Chapter 13
James has heard horror stories all his life.
“Oh, the people are so rude; you don’t want to be around people like that. The streets are filthy, and the crime rate, James, dear lord, you’re just gonna hate it, son, you’re going to hate it.” He anticipated rats the size of cats and colonies of cockroaches.
After searching thirty minutes for open street parking, James climbs out of the car, writes for Nelle to do the same, and stands on the lamplit street lined with brick buildings.
Not too different from those back home. Fire escapes scale the fronts, dotted with rugs and plants, a long-haired cat peeking through iron bars.
Unlike little downtown Lincoln, these buildings hold apartments and sushi restaurants, cafés and improv clubs.
Driving in, he saw people of all races, heights, classes, ages, and hair colors hiking up and down the sidewalk, all of them leaders of their own little worlds.
Nelle stands in a circle of yellow streetlight, hands in the pockets of her charcoal-gray pants.
When she declared Midi’s borrowed clothes too dirty to wear on the way out of DC, an hours-long shopping spree ensued in Baltimore.
After trying on a hundred things, she settled on five neutral pieces.
I’m trying to pin down my style, she said again and again as she ducked into dressing rooms.
“Is this the building?” She peers up at the fire escape. Sulfuric wind hisses down the street, twisting her blond strands.
“No.” James squints at the street signs, not really sure where he is, and it’s only getting darker.
A pair of students with dyed hair lurks on the sidewalk, both wearing crop tops.
The boy’s fingernails are painted black.
The girl is smoking a cigarette. An older man in a leather jacket climbs on his motorcycle and revs the engine.
A guy in a red tracksuit lingers on the corner after the light signals him to walk. He lifts his face, soaking up dusk.
“This is when we could use a phone,” James says.
A bulb clicks on in his head, and he scribbles in the journal for Nelle to follow.
She turns after him. “Where are you going?”
He passes a closed coffee shop, and around the corner—
“Huh.” He skids to a stop at the pay phone. “Didn’t think I’d find one that fast.”
Fifty cents. He digs through his jacket, miraculously produces two quarters, and dials a number he has had memorized for years. It rings, rings, rings.
“Please pick up, Jessie.” The vastness of the city around him, the fact that he knows no one else for hundreds of miles, is starting to sink in.
Jessie answers, her staticky voice saving him from existential panic. “Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s James,” he says. “Remember that girl I was telling you about when you came to visit? Nelle? Well, we’re in New York right now. I think we’re pretty close to your apartment. You still live at 376 Bleecker Street, right?”
“Slow down.” Jessie laughs. “You’re in New York? Why? For how long?”
“All questions will be answered over wine and pizza, both of which we can pick up on our way.”
“Wine I have. I’d love pizza, though,” Jessie says. “No mushrooms.”
“I need directions to your apartment,” he says.
“From where?”
He reads from the street sign. Jessie prattles off convoluted directions to a 24-7 pizza place on the way to her apartment.
“The menu says the largest they’ll go is extra-extra-large, but if you ask Kyle, he’ll make what I like to call a ‘big daddy.’ He might resist a little, but tell him it’s for me. He’ll do it.”
“Thanks, Jessie. See you soon.”
James hangs up the phone. Nelle stands behind him, arms crossed.
Behind her unfurls a New York street, graffitied brick walls, smooshed cigarette butts.
A siren wails. Somewhere on this island are his favorite writers, the world’s top publishing houses, the work of the most talented performers, painters, sculptors, some long dead.
For the first time, it hits James hard enough to stop his breath.
I am in New York fucking City.
James knocks on apartment 3B, the pizza against his hip.
“Ding dong, the witch is dead,” Nelle sings off-key.
She cradles a bottle of moscato in the crook of her elbow, adamant that Jessie would dislike her if she came empty handed.
“Was The Wizard of Oz on Quill’s list of approved movies?” James asks.
“Yep. He always said modern films were too vulgar.”
The door cracks open, revealing a slice of face behind a dead-bolt chain. A pair of eyeballs scans them. Nelle hears the scrape of a metal chain and, in that second, feels a classic oh shit hook in her stomach.
James hasn’t written for me to go inside.
She reaches for the journal and pen in his back pocket, but the door opens, and her moment slips away like a wet bar of soap.
Jessie tackles James in a sideways bear hug, dodging the daddy-size pizza in his hands. Her red curls are fire next to James’s walnut brown.
“Kyle didn’t give you any trouble, did he?”
Nelle has no choice but to stare at Jessie while she hugs James. Her cheeks are lightly freckled, and her eyeliner sweeps out sharply, each point dotted with a stick-on jewel.
“I started the order by name-dropping you, so, no, no trouble.” James gestures for Nelle to come into the apartment.
But she is frozen on the threshold. Trembling like a damn fawn. Realization dawns on James’s face, followed by pale dread. He mouths, One second, before following Jessie.
Inside, he says, “Jessie, look at this pizza, oh my God.”
While Jessie inhales pizza fumes at the kitchen island, James scribbles in the journal, then slips it into his back pocket.
Nelle can breathe again. She steps into the apartment and locks the door slowly to allot herself recovery time. Another deep breath. She exhales.
“I’ve never had pizza,” she says, the words slipping out.
“What?” Jessie’s concentration breaks. “You’re kidding, right?”
“She grew up in a really strict house,” James intervenes.
“My dad was really specific about what I could and couldn’t eat. Nothing mass produced, only organic. He was mostly vegetarian, so I was, too.”
Jessie uncorks the moscato. “You didn’t go out to eat with your friends in high school?”
Nelle didn’t go to high school. Father was her tutor in math, science, history, and literature. He claimed that it was a legitimate way to obtain an education, and at eighteen she received a diploma in the mail. She hung it up in her room, proud of her normal achievement.
“I didn’t have friends in high school,” she says. It’s not not the truth.
Jessie passes out three ceramic plates. “Do you like cheese?”
“Yeah.”
“Tomatoes?”
Nelle nods.
“Bread?”
“Yes.”
Jessie lifts up a gooey slice. “Then you are going to die.”
Doubtful.
She lifts a slice and nibbles at the tip.
And she does, indeed, die. Of all the cruelties Quill inflicted, banning delicacies like ice cream and coffee and pizza may have been the worst. Tangy tomato complements the salted crust and melted parmesan.
Garlic glistens in each bite. She stifles a moan.
James offers her a glass of wine, but she shakes her head.
Jessie guides them from the kitchen, barely three feet of counter space with a two-eye stove and rounded retro fridge covered in magnets and photographs.
She claims it’s nice by New York standards, but the highlight, she says, is the wood-top island facing the living room.
One wall of the room is exposed brick, the other two maple paneling.
The couch is yellow and covered in quilted throw pillows.
Threaded blankets are slung across the cushions.
Nelle’s childhood bedroom housed her books and her art, but it was barely hers. Owning a place—growing into every corner and cabinet like kudzu—is such a foreign concept that Jessie’s apartment feels massive simply because it’s hers.
“It’s very cozy.” Nelle runs her hand over the back of the couch. Her feet guide her to a bookshelf on the far wall, beside a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the street. She scans the titles, her finger whispering across the spines.
“Is this a balcony?” James unlatches the window, and it swings inward, inviting in the city air, rippling the sea-breeze candle on the coffee table.
“A small one, yeah.” Jessie pokes her head onto the balcony, and a trash-rotten wind tousles her red coils. She swirls four servings of white wine in her bulbous goblet, stabbing James with her brown eyes, clearly pissed.
“Do you want a moment alone to catch up?” Nelle asks, hoping to dissolve the tension.
“Yes, please.” Jessie sips her wine.
“Where is Nelle supposed to go?” James asks. “The fire escape?”
“I can wait on the balcony,” Nelle says. She tries to step out into the night air, but her body freezes. Shit.
James’s face goes blank with fear again. Panicky, he says, “Jessie, can I use your bathroom? It was a long drive.”
“Down the hall, third door on the right.”
“Thank you.” He speeds off.
“Typical James,” she says, plopping down on the couch. “Always running from conflict.”
“I didn’t think that was typical of him,” Nelle says.
Jessie pauses mid-sip. “How did you two meet?”
Nelle keeps a careful hand on the balcony door. Any second, James will write for her to move outside, so she has to keep this conversation short.
“At the Fourth of July festival,” Nelle says. “He came up to me, and we talked all night.”
“And you’ve lived in Lincoln your whole life?”
“All twenty-one years.”
“That’s so strange, because I lived there until I was eighteen, and I never saw you. It’s such a small town, and we’re not that far apart in age, so you’d think that I would have seen you once or twice. Here or there.”
“I was homeschooled,” Nelle says. “And I didn’t have any friends to go out with, so I mostly just stayed home.”
“With your dad?”
“S-sorry?”
“You live alone with your dad?”
Nelle bristles. “Is this an interrogation?”
Jessie’s face drops into a dead serious glare.