Page 27 of The Getaway List
Apparently the C train goes to BROOKLYN??
Anyway some hipsters pointed me back should be there in ten
Don’t do anything dweeby without me
“Well, if we’re going to be sitting here for a few minutes, I guess maybe I should … accept this?” says Tom, showing us his phone screen. It’s the same message I got from the “Dear, Love” Dispatch a few days before, saying an admirer wants to send him something.
I feel a pinch just under my ribs, something that comes and goes too fast to fully identify. It’s not that I’m jealous. It’s just unexpected, is all, to have this interruption to our planned day. If anything I should be relieved at the evidence of another friend of Tom’s, because even in my past few days here he hasn’t mentioned any of note.
Mariella leans in and taps the ACCEPT button for him, and the four of us walk back into the melee of the 79th Street entrance to meet the dispatcher. It’s the same guy who delivered my flowers, who evidently knows both Mariella and Tom—Mariella because it’s clear she’s had more than a few admirers, and Tom because he’s a coworker.
“Don’t go too wild with this one, man,” says the dispatcher, offering Tom a bright yellow bottle.
“Is that a tub of sunscreen?” says Luca.
Mariella takes it from the dispatcher, shaking it experimentally. “SPF 100. The sun is going to cry.”
Tom is also baffled, but genuinely pleased. “Well, you can never have enough of it,” he says, unzipping the front pocket of his backpack to reveal two other bottles of sunscreen.
“Who would send you that?” Luca wonders out loud as Tom redirects us to a shadier spot.
I nudge him with my shoulder. “Seems like a good mystery for a story prompt.”
Luca’s eyes light up. “You’re right.”
“So you’re a writer,” says Mariella to Luca.
Luca blinks, his eyes skimming his shoes. “Yeah,” he says. “Or—well—trying to be.”
Undeterred by Luca’s sudden shyness, Mariella pulls her camera out of her bag and says, “Same. I mean—with photography. I don’t have any patience for writing, but photos—I’m not any good yet, but I’m trying.”
Luca relaxes marginally, just enough that I can sense Tom relaxing a bit beside me, too. I’m so used to him easing the tension between people in and out of our friend groups I’m starting to realize that I took it for granted, assuming it was second nature to him. That he’s probably always on the lookout for little moments like this to smooth over.
“Okay, if you’ve got some torrid skin-care affair going on with someone, now’s the time to spill,” I say to him, hoping for a laugh.
It earns me a sheepish one, and in his distraction I take the other two sunscreen bottles and slide them into my own backpack before his starts splitting at the seams or crushes his lungs.
“Who knows? Maybe one just started.” He taps his elbow into my arm. “Still not as romantic as flowers, though.”
Or more romantic, given that it’s Tom, who probably came out of the other side of puberty with overpreparedness as his one and only turn-on. I’m trying to talk myself out of overthinking it and peppering Tom with more questions about his mysterious admirer when I’m spared the trouble by Jesse’s arrival.
“Oh, thank god,” says Jesse, putting one hand on my shoulder and the other on Tom’s like he just found home base. “Someone back there just catcalled my beautiful kidneys.”
“If you’ve got ’em, flaunt ’em,” says Mariella.
“Or maybe don’t,” says Luca in mild alarm. “I feel like you need at least one?”
“My thoughts exactly, buddy,” Jesse says to him.
We do quick introductions over the small ocean of sunscreen we swap back and forth between us, where we learn that Luca, same as Mariella, is a native New Yorker, and that Jesse and the band just came from doing a photo shoot, which is why Jesse’s jeans and gray tie-dye shirt are looking even more ripped than usual.
“So I said yes to this because Tom and Riley have never once led me astray, but also someone please explain what we’re doing?” says Jesse, once we take off in the direction of our first stop.
“Happy to,” I say. “So Lily Thorn had a charity walk around the loop of the park that I was supposed to take the bus up to do with Tom—what was it, winter break of freshman year?”
“Oh, right. You were more devastated by that than our breakup, if I recall,” says Jesse wryly.
I reach up and tug lightly on his ear. “Says the guy who never bothered breaking up with me in the first place,” I tease right back.
