Belvedere used the park regularly, for the baseball diamonds on the Great Lawn and for annual winter outings to the Lasker ice-skating rink, and for gym classes when the weather was great and spring fever had felled them all and so if they were going to jump rope, they might as well do it outside. Several members of the faculty and staff used the park as a gym as well, carrying jogging clothes in their bags and going for runs before or after school. Not Alice.
Central Park wasn’t made for exercise. It was made for this, for tucking away into a shady grove of trees and sitting on a bench. It was made for low voices and secret affairs. The size of the park—840 acres, she’d had to memorize it for a middle school project—sounded antithetical tointimacy, but that’s what it was, intimate. There were hidden pockets at every turn, as many corners of privacy and quiet as there were of Rollerblading showboats and people breakdancing for tourists. Alice loved the park—loved that there was something so glorious, so seemingly endless, that belonged to her as much as it belonged to anyone else.
Tommy sank to the grass and leaned back against a tree. He pulled a pack of Parliaments out of his jacket pocket and started smacking them against his palm.
“Why are people always slapping something?” Alice said. “Cigarettes, Snapple bottles. It’s so weird.” She sat on the ground next to Tommy and hugged her knees to her chest. Alice’s body felt like it was made out of rubber, like she could kick her leg all the way over her head if she wanted to, or do a handstand. Alice hadn’t had her first orgasm until she was in college and had her first real boyfriend, but it didn’t matter, not when her body felt this good all day every day. Just looking at Tommy, sitting this close to Tommy, made her whole body feel like it was made out of an electrical current. She could still feel his hand in hers from when they ran across the street, even though he’d let go when they reached the other side. Alice had forgotten how much she’d been in contact with her friends’ bodies, how much she and Sam were always sitting in each other’s laps and touching each other’s faces.
“Yeah, it’s kind of wack,” Tommy said, and stopped. “I don’t know. I just like it, I guess.” He unwrapped the cellophane and threw it on the ground.
“Whoa, whoa,” Alice said. “Let’s not be litterbugs.” She scooped up the plastic and put it in her pocket.
“Are you okay?” Tommy asked. “I have seen you do that about one thousand times.”
“Oh, sure, yeah,” Alice said. She felt like an imposter, like she was wearing a costume made with her own face. The wind stirred up a pile of leaves near them and twirled them into a tiny cyclone, and Alicewatched. Maybe she’d just gottenloosesomewhere, slipped through a crack. There was one episode ofTime Brotherswhere Jeff had fallen through a portal in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Scott had to go after him to bring him back, time travel within time travel. That was what happened when TV writers got bored of solving the same problems over and over again. Alice could be lost, or she could be stuck, or she could be lostandstuck. The one thing she was sure of, finally, was that whatever this was, it was really happening. It was the wobbly nerves in her stomach, like the drop on a roller coaster; it was the hyperawareness of everything around her. Alice felt like Spider-Man, except all of her powers were just being a teenage girl.
She and Tommy were friends. They had never been boyfriend-girlfriend, not even close. There were a few solid couples at Belvedere: Andrew and Morgan, Rachel Gurewich and Matt Boerealis, Rachel Humphrey and Matt Paggioni, Brigid and Danny, Ashanti and Stephen. Alice had always thought of them as several levels beyond her, in terms of human development. They kissed on the mouth in the hallways, knowing everyone could see them. They held hands in public, on the sidelines at soccer games. They freaked during school dances, knees clamped together like extras inDirty Dancing, and nobody started whispering. Alice had had a few boyfriends, but none of them lasted longer than a month and they were all variants of the Canadian boyfriend scheme, except instead of being pretend humans in Canada, they were real humans whom she hardly knew in her math class. All it took was several weeks of negotiations between various lieutenants and then one awkward phone call. It was basically exactly like the sixth grade, except that sometimes, rarely, she and a boy were alone and they clumsily reached into each other’s pants.
Alice and Tommy were different. He had girlfriends sometimes. Fellow upperclassmen, girls who weren’t virgins. He was the cutest boy in their grade, and so when the older girls got bored of their options, theyall picked him. He’d even gone out with girls from other schools, girls who would walk across the park in their uniforms to pick him up, girls who lived on Park Avenue and whose parents owned whole islands. Alice was his friend, and she was in love with him. Sometimes he would sleep over at her house and they would spoon all night and Alice wouldn’t sleep at all, just listen to his breath and sometimes, sometimes, in the middle of the night, they would start kissing, and Alice would think, Oh, it’s really happening, he’s going to beminenow, but in the morning, he would always act like nothing had happened, and so nothing ever changed. It wasn’t that different from all the men she’d met in bars in her twenties and on dating apps in her thirties.
Tommy held out the pack, and Alice slid out a cigarette. “Thanks,” she said.
“So, what’s up?” Tommy asked. “Who’s coming to the party?”
“I have no idea,” Alice said, truthfully. “Sam’s in charge.”
There were things that Alice remembered from her birthday party: She remembered helping Sam throw up, and half-heartedly trying to clean up after people while the party was still going. She remembered Tommy sitting in the corner of the couch, his head back, eyes closed. She remembered taking whatever it was that Phoebe’s brother got them, tiny little pills that looked like aspirin, and she remembered sitting on Tommy’s lap and his hands going under her shirt. She remembered Danny leaning out of the window so far that he fell four feet to the ground, fracturing his wrist. She remembered closing the blinds so that Jim and Cindy Roman wouldn’t call the police, and then wishing they had.
“Did I tell you that I’m going to write a screenplay?” Tommy said. “Brian and I were talking about it yesterday. We’re going to write a screenplay, kind of likeKidsbut without it being just skaters, you know, and less depressing, and then we’re going to star in it, too, and direct it.”
“What about college?” Tommy had gone to Princeton, just like his parents.
“No way,” Tommy said, and took a drag. “I’m not going to do just what my parents want me to do. No way.” Something buzzed, and Tommy unclipped his pager from his belt. “It’s Sam, at the pay phone at school.”
“I’ll go back in a second. What’s up?”
“Is Lizzie coming? To your party?” Lizzie was a senior and not remotely Alice’s friend except for the one time she had gone with Alice and Sam to buy weed at a bodega that wasn’t really a bodega. Tommy and Lizzie would have sex at Alice’s birthday party, right in her bed, and after that, Tommy and Alice would never speak again, not until he walked into his office with his wife and his child.
“I have no idea,” Alice said. She stood up and dusted off her pants. “Let’s go back.”
25
Sam was standing in the phone booth at Belvedere, biting her fingernails. The phone booth was on the first floor, next to the teacher’s lounge at the back of the building, its wood well carved with decades of students’ initials and various profane messages. The little door was shut, but when Sam saw Alice through the scratched glass, she slid it open, and Alice squeezed in.
“What did pretty boy want? Just to have you admire him for a little while?”
“To know if Lizzie was coming to the party.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “He asked you that on your birthday? That is so irritating. I’m sorry.”
“Honestly, I have other things to worry about right now.” Alice picked the phone up off the hook and stared at it. “How do I call information again?”
Sam showed her, and handed Alice the phone.
“Hi,” Alice said. “Can I have the number for Matryoshka Bar, please? In the subway station?” After she made the call and set thereceiver back in its cradle, Alice turned to look at Sam, whose face was pale.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid so.” Alice felt her eyes starting to well up with tears.
