'Good.' Tris lets loose a smoke signal. 'I don't want to talk about us.'
You never did,I think.
When someone breaks up with you, their beauty-which you took such satisfaction in-suddenly becomes unfair. It's like that with Tris right now. She's even managed to arrange herself in the lamplight so the shadows hit in just the right way. It feels like a rebuke.
We sit in silence for a second. She takes a drag. She's cinematic and I'm a fucking sitcom. The silence doesn't bother her at all, but it freaks the hell out of me. So I do what I always vowed not to do, and always found myself doing anyway. I throw 'I miss you' into the breach. It even feels empty to me. Like I'm not saying it to the right person.
'Don't start that again,' Tris says, but without the edge I was expecting. 'It doesn't prove anything except that I don't feel the same way.' Another drag of the cigarette, and an ear turned toward the club. 'They sound kick-ass tonight, don't they? I thought the big time would ruin them, but maybe I was wrong. I should've slept with Owen O. while I had the chance. Then I would've been only one degree of spreaderation from whatever teen-movie starlet gets to him first. I just hope they don't name their daughter after a fucking fruit.'
'April,' I say.
'What?'
'April. You said you wanted to name our daughter April.'
Tris shoots me a curious look. 'Did I? I don't know if it's sweet or scary that you remember that.'
I find the courage to ask, 'Aren't sweet and scary the same thing to you?'
She grins a little at my insight and nods. 'Maybe. Sorry.'
'Sorry?'
'Yeah. Sorry.'
She draws more of the embers toward her, stares not at me but at the punks walking across the street from us.
'Tris, I-'
'Do you like her?'
'What?'
'Norah. Do you like her?'
'Can you like someone who confuses the hell out of you?'
'All the fucking time.'
'Did I confuse the hell out you?'
It's really just a question, but this time Tris is annoyed, flicking her cigarette at me so ashes scatter on my shirt.
'Shut up, okay?' she says. 'Enough already. ENOUGH. Yes, you confuse the hell out of me. Because not only can you not let go, but you don't even fucking realize that the thing you're holding on to isn't even there. You think I hurt you? Well, I could have hurt you so much more.'
'How?' I have to ask.
'By telling the truth, Nick. I thought you'd see it. I thought you'd figure it out. I had no idea how completely blind you could make yourself. And yes, I could have just come right out and said it. But you were just so fucking vulnerable that I could never do it. And then I hurt you anyway. But fuck, Nick-you needed to be hurt. You needed to have the truth kicked into you.'
'It's more like a stabbing than a kicking,' I tell her, just so she'll know.
'For me it's a kicking,' Tris replies. 'But whatever. The subject of us is through. The subject of you and Norah is not. Let me give you some free advice. She's a runner for sure-she'll run away every time without saying a word. But here's the thing-you are not a runner. And deep down, I don't think Norah wants to run, either. She just feels like she has to. Partly because she's a tiresome spoiled-brat smartass with no fashion sense. And partly because she's a fucking human being.'
She's making sense, and that's like a rebuke, too. Why couldn't we have had these conversations when we were together? I think. And then I realize what I've done-I've made when we were together a separate, almost distant place. I still feel the hurt, but I feel much less desire to undo it.
'I'm through with you for tonight,' Tris says, standing up. 'Find that other fuck-up and have fucked-up children together. Don't name them after fruits or months. Be original and just name them like children.'
'But she's gone,' I say.
Tris snorts. 'Nick, Norah's not gone. She's clearly someplace. All you have to do is find out where that is.'
'Any ideas?' I ask.
'Nope,' Tris answers, walking out of my life once again. 'You're on your own.'
I let her leave. I watch her walk into the blast of music blaring from the open door of the club.
Then I look back to the sidewalk and try to map the possibilities.
12. NORAH
I am still hungry.
I am also still tired, and still vaguely interested in my future life of sainthood, but still. I gnaw. The stale Oreo I am munching in the cab, with the cookie part soggy instead of crisp, the white center near-gelatinous-like a room temperature ice cream sandwich-is brilliant, but not coming close to quelling this hunger. I'm not sure whether the gnawing is coming from my stomach or the Arctic vicinities around that area that, earlier, eerily melted under the greenhouse effect of Nick's touch.
'Are we going or not?' the taxi driver asks me. We've sat through five rotations of the light at Houston and West Broadway while I decide where I want to go. The driver is putting up with my uncertainty because he's hopeful I won't follow through on my threat to either be driven to Jersey or file a formal complaint if he gives me any more shit about leaving the city.
'Where to, lady?'
I DON'T FUCKING KNOW!
I can only process two rational thoughts. (1) I want more stale Oreos from that Korean grocery, and (2) I don't want some stupid fucking guy to be the reason I stop liking Where's Fluffy. I need to erase the memory of my favorite Fluffy song, their gay rights anthem 'Lesbian Lap Dance,' from being my last memory of the band, the song they were performing when genius girl decided to take Nick by the hand for some lap-dance action of our own. I need to get back to that fucking club.
'Back to Ludlow,' I tell the driver.
Did I go too far with Nick, or not far enough? Or is it that I'm just plain unattractive? I never should have deleted all those spam e-mails advertising the vitamin supplements for fuller, firmer breasts. I'm more stacked than Caroline and Tris but mine go off in the wrong directions-over and out instead of up and in. It's probably time for me to wake up and accept the fact that I may be in need of a makeover.
The driver sighs, shakes his head, then pulls an illegal U-turn across four lanes of traffic from where we've been idling at the curb. He turns up the radio volume, perhaps hoping he will not hear me if I should change my mind again. How a former second-string player on the Kazakhstan soccer team came to be driving a graveyard-shift taxi in Manhattan and listening to Z100 instead of the standard 1010 WINS (all news, all depressing, all the time), which I had always assumed to be the one cardinal rule of taxicab radio etiquette, I don't know. Everyone has their story.
Vintage Britney sings from the pop radio station; she knows about toxic. Nick must think I'm toxic, marauding him in a closet at a Fluffy show. He didn't try to stop me when I left that room, or when I left him to get into this taxi. He didn't even wave good-bye.
The cab is careening down Bowery, whizzing by the club where earlier tonight Nick asked if I would be his girlfriend for five minutes, then made me like him, then looked right at me and made a public declaration with those magic words-'FUCK-SHIT-COCK'-that left me no choice but to make a play for him. I remember seeing Crazy Lou at the Where's Fluffy show, long after those five minutes had expired. Lou would only leave his club for someone else
