His face morphs from angry to astonished and back to angry again.
“How could you know that? How the hell could you know what I could and couldn’t have done?”
“You don’t get it,” I say. “We can’t save other people. They can only save themselves,wecan only save ourselves.”
I turn to go.
“You arenotjust leaving now,” he yells. “After dropping this bomb on me.”
I glance back, and see him frozen in rage. My hand mimics dropping a grenade.
“Boom.”
33
BEN
DECEMBER 2000
Amanda calls just before I slide on my coat to leave for New Year’s Eve. Caller ID alerts me to the 415 area code, and I check my watch because I don’t want to be late. I can spare three, maybe four minutes. Despite my better instincts, I press the Talk button.
“Hey,” I say.
“It’s me,” she replies.
“I know.”
The clock on the microwave in my parents’ kitchen tells me it’s 8:23. I told Tatum I’d pick her up by nine, so we could wedge our way into Times Square by midnight, which I still can’t believe I’ve agreed to.
“This is practically highway robbery,” I’d said when she proposed it. I’d stopped at the bar to thank her for her work onRomanticah, and she’d said: “Well, as payback, you have to come to Times Square with me for New Year’s.”
“Like a date?” I’d grinned.
“I might let you kiss me if you’re lucky,” she said, then her eyes widened, and she laughed her machine-gun staccato and slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, sorry, I don’t even know where that came from.”
I sip a lukewarm beer abandoned on the kitchen counter. Leo must have opened it as part of his pre-party celebration.
Three minutes,I tell myself.Then you hang up and are gone.
Leo wanders in, his coat zippered, his gloves already on, and swipes the beer from my hands and chugs it. Then notices I’m on the phone and shoots me a quizzical look.
A-man-da,I mouth.
He rolls his eyes and slits his throat with his gloved finger.
I flip him off, then shoo him out of the room.
He turns and whispers: “Hurry up, dude, we gotta stop and get Caroline.”
He says this as if I have any idea who Caroline is, one of the ever-revolving lithe young women from high school or now, his dorm or fraternity house up at Columbia.
“I just ...” Amanda starts on the other end of the line, three thousand miles away; then she falls silent. We haven’t spoken since she left for California in June. Technically, we broke up—I broke up with her—in February, but I did it solely to get out in front of it: the fact that she was leaving, the fact that she chose a residency over me. It didn’t feel real back then—we still occasionally slept together, still sometimes found ourselves crying to each other in the dark hours of the night when one of us couldn’t sleep, and the permanence of her move or my decision (or hers) would set in.
“I just wanted to call to wish you a Happy New Year,” she says finally.
“Thanks. You too.”
Leo circles back and whispers, “Hang up, dude. This isn’t just some casual call, like girls don’t call on New Year’s Eve to say ‘hey.’”
