Page 47 of The Getaway List
Something cracks in my heart then, because I know Tom’s lying about this, too. More to himself than to me. Tom could have done anything to make money to leave. Whatever reason he had for making the app, that wasn’t it.
“You could have told me all of this,” I say instead. I’m hurt, but not accusatory. Just genuinely confused. It’s not like Tom had anything to be embarrassed about. None of this has ever been in his control.
Tom doesn’t speak for a long moment, like he’s trying to figure out how to say it. “I just—it was all so weird. I feel like an asshole about how much I’ve hated all this. So guilty I didn’t think I had a right to feel that way at all. I didn’t think you’d understand.”
My eyes sting immediately, more out of frustration than anything. That Tom would think that about me, of all people. That I’d ever see him as anything but himself no matter the circumstances, and be able to understand because of that alone.
“Maybe I’m not—getting yanked onto planes and rubbing elbows with famous Chrises, but of course I’d understand,” I tell him. “I mean, shit, Tom. I told you. I told you how controlling my mom was, how I didn’t have anything that felt like my old life anymore. I know exactly what it means to want one that’s just yours. That’s why I’m here.”
I take a deep breath, trying to ground myself again. I shouldn’t have said that just then, maybe. It’s not what Tom needs to hear or what I really need him to understand.
“And even if that wasn’t true—I’m your best friend,” I say. “It’s my job to try to understand.”
Tom leans in and says quietly, “I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me much about that stuff with your mom at the time.”
“Well, when the hell was I supposed to?” I ask, the words unexpectedly sharp on the tip of my teeth. “It was hard enough to get you to answer a single text.”
And there it is. The truth is I’ve been lying to myself, too. Telling myself that it didn’t hurt, the past few months Tom spent shutting me out and how I had to pry myself back in. That it doesn’t hurt now, realizing he was still shutting me out in a way I couldn’t have seen coming. But it did, and it does, and it’s going to take more than a few weeks of us being friends again to get over it. Especially now that it’s somehow worse.
“I know. I know,” says Tom again, his voice hoarse with feeling. It means more than an apology, hearing him say that, but it also hurts more, too. Like we’re acknowledging out loud that we’re at a level beyond apology, one that’s deeper than we’ve ever been. “It’s been a long day. Let’s head up for the night and talk inside.”
Tom shifts in the direction of home, but I stay rooted to the cement.
“I’m going to spend the night with the band.”
I say the words as gently as I can, but Tom’s eyes immediately water anyway. He swallows them down and nods.
“All right,” he says. “Let me take you there at least.”
I shake my head. “I just need to be away from you for a little bit, okay?”
He looks down at the ground fast, but not before I see the hurt flash across his face. Like I reached into his rib cage and wrung out his heart.
The thing is I already feel too much of that same hurt to account for his. Because it occurs to me as I reach up and throw an arm around him—the quickest, loosest excuse for a hug either of us has ever given—that I was wrong. Tom doesn’t feel the same way I feel about him. He spent years hiding the biggest thing he has going on in his life. He made all these plans to leave without even telling me about them. He didn’t consider me in any of his plans; he didn’t even consider my thoughts on any of it important enough to clue me in.
It’s not just that I was wrong. It’s that my mom was right. It’s that there’s nobody else in the world I want to talk to more than her right now, and I know I can’t. Not if I want to look like I’m in control of my life, like I know what I’m doing out here. One call to her about Tom and I’m scared she’ll see it as proof that the whole thing is falling apart.
I wonder for a moment if it is. My throat is so tight it feels like a bottle top on a shaken soda, like all the words I planned on saying to him tonight are trapped in my chest, threatening to spill out of me. I don’t let them. It isn’t the time to tell him about staying, and as for the rest—there’s probably never a time now.
I release Tom fast and duck back down into the subway without looking back.
I let myself cry a few tears on the subway platform. A woman hands me a tissue without breaking her stride. It’s all very New York, I think, this feeling of being lonelier and less known than ever but being in a city teeming with people who have all felt shades of the same thing. The subway train feels like a strange safe haven from my thoughts, lulling me into a calm with its newly familiar rocking and whining, with these strangers who shoot me sympathetic glances that all seem to say, Been there, publicly cried about that.
There’s a deeper comfort in it all that I can’t fully process until I’ve stepped back out of the subway and back into the crowded, warm city night, the current of people swallowing me up with the same ease as ever. That for all my hurt over Tom, for all the heartbreak I know is just on the horizon, I feel more certain than ever that this is where I belong.
I’ve mostly pulled myself together by the time Jesse’s opening the door to me, revealing not just Eddie and Dai but a giant pepperoni pizza on the coffee table.
Jesse leans in and hugs me hard. “We saved you a slice.”
“Thanks,” I say, squeezing him back. “I’m just gonna go wash up.”
I see it on my face just as the old lights in the bathroom flicker on—the faint green chalk still on the tip of my nose. I skim my thumb over it, thinking of the fond look on Tom’s face when he smudged it there, of the electricity in his eyes when he pulled me in to dance, of the heat radiating between us when he held me just after. Of the near-smug certainty I had in thinking I had nothing to worry about, telling Tom how I felt about him. How I still feel, despite everything.
I smudge the green off. All these feelings—my love for the city, for the life I’m building here, for Tom—are all so new and flashy and bright. I should have known that some of it wasn’t built to last.
Chapter Sixteen
When I wake up on the couch the window is cracked open, and I can see the back of Jesse sitting on the fire escape. I rub my swollen eyes to wake myself up, then make us both cups of instant coffee in mismatched mugs in the kitchen and join him out there.
