Love Story(11)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I noticed. That was a nice touch on my grandmother’s part. What happened was—”

She looked at me as she stepped forward. I saw movement beyond her shoulders. In a flash I threw my arm in front of her just before she walked off the curb and into the path of a taxi.

“Hey,” she complained. Then she saw the taxi. Her eyes widened. “Whoa.”

I put my hand to my heart and breathed through my nose to calm the adrenaline rush. “Be more alert until you’re used to walking around the city,” I scolded her. “Accidents happen.”

“Everybody at my high school talked about a girl who was newspaper editor there a long time ago,” Summer exclaimed. “She went to New York City on scholarship and got killed in a crosswalk by a taxi her first day. I was almost that girl!”

“My high school told the same story,” I assured her. “It’s an urban myth designed to scare you and keep you at home. Just look both ways before crossing the street, okay?”

She blinked at the traffic whizzing in front of us until the light changed and we stepped into the crosswalk. “What happened was

,” she prompted me.

I glanced up the street again, paranoid now about speeding taxis. We were crossing Fifth Avenue. The five-story town houses grew into elegant twenty-story hotels here, carved stonework on every corner of the buildings. Ten blocks up, the Empire State Building, already glowing white against the pink sky, peeked around the shoulders of the smaller buildings in front of it.

I stepped up on the opposite curb. “When my grandmother was our age, she earned her business degree here in New York so she could run her family’s horse farm. She wanted me to do the same and take over someday.”

“I thought you’re majoring in English,” Summer protested.

“I am. A few days before high school graduation, I admitted to her that I did want to come to college here, but I would not major in business. I would major in English so I could write romance novels.”

“And she freaked?” Summer asked.

“My grandmother does not freak.” I felt my nostrils flare as I thought of her. “She waited until graduation night, when I’d come home to change between the ceremony and the parties. She called me into her office. Hunter was already there. She informed me that she didn’t need me anyway. Since blood clearly was not thicker than water, she would give Hunter my college money. He would major in business here, then run the horse farm. And when she dies, he will inherit the horse farm for his loyalty.”

“What!” Summer squealed. But she had to step behind me, single file. We’d reached a portion of the sidewalk with scaffolding overhead so the construction workers in the building didn’t brain pedestrians with falling cement blocks.

I kept talking over my shoulder as I entered the passageway packed with people forming two lanes of traffic. “The worst part is, I should have seen it coming. Our high school classmates would mention going to the University of Louisville or the University of Kentucky. Hunter would always shake his head and say, ‘I am getting out of here.’”

The passageway narrowed to one lane. A huge puddle from last night’s rain blocked half the width of the sidewalk, cigarette butts and a fortune cookie wrapper floating at the edge like timid waders in a cold ocean. “So it doesn’t make sense to me that he would accept my grandmother’s offer to take over the farm,” I said as I pushed my way through the crowd around the puddle. “Yes, he’ll get a free education, and he’s getting out of Kentucky for a few years. But then he’ll have to go back. For the rest of his life. Knowing how he feels about Kentucky, I’m astounded he would agree to this plan. Even for money. Even for her.”

It had been a while since Summer had interrupted me, which was unusual. Standing firm against people shoving me. I looked back and saw she was stuck on the other side of the puddle, politely waiting for a break in the oncoming pedestrians.

“Go ahead,” the sari-clad woman behind Summer scolded her in a singsong accent, “else we’ll be here all day.”

I stepped back into the current of the crowd, let it sweep me back to Summer, and grabbed her by the wrist. I pulled her roughly against the current, ignoring the mean looks of other pedestrians. My book bag socked one man in the shoulder and he told me sharply to watch it. I held fast to Summer’s hand and dragged her out from under the scaffolding. We popped into the open twilight. She sighed with relief. I suppressed my own sigh.

“How long did it take you to change from a nice, normal Southerner to a hardened New Yorker?” she demanded.

“A couple of hours, but I was living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with five roommates.” I glanced at my own cheap watch—I’d left my Rolex in my jewelry box at my grandmother’s house. I was way late for work. I increased my stride, and Summer practically ran beside me.

“During the summer, I worked two jobs and socked away money. I was too busy to dwell on what my grandmother and Hunter did. But in the past week, I’ve started obsessing about Hunter. I knew he was here. I suspected he was in the honors program and lived in our honors dorm. Maybe I even entertained a little fantasy that we could hook up, which would somehow solve all our problems rather than making them worse. I wrote the story to indulge that fantasy. I had no idea he was going to show up in the class.”

Though the coffee shop was in sight now, I stopped on the sidewalk and turned to Summer in exasperation, remembering what she’d done. “I tried to keep him out of the class, Miss ‘Can I Have Erin’s Vote’! We’ve got to develop a better silent language if we’re going to be friends. When I groan like I’m dying, that means, ‘Don’t let the hunk into the creative-writing class. My story is about him.’”

Summer winced. “I’m sorry. And you’re sorry. You can apologize to him.”

“I don’t care about him,” I lied. “I care about winning the publishing internship I told you about.”

“Oh, no!” She slapped her hands over her mouth. She knew how badly I needed that internship.

“I don’t want Hunter to tell Gabe he is the stable boy,” I explained, “because then Gabe will think I’m not serious about this creative-writing class. All Hunter has to do is open his mouth and he will ruin every chance I ever had at that job!”

“Don’t cry in the street,” she whispered, stepping close to me. “They say it attracts muggers.”

That’s when I realized my voice had escalated into a hysterical wail that echoed against the glass storefronts. Businesspeople never even glanced at me as they hurried past. I looked all around us and made sure Hunter was not among them. He was not.

“I’m meeting him at the coffee shop at nine,” I told Summer, “to try to persuade him not to say anything to Gabe about it. But I’m not like you. People look at you and want to go over to your side and help you. People look at me and want to win whatever game they’re playing with me.”