Emmy was ready to turn in for the night. But outside her door, she heard her aunt pleading with Paige. “Would it kill you to spend a little time with her?”
A scoff. A mumble.
“Car privileges,” her aunt said.
There was a knock at the closet door.
Paige was smiling a little too brightly. “Settling in okay? I was thinking we should go out. Up for it?”
Emmy looked at her phone. It was only 8:30 in Vancouver. But she was still on Winnipeg time, and to her body it was 10:30.
“I don’t know,” Emmy said.
“Come on,” Paige urged. “It’ll be fun.”
In the driver’s seat of the little red car, Paige adjusted the rear-view mirror. Emmy thought how perfect Paige looked, no matter how small the gesture.
They drove in silence for a while. Emmy looked out at the city. The yellow and orange leaves on the trees that lined Main Street cast the city in an amber glow. Emmy wondered if she would ever start taking Vancouver’s beauty for granted.
Paige made a sharp right and parked in a no-parking zone. Emmy didn’t say anything. She would never have let her mom get away with that back in Winnipeg.
“Let’s see if Jude is working,” Paige suggested.
“Jude?”
“You remember my friend Judy, from St. Mary’s?”
Emmy remembered. “You’re still friends?”
“Well, sort of. Yeah. I mean, we’re still friends, but Judy’s not Judy anymore. He goes by Jude.” Paige raised her right eyebrow in Emmy’s direction, looking for some sort of response. Emmy couldn’t figure out what she was supposed to say, so she said nothing.
They crossed Broadway and walked into a café that looked like the set of a sitcom. Emmy took in the various event posters: poetry slams, indie bands, open mic nights, a performance series called That Hashtag. A familiar face looked up from behind the counter. He gave Paige a wave.
“Hi, Jude. This is my cousin, Emmy,” Paige said. Emmy couldn’t believe that Paige introduced them like they didn’t even know each other. She wondered if the introduction was somehow related to Jude’s gender. Did they need to be reintroduced as new people?
“Oh, hey. Yeah.” Jude nodded and smiled at Emmy.
The smile nearly took Emmy’s breath away. In front of her was the kind of guy she didn’t know existed in real life. He looked like he should be on a stage, or better yet, a movie screen. He needed to be up where the lights would highlight his perfect face, and make the mystery in his chestnut-brown eyes deeper. Emmy found herself looking at his hands and trying to find the words she would write to describe them. They were the hands of an artist — no, a musician. Emmy wanted to write a scene of him sitting on the edge of her bed and playing a love song on the guitar just for her. He looked like if he were your boyfriend, he’d sit at the edge of your bed and play guitar or something.
His hair was shaved short on the sides and the top was slicked back to perfection, though he didn’t seem like the kind of person who spent too long in front of a mirror. But the way his hair escaped his slicked-back ’do and fell in a few wispy strands around his face looked like it was done by a stylist. He dressed like he was one of the greasers from The Outsiders, in jeans and a white t-shirt with a lighter tucked into the roll of his sleeve.
When Jude fixed his dark eyes on her, Emmy was afraid she might disappear. She put up her hand to wave like a new girl at school being introduced at the front of the class. It was too formal. It was too casual.
“Hi,” she said. “You’re so hot now.”
The words fell out of her by accident. Only when they were actually out there did she realize what she’d said. She talked quickly, as though more words might make him forget. “I mean hi. I mean, we met a few summers ago. I don’t know if you remember.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “You guys sticking around?” He motioned with the rag he held, offering to wipe up a table.
“We’ll hang out at the counter so we can harass you,” Paige said.
Emmy followed her cousin to the counter. What she really wanted to do was bolt. She wanted to kick herself.
Jude looked at an order slip and got busy behind the espresso machine. Emmy tried to tell if he was taller than she was. Paige was much shorter than Emmy. She was much thinner too. Emmy was always horrified when she was the biggest person in a group.
“So, Emmy, aren’t you from Saskatoon or somewhere?”
“Winnipeg.”
Jude looked at her as though he expected her to say something more, but Emmy stayed silent. After that case of verbal vomit, she needed to have more control. But she couldn’t look away from Jude. She didn’t want to stare, but it seemed less risky than talking.
“So did you move or are you visiting?”
“Um . . . visiting?”
Emmy was desperate to come up with more than one-word answers. But she didn’t believe that a guy like Jude would be interested in hearing what she had to say. Guys were never interested. Emmy had once been told by a friend that if you were going to be the fat girl, you had to at least have personality. Emmy was sure she didn’t have that.
Jude stood tall, frothing milk into foam. Emmy looked him up and down, trying to get every detail so that she could write it down later. On his shirt, he wore a button with a picture of RuPaul. What the hell? Emmy thought she was the only person in the world who loved RuPaul. She thought about the nights after her dad died. Her mom was a mess and life was nothing but sad. The only thing that made it bearable was late-night reruns of Drag Race. She was pretty sure there was no one like RuPaul in Winnipeg, at least not at her school. But she had been drawn to the creativity, the sequins, the makeup, and the cattiness of the contestants. Mostly she loved how RuPaul talked about how you have to love yourself. She stared at the button and wanted to ask about it. But she was too uncertain of her words to say anything.
“A couple of Americanos, Jude,” said Paige. She turned to Emmy.
“So they get in the coolest spoken-word poets and musicians to perform here,” she explained. As if it wasn’t totally clear to Emmy already that this was the place to be.
“Sounds cool,” Emmy said. Cool in the way the poems in her notebook were not. She couldn’t imagine her poems performed in front of a crowd of strangers.
Jude plunked a couple of small cups on saucers in front of them. Emmy really wanted to ask for cream to put in her coffee. Instead she stared at her cup like it was a gift that she didn’t dare open. Paige stirred sugar into her cup and sipped.
Jude came back and placed two small pitchers in front of Emmy. “Sorry, I forgot because I know Paige drinks hers black. There’s milk and cream for you.”
Emmy watched the steam from her cup mist the steel surface of the cream pitcher as she poured.
When they were done, Paige stood up. She put on her jacket and said, “Let’s get out of here, Emmy.”
“Shouldn’t we pay?” Emmy asked.
“Nah. We’re good.” She turned to her friend. “Right, Jude?”
“Of course. Get out of here.”
“We should at least leave a tip then,” Emmy said. She dug through her overstuffed bag in search of her wallet. Why were there so many candy wrappers and old receipts in there? What would people think if she were suddenly struck by a bus and a random stranger had to go through her bag in search of ID?
She put a five on the counter and followed Paige out the door.