Page 79 of The Getaway List
For a few months we didn’t think anything of it. We’d just started organizing weekly write-ins for writers in the neighborhood, and were polishing up more short stories to submit to workshops and enter in contests, the same way we’d been doing since the very first one we both lost. Soon enough those handwritten lists Luca and I were making were getting so long that the truth of it was hard to deny.
“Shit,” I said to Luca one day. “These look a hell of a lot like the Getaway List.”
Within the month Mariella and I were plotting to make an app version of it, something we could share not just with the tourists from the coffee shop but anyone visiting or living in the city to use. It started out as something we were half joking around with. I guess now that we’ve locked in real live investors and have a launch date in a few days and T-shirts with our logo on them, it’s anything but a joke now.
Tom hands me a cup of iced coffee. “Liquid courage,” he says.
I take it from him, grateful, then toss back half of it like a shot. Which is naturally the moment my mom walks in the door, Vanessa in tow, both of them watching me overcaffeinate myself with mild alarm.
“Hey, kid,” says Vanessa, pulling Tom in for a hug.
My mom does the same to me, even though I only just saw her at the coffee shop this morning. Of all the plot twists of me coming to New York, maybe the biggest came six months ago, when my mom finished her degree and decided to move up here, too. She’s been working for a small advertising firm and doing community theater in her spare time. She settled into the city so quickly that it reminded me of what she said to me when she was trying to convince me to come home: that the city would still be there waiting for me later. It’s clear from the way she’s enjoying every minute of her time here that it was something she needed to hear herself.
“Looks great in here,” says my mom, an unmistakably proud gleam in her eye. “Anything else we can do to help?”
I shake my head. “You’ve done enough already.”
In fact, aside from helping plan this party, both my mom and Vanessa have helped as scouters for the app—my mom to help keep it updated with things going on in the theater scene, and Vanessa with writing and art. It’s been a fun way for all of us to reconnect again, particularly for my mom and Vanessa. They didn’t quite pick up their friendship where it left off, but they’re finding a new version of it now.
Vanessa says something that makes Tom laugh. She pats Tom on the back as she releases him, a little too emphatically, but Tom doesn’t seem to notice. He just seems happy to have her here in the first place.
I wish I could say things were perfectly fine with Tom and Vanessa, but at the very least I can say they’re working on it. It turns out Vanessa had been sending things through the dispatch knowing that Tom created it. She’d known since the start, for better or for worse—the worse being that she assumed when Tom was being withdrawn or distant from her, it was because he was throwing himself into the app. She also assumed Tom knew it was her sending the items since he was in charge of it, not taking into account that Tom would try to protect the anonymity of it across the board. It was basically a mess of misfires and miscommunication that all came to a head during a series of long talks Tom had with Vanessa last summer.
I think being around my mom has helped to some degree. Seeing the way my mom and I have navigated this new version of our relationship—one where we’re close by, living independently, but still checking in with each other—gives her a template for how she should handle Tom. By actually talking with him and being present, instead of keeping tabs on him from afar and assuming he knows that she cares. By actually listening to what he needs from her instead of finding a way to solve his problems with convenient trappings of their new life.
It’s a work in progress, but Tom is happier. Genuinely and actually embracing the city, now that he’s living separately from his mom and making friends with his fellow Ivy League nerds at school. Plus he’s taking a more publicly active role in the app he made, so he can see the joy it’s spreading firsthand. He feels settled again—not into his old self, but a happy medium between the two. The Tom who draws people in and the Tom who knows precisely the feelings that make people pull away in the first place.
He catches me staring at him and smiles so easily that, as usual, I can’t help but smile back. It’s the kind of smile that grounds me. That makes this big moment in our lives feel like it’s just one of many: nothing to worry over, but plenty to get excited about.
The party starts in earnest a few minutes later, a whirlwind of shaking hands and explaining the app and running around to make sure we’ve got enough drinks and small bites going around. I’m not nervous for any of it. We’ve worked damn hard this past year and know exactly what the app is capable of—through both Tom’s and Mariella’s experience and all the rigorous testing we’ve done. The afternoon slides into early evening and we’re all feeling triumphant and exhausted as we clean up what’s been left behind (or rather, eat up what’s been left behind).
Once we’re finished I flop back on a lounge chair and say, “That was a lot of extroverting even for me. I’ll be happy if I never have to speak to another human again.”
“Well, it was nice knowing you,” says Mariella, flopping into the chair next to me. She reaches out a fist and I bump it with my own, the two of us exchanging a look that says all the sappy things I know better than to say to her in front of an audience: that we’re so damn proud of what we’ve done here, and prouder still to have done it with a best friend.
Once we have our moment I sink in deeper and say, “If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the moon.”
Then Tom is standing over me, offering me his hand.
“Actually,” he says, “I have an idea in that vein. If you’re up for it.”
I glance over at him and see a shade of that conspiratorial look in his eye he’d get when we were kids and about to go off on some half-baked adventure. Only that look has shifted these days. It’s grounded and deliberate and suits Tom well. New York is an adventure that has no end or beginning, and we’ve spent the entire past year going on as many as we can—not a Getaway List anymore, but one that plants us new roots here every time.
“You got a spaceship parked out back?” I ask.
“Next best thing,” he says. “But it will involve a train.”
It turns out I was wrong about us not doing anything to mark our one-year anniversary, because next thing I know Tom and I are heading up to spend the night at the campground we never made it to last year for the rest of the weekend. My mom’s in on it and has my bag packed for me. Actually, turns out almost everyone’s in on it, because Jesse let her into the apartment to do it and Mariella picked a hiking outfit with the best “Instagram potential.” All I have to do is follow Tom and enjoy the view.
The sun is just starting to set when we find a spot to pitch our tent. We make a mess of it at first, laughing at each other through the whole thing, but figure it out together the same way we always do. Tom pulls out sandwiches from a deli we love and the fixings for s’mores, and once we’ve made our fire and roasted them up and relived the mutual horror of Luca’s newest ghost stories (honestly, Stephen King better watch his back), we sit leaning into each other in happy silence, watching the last of the embers flicker out.
“We should make this a tradition,” says Tom. “Do it on our anniversary every year.”
It’s a given that Tom and I will have lots of years ahead of us, but I feel the warmth of those words and the assumption behind them just the same. I turn and burrow my head into the crook of his neck.
“Yeah,” I say. “Only next time I’ll help pack. We didn’t bring you near enough candy.”
I can feel the smile in Tom’s voice when he wraps his arm around me, pulling me closer to him. “Maybe. But I’ve still got everything I need.”
Not long after that we lie back under a curtain of black night and gleaming stars, the summer air balmy and sweet, and stare up at the sky. Neither of us points out the constellations now that they’re a quiet, shared thing between us. I silently account for them all just the same, reveling in how strangely close they seem now that I know them by name—how something that always seemed so far from me suddenly feels near enough that I can reach out and skim it with my fingertips.
The longer we sit in that feeling the more I recognize it. The unknown becoming known. A strange place becoming home. It’s something I’m appreciating every day that I spend in New York, watching new homes build themselves all around me—that home has never been a place, but a feeling. It’s in the cluster of Columbia students Tom rounded up for Tuesday-night study groups at a cafe near campus. It’s in the network of bands Jesse and the Walking JED are slowly coming up with a little more with each season. It’s in the bikers for the “Dear, Love” Dispatch and the scouts for the Getaway List app that Mariella hosts karaoke and bowling nights for. It’s in the writing workshops Luca and I have started taking, and all the writer meetups we’ve arranged. It’s in my mom and Vanessa finally reconciling and meeting each other in the middle from very distant shores.
It’s right here next to Tom, in the warmth of his hand in mine. It’s anywhere I want it to be. It’s in the family I know, and the ones that I found, and ones I don’t even know yet. It’s in the power to choose, one that I love testing the boundaries of every day.
I came to New York a year ago with one directive—to get away. To find somewhere to belong. Maybe New York felt like the place to run to, but really, that somewhere was in me this entire time. I just needed the space to discover it, and people I love to help me along the way.
There isn’t a single shooting star in the sky tonight, and I’m glad for it. I don’t need to ask for wishes now; I have choices all my own. Ones that will always be built on love, on hope, and on infinite, daunting, beautiful realms of possibility.
