“Tea,” Ruth said. We were in her bedroom, which I’d recently decided was my favorite place in the world.
I called her once I’d gotten away from the Floods, and we decided to ditch school. I’d talked with her late the night before and we’d been going on about ourselves. She told me about the car accident she was in with her big sister and her mom a few summers ago, and the year she spent in London when she was in eighth grade and the proper little English boy she made out with there, and the months she spent sailing with her parents in the West Indies, which actually got me pretty excited about this trip with my swindler of a dad. She was so incredibly cool.
“And look, aren’t those scones? And jam? This is great,” I said. And then I laughed. I was nuzzling her neck and she smelled of the black currant tea and this kind of warm hippie-ish smell that I was getting to really, really like. Even though up to now I’d always said I hated hippies.
“I’m so glad we ditched school,” Ruth said. “Especially because we’re going away tonight. I would’ve really missed you.”
“You’re going away? Where?”
“The Harvard-Yale game. My dad makes us go every year. It’s at Harvard.”
“Shit! You’re going to Cambridge?”
“My sister’s a freshman there. We usually have fun when we’re together.”
“So, you know other Harvard kids?”
“Yeah—Alan Ebershoff’s sister is best friends with my sister. Actually I heard that Froggy’s been fooling around with your friend’s ex-girlfriend—Amanda something? Do I have that right? Describe her.”
“Extremely insecure and kind of short—lives in Tribeca?”
“That’s her. Froggy will probably be there with his friends, too. They’re going to fly up tomorrow morning and they’re a lot of fun.”
“But I think maybe David wants to marry Amanda. That’s why I’ve got to take him to the Caribbean, to get a cheap diamond.” That wasn’t the point though. I looked at Ruth. I sighed. “I can’t believe she moved on so quickly.”
“Some girls are like that.”
“Not you, I hope.”
“Nope, not me.”
I didn’t say anything, and for a moment a sharp needle of paranoia and jealousy poked me, even though it was three o’clock on Friday afternoon and we were in Ruth’s bed, buried deep under her comforter that smelled like jasmine and hemp. We began to kiss and the Death Cab for Cutie CD on the stereo was like a quiet reassuring whisper, calm down calm down she likes you she likes you. And so I did calm down. And then time passed and we must have been sleeping. And when I woke up, I admit, it took me a second to shake off the feeling that sometimes when I was with Ruth, I was kind of pretending to be as laid back and relaxed as her, since no matter how much I wanted to be, I knew inside that I’m not really that way.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Oh, go down to the first floor and use the one there.”
“Why?”
“The ones on this floor are these newfangled kind—my parents discovered them on a trip to Dubai, so they had them installed. But they’re weird and guys don’t like them. Let’s just say they get your private parts extremely clean.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go downstairs. I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Mmm. I’m really going to miss you this weekend.”
She smiled at me. She was half asleep and I watched her. Her eyelashes were strawberry-blond.
When I got back from downstairs, I found some cream-colored paper on her desk and a bit of charcoal and I began to draw her. I didn’t do a perfect job or anything, but I managed to get across that her eyelashes were really thick and she had freckles across the bridge of her nose. While I was drawing, she woke up and watched me.
“Is that for me?”
“Of course.”
“I made you something, too.”
She got up then, and she was wearing this long robe made of all sorts of pieces of silk, a crazy quilt of silk. She looked in a wicker basket by her desk.
“Here it is.” She handed me a thick brown wool hat with a white pom-pom on top. It was a little lumpy in places, and the pom-pom flopped to one side like a dandelion by the side of the highway and had some odd straggly bits that made it look misshapen.
“It’s for you to wear.”
“Really?” I took it from her.
“I knit it over the last couple of days.”
I pulled it down on my head and it was immediately warm and I’m sure it made me look ridiculous, but she’d made it for me. So it was beautiful. Not something I would ever normally wear, and it would totally not match my new Y-3 neck warmer, but still.
“I won’t take it off,” I said.
By the time it got dark, we’d decided that I should probably go and she should get some rest before flying to Boston. There was a big dinner that night and she’d probably have to sit next to the president of Harvard. She didn’t want to be sleepy for that, since she might want to go there in two years and it’d be worthwhile to try to impress him, even though she’d been told he definitely liked her already.
So I bopped out of her house and onto the streets of Nolita with my new hat on. As I walked toward Fifth Avenue and my apartment, I could feel the pom-pom struggling to sit still on my head.
When I got to my apartment building, there were several people in the lobby, talking. One of them was a short woman in a brown fur coat with a lot of gold jewelry. She was holding a purple folder in her hands and talking to a couple; a man and a woman who had a “just-married” look about them—they were all fresh-faced and scrubbed clean, and they both had pleats in their slacks and black loafers on. I recognized the woman’s folder: Corcoran Real Estate.
“It’s a classic eight,” the fur coat woman was saying. “Rare, very clean, and not even on the market.”
There was a shuffling then, as the three of them got closer to each other. And I shuffled too.
“Here’s the inside scoop. The family’s gone bad—I have that on good confidence from someone in my group therapy—so if we come in and make a hefty offer now, well, let’s just say it’s a done deal.”
“I think we’re interested,” the man said. He had that gross heavy-breathing sound that I always associate with new money. But I realized as I slid across the lobby and back out the front door, it was a whole lot better than my own breathing, which just sounded really, really nervous. So a young couple was about to buy the only home I’d ever known because my mom was probably so ashamed of my dad that we’d have to move to Brooklyn after all, just like I’d predicted. Great. I headed toward Patch’s and tried to forget what I’d just seen.