched between two knuckles. Marco nodded.
“You could’ve smoked inside. Richie does it all the time.”
“I know. But it felt impolite.”
Another group of people—this time three women—passed the building, circling around a metal grate in the sidewalk. One of them said, “Shit, we only have, like, ten minutes,” and they all broke into an awkward jog.
“Where are you going?” Mia asked.
“We’re out of mixers—”
“I’m aware.”
“—and ice. I offered to go on a bodega run.”
“That was nice of you.”
Marco smiled. He said, “Hmm,” then pulled his hat down an inch farther, so it entirely covered his ears.
Mia smoked, looking out onto the street.
For a few seconds neither of them said anything; then Mia realized he was waiting for her to join him, and she stubbed out the second half of the cigarette on the stoop and stood up.
The backs of her thighs were covered with dirt and dust and other bits of the city, which she quickly brushed away with her hands.
Marco said, “I think there’s one a block over,” and together they began walking north.
“You said you moved in two weeks ago?” Mia asked.
“Almost three now.”
“Where were you living before that?”
“Bogotá, Colombia.”
“Oh, wow—I thought you were going to say, like, Chicago or something.”
“Do I look like someone from Chicago?”
“No. Yes? I mean, what does a person from Chicago look like? It’s not like you look like someone from Bogotá.”
“What does someone from Bogotá look like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been.”
Marco laughed, and hearing it Mia experienced an extraordinary sense of relief, as if she had passed a difficult test. She smiled and felt herself become lighter.
He said, “I was doing a Fulbright. I moved to New York because it ended and I got a job at Lehman Brothers.”
“Doesn’t Mitch Reynolds work at Lehman Brothers?”
“Yeah. In sales and trading.”
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me. What do you do?”
“I work at Condé Nast. At Details.”
“Isn’t that a gay magazine?”
“No.” Mia cupped her hands and blew into them. “Well, yes. But not technically.”
They stopped in front of the bodega, on the south side of Broome. Through its glass doors Mia could see shelves of canned beans and boxes of cereal. Within a freezer individual bottles of beer glowed in a bright white light.
“Actually?” Marco said. “This one has really bad ice.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, I just remembered.”
“What makes the ice bad?”
“I can’t really describe it. It just is.”
“Do you want to keep walking?”
Marco nodded, a serious expression on his face. “We probably should.”
Mia glanced at him, but he kept looking straight forward, into the bodega with the bad ice. The streets were crowded, there were drunk girls screaming all around them, but somehow it suddenly felt to Mia as though they were the only two people in the city. She said, “Okay, then. Let’s go.”
Crossing Broome, they continued making their way north. As they passed a shuttered coffee shop, Marco asked Mia where she was from, and she told him Michigan. When he asked where, specifically, in Michigan, she stopped and held up one of her hands.
“If this is the entire state, then Detroit is down here.” She pointed to the base of her thumb. “And Lansing is over here. I’m from Lansing.”
“I see.”
“Lansing is the capital.”
Marco smiled. “I know what the capital of Michigan is.”
“Sometimes people forget.”
“Was it a nice place to grow up?”
“I think so? I don’t really have much to compare it to.”
“Is your family still there?”
“Yes. I think that’s probably why I don’t live there anymore.”
“You don’t get along?”
“We get along fine.” They began walking again.
“I’ve got these three older brothers. The youngest of them, Peter, is fourteen years older than I am.
My parents thought they were done having kids, but evidently that wasn’t the case, because here I am.
A favorite story in the family is how when my oldest brother found out that my mom was pregnant with me, he sat my dad down and talked to him about how to use a condom.
No one was ever, like, deliberately cruel about it—I mean, all of my brothers are assholes in their own specific ways, but I think that would be the case regardless of the age difference—but it always felt a little weird, you know? ”
“Weird how?”
“Okay, well, for example: when my brothers were kids, my dad was really into woodworking. Apparently in the garage he had all these saws and drills—even a lathe. So he made each of them a coatrack, like the kind you attach to the wall that has pegs on it. They’re very cute, and have their names spelled out on them with these wooden cutout letters.
But by the time I was born he’d given up on woodworking and had sold off all his equipment. ”
“So you don’t have a coatrack with your name on it?”
“I do not have a coatrack with my name on it.”
At Delancey Street they stopped and waited.
Mia had no gloves, no hat, though when she thought about it she realized she wasn’t as cold as she expected to be.
Cars passed in front of them, and when the light turned they were still there, blocking the crosswalk.
A few horns honked, though the cars didn’t move.
Marco took hold of Mia’s hand. He said, “Come on,” and wove them through the traffic.
She asked him what Bogotá was like, and he told her about Monserrate and La Candelaria and Plazoleta Chorro de Quevedo.
The precise and careful manner with which he described it all made it feel like a place Mia had already been to, a place that she could see perfectly in her imagination, yet was, at the same time, somewhere new that she wanted him to take her.
She began to think about her own life, about how little she had seen or accomplished, and suddenly felt incredibly young, like she had been thrust into something without being properly prepared for it, even though she had ostensibly received the same preparations as everyone else.
She felt as though when she looked around her everyone else’s life was starting up, while she was sitting at her desk, writing about men’s colognes, waiting for something to happen.
She felt like she could tell Marco all of this—like she could say to him, “Do you ever feel like you’re really bad at life?
” and he would listen without making fun of her, and would take what she said seriously.
There was an empty champagne bottle lying in the middle of the sidewalk, and she took a step over it.
She pictured herself telling him other things.
She imagined a door opening between them, one through which they could allow these secret parts of themselves to pass.
“Are you happy to be in New York?” she asked.
“That’s a good question. I wasn’t when I first got here.”
“But now?”
Marco slowed down a little bit. He said, “But now I don’t know.”
They passed by two, then three bodegas. Finally, south of Rivington, Marco led them into a fourth one.
A small cat ran in front of the door when he opened it, and Mia flinched as it leapt on top of a television set behind the cash register.
On its screen were images of crowds in Times Square, the illuminated ball descending above them.
Marco walked down one of the three aisles, filling a plastic basket with liters of seltzer water and cola.
Opening the door to a freezer, he pulled out a bag of ice while Mia stood in front of the television, watching as a clock on the screen ticked down from thirty.
Marco set the items on the counter in front of the register.
From outside, they could hear people counting the final seconds, their voices growing louder as they got closer and closer to one.
The total for the mixers and the ice came to $12.
17. Marco put $15 on the counter, and the cashier handed him his change.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
They were standing next to a rack holding yesterday’s copy of the New York Post. For a second Mia wondered if he was going to kiss her, though she tried her best not to look like she was expecting something.
Marco smiled; confetti fluttered across the television screen, drifting down toward the crowd.
The cover of the Post said: “Life of the Party, Indie Voters Eye Bloomberg for Prez.”
“What?” Marco said.
Mia smiled. She was holding her breath, though at the same time she felt something inside her deflate.
“Nothing,” she said, and pushed open the bodega’s door.