Page 11 of The Getaway List
Tom claps a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I read somewhere that boringness skips generations.”
I catch his eye and mouth the words “too nice” at him and he shakes his head at me affectionately.
We spend the rest of the morning trekking through the East Village, stopping at an old punk-rock venue, at the second oldest church in the city, and at the block that makes up Little Tokyo, coming up with new backstories and wild happenings for our characters along the way. The instructor has a different person share their ideas each time, but as the youngest of the lot, we’re spared from the public reckoning. That is, until we reach Veselka, a famous Ukrainian restaurant that has been in a bunch of classic New York–set films, and the instructor says to us, “I’d love to hear your groups’ thoughts.”
Luca takes a step back, clamming up immediately. Tom nudges me forward. The quick pulse of fear feels like lightning just crackled through my veins, but if I’m the lightning, then Tom standing behind me is the solid place for it to land.
I take in a breath.
“All right, well. My character is a disgraced former astronomer since he misidentified a comet that wasn’t actually hurtling toward Earth like he said it was, so now he’s scraping up money with freelance gigs as a background actor,” I say. “He scores one in the back of a rom-com movie scene set here. Except he wants to save money so he eats as much prop food as he possibly can and sneaks pierogies into his pockets. But because his fatal flaw is that he’s too nice, he shares all his pierogies with his ridiculous best friend, even though that very same day she got into a fight with him because she hadn’t booked the gig as an extra. They heal through the power of potatoes and friendship.”
Tom’s laughing behind me because this is a rough approximation of real-life events. In third grade he’d scored so high on our school’s enrichment tests that he’d been invited to some kind of lunch thing that the other kids weren’t. Baby Tom’s version of “fuck the system” was to shove a bunch of brownies into his pocket like a tiny Robin Hood and deposit them on my desk, as I’d been wildly jealous at the time. (Of the free dessert, to be clear.)
People are starting to murmur around us in tones that sound amused and approving, and some part of me chafes at it because for all my loudness, there’s still that little-kid part of me that doesn’t like being seen. At least not too far down deep. I’m about to take a step back into Tom, only then I blink, remembering our bet.
“Oh!” I add. “But it turns out he hadn’t been wrong about the comet, and an hour or so later it squashed them on the spot.”
There’s a cluster of laughs and the instructor gives me a quick thumbs-up that sends a ridiculous and unfamiliar thrill through me. It’s rare that I’ve ever cared what a teacher thinks. I don’t fully understand why it feels so different until the instructor slides in next to me just before the class releases.
“Hey, ‘Tom,’” says the instructor. “I just wanted to make sure you knew we have regular classes that meet up once a week, some of them specifically for newer emerging voices. The next round of courses starts in the fall. I think you’ve really got the heart for this, if you wanted to join us.”
There’s absolutely no reality in which that can happen for me, but for a moment I’m too bowled over to care. It’s just that it’s been so long since I’ve felt like I’m in my element that I was starting to doubt I even had one. Like maybe I’d just lost the ability to be present and happy in something other than sneak-reading in extracurriculars or talking to my friends between classes. It’s such a relief that all I can think is that I can’t wait to tell my mom, only to remember that she still hasn’t texted me back since I got here.
“So how long have you and Riley been together?” Luca asks me, stirring me out of my thoughts.
I have to do some quick mental gymnastics to catch up with that sentence, and once I stick the landing I feel my face flush. “Oh. We’re not—he and I are best friends,” I say.
Luca’s eyebrows lift in surprise. “Really? I was sure you two were a thing.”
I want to ask what he means by that, but I’m too self-conscious and apparently so is Tom, who’s gone very still next to me like he’s bracing for my response every bit as much as I’m bracing for his. This is decidedly uncharted territory in our friendship. Nobody would have asked us this kind of thing growing up—we were too young then, and even in the brief time we weren’t, it was almost like Tom and I were too close to date.
In the end I shoot Tom a wry look and say to Luca, “Really? I always thought dating Riley would feel a little bit too much like dating myself.”
This earns me a smirk from Tom. Luca nods like he understands, then turns on his heel, then abruptly turns back and blurts, “Do you maybe want to swap numbers?”
“Oh.” Cue the guilt. We got so swept away in the workshop that I never copped to my little prank. Also I’m leaving the city in approximately twenty-four hours. “Uh…”
Luca mistakes my hesitation and says quickly, “Not to—I mean, not because of your mom. It’s just I don’t have any writer friends, and I like your brain.” Two flaming red spots form on his cheeks and he says, “What I mean is, your brain’s good. Nope, that’s worse. I mean—it’s okay if you don’t want to. But if you do—”
“Give me your phone,” I laugh.
He does, the rest of his face as red as his cheeks. I put my number in and hand it back to him.
Luca tilts his head at it. “How come you put ‘Tom’ in quotation marks?”
“I’ll tell you later. Nice to meet you, Luca.”
He waves merrily as he heads down into the subway station. “See you guys around!”
I start heading in what is apparently the wrong direction, because Tom puts a hand to my elbow and guides me in the other one. “Respectfully, can I have my identity back now?”
“Ugh. I was really enjoying being hot and nerdy and six foot holy shit,” I say, mostly to get a rise out of him. Trying to fluster Tom over the phone isn’t half as much fun as doing it in person. “Can’t you just let me have this?”
Except Tom answers smoothly, “You can just be hot and cool and five foot nine.”
I blink because historically I am the one who teases Tom and not the other way around. Particularly not about hotness. Before I can overthink the way my entire body just started to tingle, Tom bops me on the head and says, “And I’m not buying you lunch, by the way.”
“Excuse you?” I say, somehow both disappointed and relieved by the abrupt change in topic. “I won the bet fair and square.”
