People We Meet on Vacation

IF YOU NEED me,” Rachel says, “I’ll go with you. I mean, I seriously will. I’ll buy a ticket on the way to the airport, and I’ll go with you.”

Even as she says it, she looks like I’m holding out a giant cobra with human blood dripping off its teeth.

“I know.” I squeeze her hand. “But then who will keep us up to date on everything happening in New York?”

“Oh, thank God,” she says in a gust. “I was afraid you’d take me up on that for a minute.”

She pulls me into a hug, kisses me on either cheek, and puts me into the cab.

My parents both come to pick me up from the Cincinnati airport. They’re wearing matching I–heart symbol–New York T-shirts.

“Thought it would make you feel at home!” Mom says, laughing so hard at her joke that she’s practically crying. I think it might be the first time she or Dad has acknowledged New York as my home, which makes me happy on one level and sad on another.

“I already feel at home here,” I tell her, and she makes a big show of clutching her heart, and a squeak of emotion sneaks out of her. “By the way,” she says as we bustle across the parking lot, “I made buckeye cookies.”

“So that’s dinner, but what about breakfast?” I ask.

She titters. No one on the planet thinks I’m as funny as my mom does. It’s like taking candy from a baby. Or giving candy to a baby.

“So, buddy,” Dad says once we’re in the car. “To what do we owe this honor? It’s not even a bank holiday!”

“I just missed you guys,” I say, “and Alex.”

“Shoot,” Dad grunts, putting on his turn signal. “Now you’re gonna make me cry.”

We go home first so I can change out of my plane clothes, give myself a pep talk, and bide my time. School’s not out until two thirty.

Until then, the three of us sit on the porch, drinking homemade lemonade. Mom and Dad take turns talking about their plans for the garden next year. What all they’ll be pulling up. What new flowers and trees they’ll plant. The fact that Mom is trying to Marie Kondo the house but has only managed to get rid of three shoeboxes’ worth of stuff so far.

“Progress is progress,” Dad says, reaching out to rub her shoulder affectionately. “Have we told you about the privacy fence, buddy? The new next-door neighbor is a gossip, so we decided we needed a fence.”

“He comes by to tell me what everyone on this cul-de-sac is up to, and doesn’t have anything good to say!” Mom cries. “I’m sure he’s saying the same kinds of things about us.”

“Oh, I doubt it,” I say. “Your lies will be much more colorful.”

This delights Mom, obviously: candy, meet baby.

“Once we get the fence up,” Dad says, “he’ll tell everyone we’re running a meth lab.”

“Oh, stop.” Mom smacks his arm, but they’re both laughing. “We’ve got to video-call with the boys later. Parker wants to do a reading of the new screenplay he’s working on.”

I narrowly avoid a spit-take.

The last screenplay my brother’s been brainstorming in the group text is a gritty dystopian Smurfs origin story with at least one sex scene. His reasoning is, someday he’d like to write a real movie, but by writing one that can’t possibly get made, he’s taking the pressure off himself during the learning process. Also I think he enjoys scandalizing his family.

At two fifteen, I ask to take the car and head up to my old high school. Only at that point, I realize the tank’s empty. After the quick detour for gas, I pull into the school parking lot at two fifty. Two separate anxieties are warring for domination inside me: the one that’s composed of terror at the thought of seeing Alex, saying what I need to say, and hoping he’ll hear it, and the one that’s all about being back here, a place I legitimately swore I’d never waste another second in.

I march up the concrete steps to the glass front doors, take one last deep breath, and—

The door doesn’t budge. It’s locked.

Right.

I sort of forgot that any random adult can’t walk into a high school anymore. Definitely for the best, in every situation except this one. I knock on the door until a beaky resource officer with a halo of gray hair approaches and cracks the door a few inches. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see someone,” I say. “A teacher—Alex Nilsen?”

“Name?” he asks.

“Alex Nilsen—”

“Your name,” the officer says, correcting me.

“Oh, Poppy Wright.”

He closes the door, disappearing for a second into the front office. A moment later, he returns. “Sorry, ma’am, we don’t have you in our system. We can’t let in unregistered guests.”

“Could you just get him, then?” I try.

“Ma’am, I can’t go track down—”

“Poppy?” someone says behind him.

Oh, wow! I think at first. Someone recognizes me! What luck!

And then the pretty, lean brunette steps up to the door. My stomach bottoms out.

“Sarah. Wow. Hi.” I’d forgotten that I could potentially run into Sarah Torval here. Borderline monumental oversight.

She glances back at the resource officer. “I’ve got it, Mark,” she says, and steps outside to talk to me, folding her arms across herself. She’s wearing a cute purple dress and dark denim jacket, large silver earrings dancing from her ears; she has just a splash of freckles across her nose.

As ever, she is completely adorable in that kindergarten-teacher way. (Despite being a ninth-grade teacher, of course.)

“What are you doing here?” she asks, not unkindly, though definitely not warmly.

“Oh, um. Visiting my parents.”

She arches a brow and glances at the redbrick building behind her. “At the high school?”

“No.” I push the hair out of my eyes. “I mean, that’s what I’m doing here. But what I’m doing here is . . . I was hoping, I mean . . . I wanted to talk to Alex?”

Her eye roll is minimal, but it stings.

I swallow an apple-sized knot. “I deserve that,” I say. I take a breath. This won’t be fun, but it’s necessary. “I was really careless about everything, Sarah. I mean, my friendship with Alex, everything I expected from him while you were together. It wasn’t fair to you. I know that now.”

“Yeah,” she says. “You were careless about it.”

We’re both silent for a beat.

Finally, she sighs. “We all made some bad decisions. I used to think that if you just went away, all my problems would be solved.” She uncrosses her arms and recrosses them the other way. “And then you did—you basically disappeared after we went to Tuscany, and somehow, that was even worse for my relationship.”

I sway from foot to foot. “I’m sorry. I wish I’d understood what I was feeling before it had a chance to hurt anyone.”

She nods to herself, examines the perfectly painted toenails poking out of her tan leather sandals. “I wish so too,” she says. “Or that he had. Or that I had. Really if any of us had really known how you two felt about each other, it would’ve saved me a lot of time and pain.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “So you and he aren’t . . .”

She lets me wait for a few seconds, and I know it’s not an accident. A semidevilish smile curls up her pink lips. “We aren’t,” she relents. “Thank God. But he’s not here. He already left. I think he was talking about getting away for the weekend.”

“Oh.” My heart sinks. I glance back at my parents’ minivan parked in the half-empty lot. “Well, thanks anyway.”

She nods, and I start down the steps. “Poppy?”

I turn back, and the light’s shining so bright on her that I have to shield my eyes to look at her. It makes her look like she’s a saint, earning her halo by unwarranted kindness toward me. I’ll take it, I think.

“Usually on Fridays,” she says slowly, “teachers go to Birdies. It’s a tradition.” She moves, and the light lets up enough for me to meet her eyes. “If he hasn’t left, he might be there.”

“Thanks, Sarah.”

“Please,” she says. “You’re doing the world a favor by taking Alex Nilsen off the market.”

I laugh, but it’s leaden in my stomach. “I’m not sure that’s what he wants.”

She shrugs. “Maybe not,” she says. “But most of us are too scared to even ask what we want, in case we can’t have it. Read that in this essay about something called ‘millennial ennui.’”

I stifle a laugh of surprise, clear my throat. “Kind of a catchy name.”

“Right?” she says. “Anyway. Good luck.”

•   •   •

BIRDIES IS ACROSS the street from the school, and the two-minute drive over is about four hours too short to formulate a new plan.

The whole flight down, I practiced my impassioned speech with the thought that it would be said in private, in his classroom.

Now it’s going to be in a bar full of teachers, including some whose classes I took (and skipped). If there’s one place I have judged more harshly than the fluorescent-lit halls of East Linfield High School, it’s the dark, cramped bar with the glowing neon BUDWEISER sign I’m entering right now.

All at once, the light of day is shut out and colorful dots dance in front of my eyes as they adjust to this dim place. There’s a Rolling Stones song playing on the radio, and considering it’s only three in the afternoon, the bar is already hopping with people in business casual, a sea of khakis and button-ups and cotton dresses in monochrome, not unlike Sarah’s getup. Golf paraphernalia hangs on the walls—clubs and green Astroturf and framed pictures of golfers and golf courses.

I know there’s a city in Illinois called Normal, but I’m guessing it doesn’t hold a candle to this suburban corner of the universe.

There are mounted TVs turned up too loud, a scratchy radio playing underneath that, bursts of laughter and raised voices coming from the groups crowded around high-tops or lined up along either side of narrow rectangular tables.

And then I see him.

Taller than most, stiller than all, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows and boots resting on the metal rung of his chair, his shoulders hunched forward and his phone out, thumb slowly scrolling up his screen. My heart rises into my throat until I can taste it, all metallic and hot and pulsing too hard.

There’s a part of me—fine, a majority—that wants to bolt, even after flying all the way here, but right then the door squeals open and Alex glances up, his eyes locking onto me.

We’re looking at each other, and I imagine I look nearly as shocked as he does, like I didn’t arrive specifically on a hot tip that he was here. I force myself to take a few steps toward him, then stop at the end of the table, where, gradually, the other teachers look up from their beers and white wines and vodka tonics to process the fact of me.

“Hi,” Alex says, little more than a whisper.

“Hi,” I say.

I wait for the rest to pour out. Nothing does.

“Who’s your friend?” an old lady in a maroon turtleneck asks. I clock her for Delallo, even before I see the ELHS name badge she’s still wearing around her neck.

“She’s . . .” Alex’s voice drops off. He stands from his chair. “Hi,” he says again.

The rest of the table are exchanging uncomfortable looks, kind of scooting their chairs in, angling their backs away in an attempt to give us a level of privacy that’s impossible at this point. Delallo, I notice, keeps one ear tilted almost precisely toward us.

“I came to the school,” I manage.

“Oh,” Alex says. “Okay.”

“I had this plan.” I rub my sweaty palms against my orange polyester bell-bottoms, wishing I wasn’t dressed like a traffic cone. “I was going to show up to the school, because I wanted you to know that if there’s one thing in this world that could get me to go there, it’s you.”

His eyes briefly pass over the table of teachers again. So far, my speech doesn’t seem to be comforting him. His eyes cut to mine, then drop to a vague point on my left. “Yeah, I know you really hate it there,” he murmurs.

“I do,” I agree. “I have a lot of bad memories there, and I wanted to show up there, and just, like, tell you, that . . . that I would go anywhere for you, Alex.”

“Poppy,” he says, the word half sigh, half plea.

“No, wait,” I say. “I know I have a fifty-fifty chance here, and there’s so much of me that wants to not even say the rest of this, Alex, but I need to, so please, don’t tell me yet if you need to break my heart. Okay? Let me say this before I lose the nerve.”

His lips part for a moment, his green-gold eyes like storm-flooded rivers, brutal and rushing. He presses his mouth closed again and nods.Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

Feeling like I’m jumping off a cliff, unable to see what lies through the fog beneath me, I go on.

“I loved running my blog,” I tell him. “I loved it so much, and I thought it was because I loved traveling—which I do. But in the last few years, everything changed. I wasn’t happy. Traveling felt different. And maybe you were sort of right that I came at you like you were a Band-Aid that could fix everything. Or whatever—a fun destination to give me a dopamine rush and a new perspective.”

His eyes drop. He won’t look at me, and I feel like even if he was the one who said it first, my confirmation is eating him alive.

“I started therapy,” I blurt out, trying to keep things moving. “And I was trying to figure out why it feels so different now, and I was listing all the differences between my life then and now, and it wasn’t just you. I mean, you’re the biggest one. You were on those trips, and then you weren’t, but that wasn’t the only change. All those trips we took, the best thing about them—other than doing it all with you—was the people.”

His gaze lifts, narrowed in thought.

“I loved meeting new people,” I explain. “I loved . . . feeling connected. Feeling interesting. Growing up here, I was so fucking lonely, and I always felt like there was something wrong with me. But I told myself if I went somewhere else, it would be different. There’d be other people like me.”

“I know that,” he says. “I know you hate it here, Poppy.”

“I did,” I say. “I hated it, so I escaped. And when Chicago didn’t fix everything for me, I left there too. Once I started traveling, though, things finally felt better. I met people, and—I don’t know, without the baggage of history or the fear of what would happen, it felt so much easier to open up to people. To make friends. I know it sounds pathetic, but all those little chance encounters we had—those made me less lonely. Those made me feel like I was someone people could love. And then I got the R+R job, and the trips changed; the people changed. I only met chefs and hotel managers, people wanting write-ups. I’d go on amazing trips, but I’d come home feeling empty. And now I realize it’s because I wasn’t connecting to anyone.”

“I’m glad you figured it out,” Alex says. “I want you to be happy.”

“But here’s the thing,” I say. “Even if I quit my job and started taking the blog seriously again, went back to meeting all the Bucks and Litas and Mathildes of the world—it’s not going to make me happy.

“I needed those people, because I felt alone. I thought I had to run hundreds of miles away from here to find some place to belong. I spent my whole life thinking anyone outside my family who got too close, saw too much, wouldn’t want me anymore. The safest thing was those quick, serendipitous moments with strangers. That’s all I thought I could have.

“And then there was you.” My voice wobbles dangerously. I steel myself, straighten my spine. “I love you so much that I’ve spent twelve years putting as much distance between us as I could. I moved. I traveled. I dated other people. I talked about Sarah all the fucking time because I knew you had a crush on her, and it felt safer that way. Because the last person I could take being rejected by was you.

“And now I know that. I know it’s not traveling that’s gonna get me out of this slump and it’s not a new job and it’s sure as hell not chance encounters with water taxi drivers. All of that, every minute of it, has been running away from you, and I don’t want to do that anymore.

“I love you, Alex Nilsen. Even if you don’t give me a real chance, I’m always going to love you. And I’m scared to move back to Linfield because I don’t know if I’d like it here, or if I’d be bored, or if I’d make any friends, and because I’m terrified to run into the people who made me feel like I didn’t matter and for them to decide they were right about me.

“I want to stay in New York,” I say. “I like it there, and I think you would too, but you asked me what I’d be willing to give up for you, and now I know the answer is: everything. There’s nothing in this whole world that I’ve built in my head that I’m not prepared to let go of to build a new one with you. I’ll go into East Linfield High—I don’t just mean today. I mean if you want to stay here, I’ll go to fucking high school basketball games with you. I’ll wear hand-painted T-shirts with players’ names on them—I’ll learn the players’ names! I won’t just make them up! I’ll go to your dad’s house and drink diet soda and try my hardest not to cuss or talk about our sex life, and I’ll babysit your nieces and nephew with you in Betty’s house—I’ll help you take down wallpaper! I hate taking down wallpaper!

“You’re not a vacation, and you’re not the answer to my career crisis, but when I’m in a crisis or I’m sick or I’m sad, you’re the only thing I want. And when I’m happy, you make me so much happier. I still have a lot to figure out, but the one thing I know is, wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll never belong anywhere like I belong with you. No matter what I’m feeling, I want you next to me. You’re home to me, Alex. And I think I’m that for you too.”

By the time I finish, I’m breathing hard. Alex’s face is torqued with worry, but beyond that I can’t read too many specifics. He doesn’t say anything right away, and the silence—or lack of it (Pink Floyd has started to play over the speakers and a sports announcer is jabbering on one of the TVs overhead)—unfurls like a rug, stretching longer and longer between us until I feel like I’m on the opposite side of a very dark, beer-sticky mansion.

“And one more thing.” I fish my phone out of my bag, open to the correct photo, and hold it out to him. He doesn’t take the phone, just looks at the image on-screen without touching.

“What’s this?” he says softly.

“That,” I say, “is a houseplant I’ve kept alive since I got back from Palm Springs.”

A quiet laugh leaks out of him.

“It’s a snake plant,” I say. “And apparently they’re extremely hard to kill. Like, I could probably take a chainsaw to it and it would survive. But it’s the longest I’ve kept anything alive, and I wanted you to see it. So you’d know. I’m serious.”

He nods without saying anything, and I tuck my phone back into my bag.

“That’s it,” I say, a little bewildered. “That’s the whole speech. You can talk now.”

The corner of his mouth quirks, but the smile doesn’t stay, and even while it’s there, it holds nothing like mirth in its tight curve.

“Poppy.” My name has never sounded quite so long or miserable.

“Alex,” I say.

His hands go to his hips. He glances sidelong, though there’s nothing there to look at, except an Astroturf wall and a faded photo of someone in a pom-pom-topped golf hat. When he looks back at me, there are tears in his eyes, but I know right away he won’t let them fall. That’s the kind of self-restraint Alex Nilsen has.

He could be starving in a desert, and if the wrong person held out a glass of water to him, he’d nod politely and say no, thanks.

I swallow the goiter in my throat. “You can say anything. Whatever you need to.”

He lets out a breath, checks the floor, meets my eyes for barely an instant. “You know how I feel about you,” he says softly, like even as he admits it, it’s still a sort of secret.

“Yes.” My heart has started racing. I think I do. At least I did. But I know how much I hurt him by not thinking through things. I don’t totally understand it, maybe, but I’ve barely started to understand myself, so that’s not all that surprising.

He swallows now, the muscles down the line of his jaw dancing with shadows. “I honestly don’t know what to say,” he replies. “You terrified me. It doesn’t make any sense how quick my mind works with you. One second we’re kissing and the next, I’m thinking about what our grandkids might be named. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, look at us. We don’t make sense. We’ve always known that, Poppy.”

My heart is icing over, veins of cold working their way into its center.

Splitting it in half and me with it.

Now it’s my turn to say his name like a plea, like a prayer. “Alex.” It comes out thick. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

His eyes drop, his teeth worrying over his bottom lip. “I don’t want you to give anything up,” he says. “I want us to just make sense, and we don’t, Poppy. I can’t watch it fall apart again.”

I’m nodding now. For a long time. It’s like I can’t stop accepting it, over and over again. Because this is what it feels like: like I’ll have to spend the rest of my life accepting that Alex can’t love me the way I love him.

“Okay,” I whisper.

He says nothing.

“Okay,” one more time. I tear my eyes from him as I feel the tears encroaching. I don’t want to make him comfort me, not for this. I turn and barrel toward the door, forcing my feet forward, keeping my chin high and my backbone straight.

When I make it to the door, I can’t help myself. I look back.

Alex is still frozen where I left him, and even if it kills me, I have to be honest right now. I have to say something I can’t take back, to stop running and hiding myself from him.

“I don’t regret telling you,” I say. “I said I’d give anything up, risk anything for you, and I meant it.” Even my own heart.

“I love you all the way, Alex,” I say. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t at least told you.”

And then I turn and step out into the brightly shining sun of the parking lot.

Only then do I really start to cry.