“They did, but they got another grant, so we’re back in business. I’m in the school Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the nursing home Tuesday and Thursday.”
“You have the best job ever,” I tell her. “You’re like a musical saint walking amongst us.”
“Oh, yes. I’m the Fraulein Maria of Midtown. The second my austere but compelling Austrian naval commander appears, I’ll be all set.”
“Meh, forget that. Then you’d have to be the stepmother to seven children, and the student loans for that crew would be insane.”
“True. I’m still working on my own.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Let’s pivot from the student loan talk. It’s too depressing. How was the big pre-wedding extravaganza?”
Cristina and Maggie walk that fine line between acquaintances and friends, with me as their common denominator. They’re close enough that Maggie is invited to the wedding but not close enough to have been at the party.
“As a matter of fact, it was a little unreal. My ex-boyfriend was there.”
“Mark?” she almost shouts. “What was he doing there?”
“No, not him, but I saw him, too. I’m talking about my ex from college.”
“Wait, hold on.” Maggie pulls me closer to her side as we make our way past pedestrian traffic on 2nd Avenue. “Start over. How did this happen?”
“Turns out Ryan, my college ex, is Jason’s friend from when they were kids. So not only is he here for the week, but he’s going to be a groomsman in the wedding.”
“Well, this all sounds very fairy-tale-esque to me. College sweethearts reunited. Did you make out at midnight?”
“That’s a hard no. We didn’t end things on good terms back in the day and it didn’t seem like a whole lot changed, until last night.”
I turn to Maggie for her response when she’s suddenly looking down, frantically digging through her bag.
“One second,” she mutters. “My phone is vibrating.”
Pulling said phone out, she swipes her fingers across the touchscreen. She stands eerily still before yelling, “Yes!”
“What is it?” I ask.
“I won the Oklahoma! digital ticket lottery!” she sings. Maggie tends to break out into song more often than not. She’s all but jumping up and down as she cradles her phone to her chest like a baby.
“That’s awesome,” I say, feeding off her excitement. “I didn’t even know Oklahoma! was on Broadway.”
“It only came on recently, but this version is edgy and fresh, and the cast is incredible.”
“Can’t fight that ‘Surrey with the Fringe on Top.’”
“No, you cannot,” she agrees, happily tossing her phone back into her bag. “I have two hours to claim my tickets online so when we get to the restaurant, our table needs to become mission control for a couple of minutes.”
“Fine by me.”
Maggie links her arm through mine once again, glowing from her musical theater victory. The funny thing is, she’s actually won discounted show tickets a bunch of times, but you’d never know it from her reactions. To her, each reduced-price ticket is the new best day of her life. She’s addicted to Broadway musicals. She calls it her hobby but it’s beyond that. Musicals are to her what romance novels are to me—necessary.
“Okay,” she says, winding herself down, “now that I’ve had my good news, I want to hear more about yours. You were talking about Ryan. Go on. How’d he look?”
My smile inadvertently changes to a scowl. “Ryan was always good-looking.”
“And he couldn’t have been a bad person if you used to date him. You’re one of the pickiest people I know. How long were you guys together?”
Maggie and I cross the street at the corner of 48th and 2nd, now only a few blocks away from our destination.
“We were together for two years, the last bit being long-distance.”
“Were you guys really close?”
He was everything. All of it. He was all I thought about on the inside and everything I saw on the outside. I took my first love experience and ran with it hard and fast until my lungs burned and my legs fell out from under me.
That’s my first thought.
“We were close,” I decide to say. Maggie looks as though she heard my initial response. “He was funny and sweet and he was the first guy to ever really notice me, to see me like that.”
“To see you like what?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Like something so special he could hardly believe it.”
“Did you love him?” she asks.
It takes me a second to respond. “Yes. Too much. More than I should have.”
“Well then,” she demands, “what happened?”
“It was a tough situation. It was the culmination of a lot of things.”
“Such as?”
I fight off my initial urge to detach. It’s strange—after all this time the pain is still there. It’s silent and weakened but still alive. Still breathing.
“After Ryan graduated, he got an internship back in North Carolina and he threw himself into his work. I had just started my junior year and we thought we could handle being apart. In the beginning it was okay, but as time went by I heard from him less and less. He wanted to turn the internship into a job, and it seemed like there wasn’t room for anything else. Including me. We would go days at a time without talking.”
“That’s no fun,” Maggie says. “Was that it then? The distance?”
“No.” I pause, hearing the familiar hiss of a memory as it slithers its way back through my consciousness.
“There was this girl in the internship program with him. Madison. They got close. She would always post pictures of them working late or hanging out on the weekends. Ryan kept saying they were just friends, but thinking of him with her all the time chipped away at me and I couldn’t stop it. She was beautiful. So beautiful that it turned me ugly.”
“Did you say something to him about it?”
“Yes. He would just tell me that they were friends and I had nothing to worry about, but it still felt like he was emotionally cheating. He confided in her. He liked spending time with her. And all the while,
