“It wasn’t any one thing about Kelli,” I said to Fernanda.
“I don’t get it,” Fernanda said. “What was the problem?”
“She was like, desperate for attention.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Yeah, but we don’t double-cross everyone we meet to get it.”
We walked quietly for a moment. We were on Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, in front of the Paul Smith men’s store. Out of habit, I stopped and stared in the window. I’m not normally partial to Paul Smith, because the clothes tend toward the frilly, but I kept looking, just to see if they’d changed or anything. There was a pair of reddish velvet loafers that very, very few men could have pulled off. They did have a nice cut to them, though, very long and angular. Not a JM Weston or a Crockett and Jones shoe cut, not that nice, but nice. And when I looked down—and I must’ve been staring at those shoes for a full minute—I was holding Fernanda’s hand.
“Let’s walk over to Otto and get some pizza and ice cream,” I said suddenly.
“You don’t want to go in here and try stuff on?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Fernanda smiled at me. We kept walking on Fifth. It was nearly seven on Tuesday evening and the street was quiet and kind of cool, in a really good end-of-October way.
“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve got these friends I have to take care of, and when I do a lousy job and forget one of them, they disappear.”
“You know that’s crazy, right?” Fernanda said.
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “But I lost track of Patch again and now no one knows where he is.”
“What do you mean? He’s living with Graca. His parents are annoyed, but he’s going to school and just sort of hanging with her. The whole family was driving him crazy. All those F names. It was too much. We all know that.”
“Sure, we know that. But …”
I looked over at Fernanda. Since we’d been basically inseparable for the last couple of days, there was definitely a way to think of her as my girlfriend, if I wanted to be comfortable with that, which I’m pretty sure I did want.
And further, I was happy that Flan had hooked up with that Rickenbacher kid, whom I still didn’t much like. I mean, good for her. And good for Liza for also being totally over me.
But about Flan … she wouldn’t speak to me. Wouldn’t even return my calls. And I didn’t necessarily think that was a bad thing. Not that I thought we should ever go out or anything. I didn’t. But it was nice to know she wasn’t treating me like a big brother. And I figured I’d call her again, just to see if she wanted to hang out sometime or something. Because, I figured, we still should be able to be friends. And I missed her.
“Are you thinking of that kid, Flan?”
“No,” I said quickly.
We kept walking, down toward Otto. A guy and a girl on a bright red Vespa went hurtling by. They were laughing and weaving, and the girl had a long red scarf that made a whistling noise in the wind. It was Mickey and Philippa. They were still in love.
“Right now, I don’t want to keep track of anybody but you,” I said to Fernanda. I held up her hand and kissed it.