Imagine New York City through the eyes of a little girl seeing it for the first time. The energy, the lights, the way the people who walk the streets seem like they just woke up one day and decided to be whoever the hell they wanted to be. You can be anyone and still, no one would look twice at you. Everyone in New York wants to be someone, but everyone is no one.
Imagine how that possibility felt to a little girl who had wanted—ever since she could remember—to disappear and be no one. After that little girl set foot in Manhattan the first time, mittened hand in her grandmother’s, outside the Russian Tea Room, that’s where she went whenever she wanted to disappear.
When the yelling started, spittle flying in her face, she imagined herself slipping through the subway doors. When she barricaded herself, and eventually, her younger sister alongside her, in her bedroom, she imagined living in an apartment in the Village no bigger than the closet they hid in.
Her father said New York City was dirty, filled with degenerates and broken people, but when she thought of escaping to New York City and letting it break her, it filled her with longing so powerful she felt like she would rather die than give up that dream.
Someday, she would slip away from him, from all of them, and become someone else in the city. She would make it happen; she just hadn’t realized, then, that New York City was not far away enough.
Imagine that girl, just turned seventeen, the November of her senior year, her birthday several months behind most of her classmates. That’s never stopped her from being smarter than them, better than them, according to her family.
She’s on the cusp of getting everything she’s spent the past several years working toward. Everything she deserves. Her father, who has been given everything, says no one deserves anything—but her grandmother, whose parents were born with nothing, feels differently.
Her grandmother tells the girl she is exceptional, that she deserves to go to one of the best colleges in the country. The same one she went to herself, almost fifty years ago. Boston College, five hours away from the grit and glitz of Manhattan, of those hippies at NYU. She’s applied to Columbia too, of course, because it holds the respectability of being an Ivy League, something her family cannot deny. But NYU has been her dream school since the eighth grade.
Yet her grandmother is so intent on her going to Boston College, she makes an offer. She’ll make some phone calls, ensure an interview happens, she’ll even pay every last line item on the bill; but only if every other school is off the table.
Including NYU. Especially NYU.
She knows she has no choice. She’s never had a choice: not what classes she takes; what sports she plays; not even the time she wakes up in the morning. She knows what happens when she defies him. She doesn’t want to know what will happen if she defies the woman who made him who he is.
So she trades everything she loves for that spot at Boston College: her dream of going to NYU; a future with the boy she has, against all her better judgment, let into her life.
Parts of it. He doesn’t know what goes on in her house because she hasn’t told anyone, not even her best friend. He curls his body around hers in his bed, his warmth in the dead of winter, whispering in her ear about all the things they’ll do together when she goes to school in the city, fifteen minutes away from the apartment he’ll be renting with his bandmates in the fall. She promises it’ll happen, even though she knows it’s a fairy tale. He does not realize she has been lying to her family about them, downplaying how serious their relationship has gotten.
Only her mother has met him, only her mother knows how much time they actually spend together. Of course her father and grandmother will not approve of him—maybe they will even hate him because they hate everything that makes her happy.
So she lies to him, over and over. When the email arrives from NYU—Congratulations!—she deletes it and tells him she was rejected. As his face falls, she says she doesn’t understand it either, how it could happen. Because they’re both thinking it—she gets everything she puts her mind toward, and somehow, she didn’t get into NYU.
The thing about lying is that if you do it enough, it becomes something you don’t even have to think about. Just like breathing.
I would know. I’ve been doing it my whole life, for them.
My family.