I expect I’ll have to sell Mom on the idea, but she seems distracted. She agrees quickly and doesn’t ask for specifics.
“That was weird,” I tell Harrison as we step into the bright, cold sunshine an hour later. “Our first day here, Mom was intensely worried about me. Now it’s like she couldn’t care less.”
“Maybe because she trusts me,” Harrison says.
“It’s probably because she remembered she trusts me. I’m not the trouble-making type.”
“Really?” He raises an eyebrow. “You could have fooled me.” He takes a casual sip of his coffee as my cheeks turn pink.
“Did you really bring me to your dorm just to lend me a philosophy book?”
“That and On the Road. Kerouac hits the spot when I’m feeling confused about life.”
“You have that book in your room in the apartment.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny this fact,” Harrison says lightly.
“I knew it! You were trying to seduce me!”
“Only until I saw the apprehension in your eyes outside my room. Then I called it off. You were the one who mauled me in the elevator, if you remember.”
“Oh, I remember,” I say, surprising myself.
The High Line, it turns out, is an elevated concrete trail built on an abandoned railway. In warmer months, Harrison tells me it’s surrounded by wildflowers and overgrown grasses. Today, it’s flanked by skeleton trees. The view changes quickly as we walk. One second I’ll be looking at crumbling, graffiti-stained buildings, only to turn a corner and see an imposing skyscraper. It’s the whole of New York at once, old and new, dirty and expensive, planned and chaotic. And after the crush of people at Rockefeller Center and then in Santaland, it feels positively abandoned. Harrison takes my hand and we stroll slowly to the soundtrack of warbling winter birds, stopping every now and then for a quick kiss.
It’s a movie-ready scene, and for the first time in the history of ever, I’m the heroine. Too bad I can’t fully enjoy it. I check my phone repeatedly, hoping for a message from Clover, but there never is.
“Either Clover’s furious with me for telling her not to get married, or she’s so blissfully happy in her newly engaged life that she can’t be bothered to respond. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Let me see your phone.”
“What? No!” I clutch it tighter.
“Relax. I want to look at her Instagram. What’s her full name?”
“Clover James.”
He types on his phone. “Got it.” He’s silent for several seconds as he examines her pictures. “She’s pissed at you, which is good, because it means you can apologize.”
“How can you tell?” I grab the phone from his hands and inspect the stream of happy selfies. “Six disgustingly adorable pictures in two days. She’s hardly sitting around missing me.”
“It’s not like you joined a convent to mourn her,” Harrison deadpans.
“You know what I mean.” I nudge him with my shoulder. He responds by dropping his arm around me and pulling me into his side.
“She misses you. No one who is actually this happy works so hard to prove it. Right before Mom cheated on Dad, her Facebook page was practically a tribute to him. She was trying way too hard to convince herself that she was happy. Same as Clover.”
“I don’t know—”
“Look at this hashtag: #engagedandunderaged. She’s trying to get under your skin, to prove to you that she’s making the right decision. She cares about your opinion, and you two will work it out.”
I look back at the pictures and the hashtags. They could be directed at me, but they could just as easily be a dig at her mom, who is undoubtedly less happy about the engagement than I am. Which is why she needs a best friend right now.
My stomach sinks. I really messed up.
I continue to scroll, coming across another picture from Molly’s feed. This one is a selfie in a snow-covered forest.
“Is that him?” Harrison takes my phone, clicks on Fitz’s profile, and scrolls through the pictures. I lean over his shoulder as he zooms past several images of Fitz and me together. He goes back a full year, pausing on the homecoming-to-Halloween transition from Priya to Fiona. “That’s a lot of different girls.”
I bristle against the insinuation, but for once, I don’t leap to defend Fitz, because I can’t deny what Harrison is seeing. “I know.”
“Most guys do a profile purge after a breakup.”
“He’s not like that. He doesn’t erase people from his life like they never mattered to him.”
“So what’s so special about him?” he asks, his voice tinged with something very near jealousy.
What’s so special about Fitz? A fair question.
I cast about for a concrete example. Something to hold up in the sunlight and say, “This! Right here! This is why Fitz Wilding is my favorite person.” But it’s impossible to untangle five years of memories. It’s the snowstorm and the jumbo-sized bag of sour gummy worms in his truck console and the way he holds his breath when he introduces me to a new movie, waiting to see my reaction. It’s the way he clasped my hand in that cold science classroom and talked me through my panic attack. He saved me that day, and he’s been saving me every day since, pulling me from the scary black place that tries to pull me under.
“He knows me,” I say, answering Harrison’s impossible question. And he likes me anyway, I add in my head.
“Hmm.”
“Just say it.” I try to play it cool, like I’m not desperate to know what he thinks about me and Fitz.
“I bet all these other girls think he knows them too.” His tone is marked by his chronic cynicism.
“Probably.” They’d be wrong, though. He didn’t even know Molly’s afraid of heights.
“When you wrote that letter, you hoped he’d read it and pick you over this Instagram girl. Over any of these Instagram girls, really.”
“No. It was a breakup letter, telling him all the reasons I can’t be in his life anymore.”
Harrison presses his lips into a thin line. “Be serious.”
“I am.”
“But deep down, you hoped he’d see it for what it was and pick you.”
I want to tell Harrison he’s wrong, but the honest part of myself knows that he’s not. “That’s not a question.”
“Let’s say he does read it, and he does pick you. How would you know that you were any different than any of these other girls?”
His words are broken AC in the dead of summer, a drink sucked down the wrong pipe, an impossible decision I don’t want to make. They are every bad thing in this world. I stop walking, and with his arm around me, he stops too.
Every part of me wants to defend Fitz’s honor. But the words that once came so easily are gone. In their place is a horrible realization. “You’re right,” I whisper. It feels like a confession and a betrayal.
Even if Fitz did read my letter, even if he did kiss me or date me or plan one of his grand gestures, then what? It stands to reason that eventually I’d become one of those Instagram girls too.
“I’m always right,” Harrison whispers in my ear. He tucks me tighter into his side. It’s so couple-y, so possessive, that it startles me. But I lean into him anyway, because what do I have to lose?