The Geography of You and Me(13)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“What should we do first?” Charlie had asked, and Ben pretended to think about this, tapping his finger against his chin.

“Well, we should probably eat a sensible breakfast.”

“Definitely,” Charlie agreed, laughing as he grabbed a frozen pizza from the freezer, and after that, it had become a tradition. Pizza for breakfast. Just because they could.

Now Lucy stood in front of the freezer, the last of the cool air leaking out, and ran a hand over the damp and wilting box of the frozen pizza she’d bought in preparation for her first time entirely on her own. After a moment, she closed it again with a sigh, frowning at the calendar on the door. It was the first day of school, but the city was still stuck, dark and gridlocked, and she was certain it would be postponed. This knowledge was neither welcome nor disappointing; it only meant that the countdown to the end of her junior year—to the end of high school, really—would begin tomorrow instead of today.

Lucy had always enjoyed her classes and endured her classmates, and these two things canceled each other out, resulting in a generally neutral attitude toward the whole endeavor. She’d been at the St. Andrews School since kindergarten, and it was always exactly the same: the same girls and the same uniforms. The same dramas and fights and scandals. The same catty conversations and ruthless jostling and mystifying objectives. Every year was like a rerun of the same boring show, everyone else moving fast all around her, a blur of people and plans and conversations, while Lucy remained alone in the middle of it all, standing absolutely still.

She wandered into her bedroom and stood in front of the open closet, where her plaid skirt and white blouse hung, pressed and ready to wear. But instead, with some amount of relief, she grabbed a pair of red shorts and a T-shirt, suddenly in desperate need of a walk.

The now familiar temperature of the stairwell stung her eyes, and she wound her way down the steps again, passing neighbors too tired and sweaty to do more than raise a hand in greeting. They all wore the heat like a kind of weight, and Lucy, too, couldn’t help feeling like something inside her was wilting.

With each flight, the red numbers flashed by on the gray doors, but it wasn’t until somewhere around the sixteenth floor that she realized she was no longer sure of her destination. Her intention had been to spend the rest of the morning wandering the neighborhood, but by the time she passed the tenth floor, she understood she wasn’t headed outside after all, and she was all the way down to the eighth floor before realizing she was actually on her way to the basement.

She was going to see Owen.

But when she stepped out into the lobby—which needed to be crossed to reach the door in the mailroom that led downstairs—she was greeted by Darrell, one of the newer doormen, who was sitting at the front desk, drenched in sweat.

“I feel like it’s only fair to warn you,” he said, mopping his forehead with a paper towel, “that it’s hotter than hell out there.”

Lucy paused halfway between the elevator and the front desk. “Can’t be worse than my apartment,” she said, stealing a glance at the mailroom.

“I don’t know,” Darrell was saying. “I walked in from the Bronx, and—”

Lucy turned back to him with wide eyes. “You did?”

“Well, halfway,” he admitted. “The subway’s still down, and the buses were all packed, but I hitched a ride on the back of a fruit truck for part of it.”

“So everything’s still a mess, then,” she said, and something about the tone in her voice made Darrell’s expression soften.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said with an encouraging smile. “I heard they got power back upstate, and Boston, too.”

Through the mailroom, she could see the far door swing open, and she caught her breath, surprised by the sudden quickness of her heart. But it was only the handyman from last night, who waved as he turned the corner.

Lucy sighed. “Hopefully we’re next,” she said, and Darrell nodded.

“Where’re you off to now?”

“Nowhere,” she said, a bit too quickly, and he laughed.

“Sounds nice,” he told her. “Be sure to send me a postcard.”

Once again, something seized inside her chest, and she hesitated a moment, looking from the lobby doors back to the mailroom, hoping that Owen might come loping out. It would be so much better to run into him here. She was terrified of knocking on his door only to find that he didn’t want to see her. Even now, she could imagine the painful awkwardness of such an exchange, his face going red as he made some sort of excuse because he was too polite to tell her as much.

After all, he was the one who’d left this morning.

Lucy was normally a firm believer that things worked out for the best, and she usually had no problem being optimistic, but now she felt her legs go weak as she stood weighing her next move, her cheeks pink at the thought of showing up unannounced. Something about Owen had thrown her off, twisting her into uncertain knots, and so before she could do anything she might regret, she headed for the revolving doors that led to the street.

Outside, it was clear that last night’s celebration had officially ended, and all that was left was the hangover. The streets, which had seemed like one big party just hours before, were now full of sweaty and miserable-looking people, everyone fanning themselves with day-old newspapers.

As she walked, Lucy saw a few kids chasing each other along the sidewalk, but otherwise, everyone seemed listless and beaten down by the weather. There were police officers stationed at the major intersections to direct traffic, but it was a haphazard affair, slow and grinding. All the energy seemed to have been sapped right out of the city.

She pressed her way up the street, heading in no particular direction, as she had a thousand times before. The ice-cream shop from last night was now closed, along with most of the other stores, which were all shuttered and silent. A few blocks farther uptown, she passed by her school, an imposing stone building, where a handwritten sign on the door announced that classes would begin tomorrow as long as the power was back, though there was no way to know if the note had been written yesterday or today.

Finally, having covered most of the neighborhood, and with nowhere else to go, she made her way back home again. As she climbed the stairs, she considered heading back up to the roof, in case Owen was there, and the thought propelled her up the next six flights before she reconsidered it for the same reason she’d walked away earlier.