Screw nibbling. It was time to hard-core eat my feelings. I shoved the entire rest of the cookie in my mouth, then went to wipe my hand on the napkin it had come on. I paused, my hand in midair. Someone had written a message on the napkin in small, delicate cursive: Tuesday, 8 pm, meet on the corner of Perry and Greenwich. The password is Persist.
I looked up quickly, searching for the barista who had given me the plate. She wasn’t behind the counter anymore.
Jangling with excitement and nerves, I stared down at the napkin again. Then I pulled up Miles’s text, typed out a response, and pressed send.
I’m in.
EIGHT
On Tuesday night, as the dusk turned to darkness, I stood on the corner of Perry and Greenwich and waited. The whole way over, I’d listened to pump-up girl rock, Le Tigre and Joan Jett pounding in my ears as I power walked the streets of the West Village, passing the crowds at the ice cream shops and bars on West 4th, heading toward the river, the pedestrians thinning the farther west I went. At the corner, I attempted to act casual, pulling out a copy of a Gertrude Stein book, reading the same paragraph over and over again without registering any of it. Every person who passed made my hands tremble in anticipation. They all walked right by me and carried on with their nights, paying me no mind.
I could pull this off. I was the hero of an action movie, the guy you knew was going to be okay no matter how many helicopters he jumped out of and burning buildings he dashed into. You’re Tom Cruise, bitch, I said to myself. In terms of Mission: Impossible, not the Scientology.
A woman turned onto the block, heading my way. Something about her registered as familiar—the tilt of her head, the way she absentmindedly fiddled with her watch, the length of her hair. I knew the shape of her. The uncanny sense grew as she closed in, her face shadowy in the streetlight’s glow: she was my mother. My breath quickened. She was half a block away now, and I wanted to run to her but I was frozen in place, like one of those dreams where you can’t move your stupid feet, and I wanted to call out but my voice lodged in my throat. Vanilla, my mother’s scent, hung in the air. (I’d given her some cheap bottle of vanilla perfume for Christmas one year when I was little. She was a grown woman and probably hadn’t wanted to walk around smelling like cookies, but she’d worn it ever since.) She came closer, closer still, and the light of a passing car illuminated her face, and she wasn’t my mother at all, just a fiftysomething brunette with a completely different nose and mouth. As she passed by me on her way to who-knew-where, her distracted eyes landed on me for a fraction of a second. Then they flickered onto something else, because we were total strangers.
“Do you have something to say to me?” a voice asked, close to my ear.
“Shit!” I yelped, jumping back. A woman, a few years younger than me, wearing a leather jacket and a sundress, had appeared behind me. She tapped at her phone with a look of disinterest on her face.
“Um,” I said, swallowing, and she glanced up. “Persist?”
She stared at me for a moment more. “I’m going to need your phone.”
“Why?”
She gave me a look of disdain. “Why do you think?” Either this was the most complicated stickup in history, or they didn’t trust me not to take pictures, which was smart of them, because that was absolutely what I’d been planning to do. The woman rolled her eyes. “I know we’re all addicted, but don’t freak out, you’ll get it back at the end of the night.” I turned my phone off and handed it over to her. “Do you have any other cameras or recording devices for any reason?” I shook my head. She pulled something out of her pocket: a blindfold, silky and black. “Okay, now do I have your consent to put this on you?”
“Kinky,” I said, waggling my eyebrows. She didn’t laugh. I cleared my throat. “Sure. Yeah, go for it.”
She slipped the cloth over my eyes, knotting it tightly behind my head, her movements perfunctory as if she did this every couple of weeks, like laundry. Maybe this was a duty that the younger, less impressive members performed to work their way up. Or maybe, I thought, as the world disappeared from my view, maybe the members of Nevertheless knew exactly what I was up to, and they’d sent this emissary to lead me to some abandoned warehouse along the highway. She’d tell me to wait and leave me there until I realized, hours later, that no one was coming for me. Maybe I wasn’t Tom Cruise at all, but Extra #3, whose adventure ended before it began, without any fanfare at all.
The woman gripped my shoulders, then spun me around a few times like we were about to play a very intense game of pin the tail on the donkey. She placed a hand on my back and began guiding me down the street. With my sense of sight gone, I would simply heighten my other senses to figure out where we were going, like a bat! Taking a deep breath in from my nose, I got a real strong whiff of old street piss. Okay, I would simply trust my guide to lead me without pushing me into traffic or a storm drain.
A rumble of drunken laughter grew closer. “What’s with the blindfold?” a man asked, his words a little slurry. From the sound of it, he was traveling in a pack of bros.
“Oh my God,” my chaperone answered, her voice turned girlish, bubblegum. “We’re doing
