Page 29 of The Getaway List
At the top of the castle there’s a sweeping view of the pond just below us, of the bright green lawn beyond it and the massive trees that frame it, of the city buildings beyond them. It’s water and green and concrete and sky all at once. Luca leans against the edge of the castle beside me and for a moment we just stand there and try to take it in from all sides.
“To answer your question from before,” I say, not even sure I’m going to say it until it’s spilling out of me. “What I really love about the series was the characters could just go and do whatever they wanted. Claire—the main character—nobody ever tells her what to do or where to be, or if they tried she just trusted her own gut. She got to be a bit of everything all at once and learn from her own mistakes.”
Luca nods, uncharacteristically quiet as he considers this. “So it wasn’t even the plot so much. Just the feeling of it?”
My throat gets tight, because shit. He just hit an unexpected nail on the head.
“Yeah,” I say. And I could tell him more about that feeling. How sometimes it’s felt less like a story and more like home. Almost like the series was written so it could bring me all the best things in my life—a love for reading. Inspiration to write. Ideas for adventures of my own. Tom.
“Maybe that’ll be the ticket, then,” says Luca, his eyes shifting between me and the view. “A feeling worth writing about.”
I clear my throat. “Maybe,” I say.
I turn to look at Tom but just then Jesse has distracted him by pointing out a cluster of turtles in the pond below. It’s Mariella behind us instead, her camera poised halfway to her eye, watching Luca carefully like he’s the viewfinder. She senses my eyes on her and gives me a quick smile, lifting the camera and saying, “Say ‘cheese.’”
Luca beams, throwing an arm around me, and I stick my tongue out, putting bunny ears behind his head. She gets Jesse and Tom next, the two of them immediately shifting to stand back-to-back like secret agents, the way they did when we were clowning around in junior high. Then I take the camera from her and pull her in for a selfie. She’s so surprised she almost forgets to smile, then squeezes me into a hug so effusive that I can’t hold the camera straight, prompting Tom to take pity on us and come over to take the picture himself.
“Very cute,” he says. “Particularly since none of us are suffering from the oozing sores left from poisonous time-worm bites.”
“We look after our own,” I say.
Our next stop is the Bethesda Fountain. Mariella leads the way because she’s already been plenty of times—“They filmed scenes from that Gossip Girl reboot out here,” she tells us by way of explanation—while the boys hang back, Jesse regaling Tom and Luca with some kind of shenanigans he and the band got into where they got locked out of their apartment and rented a karaoke room so they could power nap until their super let them in.
It’s a Saturday so the entire space is crawling with tourists, not just by the towering fountain with its imposing angel statue staring down like it has eyes on every one of us, but in rowboats in the lake just beyond it and the little tunnel that leads to it, with the interiors all done up in elaborate, ornate art that makes it feel like we’ve stepped into a mini cathedral.
For a moment I’m so stunned by the beauty of seeing it all up close—the tunnel so strangely holy-seeming and out of place in this bustling city, so much so that everyone in it seems to be talking in hushed whispers despite a man performing with a giant bubble-blowing rope just outside of it—that I forget to speak. Mariella doesn’t seem to mind, though, raking over the space like she’s trying to see it again with fresh eyes before she looks at it through her lens.
I open my mouth to blurt out that this was the spot where Claire and her friends used leftover energy from the time stone to bring the angel statue to life to prevent a doomsday flood brought on by misplaced space matter slowly leaking into New York throughout the 1890s, but Mariella pulls back from her camera lens before I can deeply alarm both her and myself with the amount of fake history I know about this city.
“I’m glad we did this. I feel marginally less dweeby out here with my camera when I’m not alone.”
“Excuse you?” I counter. “Tides of Time is dweeby. Whatever rabid animal Jesse just mimed at the boys back there is dweeby. I’m pretty sure chic girls with cameras don’t apply.”
Mariella jokingly flips her hair back, but can’t quite commit to the gesture, like she’s out of sync. She sighs and says, “I don’t know. I’m new at this. I’m running off a few YouTube tutorials and I feel like every legitimate photographer in the city can take one look at me and know I’m a shiny little fraud.”
“Well, everyone has to start somewhere,” I remind her. “Those shiny little non-frauds all probably sucked at first.”
Mariella cackles. “So you admit that I suck.”
“Nah. I don’t have an eye for it anyway.” I tilt my head at her, taking in her fancy camera bag and the zipped-up pockets for lenses. Her inexperience is maybe more apparent in the overly cautious way she’s handling the equipment she still doesn’t know how to use, but clearly carefully chose. “Why photography, though? You said you needed new hobbies. Did you just sort of spin a wheel and decide on this one?”
To my surprise Mariella tilts her head back at me and says, “It’s okay, Riley. I’m sure Tom’s told you by now.”
“Told me what?”
Mariella half rolls her eyes, like she’s trying to hold on to her usual edge but can’t quite. “About my whole thing in high school.”
“Tom hasn’t said anything,” I tell her. “Just that you’re a whiz with computers.”
If I’m not mistaken Mariella’s expression wobbles a bit before she says, “Ugh. Of course he hasn’t. He’s just an insufferably good person, isn’t he?”
“From the start,” I agree.
Mariella looks over her shoulder to where Tom is no doubt animatedly giving Luca and Jesse the same pseudo-tour-guide lecture about the history of the fountain that he gave me over dinner last night.
“Well. The long and short of it is I was hanging out with a different crowd back then. And they got into things I felt like I had to get into, too. And then when I decided not to anymore, they just kind of—” Mariella makes a “poof” gesture with her hands, then gives another wry eye roll to play it off. “Anyway. I felt like I needed something that was just mine. Except doing something that’s just mine is kind of lonely business, it turns out.”
There’s no way for me to fully understand where she’s coming from—not without knowing the details and how she feels about the whole thing in the aftermath, at least. But I recognize the feeling just the same. That untethered, scary feeling when time slides out from under you so fast that you’re not expecting to look up from the rush of people passing through it and realize you’re on your own.
