James pulls on a long-sleeve shirt, a hoodie, a sherpa-lined denim jacket, two pairs of compression socks, then his boots. He brings his phone back to his ear like a puppet master’s tugging his strings.
“Where can I meet you?” he asks.
“Coffee shop on the corner of Sixth and West Thirty-Eighth.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Okay, but James . . .”
He pulls on gloves. “Yeah?”
“I was panicking, so I called the first number I could find, and I don’t really have many friends in the city. So you don’t have to—”
“No worries, Lucy. I’m on my way.” He hangs up the phone and zips his jacket up to his chin. As an ex-Southerner, he has yet to acclimate to the cold. Before this winter, he had never seen real snow. Now he has mixed feelings about the frequent subfreezing temperatures and sunless days. On one hand, he loves how people huddle up. In shops. In cafés. On the subway. New York hibernates for winter, but it is a city of pedestrians, James included. So every day he joins the lines of New Yorkers marching the sidewalks like ants, ducking into coffee shops and excusing the six-dollar latte because, on the other hand, it is just too damn cold outside.
Lucy’s beneath a green-and-white striped awning. Arms crossed, cheeks red, hair tucked into a fur-lined hood. When she spots James crossing the street, her stance relaxes.
He nods in greeting, hands in pockets, shrugging off the cold. How can he play it cool, like he didn’t sprint six blocks and jump a subway turnstile to meet her here in time?
“How’s it going?” he asks, hoping he sounds casual.
“I want to quit my job. On the spot. No two weeks’ notice.”
For a moment, he is at a loss for words. She already told him this, so he has had time to stew on it. But in that time, he came up with zero advice. He can’t tell her how to make such a major decision.
So he asks, “Why do you want to quit?”
“Because my boss is an utter shithead, and working there makes me feel horrible. I doubt I’ll ever get promoted, and besides, I don’twantto work there anymore. I have a different goal for my life now.”
“Giving up writing?”
Lucy smiles, though he can tell she’s not feeling very smiley on the inside. “The opposite, actually. I want to give my all to my MFA. Thanks to my grandpa, I have a trust fund arranged for my tuition, and I’ll have a teaching assistantship as part of the program.”
“So all you need to do now is quit?”
Lucy squints down the gleaming Midtown street. “Do you want to get coffee first?”
“No stalling.” James shakes his head. “You got this.”
She groans. “Fine.”
He follows her up the street, through a throng of people rushing against them. “So where are you departing from?”
“Random House.”
James wishes he had accepted the coffee so he could spew it out. Instead he just stammers, “Wh-what? Random House! That’s insane. How’d you get a job there?”
“Undergrad at UPenn in English and two years of unpaid internships, then I came on as an editorial assistant. I thought I wanted to go into publishing, but I don’t. Instead of promoting me to editor, they switched me over to marketing, which is ... not my thing.”
James is still mind-blown when they stop outside the Random House Tower, a silver building full of literary-minded people. He gawks up at it.
“Am I completely stupid for doing this?” she asks. “This could be a stable career, and I’m throwing it away to chase after a dream. Is that crazy?”
“Whatever your gut feels, do that.”
“My gut is telling me to throw up.”
“Okay, don’t do that.”
