Page 72 of The Getaway List
I hold my hand out. “I can mostly agree to these terms.”
My mom lets out an exasperated laugh, taking my hand to shake. “You’re lucky you’re my favorite daughter.”
I beam. I am lucky. Lucky that no matter where I go, I have two places to call home—one wherever my heart leads me, and one right here that I’ve had from the start. Lucky that no matter how much time passes and no matter how different a person I become, the comfort of both feels exactly the same.
Chapter Twenty-Four
My mom stays for the rest of the day, the two of us swapping New York stories and walking around Central Park and grabbing dinner at a café in the West Village where someone does, in fact, recognize her as “Genny with the green hair!” so loudly that my mom momentarily looks like she might die on the spot. But I can’t help but notice how undeniably pleased she looks when the bartender leans in and tells me conspiratorially, “Nobody could tear it up at karaoke like your mom over here. Shania Twain was shaking in her boots.”
By the end of the day she seems almost transformed—like the shine I’ve always seen under the surface is working its way out of her with every street corner we pass, with every sweet and wild and downright bizarre memory they bring up along the way. She practically seems electric when she’s hugging me goodbye to go home on the same bus I almost got on last night. It’s a strange role reversal for a moment, being the one to wave goodbye on the curb and watch her leave, but one that suits us. One we’ll grow into over time.
Tom’s true to his word. He texts me when he gets in, and a few times a day. We talk on the phone in the evening. He tells me about working on his aunt’s online presence for the winery, about helping out ringing up customers at the front after they go on one of the hourly tours. I tell him about the deeply lawless group chat I’ve been added to with the band as we cobble together a bunch of cast-off furniture from random curbs and flea markets for the apartment. I tell him about my mom coming up, and he seems so genuinely, painfully relieved that I gently call him out on having texted my mom these past few weeks.
“I’m sorry,” he says sincerely. “I only started doing it when you said at the beginning of the summer how upset you were not to be talking to her. I guess I just—I don’t know what I thought.”
I know what he thought, but I do something I’ve been doing a whole lot of with Tom lately, even if it makes me hate myself a little bit. I avoid the truth right along with him.
In the meantime, everyone in our little group is so busy—Mariella shopping with her cousins for outfits for their trip to Puerto Rico, Luca working extra shifts for his parents with one of his brothers out of town, Jesse and me with the move—that two days pass before we’re all together again, and the others realize Tom is already gone.
At first we’re all too startled to fully let it sink in—me because I assumed Tom just told the others individually, the others because they’re confused that I let it happen at all.
“You had one job, Riley. One job!” says Mariella. “And you somehow let Tom leave this city without us throwing a goodbye- party-slash-kidnapping?”
“Unfortunately Tom has something called ‘free will,’” I say, without making eye contact with anybody.
“Fuck free will,” says Mariella, loud enough to make Dai flinch mid–pancake flip.
“This ugly one is yours,” Dai informs her, when it lands halfway out of its ring mold.
Since moving in, pancakes are pretty much all we have consumed, thanks to buying a bunch of flour and sugar in bulk. It started with my mom’s buttermilk pancakes, then Eddie’s dad’s Swedish crepes, and now Dai’s mom’s fluffy Japanese pancakes. I cannot emphasize enough how disastrous all our collective attempts at cooking these evenly on our ancient stove have been, making it all the more hilarious that Dai would dare refer to any of these pancakes as “the ugly one,” but at least they have all been delicious.
“Incorrect. I’m too cute for ugly pancakes,” Mariella says right back. She scans the rest of the new apartment, which is not hard considering it is the size of a shoe, making eye contact with the rest of our friends. “Are we really going to let this whole Tom thing stand? I mean, shit. He Irish-goodbye’d the whole city.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence that I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be the one to fill, because without Tom here I’m the closest thing to a representative Tom has. I’m so torn that I don’t know what to say—what I actually feel, or what I know Tom would want me to say to put everyone at ease.
That’s just the thing, though. It’s Tom who always knows the key to putting everyone at ease. It’s me who yanked this group together, trying to give him something he gave me when we were eight—a group of friends he could rely on. But it’s Tom who’s held us together. Who eases the tension away with a few choice words or an easy laugh. Who always has the practical solution or a bright side to any setback. Who sometimes just sets people at ease with his presence, that grounding, nonjudgmental way of his.
It’s only been a few days, but everything feels stilted with him gone. Like we’re all struggling to find a new rhythm with each other, since Tom was the steady bass beneath us. I feel a pinch of guilt. For all I’ve been worried about how Tom leaving will affect me, I didn’t think much on how it might affect the others, too. Jesse, who’s known Tom even longer than I have, so far back that Tom must be like an anchor for him in this new place. Mariella, who has been Tom’s mutual lifeboat. Luca, who is always the first to put himself down, a habit he’s gradually started breaking out of with the easy, small ways Tom will build him back up.
I used to think of Tom like the sun, pulling all of us into his orbit. But it’s not necessarily that people follow Tom. It’s just that he helps steady them. He’s the quiet matter in between that holds us together.
Evidently I’ve taken too long to decide what to say, because Mariella’s lip twists to the side. “I’ve watched Tom for the past four years, and well—he’s been a completely different person this summer. But until then he was, like, such a loner that we were all this close to spreading rumors he was a vampire. And now he’s off at some winery full of stuffy adults that seems like loner on advanced mode.”
Jesse walks the half step from the kitchen to the couch, a similarly worried look on his face. “Yeah. I texted him a bunch of times after he moved here and got pretty much nada. I only knew he hadn’t been recruited for a Mars mission because he sometimes talked to Riley. And I feel like the same thing is already starting to happen,” he says, lifting up his phone to hold up the group chat. It’s full of memes and pictures of cute dogs we’ve seen, but noticeably absent of one thing, which is any texts from Tom.
Luca, who is sitting close enough to Mariella on our scavenged couch that they’re practically squished together, looks at me thoughtfully.
“Well, Riley’s his best friend,” he says. “If she thinks it’s okay, then—it must be, right?”
Jesus. Luca could have sharpened a knife to fit exactly under the grooves of my ribs and not have hit a point as sore as that one. It must be written all over my face, because Mariella narrows her eyes at me, leaning in.
“Does Riley think it’s okay?” she asks, even as she makes direct eye contact with me.
I’m sitting on the floor for lack of chairs, but I’m still decidedly in the hot seat. I feel everyone shift slightly to look at me—Luca and Mariella from the couch, Dai and Jesse from the stove that is probably way too close to the couch for comfort, even Eddie from deep in his laptop screen.
“I…”
My throat’s gone dry. Tom isn’t here, and it makes me realize that he’s not the only one of the two of us who has been keeping things from the other. I might have told him the truth of my feelings about him, but I didn’t tell the truth of my feelings about what he was doing. I grazed the surface, maybe. But I avoided the core.
