PROLOGUE
Five Summers Ago
ON VACATION, YOU can be anyone you want. Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.
In your day-to-day life, maybe you can’t even bob your head to the radio without being embarrassed, but on the right twinkly-lightstrung patio, with the right steel drum band, you’ll find yourself whirling and twirling with the best of them.
On vacation, your hair changes. The water is di erent, maybe the shampoo. Maybe you don’t bother to wash your hair at all, or brush it, because the salty ocean water curls it up in a way you love. You think, Maybe I could do this at home too. Maybe I could be this person who doesn’t brush her hair, who doesn’t mind being sweaty or having sand in all her crevices.
On vacation, you strike up conversations with strangers, and forget that there are any stakes. If it turns out impossibly awkward, who cares? You’ll never see them again!
You’re whoever you want to be. You can do whatever you want.
Okay, so maybe not whatever you want. Sometimes the weather forces you into a particular situation, such as the one I’m in now, and you have to find second-rate ways to entertain yourself as you wait out the rain.
On my way out of the bathroom, I pause. Partly, this is because I’m still working on my game plan. Mostly, though, it’s because the floor is so sticky that I lose my sandal and have to hobble back for it. I love everything about this place in theory, but in practice, I think letting my bare foot touch the anonymous filth on the laminate might be a good way to contract one of those rare diseases kept in the refrigerated vials of a secret CDC facility.
I dance-hop back to my shoe, slip my toes through the thin orange straps, and turn to survey the bar: the press of sticky bodies; the lazy whorl of thatched fans overhead; the door propped open so that, occasionally, a burst of rain rips in o the black night to cool the sweating crowd. In the corner, a jukebox haloed in neon light plays the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
It’s a resort town but a locals’ bar, free of printed sundresses and Tommy Bahama shirts, though also sadly lacking in cocktails garnished with spears of tropical fruit.
If not for the storm, I would’ve chosen somewhere else for my last night in town. All week long the rain has been so bad, the thunder so constant, that my dreams of sandy white beaches and glossy speedboats were dashed, and I along with the rest of the disappointed vacationers have spent my days pounding piña coladas in any crammed tourist trap I could find.
Tonight, though, I couldn’t take any more dense crowds, long wait times, or gray-haired men in wedding rings drunkenly winking at me over their wives’ shoulders. Thus I found myself here.
In a sticky-floored bar called only BAR, scouring the meager crowd for my target.
He’s sitting at the corner of BAR’s bar itself. A man about my age, twenty-five, sandy haired and tall with broad shoulders, though so hunched you might not notice either of these last two facts on first glance. His head is bent over his phone, a look of quiet concentration visible in his profile. His teeth worry at his full bottom lip as his finger slowly swipes across the screen.
Though not Disney World–level packed, this place is loud. Halfway between the jukebox crooning creepy late-fifties tunes and the mounted TV opposite it, from which a weatherman shouts about record-breaking rain, there’s a gaggle of men with identical hacking laughs that keep bursting out all at once. At the far end of the bar, the bartender keeps smacking the counter for emphasis as she chats up a yellow-haired woman.
The storm’s got the whole island feeling restless, and the cheap beer has everyone feeling rowdy.
But the sandy-haired man sitting on the corner stool has a stillness that makes him stick out. Actually, everything about him screams that he doesn’t belong here. Despite the eighty-somethingdegree weather and one-million-percent humidity, he’s dressed in a rumpled long-sleeve button-up and navy blue trousers. He’s also suspiciously devoid of a tan, as well as any laughter, mirth, levity, etc. Bingo.
I push a fistful of blond waves out of my face and set o toward him. As I approach, his eyes stay fixed on his phone, his finger slowly dragging whatever he’s reading up the screen. I catch the bolded words CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.
He’s fully reading a book at a bar.
I swing my hip into the bar and slide my elbow over it as I face him. “Hey, tiger.”
His hazel eyes slowly lift to my face, blink. “Hi?”
“Do you come here often?”
He studies me for a minute, visibly weighing potential replies. “No,” he says finally. “I don’t live here.”
“Oh,” I say, but before I can get out any more, he goes on.
“And even if I did, I have a cat with a lot of medical needs that require specialized care. Makes it hard to get out.”
I frown at just about every part of that sentence. “I’m so sorry,” I recover. “It must be awful to be dealing with all that while also coping with a death.”
His brow crinkles. “A death?”
I wave a hand in a tight circle, gesturing to his getup. “Aren’t you in town for a funeral?”
His mouth presses tight. “I am not.”
“Then what brings you to town?”
“A friend.” His eyes drop to his phone.
“Lives here?” I guess.
“Dragged me,” he corrects. “For vacation.” He says this last word with some disdain.
I roll my eyes. “No way! Away from your cat? With no good excuse except for enjoyment and merrymaking? Are you sure this person can really be called a friend ?”
“Less sure every second,” he says without looking up.
He’s not giving me much to work with, but I’m not giving up. “So,” I forge ahead. “What’s this friend like? Hot? Smart? Loaded?”
“Short,” he says, still reading. “Loud. Never shuts up. Spills on every single article of clothing either of us wears, has horrible romantic taste, sobs through those commercials for community college—the ones where the single mom is staying up late at her computer and then, when she falls asleep, her kid drapes a blanket over her shoulders and smiles because he’s so proud of her? What else? Oh, she’s obsessed with shitty dive bars that smell like salmonella. I’m afraid to even drink the bottled beer here—have you seen the Yelp reviews for this place?”
“Are you kidding right now?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Well,” he says, “salmonella doesn’t have a smell, but yes, Poppy, you are short.”
“Alex!” I swat his bicep, breaking character. “I’m trying to help you!”
He rubs his arm. “Help me how?”
“I know Sarah broke your heart, but you need to get back out there. And when a hot babe approaches you at a bar, the number one thing you should not bring up is your codependent relationship with your asshole cat.”
“First of all, Flannery O’Connor is not an asshole,” he says. “She’s shy.”
“She’s evil.”
“She just doesn’t like you,” he insists. “You have strong dog energy.”
“All I’ve ever done is try to pet her,” I say. “Why have a pet who doesn’t want to be petted?”
“She wants to be petted,” Alex says. “You just always approach her with this, like, wolfish gleam in your eye.”
“I do not.”
“Poppy,” he says. “You approach everything with a wolfish gleam in your eye.”
Just then the bartender approaches with the drink I ordered before I ducked into the bathroom. “Miss?” she says. “Your margarita.” She spins the frosted glass down the bar toward me, and a ping of excited thirst hits the back of my throat as I catch it. I swipe it up so quickly that a fair amount of tequila sloshes over the lip, and with a preternatural and highly practiced speed, Alex jerks my other arm o the bar before it can get liquor splattered on it.
“See? Wolfish gleam,” Alex says quietly, seriously, the way he delivers pretty much every word he ever says to me except on those
rare and sacred nights when Weirdo Alex comes out and I get to watch him, like, lie on the floor fake-sobbing into a microphone at karaoke, his sandy hair sticking up in every direction and wrinkly dress shirt coming untucked. Just one hypothetical example. Of something that has exactly happened before.
Alex Nilsen is a study in control. In that tall, broad, permanently slouched and/or pretzel-folded body of his, there’s a surplus of stoicism (the result of being the oldest child of a widower with the most vocal anxiety of anyone I’ve ever met) and a stockpile of repression (the result of a strict religious upbringing in direct opposition to most of his passions; namely, academia), alongside the most truly strange, secretly silly, and intensely softhearted goofball I’ve had the pleasure to know.
I take a sip of the margarita, and a hum of pleasure works its way out of me.
“Dog in a human’s body,” Alex says to himself, then goes back to scrolling on his phone.
I snort my disapproval of his comment and take another sip. “By the way, this margarita is, like, ninety percent tequila. I hope you’re telling those unappeasable Yelp reviewers to shove it. And that this place smells nothing like salmonella.” I chug a little more of my drink as I slide up onto the stool beside him, turning so our knees touch. I like how he always sits like this when we’re out together: his upper body facing the bar, his long legs facing me, like he’s keeping some secret door to himself open just for me. And not a door only to the reserved, never-quite-fully-smiling Alex Nilsen that the rest of the world gets, but a path straight to the weirdo. The Alex who takes these trips with me, year after year, even though he despises flying and change and using any pillow other than the one he sleeps with at home.
I like how, when we go out, he always beelines toward the bar,
because he knows I like to sit there, even though he once admitted that every time we do, he stresses out over whether he’s making too much or not enough eye contact with the bartenders.
Truthfully, I like and/or love nearly everything about my best friend, Alex Nilsen, and I want him to be happy, so even if I’ve never particularly liked any of his past love interests—and especially didn’t care for his ex, Sarah—I know it’s up to me to make sure he doesn’t let this most recent heartbreak force him into full hermit status. He’d do—and has done—the same for me, after all.
“So,” I say. “Should we take it from the top again? I’ll be the sexy stranger at the bar and you be your charming self, minus the cat stu . We’ll get you back in the dating pool in no time.”
He looks up from his phone, nearly smirking. I’ll just call it smirking, because for Alex, this is as close as it gets. “You mean the stranger who kicks things o with a well-timed ‘Hey, tiger’? I think we might have di erent ideas of what ‘sexy’ is.”
I spin on my stool, our knees bump-bumping as I turn away from him and then back, resetting my face into a flirtatious smile. “Did it hurt . . .” I say, “. . . when you fell from heaven?”
He shakes his head. “Poppy, it’s important to me that you know,” he says slowly, “that if I ever do manage to go on another date, it will have absolutely nothing to do with your so-called help.”
I stand, throw back the rest of my drink dramatically, and slap the glass onto the bar. “So what do you say we get out of here?”
“How are you more successful at dating than me,” he says, awed by the mystery of it all.
“Easy,” I say. “I have lower standards. And no Flannery O’Connor to get in the way. And when I go out to bars, I don’t spend the whole time scowling at Yelp reviews and forcefully projecting DON’T TALK TO ME. Also, I am, arguably, gorgeous from certain angles.”
He stands, setting a twenty on the bar before tucking his wallet back into his pocket. Alex always carries cash. I don’t know why. I’ve asked at least three times. He’s answered. I still don’t know why, because his answer was either too boring or too intellectually complex for my brain to even bother retaining the memory.
“Doesn’t change the fact that you’re an absolute freak,” he says.
“You love me,” I point out, the tiniest bit defensive.
He loops an arm around my shoulders and looks down at me, another small, contained smile on his full lips. His face is a sieve, only letting out the smallest amount of expression at a time. “I know that,” he says.
I grin up at him. “I love you back.”
He fights the widening of his smile, keeps it small and faint. “I know that too.”
The tequila has me feeling sleepy, lazy, and I let myself lean into him as we start toward the open door. “This was a good trip,” I say.
“Best yet,” he agrees, the cool rain gusting in around us like confetti from a cannon. His arm curls in a little closer, warm and heavy around me, his clean cedarwood smell folding over my shoulders like a cape.
“I haven’t even minded the rain much,” I say as we step into the thick, wet night, all buzzing mosquitoes and palm trees shivering from the distant thunder.
“I’ve preferred it.” Alex lifts his arm from my shoulder to curl over my head, transforming himself into a makeshift human umbrella as we sprint across the flooding road toward our little red rental car. When we reach it, he breaks away and opens my door first—we scored a discount by taking a car without automatic locks or windows—then runs around the hood and hurls himself into the driver’s seat.
Alex flicks the car into gear, the full-tilt AC hissing its arctic
blast against our wet clothes as he pulls out of our parking space and turns toward our rental house.
“I just realized,” he says, “we didn’t take any pictures at the bar for your blog.”
I start to laugh, then realize he’s not kidding. “Alex, none of my readers want to see pictures of BAR. They don’t even want to read about BAR.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t think BAR was that bad.”
“You said it smelled like salmonella.”
“Other than that.” He ticks the turn signal on and guides the car down our narrow, palm-tree-lined street.
“Actually, I haven’t really gotten any usable pictures this week.”
Alex frowns and rubs at his eyebrow as he slows toward the gravel driveway ahead.
“Other than the ones you took,” I add quickly. The pictures Alex volunteered to take for my social media are truly terrible. But I love him so much for being willing to take them that I already picked out the least atrocious one and posted it. I’m making one of those awful midword faces, shriek-laughing something at him as he tries— badly—to give me direction, and the storm clouds are visibly forming over me, as if I’m summoning the apocalypse to Sanibel Island myself. But at least you can tell I’m happy in it.
When I look at that photo, I don’t remember what Alex said to me to elicit that face, or what I yelled back at him. But I feel that same rush of warmth I get when I think about any of our past summer trips.
That crush of happiness, that feeling that this is what life’s about: being somewhere beautiful, with someone you love.
I tried to write something about that in the caption, but it was hard to explain.
Usually my posts are all about how to travel on a budget, make
the most of the least, but when you’ve got a hundred thousand people following your beach vacation, it’s ideal to show them . . . a beach vacation.
In the past week, we’ve had approximately forty minutes total on the shore of Sanibel Island. The rest has been spent holed up in bars and restaurants, bookstores and vintage shops, plus a whole lot of time in the shabby bungalow we’re renting, eating popcorn and counting lightning streaks. We’ve gotten no tans, seen no tropical fish, done no snorkeling or sunbathing on catamarans, or much of anything aside from falling in and out of sleep on the squashy sofa with a Twilight Zone marathon humming its way into our dreams.
There are places you can see in their full glory, with or without sunshine, but this isn’t one of them.
“Hey,” Alex says as he puts the car in park.
“Hey, what?”
“Let’s take a picture,” he says. “Together.”
“You hate having your picture taken,” I point out. Which has always been weird to me, because on a technical level, Alex is extremely handsome.
“I know,” Alex says, “but it’s dark and I want to remember this.”
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Let’s take one.”
I reach for my phone, but he already has his out. Only instead of holding it up with the screen facing us so we can see ourselves, he has it flipped around, the regular camera fixed on us rather than the front-facing one. “What are you doing?” I say, reaching for his phone. “That’s what selfie mode’s for, you grandpa.”
“No!” he laughs, jerking it out of reach. “It’s not for your blog— we don’t have to look good. We just have to look like ourselves. If we have it on selfie mode I won’t even want to take one.”
“You need help for your face dysmorphia,” I tell him.
“How many thousands of pictures have I taken for you, Poppy?” he says. “Let’s just do this one how I want to.”
“Okay, fine.” I lean across the console, settling in against his damp chest, his head ducking a little to compensate for our height di erence.
“One . . . two—” The flash pops o before he ever gets to three. “You monster!” I scold.
He flips the phone around to look at the picture and moans. “Noooo,” he says. “I am a monster.”
I choke over a laugh as I study the horrible ghostly blur of our faces: his wet hair sticking out in stringy spikes, mine plastered in frizzy tendrils around my cheeks, everything on us shiny and red from the heat, my eyes fully closed, his squinted and pu y. “How is it possible we’re both so hard to see and so bad-looking simultaneously?”
Laughing, he throws his head back against his headrest. “Okay, I’m deleting it.”
“No!” I fight the phone out of his hand. He grabs hold of it too, but I don’t let go, so we just hold it between us on the console. “That was the point, Alex. To remember this trip how it really was. And to look like ourselves.”
His smile is as small and faint as ever. “Poppy, you don’t look anything like that picture.”
I shake my head. “And you don’t either.”
For a long moment, we’re silent, like there’s nothing else to say now that this has been settled.
“Next year let’s go somewhere cold,” Alex says. “And dry.”
“Okay,” I say, grinning. “We’ll go somewhere cold.”
is Summer
POPPY,” SWAPNA SAYS from the head of the dull gray conference table. “What have you got?”
For the benevolent ruler of the Rest + Relaxation empire, Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith could not possibly exude any less of our fine magazine’s two core values.
The last time Swapna rested was probably three years ago, when she was eight and a half months pregnant and on doctor-mandated bed rest. Even then, she spent the whole time video-chatting with the o ce, her laptop balanced on her belly, so I don’t think there was a ton of relaxation involved. Everything about her is sharp and pointed and smart, from her slicked-back high-fashion bob to her studded Alexander Wang pumps.
Her winged eyeliner could slice through an aluminum can, and her emerald eyes could crush it afterward. In this moment, both are pointed squarely at me. “Poppy? Hello?”
I blink out of my daze and skootch forward in my chair, clearing my throat. This has been happening to me a lot lately. When
you have a job where you’re only required to come into the o ce once a week, it’s not ideal to zone out like a kid in algebra for fifty percent of that time, even less so to do it in front of your equal parts terrifying and inspiring boss.
I study the notepad in front of me. I used to come to the Friday meetings with dozens of excitedly scribbled pitches. Ideas for stories about unfamiliar festivals in other countries, locally famous restaurants with colloquial deep-fried desserts, natural phenomena on particular beaches in South America, up-and-coming vineyards in New Zealand—or new trends among the thrill-seeking set and modes of deep relaxation for the spa crowd.
I used to write these notes in a kind of panic, like every experience I hoped to someday have was a living thing growing in my body, stretching branches out to push on my insides, demanding to break out of me. I’d spend three days before pitch meetings in something of a sweaty Google trance, scrolling through image after image of places I’d never been, a feeling something like hunger growling in my gut.
Today, however, I spent ten minutes writing down the names of countries.
Countries, not even cities.
Swapna is looking at me, waiting for me to pitch my next big summer feature for next year, and I’m staring at the word Brazil.
Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world. Brazil is 5.6 percent of the earth’s mass. You cannot write a short, snappy piece about vacationing in Brazil. You have to at least choose a specific region.
I flip the page in my notebook, pretending to study the next one. It’s blank. When my coworker Garrett leans toward me as if to read over my shoulder, I snap it closed. “St. Petersburg,” I say.
Swapna arches an eyebrow, paces along the head of the table.
“We did St. Petersburg in our summer issue three years ago. The White Nights celebration, remember?”
“Amsterdam?” Garrett throws out next to me.
“Amsterdam’s a spring city,” Swapna says, vaguely annoyed. “You’re not going to feature Amsterdam and not include the tulips.”
I once heard she’s been to upwards of seventy-five countries and many of those twice.
She pauses, holding her phone in one hand and tapping it against her other palm as she thinks. “Besides, Amsterdam is so . . . trendy.”
It is Swapna’s closely held belief that to be on trend is to be already late to that trend. If she senses the zeitgeist warming to the idea of Toruń, Poland, then Toruń’s o the docket for the next ten years. There’s a literal list pushpinned into a wall by the cubicles (Toruń is not on this list) of Places R+R Will Not Cover. Each entry is in her handwriting and dated, and there’s something of an underground betting pool on when a city will be freed from the List. There’s never so much quiet excitement in the o ce as those mornings when Swapna marches in, designer laptop bag on her arm, and strides up to the List with a pen already out, ready to cross o one of these banned cities.
Everyone watches with bated breath, wondering which city she’s rescuing from R+R obscurity, and once she’s safely in her office, door shut, whoever’s closest to the List will run up to it, read the scratched-out entry, and turn to whisper the name of the city to everyone in editorial. There’s usually silent celebration.
When Paris was relinquished from the List last fall, someone broke out champagne and Garrett pulled a red beret out of a drawer in his desk, where he’d apparently been hiding it for just such an occasion. He wore it all day, jerking it o his head every time we heard the click and whine of Swapna’s door. He thought he’d got-
ten away with it too, until she paused beside his desk on her way out for the night and said, “Au revoir, Garrett.”
His face had gone as bright as the beret, and though I didn’t think Swapna had meant it to be anything but funny, he’d never quite recovered his confidence since then.
Having Amsterdam declared “trendy” has his cheeks flushing past beret red straight to beet purple.
Someone else throws out Cozumel. And then there’s a vote for Las Vegas, which Swapna briefly considers. “Vegas could be fun.” She looks right to me. “Poppy, don’t you think Vegas could be fun?”
“It could definitely be fun,” I agree.
“Santorini,” Garrett says in the voice of a cartoon mouse.
“Santorini is lovely, of course,” Swapna says, and Garrett heaves an audible sigh of relief. “But we want something inspired.”
She looks at me again. Pointedly. I know why. She wants me to write the big feature. Because that’s what I came here to do.
My stomach twists. “I’ll keep brainstorming and work something up to pitch you on Monday,” I suggest.
She nods acceptance. Garrett sags in the chair beside me. I know he and his boyfriend are desperate for a free trip to Santorini.
As any travel writer would be. As any human person probably would be.
As I definitely should be.
Don’t give up, I want to tell him. If Swapna wants inspiration, she’s not getting it from me.
I haven’t had any of that in a long time.
“I THINK YOU should push for Santorini,” Rachel says, swirling her glass of rosé on the mosaic top of the café table. It’s a perfectly summery wine, and because of her platform, we got it for free.
Rachel Krohn: style blogger, French bulldog enthusiast, bornand-bred Upper West Sider (but mercifully not the kind who acts like it’s so adorable that you’re from Ohio, or even that Ohio exists— has anyone even heard of it?), and professional-grade best friend.
Despite having top-of-the-line appliances, Rachel hand-washes all her dishes, because she finds it soothing, and she does so wearing four-inch heels, because she thinks flat shoes are for horseback riding and gardening, and only if you haven’t found any suitable heeled boots.
Rachel was the first friend I made when I moved to New York. She’s a social media “influencer” (read: gets paid to wear specific brands of makeup in pictures at her beautiful marbled vanity), and while I’d never had a friendship with a Fellow Internet Person, it turned out to have its perks (read: neither of us has to feel embarrassed when we ask the other to wait while we stage photos of our sandwiches). And while I might’ve expected not to have much in common with Rachel, it was during our third hangout (at the same wine bar in Dumbo where we’re currently sitting) that she admitted she takes all of her photos for the week on Tuesdays, changing outfits and hair in between stops at di erent parks and restaurants, then spends the rest of the week writing essays and running social media for a few dog rescues.
She fell into this job by way of being photogenic and having a photogenic life and two very photogenic (if constantly in need of medical attention) dogs.
Whereas I set out to build a social media following as a long game to turn travel into a full-time job. Di erent paths to the same place. I mean, she’s still on the Upper West Side and I’m on the Lower East Side, but we’re both living advertisements.
I take a mouthful of the sparkling wine and swish it around as I turn over her words. I haven’t been to Santorini, and somewhere in my parents’ overcrowded house, in a Tupperware box full of things
that have absolutely nothing in common, there’s a list of dream destinations I made in college, with Santorini near the top. Those clean white lines and great swaths of glittering blue sea were about as far from my cluttered bi-level in Ohio as I could imagine.
“I can’t,” I finally tell her. “Garrett would spontaneously combust if he pitched Santorini and, once I got on board, Swapna approved it for me.”
“I don’t get it,” Rachel says. “How hard can it be to pick a vacation, Pop? It’s not like you’ve been saving your pennies. Pick a place. Go. Then pick another one. That’s what you do.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Rachel waves a hand. “I know, your boss wants an ‘inspired’ vacation. But when you show up somewhere beautiful, with the R+R credit card, inspiration will appear. There is literally no one on earth better equipped to have a magical vacation than a travel journalist with a big-ass media conglomerate’s checkbook. If you can’t have an inspired trip, then how the hell do you expect the rest of the world to?”
I shrug, breaking a piece of cheese o of the charcuterie board. “Maybe that’s the point.”
She arches one dark eyebrow. “What’s the point?”
“Exactly!” I say, and she gives me a look of dry disgust.
“Don’t be cute and whimsical,” she says flatly. To Rachel Krohn, cute and whimsical is nearly as bad as trendy is for Swapna BakshiHighsmith. Despite the softly hazy aesthetic of Rachel’s hair, makeup, clothes, apartment, and social media, she’s a deeply pragmatic person. For her, life in the public eye is a job like any other, one she’s kept because it pays the bills (at least when it comes to cheese, wine, makeup, clothes, and anything else businesses choose to ship her), not because she relishes the kind of manufactured semifame that comes with the territory. At the end of every month, she does a post with the worst, unedited outtakes from her photo shoots, the
caption reading: THIS IS A FEED OF CURATED IMAGERY MEANT TO MAKE YOU PINE FOR A LIFE THAT DOES NOT EXIST. I GET PAID FOR THIS.
Yes, she went to art school.
And somehow, this kind of pseudo performance art has done nothing to curb her popularity. Whenever I’m in town for the last day of the month, I try to schedule a wine date so I can watch her check her notifications and roll her eyes as the new likes and follows pour in. Every once in a while she’ll stifle a shriek and say, “Listen to this! ‘Rachel Krohn is so brave and real. I want her to be my mom.’ I’m telling them they don’t know me, and they still don’t get it!”
She has no patience for rose-colored glasses and even less for melancholy.
“I’m not being cute,” I promise her, “and I’m definitely not being whimsical.”
The arch of her eyebrow deepens. “Are you sure? Because you’re prone to both, babe.”
I roll my eyes. “You just mean I’m short and wear bright colors.”
“No, you’re tiny,” she corrects me, “and wear loud patterns. Your style is, like, 1960s Parisian bread maker’s daughter bicycling through her village at dawn, shouting Bonjour, le monde whilst doling out baguettes.”
“Anyway,” I say, pulling us back on track, “what I mean is, what’s the point of taking this ridiculously expensive vacation, then writing all about it for the forty-two people in the world who can a ord the time and money to re-create it?”
Her brows settle into a flat line as she thinks. “Well, first of all, I don’t assume most people use R+R articles as an itinerary, Pop. You give them a hundred places to check out, and they choose three. And secondly, people want to see idyllic vacations in vacation magazines. They buy them to daydream, not to plan.” Even as she’s be-
ing Pragmatic Rachel, cynical Art School Rachel is creeping in, giving her words an edge. Art School Rachel is something of an old man screaming at the sky, a stepdad at the dinner table, saying, “Why don’t you unplug for a while, kids?” while holding out a bowl to collect everyone’s phones.
I love Art School Rachel and her Principles, but I’m also unnerved by their sudden appearance on this sidewalk patio. Because right now words are bubbling up that I haven’t said aloud yet. Sensitive, secret thoughts that never fully exposed themselves to me in the many hours I’ve spent lying on the still-like-new sofa of my uncozy, unlived-in apartment during the downtime between trips.
“What’s the point?” I say again, frustrated. “I mean, don’t you ever feel like that? Like, I worked so hard, did every single thing right—”
“Well, not everything,” she says. “You did drop out of college, babe.”
“—so I could get my dream job. And I actually got it. I work at one of the top travel magazines! I have a nice apartment! And I can take cabs without worrying too much about what that money should go to, and despite all of that”—I take a shaky breath, unsure of the words I’m about to force out even as the full weight of them hits me like a sandbag—“I’m not happy.”
Rachel’s face softens. She sets her hand on mine but stays silent, holding space for me to go on. It takes me a while to make myself. I feel like such an ungrateful jerk for even having these thoughts, let alone admitting them aloud.
“It’s all pretty much how I pictured it,” I finally say. “The parties, the layovers in international airports, the cocktails on the jet, and the beaches and the boats and the vineyards. And it all looks how it should, but it feels di erent than I imagined it. Honestly, I think it feels di erent than it used to. I used to bounce o the walls for weeks before a trip, you know? And when I got to the airport, I’d feel like—like my blood was humming. Like the air was just vibrat-
ing with possibility around me. I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s changed. Maybe I have.”
She brushes a dark curl behind her ear and shrugs. “You wanted it, Poppy. You didn’t have it, and you wanted it. You were hungry.”
Instantly, I know she’s right. She’s seen right through the word vomit to the center of things. “Isn’t that ridiculous?” I groan-laugh. “My life turned out how I hoped it would, and now I just miss wanting something.”
Shaking with the weight of it. Humming with the potential. Staring at the ceiling of my crappy, pre-R+R fifth-floor walk-up, after a double shift serving drinks at the Garden, and daydreaming about the future. The places I’d go, the people I’d meet—who I’d become. What is there left to want when you’ve got your dream apartment, your dream boss, and your dream job (which negates any anxiety over your dream apartment’s obscenely high rent, because you spend most of your time eating at Michelin-starred restaurants on the company’s dime anyway)?
Rachel drains her glass and globs some Brie onto a cracker, nodding knowingly. “Millennial ennui.”
“Is that a thing?” I ask.
“Not yet, but if you repeat it three times, there’ll be a Slate think piece on it by tonight.”
I throw a handful of salt over my shoulder as if to ward o such evil, and Rachel snorts as she pours us each a fresh glass.
“I thought the whole thing about millennials was that we don’t get what we want. The houses, the jobs, the financial freedom. We just go to school forever, then bartend ’til we die.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but you dropped out of college and went after what you want. So here we are.”
“I don’t want to have millennial ennui,” I say. “It makes me feel like an asshole to not just be content with my amazing life.”
Rachel snorts again. “Contentment is a lie invented by capi-
talism,” Art School Rachel says, but maybe she has a point. Usually, she does. “Think about it. All those pictures I post? They’re selling something. A lifestyle. People look at those pictures and think, ‘If only I had those Sonia Rykiel heels, that gorgeous apartment with the French oak herringbone floors, then I’d be happy. I’d swan about, watering my houseplants and lighting my endless supply of Jo Malone candles, and I’d feel my life in perfect harmony. I’d finally love my home. I’d relish my days on this planet.’ ”
“You sell it well, Rach,” I say. “You seem pretty happy.”
“Damn right I am,” she says. “But I’m not content, and you know why?” She plucks her phone o the table, flips to a specific picture she has in mind, and holds it up. A shot of her reclined on her velvet sofa, laden in bulldogs with matching scars from their matching lifesaving snout surgeries. She’s dressed in SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas and isn’t wearing a lick of makeup.
“Because every day there are back-alley puppy mills breeding more of these little guys! Getting the same poor dogs pregnant over and over again, producing litter upon litter of puppies with genetic mutations that make life hard and painful. Not to mention all the pit bulls doubled up in kennels, rotting in puppy prison!”
“Are you saying I should get a dog?” I say. “Because the whole travel-journalist thing kind of precludes pet ownership.” Truthfully, even if it didn’t, I’m not sure I could handle a pet. I love dogs, but I also grew up in a house teeming with them. With pets come fur and barking and chaos. For a fairly chaotic person, that’s a slippery slope. If I went to a shelter to pick up a foster dog, there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t come home having adopted six of them and a wild coyote.
“I’m saying,” Rachel replies, “that purpose matters more than contentment. You had a ton of career goals, which gave you purpose. One by one, you met them. Et voilà: no purpose.”
“So I need new goals.”
She nods emphatically. “I read this article about it. Apparently the completion of long-term goals often leads to depression. It’s the journey, not the destination, babe, and whatever the fuck else those throw pillows say.”
Her face softens again, becomes the ethereal thing of her mostliked photographs. “You know, my therapist says—”
“Your mom,” I say.
“She was being a therapist when she said this,” Rachel argues, by which I know she means, Sandra Krohn was being decidedly Dr. Sandra Krohn, in the same way that Rachel is sometimes decidedly Art School Rachel, not that Rachel was actually in a therapy session. Beg as Rachel might, her mother refuses to treat Rachel as a patient. Rachel, however, refuses to see anyone else, and so they remain at an impasse.
“Anyway,” Rachel continues, “she told me that sometimes, when you lose your happiness, it’s best to look for it the same way you’d look for anything else.”
“By groaning and hurling couch cushions around?” I guess.
“By retracing your steps,” Rachel says. “So, Poppy, all you have to do is think back and ask yourself, when was the last time you were truly happy?”
The problem is, I don’t have to think back. Not at all.
I know right away when I was last truly happy.
Two years ago, in Croatia, with Alex Nilsen.
But there’s no finding my way back to that, because we haven’t spoken since.
“Just think about it, will you?” Rachel says. “Dr. Krohn is always right.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”
2
is Summer
IDO THINK ABOUT it.
The whole subway ride home. The four-block walk after that. Through a hot shower, a hair mask, and a face mask, and several hours of lying on my sti new sofa.
I don’t spend enough time here to have transformed it into a home, and besides, I’m the product of a cheapskate father and a sentimental mother, which means I grew up in a house filled to the brim with junk. Mom kept broken teacups my brothers and I had given her as kids, and Dad parked our old cars in the front yard just in case he ever learned to fix them. I still have no idea what would be considered a reasonable amount of bric-a-brac in a house, but I know how people generally react to my childhood home and figure it’s safer to err on the side of minimalism rather than hoarding.
Aside from an unwieldy collection of vintage clothes (first rule of the Wright family: never buy anything new if you can get it used for a fraction of the price), there isn’t much else in my apartment to fixate on. So I’m just staring at my ceiling, and thinking.
And the more I think about the trips Alex and I used to take to-
gether, the more I long for them. But not in the fun, daydreamy, energetic way I used to long to see Tokyo in cherry blossom season, or the Fasnacht festivals of Switzerland, with their masked parades and whip-wielding jesters dancing down the candy-colored streets.
What I’m feeling now is more of an ache, a sadness.
It’s worse than the blah-ness of not wanting anything much from life. It’s wanting something I can’t convince myself is even a possibility.
Not after two years of silence.
Okay, not silence. He still sends me a text on my birthday. I still send him one on his. Both of us send replies that say “Thank you” or “How are you doing?” but those words never seem to lead much further.
After everything happened between us, I used to tell myself it would just take time for him to get over it, that things would inevitably go back to normal and we’d be best friends again. Maybe we’d even laugh about this time apart.
But days passed, phones were turned o and on in case messages were getting lost, and after a full month, I even stopped jumping every time my text alert sounded.
Our lives went on, without each other in them. The new and strange became the familiar, the seemingly unchangeable, and now here I am, on a Friday night, staring at nothing.
I push o the sofa and grab my laptop from the co ee table, stepping out onto my tiny balcony. I plop into the lone chair that fits out here and prop my feet on the guardrail, still warm from the sun despite the heavy cloak of night. Down below, the bells chime over the door to the bodega on the corner, people walk home from long nights out, and a couple of cabs idle outside my favorite neighborhood bar, Good Boy Bar (a place that owes its success not to its drinks but to the fact that it allows dogs inside; this is how I survive my petless existence).
I open my computer and bat a moth away from the fluorescent glow of its screen as I pull up my old blog. The blog itself R+R couldn’t care less about—I mean, they evaluated my writing samples from it before I got the job, but they don’t care whether I maintain it. It’s the social media influence they want to keep cashing in on, not the modest but devoted readership I built with my posts on shoestring-budget travel.
Rest + Relaxation magazine doesn’t specialize in shoestringbudget travel. And though I’d planned to keep up Pop Around the World in addition to my magazine work, my entries petered o not long after the Croatia trip.
I scroll back to my post about that one and open it. I was already working at R+R by then, which meant every luxurious second of the trip was paid for. It was supposed to be the best one we’d ever taken, and small slivers of it were.
But rereading my post—even with every hint of Alex and what happened scrubbed out of it—it’s obvious how miserable I was when I got home. I scroll further back, scouring for every post about the Summer Trip. That was what we called it, when we texted about it throughout the year, usually long before we’d nailed down where we would go or how we’d a ord it.
The Summer Trip.
As in, School is killing me—I just want the Summer Trip to be here already, and Pitch for our Summer Trip Uniform, with an attached screenshot of a T-shirt that says YEP, THEY’RE REAL on the chest, or a pair of overall shorts so short as to be, essentially, a denim thong.
A hot breeze blows the smell of garbage and dollar-slice pizza up o the street, ru ing my hair. I twist it into a knot at the base of my neck, then shut my computer and pull out my phone so fast you’d think I actually planned to use it.
You can’t. It’s too weird, I think.
But I’m already pulling up Alex’s number, still there at the top
of my favorites list, where optimism kept him saved until so much time had passed that the possibility of deleting him now seems like a tragic last step I can’t bear to take.
My thumb hovers over the keyboard.
Been thinking about you, I type. I stare at it for a minute, then backspace to the beginning.
Any chance you’re looking to get out of town? I write. That seems good. It’s clear what I’m asking, but pretty casual, with an easy out. But the longer I study the words, the weirder I feel about being so casual. About pretending nothing happened and the two of us are still close friends who can plan a trip in such an informal forum as a postmidnight text.
I delete the message, take a deep breath, and type again: Hey.
“Hey?” I snap, annoyed with myself. Down on the sidewalk, a man jumps in surprise at the sound of my voice, then looks up at my balcony, decides I’m not talking to him, and hurries o .
There’s no way I’m going to send a message to Alex Nilsen that just says Hey.
But then I go to highlight and delete the word, and something horrible happens.
I accidentally hit send.
The message whooshes out.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I hiss, shaking my phone like maybe I can make it spit the text back up before that measly word starts to digest. “No, no, n—”
Chime.
I freeze. Mouth open. Heart racing. Stomach twisting until my intestines feel like rotini noodles.
A new message, the name bolded at the top: ALEXANDER THE GREATEST.
One word. Hey.
I’m so stunned that I almost just text Hey back, like my whole first message never happened, like he just hey’d me out of the blue. But of course he didn’t—he’s not that guy. I’m that guy.
And because I’m that guy, who sends the worst text message in the world, I’ve now gotten a reply that gives me no natural inroad to a conversation.
What do I say?
Does How are you? sound too serious? Does that make it seem like I’m expecting him to say, Well, Poppy, I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you BAD.
Maybe something more innocuous, like What’s up?
But again I feel like the weirdest thing I could do right now is willfully ignore that it is weird to be texting him after all this time.
I’m sorry I sent you a text message that said hey, I write out. I erase it, try for funny: You’re probably wondering why I’ve brought you here.
Not funny, but I’m standing at the edge of my tiny balcony, actually shivering with nervous anticipation and terrified to wait too long to respond. I send the message and start to pace. Only, because the balcony’s so tiny and the chair takes up half of it, I’m basically just spinning like a top, a tail of moths chasing the blurry light of my phone.
It chimes again, and I snap down into the chair and open the message.
Is this about the disappearing sandwiches in the break room?
A moment later, a second message comes in.
Because I didn’t take those. Unless there’s a security camera in there. In which case, I’m sorry.
A smile blooms across my face, a flood of warmth melting the anxious knot in my chest. There was a brief period of time when Alex was convinced he was going to get fired from his teaching job. After waking up late and missing breakfast, he’d had a doctor’s ap-
pointment over lunch. He hadn’t had time to grab food after, so he’d gone to the teachers’ lounge, hoping it was someone’s birthday, that there might be donuts or stale mu ns he could pick over.
But it was the first Monday of the month, and an American History teacher named Ms. Delallo, a woman Alex secretly considered his workplace nemesis, insisted on cleaning out the fridge and counter space on the last Friday of every month—and then making a big deal about it like she expected to be thanked, though oftentimes her coworkers lost a couple of perfectly good frozen lunches in the process.
Anyway, the only thing left in the fridge was a tuna salad sandwich. “Delallo’s calling card,” Alex had joked when he recounted the story to me later.
He’d eaten the sandwich as an act of defiance (and hunger). Then spent three weeks convinced someone was going to find out and he’d lose his job. It’s not like it was his dream to teach high school literature, but the job paid okay, had good benefits, and was in our hometown back in Ohio, which—though to me, a definite negative—meant he got to be close to two of his three younger brothers and the children they’d started churning out.
Besides, the kind of university job Alex really wanted just didn’t come up very often these days. He couldn’t a ord to lose his teaching job, and luckily he hadn’t.
SandwichES? PLURAL? I type back now. Please, please, please tell me you have become a full-fledged hoagie thief.
Delallo’s not a hoagie fan, Alex says. Lately she’s been hot for Reubens.
And how many of these Reubens have you stolen? I ask. Assuming the NSA is reading this, none, he says.
You’re a high school English teacher in Ohio; of course they’re reading.
He sends back a sad face. Are you saying I’m not important enough for the U.S. government to monitor?
