in dog pee.”
Jenny took a deep breath, thinking about how best to broach this difficult subject with Aubrey.
“Guess what?” Kate said, before Jenny could get a word out.
“What?”
“Jenny and I were just saying how you seem a little blue lately, like maybe you could use a pick-me-up. So both of you are going to come to New York with me over Thanksgiving break!”
Jenny opened her mouth to protest. Aubrey was coming home with her for Thanksgiving. Her mom had already made up the guest room and planned the menu.
“Oh my God, really?” Aubrey shrieked, jumping up and down and throwing her arms around Kate. “That is the best thing I have ever heard! I’m so happy.”
When Kate met Jenny’s eyes over Aubrey’s shoulder, Jenny could’ve sworn she saw a look of triumph there.
Jenny fell asleep on the train to New York and dreamed of Lucas. Nothing surreal, just an incredibly vivid experience of being with him, complete with sounds and smells and tastes. It was the worst type of dream she could have had at that moment. The two of them were alone together in the yearbook office late at night, talking and making out. The yearbook office was the one place they could spend time together without raising eyebrows. He was a jock and she was a brain, and in their school, those cliques didn’t mix, so they were keeping their relationship on the down low for the time being. And that’s where it stayed: they never ended up going public. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears, was Lucas really her boyfriend?
In the dream, she asked to see the photographs he’d taken that day, and he showed her one of them kissing. (This couldn’t happen in real life. No photograph existed of them kissing, which made her sad to think about.) Jenny laughed and looked up into Lucas’s eyes. You would call his eyes brown like hers, yet the word hardly captured them. They had flecks of gold and hazel that sparkled in the light. In the dream, Lucas wore his old blue Cape Cod T-shirt. She put her hands on his shoulders, feeling the hard muscles underneath the soft fabric, and moved her hands down to caress his bare arms. His skin was smooth and velvety. He took her hands, turning them over and kissing the underside of her wrists, then kissing her palms, and her heart went crazy. She felt the familiar heat in the pit of her stomach as he leaned in to kiss her. And then his kiss – soft and slow, his tongue exploring her mouth, yet hard at the same time, his chin bristly, his mouth aggressive.
The train jerked, and Jenny woke to the awful knowledge that it was only a dream. They weren’t together anymore. Officially, they never had been. She had tried to banish him from her thoughts, but since she’d seen him in Kate’s bed, he’d come back with a vengeance. When she looked out the window, the world seemed ugly. New England in November, viewed from the train tracks in the waning light, was a wasteland of sagging clapboard houses coated in a dirty snow that looked like ash. Some of the houses were three-families like the one her family lived in in Belle River, though her parents’ house was in much better condition – perfectly kept, in fact. Her parents lived on the top floor, where Jenny’s bedroom always awaited her return. Her older brother, Chris, occupied the apartment on the second floor. He’d come back from the army not quite the same, and her parents treated him like a conquering hero even though he’d never seen combat. Jenny suspected a substance abuse problem, but her snooping around his apartment had turned up nothing, so maybe she was wrong about that. Chris played video games and worked at the store, where he handled deliveries and moved boxes. The idea that Chris had the chops to take over the business someday was a fantasy, but it wasn’t her problem, so long as her parents didn’t start looking to her. She planned to get out of Dodge the second she had a diploma in her hand. She’d told them so, many times. Her mother kept saying that Jenny would change her mind. The first-floor apartment, currently rented out, had Jenny’s name on it as far as her mother was concerned, no matter how often or how loudly she said she didn’t want it. That reckoning could wait, however. At present Jenny was busy dealing with the fallout of abandoning her family to go to New York for Thanksgiving. Her mother actually cried when Jenny told her about the change of plans over the phone. Jenny had to make a special trip home before departing, where she sat at the kitchen table for half an hour explaining Aubrey’s problems in gory detail, and how going to New York would cheer her up, before her mother grudgingly consented.
“Oh, you’re awake,” Aubrey said.
Jenny looked around. “Where’s Kate?”
“She saw some girls from Omega Chi, and they said for her to go up to first class and sit with them. They want her to rush in the spring.”
“Can you do that? Sit in first class if you didn’t pay for it?”
Aubrey shrugged and smiled, as if to say, Kate can.
“Isn’t it great?” Aubrey said, gesturing at the cold scene outside the window.
You’re delusional, Jenny thought, but she said nothing, pulling her psychology textbook out of her backpack and pretending to do homework so Aubrey would leave her alone.
On its final approach to Penn Station, the train entered a pitch-dark tunnel and began to buck and wheeze, like it was having second thoughts about the trip to the city. Aubrey looked at Jenny wide-eyed.
“Is this normal?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry,” Jenny said, trying to sound jaded.
Jenny had been to New York City several times at Christmas, to see the Radio City Christmas show with her mom, and she felt like an old pro, like the place belonged to her as much as it did to Kate. Her confidence was put to the test as the train pulled into the station, and Kate was nowhere to be seen. It would be just like Kate to forget all about them. What would they do if they lost track of her? Jenny hadn’t brought along Kate’s address or home phone number, since they expected to sit with her on the train. She thought she remembered Eightieth and Park, but was that enough information for them to find their way?
People began collecting their belongings from the overhead rack.
“Hurry up, get your things,” she said to Aubrey. “We need to find Kate.”
Out on the platform, that old New York City subway smell hit Jenny in the face, and she felt excited about the trip for the first time. She could handle Manhattan. The place was a grid. If you could count, you could navigate. She imagined living here – less than four years from now – going to work in a shiny office tower, in a suit and heels, carrying a briefcase.
They spotted Kate’s bright hair in the distance, heading up the escalator, and hurried to catch up with her. Outside in the cold, Kate beckoned to them from the open door of a yellow cab. The driver popped the trunk. They heaved their luggage in and piled into the backseat of the taxi laughing breathlessly. On the ride uptown, Jenny craned her neck and drank in the tall buildings. She really should put Lucas – and Kate in bed with Lucas – out of her mind, and enjoy this trip, or she’d be wasting an opportunity, and Jenny hated waste. On Park Avenue, Christmas trees lined the medians. Their white lights twinkled against the blue of the evening sky, making her happy, until Kate killed the mood by warning them about what to expect.
“Beware the stepmonster,” she said.
Kate’s mother had died of cancer when she was ten, and she was on her second stepmother.
“Victoria hates me. She’ll
