I don’t know if you’ll even see this but if you do, I just wanted to say that I’m rooting for you, and it really makes me happy to see you succeed.
All best,
MA
Cleo, unprepared for the ascent, was out of breath by the time Lucas had finished. Gaby, because she was training for the marathon, was not, and in fact had taken to running up the hill backward, then sprinting down it to meet them, then repeating it all over again. Also, she had barely slept last night after her evening with Oliver Patel but seemed not at all affected. That women in Washington (and beyond, of course) were judged on their stamina was utterly ridiculous, Cleo thought, as she watched her friend bounce up and back.
“What happened with him?” Lucas asked as she jabbed the crosswalk light. No one in Seattle jaywalked, and Cleo was not about to break the rules of the city and be criticized for anything else.
“It was high school,” Cleo said. “What happens with any of that?”
Lucas narrowed his eyes, and because Cleo did not want him to disengage, she elaborated.
“When your grandparents died, I guess my singular focus was moving on. Getting through that grief intact. Living up to their expectations of me, which, I mean, not to be a cliché, I could never now live up to. And part of that meant getting out of Seattle and just . . . getting through things. Forging ahead toward what I told them I would do: rule the world.”
“It’s so nice here, though,” he said. “You couldn’t rule the world from here?” They each took a moment to look around, and each concurred that this was true. The air was squeaky-clean, the vibe was hip and electric, the mountains sprang up unexpectedly in the background with peaks dusted in snow. No one was in too much of a rush, but no one meandered either, and everyone seemed placid and accepting and, well, pleasant. You could just tell by the way people stood at the corner and waited for the orange hand to turn white and said “excuse me” when they stepped around you to peer at the coffee menu at Starbucks.
Cleo exhaled, and the light changed, and they crossed the street while she considered how to best explain why she dumped an extremely sweet person who had only her best interests at heart.
“It was nice growing up here, which is why I wanted you to see it. And I wish you could have met your grandparents, not just have seen the house that I grew up in. But . . . I don’t know. The longer I was here, the smaller it felt. I wanted to be the big fish in the big pond. That’s how I think I defined success back then.”
“I think it’s how you define it now too,” Lucas said as he stopped and peered into the window of a tattoo parlor, his hand above his eyes, shielding them from the sun. Cleo yanked his arm.
She didn’t press him because it’s a rough day for parents when they discover that their child’s wisdom has surpassed their own, even if that’s the entire point of parenting. So instead, she said, “You have to be eighteen to get a tattoo, and even then, it’s stupid.”
“As stupid as running away when you were eighteen?”
“Eighteen-year-olds make plenty of dumb choices,” Cleo said. “And I didn’t run away. I got into college. And then my grandmother died. And then what was I going to return to anyway? I wanted to go to law school. And then I wanted to get into Congress. And so on.”
Lucas’s phone buzzed before he could reply. “Oh. That’s cool. He just wrote you back.”
“He who?” Cleo asked. She was peering up and down the street, which looked nothing like the street she remembered from twenty years ago. There were espresso bars at every other storefront and impossibly hip clothiers and organic juice pop-ups and one store devoted entirely to essential oils. Georgie would love Seattle now, Cleo thought, and reminded herself to text her back. Which she already knew she would not.
“Matty,” Lucas said.
“Why would Matty be writing me back?”
“Oh, I wrote back to him writing you in the first place.”
Cleo stopped short, and a man with a handlebar mustache, a magenta vest, and rolled jeans, with an adorable yellow Labrador, nearly tripped over her.
“Why would you do that?” she nearly screeched. The man did a double take, and so she offered, “Sorry, not you. Him, my son.” So the man flashed her a peace sign and went on his way, and Cleo thought this was a very distinctly Seattle interaction. And it slayed her just a little bit in the best of ways. Maybe you couldn’t run away from where you came from as easily as she had thought.
“I didn’t, like, say that you loved him,” Lucas said. “I just said, ‘hey, thanks, nice to hear from you.’”
“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to have a little romance in your life,” Gaby butted in.
“Where is this pizza place anyway?” Cleo barked. Nothing about this street looked familiar anymore. Back then, she and MaryAnne could have stomped down the avenue (in their Doc Martens, because in Seattle, even the semi-non-cool kids wore Docs) blindfolded and still found their way to Pagliacci’s. She spun around to the west, then the east, and was no better oriented.
“I can ask Oliver about him,” Gaby said. They were striding down the next block, simply to move from point A to point B. “Maybe he knows his deal.”
“Why would you ask Oliver about Matty? When would you ask Oliver about him?”
“Oh, we’re having dinner tonight. I figure, we fly out in the morning; why not?”
“Great,” Cleo said. “You both have dates tonight.”
“Mine is not a date,” Gaby protested, but Lucas said nothing, which made Cleo wonder if Lucas really knew what a date date was, and if so, how he did and when he’d been on one. Also, should she bring up the fact that Gaby was reading his texts on the phone and maybe he was technically cheating on someone back home? She wanted to raise a man who respected women but she didn’t want to be a mom who snooped on her kid. Though she’d read some studies that she should be snooping on her kid, so . . . This whole thing was getting out of hand. All she wanted right now was a fucking piece of pizza.
Before everything went south their senior year, she and MaryAnne used to split a Canadian bacon and pineapple pie. They’d trudge up the hill after school, on breaks from their homework and before going to MaryAnne’s (with the pool and the ping-pong table and the Pac-Man machine) and were at Pagliacci’s so often that the guys knew their order. They’d slurp their Diet Cokes until the ice rattled and pick the bacon off their slices and drop it on their tongues, nearly drinking in the grease. They’d talk about their own versions of ruling the world—it changed by the month. Sometimes it was through politics and sometimes it was through solving the hunger crisis in Africa or ending the Iraq War, and sometimes it was just making some boy who demeaned them feel small in a reciprocal way. Ruling the world could be both literal and metaphorical. This was before every T-shirt in the Gap screamed with quippy slogans like “This Girl Is on Fire” and “I Am My Own Future” and “#SquadGoals.” It was just them and their pizza and their aspirations.
Today, in the bright and welcoming Seattle sun, Cleo landed on the block that she was certain was the block. But where she expected to find her old pizzeria, she instead found a vegan bar.