Ben had called a few weeks ago. We hadn’t really spoken since that night at the bar. Sometimes I’d see him around the Village and wave, a little stutter of the hand, but we always kept walking with a bob of our chins. But then Daisy got the chicken pox, and he needed an actress for his graduate film, and that was how he ended up being indebted to me and by my side in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Also: I really wanted to kiss him.
He was single now. Daisy told me as much when I stopped over at her place with an oatmeal bath from Duane Reade and some trashy magazines. I’d gotten the chicken pox when I was six, when the entire first grade went down for the count over a particularly brutal Ohio winter. My mom let me sit in front of the TV all day, and then three days later Piper was covered in spots and joined me, and I was mostly miserable but also happy that my mom had canceled her shifts at the hospital and snuggled next to us while we watchedKids Incorporatedor she tried to explain the drama onDays of Our Lives.
“He dumped his girlfriend,” Daisy said, picking at a particularly gruesome blister on her left forearm. “A while ago now. So, totally single. Totally eligible.”
“What happened?”
“Something about how she applied to residencies only outside of New York. He broke it off before she moved out of the state and left him behind. He got drunk one night and rambled on about loyalty and how it was all he really wanted.”
“Ouch,” I said, because it wasn’t as if I couldn’t relate. I may have been the one to move out of state, but mostly it was because I was fleeing the life I wanted to leave behind. Leave behind the shame of Aaron Johnson, the football player I lost my virginity to in high school, who I believed had loved me, but who ditched me a month later for Julie Seymour, a girl on the field hockey team, and utterly detonated my teenage confidence by refusing to return my calls, refusing to acknowledge me in the hallway or after school when he picked up an item at the pharmacy where I worked (under horrifying lighting and wearing a poop-colored apron); or with others like Brandon and Mark and Eddie in college, all of whom managed to strip me—piece by piece, slowly enough that the damage was almost undetectable—of whatever self-confidence with boys I had left after Aaron and all the chaos of my home life. All of whom somehow convinced me that the current version of myself wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. That maybe if I were just a bit smarter or just a bit skinnier or just a bit prettier, they wouldn’t have grown bored or listless or looked elsewhere.
“He’s a good guy,” Daisy said, wincing, scratching with more fervor.
“You shouldn’t be doing that; it leaves scars.”
“We’re actors,” she replied. “Scars are what make us interesting.”
Tonight, Ben’s younger brother, Leo, elbows his way through the New Year’s Eve swarm and lands next to us, dragging a girl I don’t know but have been told is named Caroline, who is a freshman at Barnard; Leo’s a sophomore at Columbia. (“My parents’ second wind,” Ben said. “The baby of the family in every way.”) Tonight Leo is just the right amount of tipsy, and it’s impossible not to giggle when he stumbles and flattens himself against Ben to stop himself from falling, and then kisses his cheeks when he is steady.
“My big brother.” He grins. “You’re always looking out for me. Get him to tell you sometime about how he took the blame for my stash of pot freshman year in high school.”
Ben shakes his head. “Mom and Dad threatened to stop my tuition payments for college.”
Leo laughs. “Dad is always busting our balls.”
“Just trying to bring out our potential,” Ben says, and though I don’t know him well, I can see he’s deflecting. “And mostly, he’s busting mine.”
“Well, that’s what makes you the best big brother in the world,” Leo crows. He looks toward me. “I assume you are the lovely lady who somehow got my uptight brother into Times Square right now?”
“Tatum,” I say, extending a gloved hand, which he ignores as he pulls me into a hug as if I’m family.
“This is the sickest thing I have ever done.”
Ben laughs. “And that’s a high threshold.”
“No, dude, seriously, don’t be a downer. We’re gonna remember this forever. Times Square in New York!” He cups his gloves around his mouth and tilts his head toward the night sky. “Hello, 2001! Let’s see what you got!”
Caroline passes around an open bottle of champagne concealed in a paper bag, and we all drink generously, the bubbly matching our effervescent spirits, the alcohol warming us in the frigid Manhattan air.
The wind kicks up, and the snow starts to fall: thick, pregnant flakes that feel like they’ll stick almost immediately. Leo and Caroline huddle together, him wrapping his scarf around her and tugging her closer as if their lips are magnetic, each unable to be without the other. In seconds, Ben’s wavy dark hair is frosted in white, and he reaches out and brushes a few errant flakes off my eyelashes. There must be ten thousand people in Times Square, and I peer up at the Jumbotron, wondering where we are in the sea of faces and bodies that are mashed together, a pulsing wave ready to flush out the previous year, harken in a new one.
Ben and I gape at Leo and Caroline for a beat, self-conscious, awkward in that new way when you’re waiting for the other one to kiss you, when you’re too new to each other, too unsure to do anything more than bite your lip or stare at your shoes.
“Leo’s always been like this,” he says. “All the girls in my grade thought he was the cutest. Imagine losing girls to your younger brother. And he was, like, eleven!”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I’m too nice a guy.” He shakes his head. “That was never Leo’s problem.”
“Ah, the curse of the nice guy.” I don’t mention that Daisy told me she thought that breaking up with the medical school girlfriend gutted him through the summer, that Daisy told him to go out and screw a few randoms, but he chuckled and said that wasn’t his style. And she had said: “Not a guy’s style? Casual sex is every guy’s style!” Which had made him blush a little deeper, laugh a little harder.
“Well,” I say now, “I don’t think you’rethatnice. I mean, you were a bit of a tyrant on the shoot.”
“I was the director; that’s my job. I was trying to make the day, get the light. Also, since we’re here and I’m being honest, I can admit to asking for an extra take or two because I thought you were so spectacular.”
Now it’s my turn to deflect, because I’ve never been great at accepting compliments unless I’m playing a part. “Well, I hope you write that into your Oscar speech. ‘I apologize to Tatum Connelly for being a tyrant. And for making her do extra takes just for the hell of it. It was part of my job!’”
I can see his eyes wrinkle into a grin underneath his muffler. “It was just some stupid short to fulfill my thesis.Romanticahisn’t winning any Oscars.”
