Page 8 of The Getaway List
Once we’re settled in with the pizza I check my phone to see if she’s texted me back—I let her know when I got in. I can see she’s read the message, but she hasn’t replied.
“All good?” Tom asks.
I nod, setting the phone down and ignoring the slight churn in my stomach. This is our weekend. She’s taken enough time from us, so at least for the next two days, I won’t let her take any more.
I wipe my greasy pizza hands on a napkin, pull Tom’s copy of the Getaway List off the table, and say, “All right. We need a game plan. Do we try to do these in order, or go into full chaos mode for as many as we can in one weekend?”
Tom doesn’t bother looking at the list, staring at me with the beginnings of a smirk on his face. “Is that even a question?”
“Unmitigated chaos it is.”
Chapter Three
The truth is when I first met Tom I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. Our moms had both dragged us to some Facebook meetup for single parents in the area, which led us to a patch of dead grass claiming to be a playground where really there were only two swings, a broken slide, and an enormous tree, under which sat Tom, his nose buried in a chapter book.
“Doesn’t that kid go to your school?” said my mom. “Go say hi.”
A simple enough directive, except in my pre-Tom era, I was ridiculously, bitterly shy. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say. It was that anytime I tried to interact with someone I didn’t know, I could feel words getting stuck in my throat like an invisible fist was pulling them back down into me. So I ignored Tom, partially because of the irrational terror and also because even at seven I knew a nerd when I saw one, and the last thing I wanted to do was talk about books.
I lurked behind my mom instead. Ostensibly my mom and Tom’s had the least in common of the group—my mom was a twenty-six-year-old raising a surprise kid and pulling doubles in a coffee shop while I bounced around my aunts and grandparents like a windup toy, and Vanessa was forty-three, had Tom with a sperm donor, and had recently left her corporate finance job to focus on writing. When we showed up my mom’s high-waisted shorts and glittery crop top got her mistaken for my babysitter by everyone aside from Vanessa, who demanded to know where my mom had gotten her dandelion shoulder tattoo done because she was feeling quite liberated post–job quitting and wanted a dainty ankle tattoo of her own.
Already bored out of my skull, I turned to glance at book boy only to find he’d been swallowed by a cluster of kids. It was clear even from a distance that he was the heart of the little group—his smile was wide and easy, eyes lit up with a quiet mischief, and everyone was looking to him, clearly jostling for his attention despite his clear willingness to give it.
By then I was used to hovering on the fringes of things and slowly inserting myself into them, not unlike a tiny ghoul. Kids were just accepting of newcomers in that way, even the quiet ones. Except just then Tom turned around as if he’d been waiting to hear me approach and said, with an easygoing smile, “Hey, what’s your name?”
Naturally, I froze. I instantly and unrepentantly hated him for it. Now all these kids were staring at me and the whole point of not talking was so that wouldn’t happen in the first place.
Even at that age Tom was a master at brushing over awkwardness. He just went on to introduce himself and the others as if I hadn’t turned into a Riley-shaped rock. I stayed with the group but didn’t speak the whole afternoon, one wary eye on the other kids and one always, always on Tom, who seemed to be the axis everyone else was spinning around. By the end of the afternoon I couldn’t tell if I hated him or wanted to be his friend or wanted to be him, but it was all too complex for my kid brain to handle, so instead it just short-circuited.
To my absolute horror, our moms kicked it off so instantly that I went from meeting Tom to seeing him pretty much every other day. That summer Vanessa would pop by the coffee shop where my mom worked to do her writing, leaving me and Tom to split a brownie. My mom would take me to the park so she and Vanessa could jog on the circular path on Saturday mornings. Once school picked up they even started to carpool, my mom dropping us off in the morning and Vanessa picking us up. They hung out without us occasionally, too, and we’d end up watching Netflix with Tom’s babysitter or one of my aunts as they went to a wine bar or a pottery class or to get Vanessa’s first tattoo.
Tom still tried to talk to me, and sometimes I could even warm up to him enough to talk back—a massive relief to my mom, who watched me talk a mile a minute with my aunts and cousins but go frosty around just about anyone else. Most of the time we just sat quietly. Some of the time I’d even sneak-read over his shoulder, but apparently with the subtlety of a cowbell—he was always much slower turning the pages when I was hovering like that.
It might have just gone on like that forever, except one day Tom unceremoniously handed me a book and said, “If you’re going to read parts of it, you should start from the beginning.”
I’d only recently graduated to short sentences with Tom. “I don’t like reading.”
Somewhere there’s a parallel universe where Tom shrugged and took the book back and Tides of Time didn’t become my largest, loudest, and most enduring personality trait. But we exist in the universe where Tom pressed the book farther into my hands and said, “I want to know what you think.”
Maybe it was just the shock of it that made me open the first book. That Tom spent plenty of time around people itching to give him their opinions but for some reason he wanted mine.
He ended up getting a whole lot more opinion than he bargained for. That night I did something I’d never done and read an entire chapter book in one night. We were picking him up the next morning for car pool and before he could slide into the back seat I demanded, “Do you have the second one?”
It was the first time I ever saw the full wattage of a Tom grin aimed at me—not the practiced one he seemed to wear to put everyone at ease, but a genuine, bright-eyed one that lit up his face like a firecracker.
After that Tom probably couldn’t have gotten me to shut up if our lives depended on it. I tore through the entire Tides of Time series so fast that teachers were prying it from my tiny fingers during lessons, and I’d nearly take his mom’s car door off its hinges rushing to talk to Tom about it after school. I was obsessed with the main character, eleven-year-old Claire, a student who went to a school separate from space and time so she and her friends could learn to move through the continuum and keep the universe in working order. She was like me—rough around the edges, impulsive, slow to warm up to new friends but always ready for adventure. And Tom loved her, too. For some reason that made it easier to believe he actually wanted to be friends.
It wasn’t long before Tom and I started taking adventures of our own—some our moms approved of, some they didn’t, and some they never found out about. We couldn’t go to ancient Greece or 1950s New York or 3033 Mars, but we could sneak into the woods at the edge of the playground during recess and carve things into the dirt. We could use Vanessa’s phone while she was locked in her office in a “writing sprint” to map out the walk to the ice-cream shop in town and sneak out. We could go on tangents about what we would have done differently, or what we hoped would happen in whatever book came next, like writing fanfiction before I even knew what it was.
Somewhere along the way it wasn’t just Tom I was my loud, mouthy self with, but everyone else, too. Like being friends with Tom was the catalyst I needed to go ahead and spill my very opinionated guts out to the rest of the world. We were always RileyandTom or TomandRiley at the heart, but like Claire and her growing cluster of friends in the series, we both pulled kids into our orbit along the way. If Tom was steady like the sun, I figured I was like Mercury—the planet rotating closest to him, the one who got him in all of his shades, the one who showed the other planets how easy it was to be in his pull.
And then Tom left, and for a while it was like the sun went out. Like the Getaway List was an ember of it that was still keeping me in motion. I had to find new ways to navigate the universe without him, and even though it wasn’t as scary or lonely as I thought it would be, it never once dulled the ache of him being so far away.
Only now that I’m waking up in the same place as him again do I understand how deep it went; only now that we’re spending our morning packing our backpacks for the day and standing in line for breakfast, doing things that should be too mundane to feel so precious, do I understand the larger whole of all the little things we’ve missed.
We take the R train down to the East Village and I do my best not to gawk like the tourist I am, but I can’t help it. “The subway is so fucking weird. You go into a pit of darkness and it spits you out into a whole different world.”
“It’s all interconnected, too,” says Tom. “You can swipe into any station with the same fare and if you figure out the transfers you can just go anywhere in the city you want.”
