Page 56 of The Getaway List
“Good, because I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself when I’m done.”
I walk back up the stairs to the register with him, a heck of a lot more at ease than I was two hours ago when Luca and I met up. A few days after we went “camping” he messaged me outside of the group chat to ask if I wanted to get lunch in Riverside Park, which I was familiar with both from my dispatch routes and because my mom and I have watched You’ve Got Mail no less than sixteen times. Because I’m primed to think of that park as “the famous kissing spot” and because I know Luca sent me something through the dispatch, I was worried that maybe he was inviting me for romantic reasons.
A worry I felt particularly silly for having when Luca immediately busted out a flyer for a short-story contest he saw at the library and started talking a mile a minute about how we had to had to had to enter it, calling me “dude” about ten times in the process. We spent the afternoon swapping each other’s Google Docs links for potential contenders for the contest. Once we’d exhausted our brains with plot points and prose we popped into the Strand on our way to an ice-cream truck to reward our efforts.
It’s there, standing over the shelves of all these published books that used to be nothing more but ideas floating around in authors’ heads, that I know how I want to use the notebook I was sent. I’ve been so hesitant to write in it, worried I wouldn’t be doing justice to the pages that felt so much more permanent than a Google Docs tab. It feels almost like stage fright, as if the notebook itself would be watching me, making sure I was writing something worthy of it.
But a short-story contest is something else entirely. For the first time, other people would be reading and critiquing our work. For the first time I wouldn’t just be pulling out a piece of myself and putting it into words, but giving it to other people to see, too. That feels notebook-worthy. That feels big.
And scary. Scary enough that I can’t decide whether or not I’ll actually submit anything. But whether I submit it or not, I know exactly where I want to start.
“Thank you for this,” I say to Luca, feeling strangely but happily overwhelmed.
Luca looks up from the shelf he was staring at. “For what?”
“I just—never imagined writing this much at all, let alone sharing it with other people. I thought that would be terrifying. And it still kind of is?” I say. “It’s just that I don’t feel that way swapping things back and forth with you.”
Luca gives a sheepish smile. “Yeah, well. Probably because I’m the least intimidating person on the planet.”
“No. Because you’re supportive and nonjudgmental and give really, really good writing feedback,” I tell him.
Luca blinks like he’d been expecting us to banter back and forth like we usually do, and the sincerity of the compliment doesn’t know how to land. I feel a sympathetic twinge thinking that Luca probably doesn’t have a lot of people in his life who talk to him that way, at least when it comes to writing. From what I’ve gathered his family is really tight—enough so that they all work at his family’s restaurant—but aren’t quite on his same literal or figurative page about this.
“Seriously,” I say as we make our way out of the bookstore. “There’s no way in hell I’d be considering something as big as a contest if I didn’t have you to talk writing with like this. Getting to toss ideas around with you is always one of the best parts of my day.”
Luca is uncharacteristically quiet for a few paces. In the silence I realize how ridiculous I’ve been, being disappointed at the idea that the notebook might have come from Luca. Here’s this whole person who is not only as eager to start from scratch as I am, but is so open about it that I don’t even have to think twice about texting weird ideas to him in the middle of the night, that I can already feel our writing styles starting to shift and grow as we feed off each other’s excitement.
“It’s been really nice to have someone to talk to about writing at all,” he says. “I’m so relieved you’re staying. Seriously. You have no idea.”
I grin. “Yeah. Manhattan’s sure having a hard time getting rid of me this summer, huh?”
I made this announcement the morning we all woke up on the roof. Jesse let out a celebratory howl and got lawless flickering his lighter in every direction. Luca leapt up and hugged me like I’d just declared second Christmas. Mariella was entirely unsurprised and deeply smug, whipping out the calendar on her phone and saying, “Ugh, it’s about time you made it official. Now I can stop pretending I didn’t factor your face into all the plans I made this fall.”
Tom didn’t immediately tell the others he was planning on leaving, but I nudged him into telling Mariella. I figured if he was going to leave someone else the app it should probably be more her decision than his, which he agreed with immediately.
I can’t say any progress has been made on finding anyone, though—not only was Tom not looking all that hard in the first place, but Mariella processed this task by patting Tom on the shoulder and saying, “No.”
“No?” Tom repeated.
“No,” said Mariella. “You were planning on running it remotely until you found someone, right? Just do that. This is your baby. So, no.”
I don’t know if they’ve actually worked any logistics out between them since, but I’m secretly grateful that Mariella and I feel the same way about it, at least.
All this to say, Luca and Jesse still don’t know about Tom’s imminent departure, so it only makes sense for Luca to ask, “Are we still going to try to get through the Getaway List this summer?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We’ve only got two things left. One is a road trip, which I guess we’d better figure out.”
I feel like the pressure is a bit off on that one, though. At some point or another Tom is going to have to leave the city. If he’s hoping to do that in relative peace and quiet, well, tough luck. He’s got too many friends who will want to see him off for that.
“I hope by ‘we’ you mean you and Jesse, because I think it’s safe to say none of the New Yorkers can drive,” says Luca. “Where is the road trip supposed to be?”
I shrug. “When we were freshmen Tom and I always said we’d take a road trip together when we graduated. It was the first thing we put on the Getaway List, actually. But we didn’t have any place in mind.”
It was like that in the old days. Meeting up with no plans for the day, no idea where it was going to lead us. As long as we had each other it didn’t matter where we went. Safe to say that neither of us imagined when we made the plan to road-trip together that we wouldn’t have seen each other in the four years in between.
“Well, what’s the other thing?” Luca asks.
“An oddly specific but easily achievable one,” I say. “You know that famous brownie place a few blocks from here?”
