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Thomas waved us over excitedly, having saved us seats. Thomas was always early and liked to sit directly in the middle of the classroom, like it was a movie theater and he wanted the best view. I wasn’t sure why he bothered since he drew little comics in his notebook throughout the entire lecture.
“Hey, guys!” Thomas shuffled his stuff aside so we could sit down. “Did you see Marin’s shoes?” Everything Thomas said sounded like there was an exclamation point after it.
I squinted to see that stone-faced Marin was rocking some Vans with kitties on them or something.
“Are they cats?” asked Milton, also squinting.
“They’re amaze!” said Thomas, turning to his notebook where he spent the next fifty minutes drawing a comic about a cat that had wings like Pegasus as Professor Ginsberg talked about Emotions. She said “capital-E emotions” to designate it as a topic. Which cracked me up, because of course I knew emotion was psychology, but the idea that we were studying emotions—going to school to learn about feelings like some alien species studying how to be human—just tickled me.
Not that it’d go amiss for some people.
I’d spent a solid week sulking over Will’s rejection. Then I randomly woke up super early one day, as I sometimes had in Holiday, and walked out into the morning. I found myself in Washington Square Park, strolling along the sidewalks as the city woke. I sat on the edge of the fountain, watching as, in the middle of this sprawling city, the water spewed upward, caught the sunlight, and fell down again, recollecting itself only to do it all over again.
I watched, and I started laughing. At myself. Because I was here. Here. In New York City. Taking classes at NYU. Sitting smack-dab in the middle of Washington Square Fucking Park. And I was missing it. I was missing the whole damn thing because I was hung up on Will. It was, I told myself, basically the stupidest thing ever.
It felt so good to laugh. I hadn’t done much laughing over the last year, what with missing Daniel, feeling abandoned by Will, and any enthusiasm for my classes at Grayling being crushed within a week of the semester starting. And as I sat there, grinning like an idiot, people who walked past me smiled back. I thought about what Will had said about not smiling at babies and their parents getting so offended, and I smiled even bigger.
He’d been right. I’d tried it a few days after he had mentioned it in a twisted attempt to feel closer to him, though I’d broken at the last minute and smiled at the baby anyway. The baby’s mom had expected me to smile at her kid, and when I hadn’t, it was as if I’d broken some social law.
But, though Will was right, his point wasn’t mine. It felt amazing to smile at someone and have them smile back. And I could tell from the way people smiled back at me that morning that they thought so too. After all, things were shitty so much of the time. If you could connect with someone over something as small and easy as a smile, why wouldn’t you want to?
In that spirit, I’d texted Will.
It’s soooo beautiful here today, I wrote, with three grinning face emojis and a picture of the fountain.
His reply had been almost immediate, though it was barely 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning: Here too, and a picture of the view from out his living room window, sunlight falling gently on brick and, in the bottom corner, a man buying flowers at the corner bodega.
Since then, Will and I had fallen into the habit of texting each other random silliness. Well. I texted him random stuff that I hoped he’d think was funny, and he texted me back, basically making fun of me. But in a friendly way. A flirty way, I hoped. That was how I chose to take it, anyway.
Last night, for instance, I’d texted him a pic of mud splattered all over my skateboard and my shoes that said Another driver just tried to kill me. Should I be taking this personally???
He’d responded: He probably took your shoes personally and wanted to put them out of their misery. Srsly, they’re dead.
What I hear you saying is that you want to take me shopping! I’d written, though I totally did not have the cash for new anything right now.
He hadn’t responded for a while, then wrote, Well, I’d be doing the entire city a service, I suppose. Saturday afternoon.
I’d practically run my battery down looking at the text every ten minutes since it came. Every time I did, this warm, kind of squeeish happiness burbled up in me. It’d be the first time I’d seen Will since our awkward meeting at his apartment when I first got to town.
