Page 74 of The Getaway List
“Because he’s all up in his head about this shit with his mom, maybe,” Mariella counters. “But you already knew that.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “Yeah. I think he does, too. But it still felt wrong to try to stand in his way.”
Mariella nods, seeming to visibly recalibrate. “For noble reasons, sure. But the rest of us are not beholden to that, and we’ve got more than enough proof of how happy Tom is here to make him see sense. Exhibit A.”
Mariella produces her phone and opens up the shared file where she’s kept all the photos she’s taken of the group this summer. She swipes her thumb through them in big, bright, colorful clusters—the day we spent in Central Park, the times we met up for pizza and cheap Tuesday movie tickets, the night we spent camping. It’s a blur of buildings and limbs in motion and wide smiles, including Tom’s, over and over again.
She lingers on one that has my heart in my throat. It’s me and Tom the night we all went to Jesse’s show on that hotel roof. Tom has an arm around my waist. I’m looking straight ahead—embarrassed, I remember, to be feeling as intensely as I did at his touch. But Tom is staring down at me with a smile so soft and bright that it reminds me of the way his face looks when he’s talking about constellations, so awed by the expanse of the universe that his eyes get misty with it.
My own eyes are misting now, but even then I’m reluctant to let myself be swayed. “What are we going to do, scrapbook him back to the city?” I ask.
I mean it as a joke, but Mariella jolts to attention like she’s already grabbed the idea and run a mile with it. Before I can even think to talk her down, Jesse says, “If we did that, I kept all of the ticket stubs and flyers from places we went.”
Mariella and Luca nod enthusiastically, but I still don’t move. Even if we wanted to do that, we’ve hit a snag—one that’s hard to define, but I can sense we’re all feeling in the next few moments of quiet. It’s all well and good to document all the fun we had this summer, but life can’t always be like it was these past few weeks. We’re all hurtling into our own versions of the city right now, separate from each other, and Tom has seemingly rejected his.
“But Tom was already here for all of that,” says Luca sadly. “He knows.”
I feel a tide of something starting to well up in me, a sadness I’ve tried to tamp down the past few days bubbling up to the surface. It’s one thing to push it down for my own sake. It feels impossible to do it when everyone around me is feeling it, too. I can’t help but start to write the whole idea off.
Then my phone buzzes next to me, reminding me of my afternoon dispatch shift, and of something else entirely.
Tom didn’t reject New York. He only thinks he has. But he took part of it with him, maybe the most important part—despite swearing upside down and backward he was done with this place, he never found a replacement to run the app. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think he never planned to—he wouldn’t have really hired someone without running it past Mariella. If he’d been serious about it, he’d have told Mariella from the start.
“The ‘Dear, Love’ Dispatch,” I say. “As soon as Tom started telling me about it I was obsessed with the whole idea. I was always looking up cute stories about it that people were posting online. Like tweets and TikToks and even reviews in the app store.”
I look up, feeling oddly self-conscious in front of everyone, now that it seems like I’m all in on this, too. Now that we’re committing to something, knowing there’s a chance it still might not work.
I clear my throat. Mariella’s right. I’ve been brave, but now I’m on the other side of that. Now I need to figure out how to harness it—not just for Tom, but the friends who need me to be right now. Someone has to lead the charge, and for the first time in my life, I feel ready. Like even after all these weeks I’ve spent here discovering new things about myself and what I can do, I’m still shifting into someone stronger, someone new.
“Maybe if Tom read the stories and saw everything he’s done to connect people here, it would help him feel like he really belongs,” I explain.
For a moment nobody speaks, but I don’t feel the flicker of doubt I’m expecting. Instead I feel a measurable difference between the Riley I was when I got here and the Riley I am now. One that’s still figuring things out, sure. But one I couldn’t have imagined the day I was sitting in that graduation hall, trying desperately not to cry as it felt like everyone I knew was leaving me behind.
It was easy to blame that feeling solely on high school, on my mom’s scheduling and all the things that kept me distracted. But it was also that I just hadn’t grown into this person yet. One with confidence. One with clarity. One who has taken charge of enough of her life to take charge when it matters most.
“Well, fuck,” says Mariella. “That’s beautiful.”
Jesse nods. “I love that.”
Luca looks up nervously, and I worry he’s about to work himself into a state about not having an idea of his own to contribute, but then he says, “If you guys all want to send everything to me, I can be the one to arrange it all. Turn it into an overarching story,” he says. “If there’s anything I’ve learned this summer, it’s how to structure a plot.”
Mariella kisses Luca on the temple. “That’s genius.”
Luca’s lips press into a smile that makes his entire face look like a sunbeam. I raise my eyebrows at Mariella, who has yet to update me on her situation with Luca. She gives me one as unsubtle as she can possibly give when she answers my eyebrows with a cheeky wink.
“All of this is great,” says Jesse, “except what do we do once it gets sent in the mail? Four-way call him and yell at him to come home?”
The idea that’s forming in my head right now is a Riley classic, because if we follow through with it, it will be exactly on brand: unmitigated chaos. But if there were ever a time for it, it’s right now.
“Well,” I say slowly, “there’s one more thing on the Getaway List we haven’t checked off.”
Mariella looks between me and Jesse, eyes gleaming with delight. “Which one of you suburban clowns knows how to drive?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
As it turns out, nobody in their right mind will rent a midsized car to a bunch of eighteen-year-olds with an armful of Sour Patch Kids and a mission. In the end we all take the bus down to Virginia, where my mom meets us with the car and finally meets all of my new friends. We grab a quick bite at my mom’s coffee shop for lunch, and any lingering nerves I have about us taking this trip are pushed aside by the pride of watching my mom start to take a shine to my friends the way I knew she would when she got to know them. By the time we’ve polished off our sandwiches and lattes, Mariella and my mom have swapped enough true-crime podcast recs to warrant both their arrests, my mom has all but adopted Luca, and Jesse has finally gotten her to tell him the real stories behind her few tattoos he’s been pestering her about since we were kids (most of which involved friends and Fireball).
My mom hugs me on our way out, squeezing me tight. “I trust you. But be careful.”
