Page 10 of The Getaway List
Tom pulls out his random character first and says, “I’m nine, enjoy pranks, and my weakness is I’m loud.”
I squint at mine. “I’m seventy-four, enjoy astronomy, and my weakness is ‘being too nice to people.’” I look up at Tom. “Wait, so you got baby me and I got old you?”
Tom furrows his brow. “I’m not too nice.”
“A lady bumped right into you on the subway earlier and you said ‘thank you,’” I remind him.
“I was flustered!”
“Nicely flustered.”
“And you’re not loud,” says Tom.
I press my shoulder into his, playfully sagging half my weight into him knowing full well he won’t budge. “Sounds like a lie a too-nice person would tell,” I say, prompting Tom to laugh and tap the top of my head with his chin.
Luca is standing off to the side, laughing nervously like he’s not sure whether to insert himself in the conversation. I turn to him expectantly and he meets my eye with clear relief and says, “I’m fifty-eight, enjoy making my own cheese, and my greatest weakness just says … ‘bees.’”
I nod. “High-stakes charcuterie boards, then.”
We start walking as a group toward the first spot, not making it more than ten steps before Luca blurts, “What’s it like having Vanessa Whitz as a mom?”
Luca looks so much like a puppy that I feel mildly bad about the prank then, but figure I’m never going to see him again. I commit to the bit but keep it brief. “Oh, you know. Lots of traveling,” I say.
“I bet. What’s it like watching her work?”
I turn to Tom. “Hard to say. What do you think, Riley?”
Tom’s lips press into a bemused smile. “I don’t know, Tom. She’s in her own world for most of it. Sort of like she forgets anyone else is there.”
Tom’s eyes hit the pavement fast, almost like he’s surprised at what just came out of him. Before I can follow the thought down, Luca says, “That makes sense. I feel like I’m stuck coming up with ideas—or I have a bunch but I just haven’t found the perfect story to write yet, you know? One that’s deep but still kind of flashy but real but personal but also, like, universal? Anyway, your mom just nails it every time. I saw some behind-the-scenes video of her once. She’s so in it. So immersed.”
I look at Tom conspiratorially, wondering if one of us is going to confess to the bit, but Tom’s gone quiet. When he meets my eye it’s as if corners of his lips are tugging it up to keep the smile there.
We settle at the first spot, a striking Victorian-style building that the instructor tells us was built in the 1850s as a newsboys’ lodging house, then became a Jewish educational center in the 1920s before eventually converting to apartments in the 1970s. She gives us a brief background of what it would be like for tenants and students of the building in each of those times, then tells us we have ten minutes to talk among ourselves about where our characters might fit into some point in time.
Tom’s still quiet, or at least I think he is until I realize he’s stepping in between me and an older guy in the class who was clearly about to approach me to ask something, a slightly rabid look in his eyes. One of the fans of his mom, I realize. Good grief.
“Oh god. I don’t know,” says Luca, looking suddenly skittish. “Is it writer’s block if your whole brain stops moving, or is that just human block? I can’t think of anything except bees.”
I clear my throat because this right here is my wheelhouse. Out of sheer boredom I’ve been making up harebrained stories in my head for years. “Maybe in the 1980s an eccentric rich neighbor set up a honey farm on the top-floor fire escape, then lured your cheese-making character into collaborating on a charcuterie board so he could sic his bees on you and get away with the perfect murder.”
Luca’s eyes light up with equal parts excitement and relief. “Oh, but then he has to have a good reason to murder me. Maybe I didn’t invite him to my fifty-eighth birthday party.”
“An audacious and unforgivable snub,” I agree. “You only live because there was an eclipse that night and my character was climbing the fire escape to get a look at it. Used their telescope to knock your attacker out of the way before they released the bees.”
Luca leans in closer, the words spilling out of him like his mouth can’t keep up with his head: “And then the attacker stares directly at the eclipse, and the shock of it is so overwhelming he stumbles into his own bee cage and locks himself inside—I don’t know how bee cages work, but he makes the queen mad and gets stung a bajillion times—”
“He’s my character’s grandfather,” says Tom, “and I inherit his vast fortune and his killer bees.”
Luca and I let out sharp, unexpected laughs and when I turn back around, Tom is Tom again—at least, the easygoing, relaxed version of himself he usually is in a crowd. We spend the next few minutes riffing other ideas. Apparently the boys who lived there when it was a newsboy lodging house weren’t allowed to swear, so we decided Luca’s character lived there as a boy and just yelled “BEES!” as a curse word well into adulthood. Tom comes up with an elaborate idea that Luca and I gently have to tell him is already the full plot of Newsies. We expand even further on our first plot, Luca and I piling on each other’s ideas so fast that we almost don’t notice when the rest of the group starts moving on.
“Sheesh,” says Luca, shaking his head at me as we move on to the next spot. “I guess talent really is genetic.”
The praise is so unexpected that I nearly trip on my own heel. I’m not used to it, is all—at least not lately. I had a decent following on the Archive back when I was still writing fic, but it’s been ages since I’ve had the time or inspiration to write. I’ve been too distracted doing things I’m mediocre at, where my only actual talents were amusing fellow bored students with my antics or speed-reading my way through the Kindle account I share with my mom and aunts.
Tom nudges me with this proud curl to his smile, but even then I can’t think of what to say. “You seem disappointed,” Tom says to Luca, easily picking up the conversation I let drop.
“Well, yeah,” says Luca glumly. “My parents are the most boring people on earth.”
