Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet (9781476763248) (33 page)

“Oh, don't start! I definitely saw tears during the last song,” I pointed out.

“Hey!” he protested. “Yes, I cry at touching scenes. I'm man enough to admit that.”

“You own the soundtrack,” Kat said. “I've seen your iTunes.”

“Fine, fine,” he relented, smiling.

After the show, we'd said good-bye to Kat's friend and taken the train down to . . . well, I'm not totally sure where, but we just bought the best french fries I'd ever tasted and apparently there is the promise of a bar in our future. One that doesn't card, since Kat doesn't have a fake ID (super jealous her nineteen-year-old self lives near non-carding bars), hence why we wound up in yet another part of the city.

Growing up in a town with one bar, one diner, and one pharmacy/pet shop/school supply store, I was starting to wonder if it was even possible to see everything this city has to offer. People here must never get bored.

“I wonder how it'd go if they retold every story from the villain's point of view,” I said, still on
Wicked
.

“Sure, but wouldn't you rather the bad guy just not be a dick?” Milo asked.

“So you're sure you're not the villain of anyone's story?” I asked him.

“Are you calling me a villain?” he teased.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “At least, not in my story. But there's no situation where you'd be cast as the bad guy? No one who sees you
differently
than I do, or Kat does?”

He appeared to catch my emphasis, pausing to think on it for a second. “Lee Newman. He'd been working up the courage to ask out this girl in our class since seventh grade, but the day he finally got the nerve, she agreed to go to homecoming with me. And we dated for two years.”

“See? There you go,” I said.

“Guess this is what we get for hanging out with a psych major.” Milo laughed.

“Nah, my mom just watches a lot of
Days of Our Lives
. Everyone's always declaring their selfless love to somebody in one scene and plotting to kill someone else in the next,” I said. A small part of my brain registered that he'd called me a psych major, and I didn't bother to correct him. I kind of liked the sound of it.

“Hey, Lydia,” Kat said, stopping at a stand we were passing and snatching a hat up off the shelf. “I think you need a souvenir from this trip. Something fancy. This is so you.”

She placed the hat on top of my head and directed me to a small mirror glued onto the side of the stand.

It was a furry headpiece that was meant to look like a white tiger. Long white-and-black-striped pieces of cloth hung down from the top part, and the whole thing felt itchy on my head. I looked in the mirror and laughed.

“Perfect, but I don't think anyone would take me too seriously as a college student if I wore this everywhere.”

“You'd be surprised,” Milo said. “Besides, it's too late, I already paid for it. This is who you are now. Tiger-hat girl. Girl of the tiger hat.”

“Didn't realize we were close enough for nicknames,” I joked.

“Oh, yeah, we're all best friends now, did you miss that?” Kat said, playing along.

I looked around us as we started moving again, taking in all the shops for the first time. There were a couple more stands like this one, some grungy clothing stores, and a lot of piercing and tattoo shops.

“Where are we, anyway?” I asked.

“Saint Mark's Place,” Kat answered.

“My cousin would be so in love with this street,” I said, grabbing my phone out of my pocket and snapping a quick picture of the area. “She's super into darkness and stuff.”

I made Milo and Kat pause and do a quick selfie with a shop whose windows were covered in skull-and-crossbones decals, too.

“It's hard to imagine someone related to you and Jane being into ‘darkness and stuff,' ” Milo noted as I saved the photo.

I nodded. “Trust me, I know. But she's cool. Hang on, I'm going to send that to her real quick.” As much as I loved texting and walking, I'd figured out the hard way that it wasn't particularly easy in a crowded city. I'd probably walked directly into at least six people since I'd been here, and one street sign.

Swiping through my photos, I added one from the theater to the text—Mary loves theater and art and all that stuff, so I was pretty sure she'd appreciate that—and another I'd taken of the skyline walking across the bridge earlier this evening. I tried to fight off the twinge I felt when I remembered I wasn't sure if she'd respond, and that even if she did, it would probably be something simple like
cool
or
okay
, and pressed send all the same.

“There,” I said, lifting my eyes up from my phone screen and picking up the pace again. “Goth shopping street photo sent. I sent her that picture I took from the Brooklyn Bridge, too.”

I saw Milo's face drop and knew immediately that I had said something terribly wrong, even before Kat slowed to a standstill and didn't turn around.

“You went to the bridge?”

It was silent for a long handful of seconds, everything moving slowly in our small bubble of the world even as everyone around us kept going at full speed.

Finally, she turned back toward us, skimming over me entirely and fixating on Milo.

Milo shook his head and took a step forward. “Kat, I'm sorry, I didn't mean for you to find out—”

“It's not about me
finding out
, Milo,” she said, her eyes growing wider and her weight shifting backward, away from us, away from Milo. “You didn't tell me you were gonna be late. And you didn't answer my texts. For all I know—”

She cut her words short, swallowing hard and shaking her head.

Milo opened his mouth to try again, but Kat didn't give him the chance.

“I don't want to talk to you right now.” Her voice was low and shaky, even as she tried to sound commanding. Still, it worked, because Milo shut his mouth and stayed where he was as she turned away from us and, very soon, had disappeared around the corner onto another street.

“What just happened?” I asked, almost more to myself than to Milo, who simply shook his head, raking his fingers through his hair. I watched his jaw clench, and he looked like he wanted to kick the brick wall next to us, but he didn't.

“Should we . . .” I looked off toward where Kat had gone, but when I looked back, Milo was still shaking his head, pacing.

“She won't listen to me right now,” he said to me, and then to himself, “Should've known better.”

“Hey.” I moved closer to him and placed my palm flat against his chest, willing him to look at me. “I'll go talk to her. Okay?”

He worked his jaw up and down, and I thought he was going to speak, but finally he just nodded his head.

“Wait here.”

*  *  *

Once I turned the block, catching up to Kat didn't take as long as I'd expected. She'd only made it up the street before settling down on concrete steps, pressed up against the iron railing alongside them.

I hesitated when I saw her. Saying I would come out here and talk to her seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but now that I was faced with actually doing it . . . I didn't even know what was going on, let alone how to fix it.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, remembering my time at the center with Bing, and even my sessions with Ms. W.

I didn't have to fix it. I couldn't, most likely. That wasn't what I'd be good for here.

I approached slowly, so she could see me. She didn't look up even as I sat down silently next to her.

She was picking at the handrail, the paint coming off in small chips. It made the tiniest metallic sound every time she touched it with her fingernail. She was shaking, just barely, and silent. I kept my distance.

“You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to,” I said quietly. “I'd like to at least just sit here, if that's okay. But if you do want to talk . . .”

Ting. Ting. Ting.

The gray metal underneath the black paint formed an abstract design, something that reminded me of the art Jane and I had looked at when we went to the Met. We had seen this one guy staring at a painting when we first walked in, and when we left, I caught a glimpse of him still standing in the same spot, looking at the same painting. It had seemed silly to me to look at one thing for so long, but Kat was fixated on chipping away this paint with the same intensity that that man had been looking at the artwork in front of him.

Finally, I heard the sound stop, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her move her hands to her lap.

“My cousin was killed there.”

My brain jumped into motion, doing its best to interpret what she was saying.

“Cousin”—the one that Milo dated?

“There”—the Brooklyn Bridge?

The place we went—the place we were late, when Kat couldn't get ahold of either of us.

I waited.

“There was another girl there, they said.” Her voice was scratchy and she tried to clear it as she went, but it still shook. “Some guy was harassing her, and Nikki saw it when she was walking home. Across the bridge. She got in the way, tried to stop it. The guy stabbed her. Ran off. They, um . . . they didn't get help in time.”

“I'm . . . so sorry,” I said.

“I came to school out here because . . . I just always figured I'd go where she went. Couldn't get into Columbia like her and Milo, but I was still in the same city, at least. After she died, Milo was the only person I really knew here. And who got it. Who understood why I didn't want to be out at night, or by myself, or anywhere—
anywhere
—near that place, without acting all weird, like I was broken or something. Because he felt that way, too.”

I thought of all the things I could say right then.

I promise I had no idea.

I'm sure he didn't mean to upset you.

We're fine, so everything's okay, see?

I know how it is to feel like everyone's looking at you differently.

But I kept my platitudes to myself and moved just a little bit closer as I put my hand on her shoulder.

She finally turned to look at me, and I saw the hint of tears in her eyes even though she was trying not to let them spill over.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes.

I shook my head deliberately. “Don't be.”

“I just . . . feel like I should be past this now.”

“Are you?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly, and I shrugged.

“Then you're not. That's okay.”

“Thanks,” she said after a moment, almost too softly for me to catch.

“What are friends for?”

I smiled. She smiled back. And we stayed there for a while, her telling stories about trouble she and her cousin used to get up to when they were kids. Me just listening.

“We should probably go find Milo,” she finally said. “I want to apologize for flipping out at him. He shouldn't feel bad about going there, if that's what he wants to do.”

“Kat . . .” I started as we stood up. “Maybe I'm way off base, but, if I'm not, maybe it wouldn't be the worst idea for you to go
back there sometime, too. Make a new memory of it. One day, at least.”

She bit her lip and looked off to the side, and for a second I was worried I'd said something wrong again.

“Maybe you're right,” she said, nodding. Then she looked up a little higher. “I guess it isn't hard to take you seriously in that ridiculous hat after all.”

My hands flew up to my head, touching the tiger hat, having totally forgotten it was still on my head.

I smiled sheepishly. “Oops.” But I guess Milo was right.

Milo, to his extreme credit, was right where we had left him. He'd taken a seat on the ground against the wall, and stood up nervously as we approached. I couldn't see what Kat's face looked like, but I smiled, trying to reassure him that things were okay, and as I did, she threw her arms around him. He looked surprised, but adjusted quickly, letting her hug him, a quiet apology in the air between them.

I watched, and after he got over the shock, his eyes locked with mine, as sincere as I'd ever seen them.

“Thank you,” he mouthed.

I smiled back at him.

Maybe I wasn't so unprepared for being helpful after all.

*  *  *

We decided to skip the bar and just call it a night, taking Kat back to school before riding the subway all the way back to Jane's apartment. She'd made me promise to keep in touch, and let her know if I ever came back to visit, or if I decided to move out here after all.

“I don't know what you did,” Milo said, “but you did good. I've never been able to pull Kat out of her own head when she's gotten like that.”

“I just listened,” I replied.

He studied me before nodding. “I knew she was still upset about everything. Hell, I mean, I am, too. I know it's not the same, but . . .”
He shook his head, clearing it of whatever he was going to say. “I didn't know how to tell her I go back there sometimes.”

“Why do you?” I asked carefully.

“I don't wanna forget it happened, I guess,” he said after a moment. “It mattered. It's important to who I've become, who Kat's become. And . . . that's not the only thing that's happened there. I've had a lot of good memories on that bridge, too. Bad stuff happens all the time. But . . . as bad as it is sometimes, I can't let that stop me from living my life.”

“You'd never even go on the subway,” I agreed, thinking of Bing's pickpocketing adventures.

“Exactly. I just . . . I can't do that.”

“I think she knows that,” I said. “Sometimes there's just some space in between when you figure something out in your head and when you actually
get
it, you know?”