Page 32 of 72 Hours of You

The Grand Central ceilings are beautiful, though. They’re this light turquoise color littered with giant golden constellations of triangles and crabs and leaping fish and scantily clad Greek men with bowl cuts. I wonder how many people have died looking up at this ceiling, the little angel man getting ready to bludgeon a bull the last image they see before they ascend to the heavens themselves. Metaphorically.

“The constellations are actually all backward,” Peter says, following my eyes and leaning down so I can hear him over the noise. “They projected the image onto the ceiling so they could paint, except they did it facing the wrong way. But sometimes mistakes just make something more interesting and beautiful, don’t you think?” His mouth is close to my ear, and it sends a not-entirely-unpleasant shiver down my spine.

I clear my throat and turn to face him. “Did you study a BuzzFeed listicle about fun NYC facts on the train?”

“No, I read a Frommer’s guide on my Kindle app,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. “Do you want to—”

My Apple Watch zaps my wrist over and over at the same time Peter’s phone buzzes in his front pocket. I slide my phone out too and swipe up to see thirty-six alerts. And counting. All from the senior class group chat.

I read through the flurry of messages, new ones dragging the chat back down every five seconds. I guess the news is fully out about Ms. Jegstrup. From what I can piece together, she died yesterday (right on schedule), but no one found her until this morning. When her daughter (who lives in some flyover state) hadn’t heard from her all weekend, she got worried and asked the police to do a wellness check. Things were not well.

Noah’s dad is the head of our town’s police department (#DefundNoahsDad), so we’re getting a pretty descriptive account of what went down in Ms. Jegstrup’s living room.

She died on her couch, a stack of mediocre essays on her lap and a message from Netflix superimposed over a Heartstopper kiss asking, Are you still watching?

They haven’t done an autopsy or anything yet, but the police are unofficially reporting a brain aneurysm. And the senior class is unofficially reporting that Jegstrup was secretly fucking the assistant principal, based on the fact that she had four unread texts from him on her locked phone screen.

“That’s so fucking sad,” I say at the same time Peter says, “At least she died peacefully.”

I’m about to say something back to Peter when a forty-something woman with purple bags under her eyes and a fresh baguette under her arm walks by with a pink clock buzzing over her head. The light makes her eyes look even more sunken. She’s got eleven hours, twenty-two minutes, and three seconds left.

I’m in the city for one minute and I’m already seeing a clock. This place is so fucked.

The woman stops directly in front of us and fishes a phone out of her knitted purse. It’s a silver flip phone from like the 1900s. She presses some buttons and balances the phone against her ear. “Hey, Ger. I— Yeah. I got the bread. I’ll be there in thirty.” She pauses and then lets out a throaty laugh, tipping her head all the way back, her long black hair grazing the top of her butt. “No way. You’re not getting me again. I swear! You’re scrabbling!”

I have no idea what they’re talking about. I have no idea who Ger is, who this woman is, or why she’s got tired eyes and a loaf of crusty bread. I have no idea if “scrabbling” is an inside joke or what the hell she’s talking about.

And I’ll never know.

She snaps her phone closed and heads off toward whatever platform is taking her to Ger. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t make eye contact. We have no cosmic moment of understanding about the absurdity of life and death through a glance that, for some reason she can’t put her finger on, feels meaningful. She doesn’t even know I exist.

But now I know she does. And I have to make this stranger a page in my notebook.

“. . . according to Emma.” Peter pauses whatever he was talking about and follows my eyes.

“Sorry,” I say, turning my attention back to his overly concerned face. “Were you saying something?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, earnestly. “You look … Did you see something?” He glances back in the direction of the baguette woman.

“That bread lady’s got less than half a day left.”

“Oh, Sydney …”

“Listen, if you’re expecting me to break down crying, or whatever, it’s not happening. People die every day. Every second of every day. It’s not like people sob every time they turn on the news, which recounts, like, thousands of deaths all over the world. And that doesn’t make me a bad person. For not crying. I don’t know her. So.”

“I know,” Peter says. “I get it.” He stops for a second, like he’s actually taking the time to think about what he says next. Which is not something I am used to from teenage boys. “Listen,” he starts, “my mom was a doctor, remember? An ER doctor, actually. I get how you have to compartmentalize to survive. No one’s judging you, Sydney. Well, at least I’m not.” He pauses, his eyes scanning my face. “But it would still be okay to admit you felt a little bad too. No one would judge you for that either.”

“I don’t feel bad”, I say. “I feel … I don’t know. It’s just weird. She’s going to die, and I’m the only one who knows it.”

“That’s not true,” Peter says. “Now I know too.”

This thing happens, then, when he looks at me and says that. This thing where my heart pushes against my chest, swelling like a broken bone trying to heal itself.

Well, that’s about enough of that.

“Sydney …”

“Let’s get some pizza,” I say before Peter can start quoting Socrates or Colleen Hoover or whoever he’s reading this week.