“I mean, it’s not like he gave you any sort of explanation.” It had been over two months, but I was still annoyed about this. You did not get to dump my best friend in a mid-priced Mexican restaurant without any explanation. You just didn’t.
“I’m not going to the play,” Stevie said, glancing out the window, a note of finality in her voice. “So it’s a nonissue.”
“Good,” I said. I was heartened by how definitive she sounded. It had been clear to me recently that she was finally getting over being broken up with, and I didn’t think it would be the best call to start hanging out with Beckett again. “I don’t like that he’s suddenly doing this now. Do you think he’s having second thoughts?”
“I…,” Stevie started, then looked down, her hair falling over her face like a curtain and blocking it from view. “I don’t know.”
As I took a breath to reply, I happened to glance up and felt my heart stop. Kathie Alden, one of my mother’s friends, was stepping onto the train and looking around for a seat.
I turned away and ducked down, heart thumping, pretending to be pulling on my ankle boots, praying to any deity currently available that she hadn’t seen me.
“What is it?” Stevie asked at a normal volume. “Kat? What’s—”
“Shh!” I hissed at her. Stevie ducked down too so that our faces were level.
“What’s going on?” she whispered. “Are we about to get whacked?”
I turned my head slightly and saw Kathie stop at a two-seater halfway down the car and take her coat off. I straightened up and sat back against the seat, slouching down so that my head couldn’t be seen. “My mom’s friend,” I murmured, and Stevie’s eyes went wide and she slouched down too.
“Oh noooooo.”
“Exactly.”
I swallowed hard, trying to get my heart rate to return to normal. I was suddenly aware that I was sweating in really awkward places, like the top of my lip and in between my shoulder blades.
“Did she see you?” Stevie asked, still talking just above a murmur.
“I don’t think so,” I said with more confidence than I currently felt. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to marshal my thoughts, but it was proving difficult. All I could think was that if Kathie Alden saw me—and told my mother—I would be in such trouble.
The reality of what might actually happen if my parents found out made me feel dizzy and slightly vertigo-y, like I’d just looked over the edge of a canyon and seen how far the drop was. If they found out I’d lied to them—and then went into the city, alone, at night, with Stevie… I shuddered even thinking about it.
The conductor announced that the Hartfield stop was upcoming, and Stevie nudged my foot with hers. “Let’s move cars,” she said, her lips barely moving.
“You don’t think it’s better to stay put?”
Stevie shook her head. “Safer this way,” she said. “Just move slowly and don’t look back.”
I was tempted to make a joke about Lot’s wife—or Oasis—but knew it wasn’t the time. As the train slowed to a stop and the station was announced, I got up, gathering my coat and looking resolutely straight ahead. Knowing that Stevie was behind me, I stepped out of the train onto the Hartfield platform. We ran for the next car up, stepping back onto the train again just as the doors were sliding shut.
I let out a sigh of relief as the train started to move again, grateful that nobody had collected our tickets yet, since it was pretty much impossible to change seats once that happened.
This car was a little more crowded than the one we’d just left, and we ended up in a two-seater with a toddler’s face peeking over the back of the seat in front of ours. As soon as we got close, she ducked down, and I just hoped she’d be quiet for the next forty minutes or so.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like kids—I was just burned out on them. I’d babysat for years, starting as a mother’s helper when I was twelve, until this fall, when I’d quit. I told my parents that it was just too much to take on senior year. But truthfully, I had hit my limit. My former clients still called—and some even called my mom, which felt extra sneaky—but even though I missed the money, I’d held the line. I was retired.
Stevie took the window again and I dropped into my seat next to her as the conductor moved through our car, calling, “Tickets!” Most people just held out their phones, but we held out our paper tickets to be punched, and then she handed them back to us—we’d gotten round trips and would need them to get home again at the end of the night.
It wasn’t until she walked away that I realized I’d been half expecting the conductor to look at us and ask what we were doing there, somehow suss out that we were doing something we weren’t supposed to. And even though next year at this time we’d both be on our own, in college and probably allowed to take whatever trains we wanted—it didn’t change the feeling that right now, we were doing something we shouldn’t, and it seemed to me like it would be obvious to everyone around us.
“It was a good call to change seats,” I said, handing my ticket back to Stevie. She zipped both of ours into the inside pocket of her clutch. “Way better than spending the entire ride hiding and panicking.”
Stevie laughed. “Well, I thought so.” She glanced toward the car we’d just left—we could see just a little of it through the swaying window at the back of our car. She turned to me again. “Do you think she saw you?”
“I don’t think so.” I shook my head, trying to get rid of the lingering canyon-vertigo feeling. “Thank god. I would have been in so much trouble.” I squashed my coat down next to me, wishing that we could have found a three-seater in this car too, since the two-seaters were tight if you needed to turn and talk to someone.
“Would they have pulled the nuclear option?”
The nuclear option was what my parents had held over me but never ever followed through on. And because I was aware that it was in their arsenal, I had made sure never to go too far over the line—which meant, I suppose, that it had been a successful deterrent. It was the worst consequence they could come up with, the one floated in those times when they’d found out I’d gone off campus when I was supposed to be in class, or lied about not having any work when I had a massive essay due, or forgot the fender bender I’d gotten into until they got the insurance claim.
It was simple but devastating: I couldn’t be in the plays. I didn’t think they would have made me drop out of a current production, but I’d never wanted to test it.
“They might have,” I said, knowing full well as I said it that there was no might about it. If my parents found out I’d lied to them and gone into the city alone, I wouldn’t be allowed to be in King Lear—and possibly not the musical, either. “It would be really ironic,” I mused, leaning back against the seats that were never as comfortable as I wanted them to be, “that I’d go into the city to save my part and then not be allowed to play it because I went into the city.” I shook my head. “That would be like ‘Gift of the Magi’–level irony.”
Stevie’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”