In front, I find a sign advertising a special Kandinsky exhibit. I take a photo for Marisa, who famously detests art museums. She says they’re just excuses for people to pretend they’re cultured.
I pay the eighteen-dollar student rate and enter the museum. While I’m wandering up the curved walkways, my phone buzzes with a text. I assume it’s Fitz, who hasn’t replied to me in an hour. Admittedly, I’m curious about whatever is distracting him. But when I unlock my phone, I find a text from Marisa.
Do you know how much of a dork you are?
I smile, stopping to lean against the railing overlooking the interior.
I’ve never claimed otherwise.
I’m still mad at you for getting me grounded.
She follows up the message with a string of emojis—the frowning cat—and I know her anger is fading.
Be mad at yourself. You know I didn’t have a choice.
She replies immediately with a new row of emojis. Flames and the purple devil face.
I wait. I have a pretty good feeling the conversation’s not over, and I’m not surprised when the typing bubble pops up. It disappears, and I gaze over the railing into the museum while tourists examine the artwork opposite me. The typing bubble reappears, and finally my phone vibrates.
How’s your trip?
The question is whiplash. I’m immediately grateful to my sister for her effortless reconciliation. The very next instant comes the nasty yank of remembering she doesn’t know Matt and I broke up. I can’t tell her, either. I know what would happen if I did. The news would reach my parents, who would definitely try to convince me to come home, and then Tía.
Tía, who would turn my heartache into a tactic. Who would feed my loneliness to the arguments never far from her reach. Who would hint and imply and eventually remind me outright I wouldn’t be hurting on my own if I were home in the comfort of my family. To her, my breakup would just be proof that I’m not mature, that I still need my family.
I won’t give her the chance.
Really amazing. You’d love the campuses.
Don’t worry, I’ll invite you to visit me next year.
I hate the forced cheeriness of my replies. This is the one time I don’t want to talk about college. I want to talk about my boyfriend—ex-boyfriend. Instead, I have to pretend everything is wonderful and I’m enjoying my trip exactly the way I’d planned.
I could really use sisterly commiseration right now, which is unlike me. We’ve never been the type of siblings who braid each other’s hair, who share every secret and every detail of our lives. But this is one time it’d be nice to open up to her. The fact that I can’t doesn’t just frustrate me. It frightens me.
Because I’m beginning to recognize this feeling. I don’t want this to be the rest of my relationship with my family, this dynamic of their constricting tendencies forcing me to push and push until I no longer remember wanting to be close to them. I don’t want to not reach out to my sister when I need her. Or dread coming home from school on holidays because of the lectures and judgment I know will be waiting. And I don’t want to move far from home and never return, not even when I get married, not even when I have kids, not until it’s one of my own parents who is ill or dying.
I explore the museum for half an hour, but my heart’s not in it. As I walk out the front I check my phone, hoping for a text from Fitz. I can’t confide in my sister, but there are eight million people in this city. It’s nice to know I could confide in one of them.
Fitz
OKAY, I UNDERSTAND why my mom loves this book.
I lift my head from the final page, gazing out the window of the café where I holed up when the temperature dropped in the park. I spent the remainder of the day reading, and the sun is lower in the sky. The streets glow with golden light breaking through the buildings. Walking out into the park, I rub my hands in front of my face while I watch the passersby, The Great Gatsby’s final words echoing in my head.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. My chest loosened when I read them. I sat up straighter, feeling lightened.
I don’t fully understand the effect the ending has on me. Hoping to figure the question out, I walk through the park, holding my trusted companion Gatsby to my side. I pass couples hand in hand and evening dog walks, circling the park three times before I’ve organized my thoughts.
Gatsby spent his entire life trying to recapture the past. He failed. Time worked against him like it does everyone. Everything he accomplished, every piece of his meticulous planning, was in the pursuit of something already behind him, something receding in a rearview mirror he mistook for a windshield. And for what? Gatsby lived a half-life, the warped reflection of human existence.
I won’t repeat his mistake.
I lift my head to the road ahead and pull out my phone.
Juniper
FOR A MOMENT, I wonder if I’ve wandered into a fairy tale. Except not one of the fairy tales Mom would read to me and Marisa and Callie from her hardcover anthology with the pastel-painted cover, with stories of princesses and witches and occasionally dragons. No, this is the kind of fairy tale Juniper Ramírez would live, if magic whisked her from the college tour she was enjoying in the present day and transported her to this incredible, impossible wonderland between buildings.
I’ve just come up the grimy bolted-metal stairs from street level. What spreads out in front of me is a walkway—or park—or both. Sheets of rough concrete stretch in either direction, with smaller pavement pathways and wooden decks interspersed. Plants entwine the paths, the trees brittle and the bushes brushed with snow. The walkway hangs high over the streets, cutting through the skyscrapers rising up on both sides.
The High Line, Fitz called this place. When he texted with nothing but an invitation—no dictionary words, no college questions—I didn’t recognize the name. I promptly found the place on my phone and hopped on the subway.
I stare over the edge, watching the churn of cars below and the colors of the sunset. Turning back, I imagine the High Line in spring and summer, the foliage green, the trees waving in the breeze like guests enjoying a party to which they have no idea they weren’t invited.
I’m envisioning the vivid vein this place would cut through the city when Fitz walks up the stairs. His eyes meet mine, and he smiles.
The effect is instantaneous. I notice he’s different, somehow. There’s an easiness to his motion, or even his momentum, like he’s headed in a new direction. I haven’t known Fitz for long, but he’s definitely never had momentum. He walks over while I take in the unusual freedom to him.