Until I get so tired that I close my eyes.
My surroundings softly fade away.
“Wake up,”I hear a whisper in my mind. I was just floating weightlessly somewhere in an ocean, dipped in an orange horizon of the sundown.
I open my eyes.
“It’s already 9,” says El. “Don’t you have lectures?”
“Shit,” I say as I turn on my back.
“Whatever,” El says.
“No, not whatever. Jane will freak.”
“You’re not her dog; lectures are optional. Tell her you need a day to figure something out.”
“A day won’t be enough for that.”
“I know,” says El. “But you will come anyway.”
“Come where?” I ask.
“You’ll see,” she says. “Keep an open mind.”
I draw up an eyebrow.
“How open-minded do I have to be?”
“Depends on how deep that stick in your ass is,” she says and sticks out her tongue.
I punch her in her arm, and get a pillow in my face in return. Something I can’t let her get through with, so I take my pillow and smash it at her.
She grasps the next throws it full in my face.
“Girl!” I say, laughing, as I get up to pick up the pillows.
She just laughs and runs.
Oh, I’m so gonna get you,I think to myself as I head after her.
An hour and a pillow fight later, I am showered, dressed, and fed.
“Ready?” she asks.
“I suppose,” I say as she leans onto the kitchen counter.
“Here,” she says and throws a car key next to my cereal bowl.
“What’s that for?”
“You can drive, yes?” she asks, ignoring my questions.
“Yeah, duh,” I say.
It’s this moment, here at the kitchen counter, where I realize how much of El’s vocabulary I have taken on at this point. But only when I’m with her. The El me differs so much from the me I am with Jane. But the version I am with El…It makes me feel as young as I made myself out to be on paper. It is like a second chance to live my young adulthood—exactly what New York was about.
I turn the key to find a golden Porsche emblem on it.
