“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That’s really cool.”
He gave an embarrassed shrug and looked up at the elevator lights again. “I mean—it’s not a movie yet. Not even close. But I’ve been working on storyboards, and one night when I was here, someone took about an hour to get their dry cleaning together for me to pick up, and Wes saw me sketching.…”
“What’s it about? Your movie, I mean.”
“It’s an adaptation,” he said, looking back at me, the tips of his ears slightly red. “Of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’ It’s a short story by Herman Melville. Do you know it?”
I shook my head. I’d never read any Melville. My dad carted around an old copy of Moby-Dick on our lake vacation every year, always promising that this would be the year he read it, but my mother and I had decided that this was just because he liked telling people that finishing it was his white whale. “What’s it about?”
“It’s about this guy—”
“Bartleby?”
“I thought you hadn’t read it.”
I rolled my eyes at that, and Cary grinned and continued. “Anyway, he’s a scrivener—he writes documents. And then one day he stops. When his boss and the other clerks ask him why, he just says ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”
“I would prefer not to?” I echoed.
“Yeah. And so he refuses to work, and then refuses to leave the office, always just telling people he’d prefer not to. And eventually he’s thrown in jail, and won’t eat—because he’d prefer not to—and then eventually dies of starvation.”
“So it’s a musical?” I asked, deadpan.
“I know,” he said, shaking his head. “Kind of a weird choice for animation.”
“Is this for a class?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized, all at once, just how much I didn’t know about this person. We’d ridden the streets of New York together, and it was easy to banter with him, but we’d skipped right over the foundational details. I’d assumed he was about my age, maybe a little older, but I wasn’t sure if he was in high school still, or in college. He’d been wearing an NYU sweatshirt when he’d first opened the super’s door, but I wasn’t sure if this meant anything.
There was a ding, and the elevator doors slid open, and a woman dragging a reluctant toddler by the hand struggled out the door. Cary picked up the bag and stepped into the elevator, holding his arm across the door for me, and I followed. He pressed PH and the doors slid shut.
“Not for a class,” he said, picking up the thread of the conversation again. “I graduated last spring and got into NYU, but I deferred for a year to try and earn some money. It turns out one of the most expensive schools in America is actually not cheap?” he asked this in a faux-amazed voice, and I laughed, because I could tell he wanted me to. “My aunt and uncle can’t really afford to help much, and I don’t want to be completely buried under debt my whole life, so I just wanted to try and make as much as I could.”
I was about to ask where his parents were, why he lived with his aunt and uncle, but something in his tone—the finality of it—stopped me. “Hence the multiple jobs.”
“Hence!” He raised an impressed eyebrow at me. “But yeah.”
“Six of them, right?” Cary nodded. “So what are the rest? I know about watering plants and helping your uncle. And delivering dry cleaning and laundry dressed like Tom Cruise.”
Cary laughed. “I also scan IDs at the New School Library,” he said. “And tutor two kids from Allen-Stevenson for the SAT. But their scores are actually getting worse, so I might need to start giving that money back.”
I counted in my head and realized that only took us to five. I took a breath to ask what his sixth job was when the elevator stopped and the doors slid open on floor ten. But there was nobody there, and after another second, they slid shut and we continued upward.
“So you’re… a senior? In Connecticut?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, even though I was still confused. “But wait, if this movie isn’t for a class…”
“I’m just doing it,” he said with a shrug. “The way I figure, you wait around for permission, you never stop waiting, right?”
“Right,” I murmured, like this was normal, and not a revolutionary idea to me—that you could just make a thing. That if you wanted to do something creative, you could just do it. It had never even occurred to me to do something on my own, or outside the theater department. “That’s really cool,” I said, giving him a smile. “Good luck with it.”
“Thanks,” he said. He smiled back, and our eyes met, and neither of us looked away. I took a breath to say something when the elevator stopped again, and a guy wearing the same uniform as the doorman downstairs was standing there with a cart stacked with suitcases. He waved us off. “I’ll get the next one.”
“No, it’s okay,” Cary said, holding his arm across the elevator doors and motioning him in. “We can fit.”
I wasn’t exactly sure about that, but after some maneuvering, both the guy and the luggage cart were inside—and Cary and I were standing very, very close to each other at the back of the elevator.
Our hands were just centimeters away from each other, and if it hadn’t been for the guy riding with us, I might have accidentally-on-purpose brushed my hand with his.…
“Whoa!” Cary reached forward to steady one of the suitcases, which had started listing to the side, about to topple off.
“Oh, jeez,” the guy said—he was on the other side of the elevator, and blocked by the cart.
“I’ve got it,” Cary assured him cheerfully. “I’ll just hold it.”
“Thanks,” he said, sounding grateful.
I looked over at Cary. His hand was now holding on to the suitcase, which meant he’d taken a step even closer to me and his hand was just above my shoulder. It was almost like his arm was around me; like he was doing the doorframe lean, but with suitcases.
He grinned at me. “Hi.”
I smiled back at him. I could see that his eyelashes curled up slightly; that he had the faintest scattering of freckles across his nose. “Hi.”
The elevator stopped at the twenty-fourth floor, and there was reorganizing as we helped the suitcase guy get both carts out before we started rising up again. Even though we now had the whole elevator to ourselves, we were still standing close together, much closer than we actually needed to, which was giving me excited, swoopy butterflies in my stomach. But before anything could happen, the elevator stopped—and the doors slid open at the penthouse.
“Okay,” Cary said, stepping off first and putting his arm across the elevator again until I got out. It looked like we’d arrived in a little private hallway—there was only one door ahead of us. “This one might be a little… weird.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, figuring that this explained the look that he and Wes had exchanged down in the lobby.
“You’ll see,” he said, as he knocked on the door.
“You sure you don’t want to put the aviators on?” I asked. I could still see them looped over the top of Cary’s white shirt.