“You said tonight wasn’t the date you would have planned for me. What would you have done differently?”
He checks the sleek black watch on his wrist. “We can still find out.”
“Bingo starts in ten,” the waitress says as she slaps our bingo sheets on the table alongside a chubby-looking marker. “Dot markers are extra. Food will be out soon.”
“I think we just ordered enough dim sum for a party of six,” I say.
“I could put away enough dim sum to feed this whole place. I’m so tired of TV food,” Henry moans.
“TV food?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Didn’t you notice how tasteless the food was tonight? They take me to closed restaurants for these dates and basically feed me cold spaghetti. I miss real food. It’s like eating airplane food every night.”
“I think that might be my own personal hell. Airplane food for eternity.”
“Oh, I think my actual personal hell is a party that I can’t seem to leave. Like every door I go through is just a door that takes me back to the same party and no matter how hard I try I can’t get out.”
“So I guess a surprise birthday party is your worst nightmare?”
He shakes his head. “I hate them. My mom threw me one for my thirteenth birthday, and it was mostly adults who came.”
“Didn’t she invite your friends from school?”
“Well, yeah, but I had four or five friends. Not nearly enough for the kind of party Lucy Mackenzie intended to throw. There were waiters on roller skates. And ice sculptures.”
“Ice sculptures?” I ask.
“Of me.”
My jaw hits the floor. “I’m sorry. Did you just say ice sculptures? Of you?”
“Make fun of me all you want, but we were competing with bar mitzvahs so intense that TLC filmed a pilot for a guy in our building calledMy Ballin’ Bar Mitzvah.”
“Whoa. My thirteenth birthday party was at the neighborhood pool. We rented a picnic table and ate nachos from the snack bar.”
“That’s the kind of party I would gladly attend.”
I laugh at the image of Henry at my dingy old neighborhood pool with all the teenage lifeguards who I thought were so hot but in reality had bacne just like me. “See, parties aren’t all that bad. And hey, you met Sabrina at a party. Aren’t parties sort of a way of life in the circles you run in?” Of course I wish our relationship wasn’t playing out on this TV show, but even if all this was stripped away, our lives are still worlds apart. The elite NYC parties Henry grew up attending are just one example of that. Maybe I should be more thankful for our little reality television bubble.
“Exactly why I hate them,” he says. “And I met Sabrina because I’m always looking for the person who can help me escape the party. The person who wants to take a walk or—”
“Go back to your place?” I ask playfully, but fully serious.
The corner of his mouth turns upward devilishly. “I guess that too…Back when I had time to meet people and I wasn’t trying to dig my family’s company out of the Mariana Trench.”
“Nice. A marine biology reference.”
“Cape Cod Marine Biology camp. Third grade through sixth grade.”
“Sleepaway camp?” I ask. “First boarding school. Now sleepaway camp. That’s rich-kid shit.”
“Well, you gotta dump your kid somewhere while you’re trekking across the globe bouncing from one ayahuasca retreat to the next.”
“Whoa. I didn’t realize Lucy went that hard.”
“Yeah, she’s real hip until the camp nurse is calling because her son broke his arm trying to dive out of a tree because he thinks if he just believes hard enough that he’s an astronaut, gravity will cease to exist. The only adult sober enough to talk was my mom’s assistant’s assistant, and he thought my name was Carson.”
“Okay, I have a lot of questions, but how does anyone get Carson from Henry?” I wish so hard that I still had my dad in my life, but at least when he was alive, he was the kind of dad that Father’s Day was made for. “What about your dad?” I ask. “He’s still around, right?” I remember seeing the picture of the three of them in his office, and it felt so far off and distant that I almost wondered if he was even still in Henry’s life.
