The Geography of You and Me(10)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“A lot of the time, they leave it unlocked,” he explained. “Which is why I don’t feel too bad about the key.”

“Aha,” she said. “So you’re not as much of a badass as you would first appear.”

He laughed. “I’m not a badass at all. I’m just a guy with a key.”

When he unlocked the door, they stumbled out onto the darkened roof, their eyes focused on the ground as they picked their way across the tar-covered surface.

“Over there,” Owen said, pointing at the southwest corner, and Lucy walked over to the ledge that ran along the perimeter, where she stood looking out.

“Wow,” she breathed, rising onto her tiptoes. Owen dropped the backpack before joining her, positioning himself a few inches away. The wind lifted her hair from her shoulders, and he caught the scent of something sweet; it smelled like flowers, like springtime, and it made him a little dizzy.

They were quiet as they took in the unfamiliar view, the island that was usually lit up like a Christmas tree now nothing but shadows. The skyscrapers were silhouettes against a sky the color of a bruise, and only the spotlight from a single helicopter swung back and forth like a pendulum as it drifted across the skyline.

Together, they leaned against the granite wall, invisible souls in an invisible city, peering down over forty-two stories of sheer height and breathless altitude.

“I can’t believe I’ve never been up here,” she murmured without taking her eyes off the ghostly buildings. “I always say the best way to see the city is from the ground up, but this place is amazing. It’s—”

“A million miles above the rest of the world,” he said, shifting to face her more fully.

“A million miles away from the world,” she said. “Which is even better.”

“You’re definitely living in the wrong city, then.”

“Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “There are so many ways to be alone here, even when you’re surrounded by this many people.”

Owen frowned. “Sounds lonely.”

She turned to him with a smile, but there was something steely about it. “There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude.”

He was about to say more but was reminded of the postcards just downstairs, dozens of monuments to one or the other—loneliness or solitude—depending on how you looked at them.

“Then I guess you’ve come to the right place,” he said, watching her fingers drum an unconscious rhythm on the rough stone of the ledge. “Even though you’re not technically alone at the moment.”

“No, that’s true,” she said, fixing her gaze on him again, and this time the smile was real.

They spread the picnic blanket on the uneven surface of the roof, then spilled out the contents of the backpack. The sun was long gone, but it was still warm out, even up here, where the wind made it difficult to light the candles. After a while, they gave up and dined in the dark instead, sharing an assortment of cookies and crackers and fruit, and Lucy’s eyes kept straying back up to the sky between bites, as if she couldn’t trust the unfamiliar stars to stay put.

When they were full, they dragged the blanket over to the wall so that they could lean against it, sitting side by side, their heads tilted back, their shoulders nearly touching.

“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?” Lucy asked, and Owen felt a flash of recognition; it was a question that was always on his mind, and the first thing he usually wondered about other people, even if he never got around to asking.

“Everywhere,” he said, and she laughed, the sound light and musical.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Sure it is,” he said, because it was true, possibly the truest thing about him. Sometimes it seemed as if his whole life was an exercise in waiting; not waiting to leave, exactly, but simply waiting to go. He felt like one of those fish that had the capacity to grow in unimaginable ways if only the tank were big enough. But his tank had always been small, and as much as he loved his home—as much as he loved his family—he’d always felt himself bumping up against the edges of his own life.

New York City wasn’t the answer. What Owen wanted was something wider, something vaster; he had applications ready for six different colleges that ranged up and down the West Coast, from San Diego all the way to Washington, and he couldn’t wait for the day when he could take off to start a new life out there, crossing through states heavy with vowels beneath skies flat as paper, through the impossible bulk of jagged mountains, all the way to the silvery ocean.

For as long as he could remember, he’d felt the pull of the road, an itinerant streak that chimed from somewhere deep inside him, perhaps inherited from his once-restless parents. One day, he hoped to find their kind of peace, too—a home that was nothing special until they’d deemed it so—but that would come later, and for now there were thousands of places he burned to see, and next year would just be the start of it.

He could feel Lucy’s eyes on him, and when he turned to face her, she dipped her chin. “Okay, then,” she said matter-of-factly. “Everywhere.”

“What about you?” he asked, and she considered this a moment.

“Somewhere.”

He grinned. “How is that a better answer than ‘everywhere’?”

“It’s more specific,” she said, as if this should be obvious.

“I guess that’s true.” He looked down at his folded hands. “You know, I’ve never really been anywhere. New York, obviously. And Pennsylvania. We went to the Delaware shore once when I was little. And crossed through New Jersey a few times. That’s what? Four states.” He shook his head and smiled ruefully. “Pitiful, huh?”

“What about next year?” she asked. “College seems like a pretty good excuse to get out of here.”

“It is,” he agreed. “I’m looking at a lot of places out west. California, Oregon, Washington…”

She raised her eyebrows. “Those are all really far.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s kind of the point. They’ve all got pretty good science programs, too.”

“Ah,” she said. “So you are a science whiz.”

He shrugged. “Whiz might be taking it a bit far.”

“What about your dad?”

“What about him?” Owen asked, but he knew what she meant, and he felt something go cold in his chest at the thought. There were so many parts of this—this lonely next chapter—that he dreaded now, most of them having to do with his mother: that she wouldn’t be there to watch him walk across the stage at graduation, or to help him pack, or to make the bed in his new dorm room the way she always did at home. But the worst of it was actually this: that, after dropping off his only son, his dad would have to come back to this miserable basement apartment on his own.