I stepped off the escalator, completely at loss for words, having had no expectation I’d see this person now. Certainly not here. Certainly not this soon. Probably not ever. Impulsively, I yanked her by her hand to pull her away from the streams of people coming at us from all directions, looking around to see who might be studying the conversation we were about to have. I brought her to a corner. “This is not the time.”
“I need your help.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“You need my help.”
“Like I said . . .” I turned. I left. “This is not the time.” With ten different objectives clashing in my head, I couldn’t be sure which ones logically outranked the others, but despite how important this girl was to me, the imminent fear of losing Jenn dominated them all. I started walking toward Jenn’s terminal.
“Will you please stop walking?” she said, following me for a few steps. “So we can talk?”
I stopped.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” she said.
It was exhilarating to be inches from her. I had to be honest. I’d never gazed at someone so beautiful while telling her to go away. It was a rush of fear, nerves, anger, hope, adrenaline, sleep deprivation, and confusion. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I’ll explain everything to you but right now you don’t know what you’re dealing with, so you need my help.”
“You’re drawing a lot of attention to me and that does not help, and I absolutely can’t talk right now, so . . .” I couldn’t think fast enough, logically enough, to wrangle all the conflicts involved. I did need her, but I also needed her to get the hell away from me if I were to have any chance of convincing Jenn of anything. If Jenn were even here. “Please let me do what I have to do.”
I started to walk off again.
“I have no one else,” she said.
“For what?”
She caught up to me and accompanied me this time. I saw it in her face. The pleading.
“For what?” I repeated, knowing I wasn’t going to give in. I told myself I wouldn’t give in. “Fine. I’ll let you explain to me whatever you need to explain to me, but you’ll do it after this thing I gotta do, okay? Not now. After. I need to meet someone now and you need to disappear.”
“Where will I find you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where will I find you?”
“Not here. Inside . . . Inside . . . Sacré-Coeur.”
“No.”
“Then?”
“It has too many people.”
“Then . . . the Pyramid.”
“At what time?”
“I don’t know. I have to go.” I looked around. There was this sinking feeling that police were slowly assembling around us in an arc, whispering into their headsets. Male. Five-ten. Light-skinned Hispanic. “In several hours?”
“The Pyramid closes in several hours—”
“God!” Is nothing simple? “Then you pick a spot, okay? Pick one. Hurry.”
“Pont des Arts. It’s a bridge—”
“Fine.”
“City center—”
“Yes. Fine. That.”
She was now looking at me almost condescendingly, almost like she was about to say more but decided I wasn’t worth it. I started to respond but she turned and walked away.
I didn’t have time to figure out just what that look meant. I hustled up to the third concourse where the main security gates were located. They had a ramp crossing diagonally through the courtyard within a multilevel stack of floors. Fortunately, the whole thing was weirdly transparent, and I could see people crossing to any floor and, like clockwork, right on time, within her patented two-hour cushion, I saw Jenn rolling her luggage ten yards ahead of me. I felt like I was dreaming. The sight of her. Nothing else had gone right in the past twenty-four hours, yet there she was, and when she saw me, when I saw that she wasn’t going to run in the opposite direction, or slap me, or whatever the hell any of this warranted in her unpredictable Jenn mind, I forgot all my counterarguments.
“Hey,” I said.
Her presence did that to me. A slight rush. A slight escalation of breath.
“Hey,” she said back.
I tried to pull her aside so we could talk discreetly but she flinched as soon as I touched her, so I moved back a step, not wanting to create a spectacle. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” She seemed furious, which was something I hadn’t really prepared for.
“Uh . . . okay . . . okay . . . Here’s the deal . . . Here we go . . .” I turned my back to the nearest video camera, knowing the effort was futile but doing it anyway. “I need something from you. I don’t have a lot of time to convince you I need it, but I need it. I’m getting a sense you’re upset with me, though I’m not sure why, though I’m also sort of entitled to be upset in return, based on you missing lunch. Upset is a strong word. I’m not upset. I’m just trying to say I’m in a serious situation. You don’t need to be part of it. I just need you to let me have something of yours without fully authorizing me to have it. Just . . . Well . . . I thought this through and here’s how it could work. You’ll tell them you lost what I’m about to ask you for. And I’ll tell them that I stole it from you when—”
She pulled her employee ID from her purse and held it out toward me.
She did it so effortlessly I couldn’t even process it at first. “The—?” I didn’t know what to say.
“They locked you out of the network, right? And now you need to access your account?”
How could she know that this is exactly what I’d be asking?
“Is that right?” she said. She was fatigued. “Look, I don’t really want to hear all the details of what you’re about to do. You stole this from me, fine. I’ll say it’s lost, fine. The fact that the only reason you hunted me down is to grovel for some bullshit scheme that probably won’t even come—”
“Whoa.”
“—close to—”
“Whoa. The only reason I hunted you down? I fucking texted you up the ass.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“I called you and left messages all morning to make sure you—”
“All morning? All morning?! Let’s process that for a second. All morning. First of all, I was exhausted. I inhaled approximately nine thousands pounds of smoke last night, I had to take all these heavy meds, so I’m sleeping in just to survive, then I wake up and literally half the planet has texted me asking for ridiculous shit, like, everything that ever existed, and so here I am just doing our job, just piecing together a halfway usable battle plan for damage control for the Paris leg before they confirm Amsterdam, and when I finally do get a chance to read your passive-aggressive text-vomit, during which you go from Zero to Guilting-Me-Out-for-Not-Being-at-Your-Disposal, maybe I didn’t have the time to apologize for things I didn’t do in order to protect our friendship, which in your eyes is utterly delicate because I was too busy doing both our jobs to keep a last-minute lunch when you couldn’t even keep yourself out of trouble for our most important night ever, even after I told you seventy-five million times how important last night was to me, yet here I am still willing to do you this favor that could get me fired.”
She put her employee card in my hand.
I couldn’t think at first.
“Okay, first of all, uh, thank you . . . for this . . .” I said, holding up the card. “Second of all, I mean, no, wait, wait, how in the world is this my fault? I didn’t drop the ball. I got terminated. They—”
“You were flirting with some girl.”
“Me?”
“I’ll never forgive you for that. The whole reason we were late was because you let your dick take over your spinal—”
“Whoa, slow your—You cannot say Evan Goldman happened because of me.”
“I’m saying you knew how important last night was to my career and you couldn’t even be reliable for half a day.”
“I got suspended. I did not chase down a girl.”
“Trevor said you went to find her.”
“I nev—What? No. Trevor’s—No. I’m not gonna go into the details of my day but just know that my day was by your own medieval standards of hard, hard.” I couldn’t tell her exactly what happened because I couldn’t make her liable. The more she knew, the more she could get fired. “But what you went through on the roof last night . . . is . . . yeah . . . Okay, you’re right.”
She seemed to sense that I’d experienced something dire. Her posture relaxed ever so slightly.
“Okay?” I said.
Best friends are like that.
She took a new tone.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.” I took a new tone too.
“I’m sorry I accused you of anything with that girl.”
“It’s fine.”
“You’re stressful sometimes . . . but . . .” She felt bad. I could see it. She’d said whatever nastiness she needed to say to me, probably directed at the universe in general, and not my head, but I happened to be in front of her nozzle. “I’m sorry to accuse you of anything. I understand you’re up against a corporate wall. I’m sure it’s ugly. I might be able to talk to our legal team and see if there’s—Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Oh my God.”
“What is it?”
She saw something behind me.
And once I saw her see it, I didn’t even need to turn around to see what it was. I could read the entire situation on her face.
The girl.
The girl had approached us, coming up from behind me to stand directly by my side, facing Jenn.