“Let’s see the film tomorrow.”
“Nah, you’ll be busy. I’ll see it by myself.”
They avoided each other in the hallways at school. When he awoke on Valentine’s Day, something was not right.
It was one of those brutal days in Brooklyn, the wind so cold it burned, the curbs slicked with black ice. The poetry collection was in his backpack. In the school lobby, the Cooking Club sold roses and cupcakes. He glanced at them in fright and continued walking.
In English, Elaine bit the tip of her pencil, her eyes on the door. He could hear her breathing. He felt every blink of her eyelashes. He had memorized each of the charms on her bracelet, could spend an hour just going around and around her wrist:trumpet, ballet shoes, tragedy mask, teapot, kitten…
He thought about what Macon had said.
To give her the poems, or not give her the poems. That was the question.
Halfway through the period, someone knocked on the classroom door and turned the handle, disrupting the lecture.
“Mrs. Palmer, may we interrupt for just a minute?” begged a Cooking Club member. “We’re making a delivery.”
When Mrs. Palmer relented, the two girls entered the classroom, their arms full of separately wrapped roses, and their elbows strung with shopping bags full of cupcakes.
“You got one for me?” someone shouted from the back of the classroom.
“Buy me a cupcake, Mrs. Palmer!” another student jested.
Jason held his breath. Birds pecked at the flesh of his rib cage. He had wrapped the poetry collection in red tissue paper and hid it in his desk cubby.
“One rose,” said the Cooking Club member, and she read a tag attached to the flower. “For a… Elaine McIntosh?”
Everyone turned to look at her, and Elaine’s cheeks flushed.
“Ooooooo,” the room cooed as the flowers made their way to her desk.
“Who’s it from?”
“Is it from Caleb?”
“Nah, it’s Ronny Stein, right?”
“Are you and Ronny going out?”
Elaine took the plastic-wrapped rose and read the label on the stem. A tender smile crept across her lips. She cradled the rose against her breast, her care for it reminding Jason of the way she’d held the limp, fake-dead hand of Caleb-as-Romeo. He could not see the label, but he didn’t need to.
Jason tucked the poetry collection back into his backpack. He would have liked to cry, but instead, he studied a dried splotch of gum in the cubby. It was a green brain, a tiny map of a fantasy island, a foreign planet.
Who cared if he was good or not. Turning inward, he was safe. He would retreat there—as he would for decades onward—to forget about what hurt him.
SADIE
When Sadie reached home, her parents were sitting in the living room, reading aloud articles fromThe New Yorker. She avoided their eyes. “I just need to change,” she muttered. The wind at Grand Army Plaza had sucked the last life out of her umbrella, and in her room, she peeled off her sweater, jeans, shirt, and bra. It was like peeling off a layer of skin. Buried in her comforter, eyes closed, she saw the moment when Ms. Lina had told her to leave.
She’d messed up.
No, she would not tell her parents what happened, not yet. And she couldn’t talk to her friends fromThe New York Timesinternship—didn’t want to admit to them she’d gotten herself thrown out of an interview. Her transplant friends from Yale would be the most sympathetic, but she didn’t want their kindness. They wouldn’t really get it.
Of course, she couldn’t speak to Wendy or another reporter atNew Gothambecause the truth was, she should never have been reporting on a story of personal significance in the first place.
Thinking about Wendy, Sadie realized she had an article due the following day, a piece about a healthy-eating initiative in Brownsville. She sat up immediately in bed and grabbed her laptop. No more dwelling on what had happened. There was no time.
She stayed up till one a.m. drafting an outline for the healthy foodarticle, and the next morning, she tried to contact a few sources. It was more difficult than usual. Ms. Charlene, one of Brownsville’s nutrition gurus, almost always picked up her phone, but that morning, she didn’t answer. Sadie had arranged an interview with a local children’s advocate for ten a.m., but that source emailed her at the last minute.Sorry, something came up.Sadie tried several other numbers, but people either failed to pick up or dismissed her curtly. She wrote to Wendy for a twenty-four-hour extension.
