Page 55 of The Getaway List
“Mid-August. I’m waiting for my mom to come back so we can still spend the week with her. I’m sure she’ll want to take you all over the city.” He shifts his hand off my face and there’s more of a strangeness in it leaving than it being there in the first place. “I’m sure you already know this, but you’re welcome to stay with us even after I go. I feel like I can very freely speak on my mom’s behalf about that.”
“I know,” I say. “But it’s like you with the app, I guess—I have to know I can do it on my own.”
He nods knowingly, then slowly shifts himself onto his back beside me, both of us looking at the sky again.
I know any moment now that the others are going to spill back onto the roof, and there’s still so much I want to say to him. So much I feel like I can’t, without being the most selfish person in the world. So instead of saying any of that, I ask, “Can I tell you something ridiculous?”
Tom’s voice is wry. “I’ll allow it just this once.”
The stars in front of us are faint but feel so strangely stark despite it that I realize Tom’s right. This might be the first time we’ve seen them all summer. Like the sky was only waiting for this night to split the clouds and light just enough for us to have this moment now.
I point at the sky but tilt my head so I’m talking into his ear. “I know that’s Orion’s Belt,” I say.
Tom’s lips quirk immediately, his eyes still trained on the sky. “Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka,” he says, naming the stars in it with that same cadence he did when we were kids, each of them like tiny touchstones on his tongue.
“And I know that moon up there is currently waning,” I tell him.
Tom hums in agreement. “Not unlike the pizza we’re about to inhale.”
A beat passes before I pull in a resolved breath. “Actually, I know most of the constellations in your nerdy book,” I confess. “I learned them two years ago, when we were supposed to do this the first time.”
Tom turns his head toward me then. “You did?”
“Yeah,” I say, nudging his shin with my foot. “Couldn’t have you shouldering the burden of being the only nerd on the trip. That’s what best friends are for.”
Tom leans his head in closer, just close enough that I turn my head, too. That I can see the faintest spray of freckles on his nose, the ones he gets every summer despite his diligent sunscreening. I resist the urge to lift a finger and tap them each in turn the way he pointed up at the sky, and have the strangest sense in that moment that he’s resisting something, too.
“This is going to sound so cheesy,” says Tom. “But that makes me so happy. The idea that we know all the same stars. That we’ll always have that in common even when we’re far away.”
It doesn’t sound cheesy. It sounds heartbreaking. Fuck stars, I want to tell him. Every single one of them. I’d rather have you.
Tom does something that knocks that thought right out of my head, though. He inches his hand toward mine, interlocking our fingers and squeezing tight.
“I’ll miss you,” he says. “Same as I did all these years. But I’m happy you found your place here. I really am.”
I want to be able to say the same for him, but I can’t. Because I won’t miss him the same way he misses me. And I’m not happy for him. I’m uneasy. I still can’t say why.
But I’m spared from having to say any of that, because the door to the roof creaks open again. Just before Jesse and Mariella and Luca clamor back onto the campground Tom squeezes my hand one last time, quick and reassuring, then lifts himself up from the sleeping bag and diligently fishes out the paper plates and napkins.
Maybe there’s some other version of this summer where the five of us took that train upstate and settled out in the mud and trees like real campers, but if there is I wouldn’t want it. We spend the rest of the night so high up and insular that it feels like Manhattan’s our kingdom and the rumpled sleeping bags are our thrones. We polish off the pizza while looking at the videos we took of our more epic karaoke moments last night, including the one where Luca and Jesse jumped on the couch so aggressively to a One Direction song that it’s frankly a miracle they’re both intact today. Jesse whips out the Reese’s for his famous “s’mores hack” and starts lighting marshmallows on fire with his pocket lighter. Luca tells a ghost story about a kid who haunts the F train that’s somehow so unexpectedly frightening that we make Mariella describe every cute dog in her building to recover from our mutual terror. The others indulge me and Tom when we go off on a tangent about “star hopping,” a sport in Tides of Time where pilots in the distant future operate tiny ships that go a hundred times faster than light speed in a Space Olympics.
The tent turns out to be more of a prop than anything, because in the end we all decide to lie out on the roof under the open, cloudy sky.
“We can make wishes on pigeons,” jokes Mariella.
Luca turns his head to look at her and says earnestly, “I always make them on planes.”
Mariella reaches out and pats Luca on the hand like she’s just too overcome by the cuteness of that to say anything else. I don’t miss the quiet moment when Luca lifts his hand to briefly squeeze hers. They don’t hold hands, but they hold each other’s eyes for a long beat before looking back up at the sky with identical close-lipped smiles.
Over the course of the night we wish for a whole lot of things between us, including and not limited to all our hopes and dreams coming true, more pizza, and the rumored Tides of Time prequel to come out faster. We wish until we start running out of silly things to wish for and start dropping off one by one, until I’m pretty sure I’m the only one still awake, Tom breathing even breaths on one side of me and Mariella on the other, Luca and Jesse lightly snoring on the other side of her.
The faint stars are fully blotted out by clouds by the time I finally shut my eyes, but I like the idea of wishing on planes better. Knowing that half the ones overhead might be leaving this city, but they’ll eventually come back again.
Chapter Nineteen
“I can’t believe I’ve just been existing in the human world all these years without having read these books,” says Luca, who is currently crouching in the YA section of the Strand’s Upper West Side location, digging for the fifth Tides of Time novel. “No wonder you and Tom are so obsessed.”
“Just wait until you finish and don’t have to worry about spoilers. Tumblr and the Archive are a black hole of fan art and fic,” I warn him.
