The windows stretched from the ceiling to her knees. There was an empty sill, and on the empty sill was a bright blue hair tie. She picked it up and stretched it with her fingers. She sniffed it as though it might have an answer to her question, which it did.
Jenna Fucking Silverstein. It was all so perfectly designed to get her goat. She still couldn’t quite believe it. But it made so much sense that she laughed out loud.
Smiling still, she lifted her robe off her shoulders so that she could dry her hair with it, and then she combed her hair back with her hands and drew the bright blue band around her ponytail. It was hers, Whitney knew. It was hers and now it belonged to Whitney.
“So, now what?” Whitney whispered to her reflection in the windows of Jack’s apartment, and to the city outside, sooted over in shadow and rain. Her phone was somewhere in the apartment, probably dead. But containing all the new texts and emails that were always waiting for her. She lowered her robe back down onto her shoulders and loosened the knot around her waist. “Now what?”
As Will walked Jenna back to her hotel, he slipped off a curb and ended up on his hip in the gutter. They’d had five or six little beers each, on top of whatever it was she’d given him earlier, and his body was humming when he went down. He didn’t appear to have broken any bones or done much but scrape up his ankle and wrist, but his heart was beating hard and he felt the blood in his brain. Then he sensed the crackle in his pocket, like a plastic baggy. He understood the implication at once. He carefully slid the mess of his phone out between two pincers. The screen was lit still but splintered in a dense web. He couldn’t comprehend anything on it but the power bar in the upper right-hand corner, which was running out anyway.
His mouth was slack in incomprehension. He stared back at the curb as though it was the curb’s fault. They were on a walkway that split Diagonal. The curbs were gleaming. The result of the healthy and happy-seeming street cleaners he’d admired that morning. The civic pride, the reasonable cost of living, the halfway decent hours. He had them to thank for the cleanness of the curb.
“It’s decimated,” he said.
“Throw it out,” she said.
“I’m not throwing it out. I can’t just throw away a phone.”
“Then at least try not to cut your hand. Look at that thing.”
He held it a foot from his body, the way dog-walkers hold a bag of shit. Jenna was off down the sidewalk, up Diagonal. He was drunk and rattled and his head was flooded with adrenaline, contemplating all that he would miss now that his phone was busted. His mind was elsewhere, which was how he started absently answering all of Jenna’s questions about 1-2-3.
Once he’d started, he worried that he shouldn’t have said anything to begin with, and knew it was a double betrayal of Whitney that he was blabbing to someone who irked her so intensely. But it was out of the bag, and so he decided to go fishing for a big laugh. He told her things he had told Whitney at dinner on Saturday—the bloody nose, the litter box. But he told her things he’d forgotten to tell Whitney, too. He told her about how he’d gone empty-handed to Kelly Kyle’s, how they’d had to go on a scavenger hunt for condoms in her closet, and how they’d found a single glow-in-the-dark something called a “Night Light.” He told her about how Whitney had taught him some new moves before she’d gone to L.A., “tricks” she’d picked up from somewhere but never suggested he use before, not for them, but that she figured might come in handy when he went out there all alone in the world. He told her that, in retrospect, one of those new moves might have prevented the bloody nose. He told her about prowling the East Village, the way he’d walk into bars to case the joint, the way he wouldn’t even buy a beer sometimes, but would just sweep around for realistic targets. He said he didn’t even know what he meant by that—realistic targets—but it’s what it felt like. He told her how he’d look for girls in the East Village whose dresses weren’t zipped up all the way to the top, who evidently didn’t have a helping hand at home in the mornings. He told her how he’d look for girls reading alone on benches in the park. How he’d look for girls in bars whose friends were coupled off with other guys. It reminded him of something Whitney had said before: that she wished her single friends from work could hang out together like Will and his friends could, where the hanging out was the point, rather than just a means toward the be-all-end-all mission of getting picked up. Every night she went out with them, Will said, Whitney would be traded out at the earliest opportunity for the first cute guy who approached their table. Jenna shrugged like it was nothing surprising, like everything he’d said made obvious boring sense.
Her hotel wasn’t far, just a few more blocks, and it was a good thing, because the rain was starting to come down again. It would be warmer there, at least. The AC in the bar had practically given him the flu. He could use the bathroom in the lobby before checking in with Whitney, if he could even remember her number.
