I give a dramatic sigh, but on the inside, I’m smiling. I want theideasidea the same way I wanted to see his handwriting. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
He picks up his napkin—which he’d actually draped over one of his thighs, as if we’re somewhere fancy—and swipes it across his mouth before setting it neatly beside his cardboard plate. “I was thinking about your list.”
I must get a look on my face.
“Which is a great list,” he adds, hastily. “Very efficient.”
“Bu-ut,” I say, prompting him before I take my last bite of food.
“It seemed stressful. Following the list and looking for . . . expected things.” He clears his throat again. “It struck me that—it could be useful to remember that signs are, ah.” He pauses, looks across the street again. “Often unexpected.”
Like you,I want to say again.
“I know you have a goal, to get your inspiration. But what if you . . . made it more fun? Like a game.”
I blink, swallowing my food heavily. Anyone looking at me and Reid right now—anyone who notices his excellent table manners and good posture and tasteful weekend clothing, and my Clever Girl dinosaur T-shirt and the way I slouch over my plate and how I never thought to put my napkin in my lap—anyone would think it’d be me who’d suggest something fun, something light. A game.
“It isn’t my business,” he says in the silence I leave there. He makes a move to gather his plate.
“Wait,” I say, and his hands still. Anyonewouldthink that, even me. But having Reid for a fr—forcompany—it’s probably going to mean that I stop thinking that way. We’ve built up quite a tower of blocks here, the two of us, in this small, inexpensive, delicious restaurant.
“It’s sort of your business,” I say. “If you’re still doing this with me.”
For a second, we look at each other, the tower tall and quivering between us. The corners of his mouth are tight, as though he’s making an effort to control his expression. It’s still so noisy in here, but not so much that I can’t hear his next two words, a quiet, simple promise.
Of company. Maybe even of friendship.
“I am,” he says.
“Margaret,” Reid says an hour and a half later, staring down at his phone. “We got it.”
“All of them?” There’s a note of disappointment in my voice.Over so soon?I’m thinking, even though the light’s fading and my feet are getting tired.
I move next to him easily, more familiarly now, and peer over his shoulder, but still make sure I don’t let any of my unruly hair blow onto his person. And there it is, spread out over the eight photos on the grid of Reid’s photo library—all the letters of my name, myfullname, the one no one ever really uses, but the one that’s been half of our quest since we left the restaurant.
We’d picked something easy for our first try at Reid’s game idea. Each of us, we’d decided, would have to try to find versions of all the letters in the other’s name, Reid including his middle name—Hale, from his mother’s side of the family, he tells me—to even things out. The rules were simple: no using the same sign for more than one letter, and nothing that’s not hand-lettered.
We haven’t really been competing; it’s not the kind of game where we’ve been trying to one-up each other. It’s like sharing the Sunday crossword, I guess—instead of passing the folded newspaper back and forth, trading clues and guesses, Reid and I had pointed out to each other the signs we noticed as we’d walked. And the same way the Sunday crossword-share never finishes without at least one concession to a Google search, Reid and I had adjusted some of the rules as we went along. A particularly impressiveHon a vinyl sign inspired the “wild card” exception: one letter from a sign that’s not hand-drawn. A best out of three rock-paper-scissors practice implemented for when one of us would spot a good example that matched with one of the letters—A, E, R—that we both have in our names.
“TheE,” Reid says, nodding up toward the mural he’s standing in front of on Bleecker, an amazing red, white, black, and gold image of Debbie Harry of Blondie wearing a leopard-print blouse and a look of challenge in her black-rimmed eyes. There’s a lot of lettering on this mural—a crooked version of the CBGB logo minus the decorative serifs, a narrow black script against a deep-red background, a blocky, clean all caps in the lower right corner.
Reid’s zoomed in and snapped theEin BLONDIE as it appears on a rendering of a concert ticket—1979; gates open at 6 p.m.; no bottles, cans, coolers, or pets. It’s red, theE, and the top arm is shorter than the bottom, a sturdy-looking thing, and even though all the images on his phone are out of order—no rule for having to find consecutive letters—it’s easy to reconstruct my name from these eight snapshots, to rearrange them. Here,Margaretdoesn’t look so old-fashioned. It looks bright, colorful, cheerful. It somehow looks moreMegthanMargaret.
I swipe my thumb over my own screen, tip it toward Reid so he can see the various building blocks of my own take.Reid Hale. His name, it sounds kind of . . . new-fashioned. And also stuck-up. But as with the letters from my own name,R-e-i-dlooks different in the pictures. Noisy and alive andfun, like the game itself and the Bowery around us, coming to life on a Saturday evening.
My hands feel restless to sketch. I don’t even notice that my hair’s blown against him again until he clears his throat and straightens.
“I can send these to you,” he says, moving to tug down the sleeve of his jacket again. It’s stayed warm tonight, warm enough that I’ve never even taken my own be-buttoned jacket from where it’s stuffed inside my bag, but Reid has left his on the whole time.
“Yeah, that would be great!” I’ve basically cheered it, because now that the game is over, Reid and I seem to have slipped back into our familiar roles. I resist the urge to sigh. During our walk, Reid wasn’t exactly loose, but he was engaged, and interested, and determined. His version of excitement is basically—pointing, I guess, with the occasional attractive eyebrow raise, but still, there’s something about it. Something friendly, and comforting, and nice to be around.
“That was a really good . . .ideasidea,” I say.
“It helped?”
“It did.”
Reid nods once, that firm tip of his head, a piece of punctuation. An end to the sentence we’ve kept going between us for a while now.
