Oh god. What if these people are weird or mean or have a side hustle as organ harvesters? What if there’s a meth lab in the bathroom or worse, what if they’re people who clip their toenails in the living room? What if they hate me? What if they take one look at me and decide I’m too sheltered or too prissy or too California and tell me to kick rocks? The ad said two people already lived here, which means I’m walking into an pre-established ecosystem, and everyone knows that’s social suicide.
Before I can catastrophize any further, the door swings open.
A woman stands there, and my first thought is that she’s a forest nymph who got lost and decided to try living in the East Village. She’s tall and willowy and graceful with a waterfall of auburn hair that hits her waist. She has freckles everywhere—on her nose, her arms, her collarbones—like someone took a paintbrush to her skin and flicked away. She’s got an easy, radiant beauty that makes me hyper-aware of my pit stains and the hair plastered to my forehead.
But she’s smiling. A wide, genuine, welcoming smile that reaches her light brown eyes.
“Hi! You must be the woman from the phone,” she says, her voice as warm as it sounded through the receiver.
“That would be me.” I give her what I hope is a friendly smile and not the unhinged grimace of someone who’s been awake for too many hours running on hotel coffee.
Her gaze flicks to my bags—my one pathetic duffel and suitcase—and her brows knit together. “You travel light, huh?”
“Oh. Yeah. I’m a minimalist,” I lie, my voice hitching. “I’ll pick up the rest once I’m settled. These are just…the essentials.”
The “essentials” being every single scrap I have left of my former identity, but she doesn’t need to know that.
Her smile amps up, warm as fresh cookies, and she thrusts out a hand. “Corinne Feldman. Cori to pretty much everyone.”
I shake it. “Annie Collier.”
Just Annie. Plain, unadorned, forgettable Annie.
Annemarie Collier has been plastered all over the newspapers for the past five days.Runaway Heiress Flees $3 Million Wedding.My face—the old one, with the perfectly blown-out hair and the serene, vacant smile—has been in gossip columns, and apparently the ten o’clock news, though I haven’t had the stomach to watch. My mother is probably blazing through her Valium stash. Daniel’s mother isdefinitelyblazing through her Valium stash while commissioning a voodoo doll in my likeness. The paparazzi are still probably camped outside my parents’ house, eager for my return.
Which isn’t happening.
But that means I can’t be Annemarie anymore—not the version everyone’s hunting for in the tabloids, anyway. Annemarie had a long, thick, curtain of glossy chestnut hair people fawned over as if it was some crown jewel. So, two days ago, I walked into a grimy salon on Bleecker Street where the mirrors were cloudy and the stylist had sleeves of tattoos and a Parliament smoldering above her ear. I told her to hack it off.
Thirteen inches fell to the linoleum in silent, heaping piles. Then she’d snipped in blunt, face-framing bangs for good measure.
I stared at myself in that smudged mirror afterward, and it was like looking at a stranger who’d borrowed my face. My hair still had a thick wave to it, grazing a few inches past my shoulders, the bangs softening my forehead in this unfamiliar, almost chic way. Back at the hotel, I slid down the bathroom wall, my knees to my chest, and bawled for an hour. Not because the haircut was a disaster—it wasn’t. It looked cute, actually, but I cried because cutting it felt like the final, violent act of unmaking myself. The final severing of ties from Annemarie Collier. I was pruning the version of me that everyone loved and knew, and even though that’s exactly what I came here for, it stung like hell.
Now, those bangs are plastered to my forehead with a layer of East Village grime, and I probably look like a very stressed poodle, but at least I no longer look like the girl on page six of thePost.
Cori effortlessly hefts my suitcase as if it’s full of feathers instead of my entire, collapsed life, and tows me inside. “Marcus! Stop being a hermit and get out here!”
She shoots me a quick “One sec” over her shoulder and vanishes down the hall, leaving me planted in the middle of…well, home?
The first thing I notice is how tiny it is. It feels like someone’s playing a joke on me, like the door has opened into a dollhouse version of a living room. It has to be about just under a hundred square feet, if I was being generous, with a ceiling that hovers just low enough to make me wonder if I’d grown an inch overnight. The walls are a sad off-white, a color that probably started off hopeful and bright back in 1975 but has since ended up the color of tea bags from years of other people’s smoke andspills, pockmarked with nail holes like acne scars from tenants who’d hung up posters and pictures and then taken them down when it was time to go. The couch squats against one wall, a floral relic from a seventies disco fever dream, sagging in the center as if it’s tired of holding up everyone’s bad decisions. A prehistoric beast of a coffee table sits in the middle of the room, looking salvaged from the curb, chipped and uneven. A TV with a VCR built in it sits on a milk crate and beside it, a teetering stack of VHS tapes withSeinfeldepisodes scribbled in ballpoint pen on the spines: “The Soup Nazi” or “The Bubble Boy.”
The kitchen is smooshed right in, separated by a counter with two bar stools that couldn’t be more mismatched if they tried—one spindly metal, the other wooden and short. The stove is avocado green with rust freckles around the burners and right next to it is the fridge, buzzing as if it’s complaining about its lot in life, its door a collage of fruit-shaped magnets, takeout menus from places with names like “Falafel King” and “Dragon Wok,” and Polaroids taped up crookedly. The sink drips steadily, aplink-plinkthat’s probably either annoying or oddly soothing, depending on your mood. A dish rack is loaded with different colored mugs and plates, and the whole nook smells like aged wood mixed with yesterday’s coffee.
There’s no AC, just open windows with sheer curtains yellowed like old lace, flapping listlessly in the non-breeze. A box fan wedged in one corner does zilch against the humidity—it’s only recirculating the soupy air we’re all breathing. I peek out and the fire escape is right there, with the building across the alley so close that I could pass a cup of sugar to the neighbors if I wanted to. The floors are hardwood, warped and scratched and the rug in the center of the living room is a faded, fraying patchwork of colors.
My apartment at Stanford had central air and a dishwasher and big windows that looked out over a tree-lined street. Myparents’ house has marble countertops and a Sub-Zero fridge and spare rooms we don’t even use. This place is smaller than my childhood bedroom. It’s smaller than my childhoodcloset. The couch looks like it might harbor an ecosystem entirely its own and the ceiling has a water stain blooming in the corner that suggests the promise of a leak during the first thunderstorm of the season.
And I freaking love it.
Or maybe I just love that it’s mine. There’s no Mom curating the decor, no Daniel vetoing the throw pillows. It’s a place where no one knows who I am or what I’m running from. Here, I can just be Annie, whoever she turns out to be.
Cori barrels back in, towing a guy behind her like he’s a reluctant puppy on a leash. He’s tall—at least six feet of lanky attitude—with brown hair that’s mussed and beautiful olive skin that screams that he might be from somewhere Mediterranean, somewhere with summers by the sea, warm and far-flung. His eyes are a startling celery green, framed by lashes that could sell mascara, but right now they’re narrowed at me in a scowl.
“This is Marcus Silva,” Cori says, gesturing to him with the enthusiasm of someone introducing a celebrity. “Your fellow inmate. I promise he’s not always this sunny.”
Marcus flicks the scowl her way for a beat, then swings it back to me, extending a hand. “Hey.”
I shake it. His grip is firm but not aggressive. “Hi. I’m Annie.”
