What If It's Us
Page 8

“You told Issa Rae it was my birthday?”
I beam. “Yup.”
“Why?”
“So she’d tweet you a birthday message.”
“My birthday’s in March.”
“I know. I’m just saying—”
“You lied to my queen.”
“No. Well. Sort of?” I rub my forehead. “Anyway, y’all want to hear about my latest screwup?”
“I think we just did,” Namrata says.
“No, this is different. It’s boy-related.”
They both look up. Finally. The squad can’t resist hearing about my love life, not that I have a love life. But they like hearing about the random cute boys I see on the subway. It’s pretty awesome to actually talk about this stuff out loud. Like it’s no big deal. Like it’s just a thing about me.
“I met a boy at the post office,” I say, “and guess what.”
“You made out behind a mailbox,” says Namrata.
“Uh, no.”
“Inside a mailbox,” Juliet suggests.
“No. No making out. But he has an ex-boyfriend.”
“Oh, so he’s gay.”
“Right, or bi or pan or something. And he’s single, unless he rebounds really quickly. Do New York guys rebound quickly?”
Namrata cuts straight to the point. “How’d you fuck it up?”
“I didn’t get his number.”
“Welp,” Namrata says.
“Can you find him online?” asks Juliet. “You seem . . . good at that.”
“Well, I also didn’t get his name.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
“Well, I did. Sort of. I’m like fifty percent sure his first name is Hudson.”
“You’re fifty percent sure.” Juliet’s mouth quirks.
I shake my head slowly. I mean, I could show them the address label. But I’m not sure they need to know about me scrounging for trash on the floor of the post office. Even Jessie thinks that’s creepy. And this is the girl who once told our entire math class she was related to Beyoncé and showed up the next day with Photoshopped pictures to prove it.
“So all you have on this guy is his first name, which . . . might not even be his first name.”
I nod. “It’s hopeless.”
“Probably,” says Namrata. “But you could put a thing on Craigslist.”
“A thing?”
“A missed connection. You know those posts where it’s like, I saw you on the F train reading Fifty Shades of Grey and eating candy corn.”
“Eww, candy corn?”
“Excuse me, candy corn is a fucking gift,” says Namrata.
“Um—”
“Seriously, Arthur, you should do it,” says Juliet. “Just write a post that describes the moment, like, Hey, we met at the post office and made out inside a mailbox, so on and so forth.”
“Okay, do people make out inside mailboxes here? This is not a thing we do in Georgia.”
“Jules, we should write the post for him.”
“Who even fits inside a mailbox?” I add.
“Yo,” Namrata says. “Fire up your laptop, kid.”
Okay, tiny pet peeve: when the girls call me kid. Like they’re so mature and all-knowing, and I’m some kind of half-formed fetus. Of course, I open my computer anyway.
“Pull up Craigslist.”
“Don’t people get murdered on Craigslist?”
“Nope,” Namrata says. “They get murdered for not getting on Craigslist fast enough and wasting my time.”
So now I’ve got Namrata hovering over me, and Juliet beside me, and a million blue links arranged in narrow columns on my screen. “Um. Okay.”
Namrata taps the screen. “Right here, under community.”
“You seem to know your way around Craigslist,” I say, and she smacks me.
I have to admit I love this. The fact that they’re interested. I’m always vaguely paranoid that Namrata and Juliet are exasperated by me. Like I’m some high school kid they’re forced to babysit when they’d rather be doing important things like consolidating the Shumaker files.
The thing is, they’re the only squad I have in New York. I don’t know how people make friends in the summer. There are a million and a half people in Manhattan, but none of them make eye contact unless you already know them. And I don’t know any of them, except the ones who work in this law office.
Sometimes I miss Ethan and Jessie so much my chest hurts.
Juliet’s taken over my laptop. “Oh god, some of these are really sweet,” she says. “Look.”
She rotates the computer back toward me. The screen says this:
Bleecker Street Starbucks/Not named Ryan—m4m (Greenwich Village)
You: button-down shirt with no tie. Me: polo with popped collar. They wrote Ryan on your drink, and you muttered, “Who the hell is Ryan?” Then you caught my eye and gave a sheepish smile and it was very cute. Wish I’d had the guts to ask for your number.
Fuck. “Ouch. That sucks.”
I click to the next listing.
Equinox 85th Street—m4m (Upper East Side)
Saw u on the treadmill, u look good. Hit me up.
Juliet grimaces. “And they say romance is dead.”
“I love the total lack of specificity,” says Namrata. “He’s like, ‘hey, you look good. Why don’t I give you absolutely no frame of reference for who I am.’”
“Well,” Juliet says, “at least he’s giving it a shot. Arthur, you want to have sex with this guy in a mailbox again, right—”
“That is not a thing. Mailbox sex is not a thing.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Look, he’s blushing!”
“Okay, I’m closing this now.” I slide my laptop into the center of the table, burying my face in my arms. “Let’s do the Shumaker files.”
“And that,” Namrata declares, “is how we get Arthur to do some fucking work.”
Chapter Four
Ben
“I think she died,” Dylan says over FaceTime.
Maybe I shouldn’t have answered Dylan’s call on my way to school. I’m on a Lorde kick this week and could be listening to more of her music before class, but I got my best friend pants on because Dylan is thrown off by Samantha right now. Last night he texted her some YouTube videos of underappreciated Elliott Smith songs and still hasn’t heard back. Dylan’s love for Elliott Smith can go overboard sometimes, like when he gave me shit for a solid week because I once spelled Elliott’s name without the second t.
“I don’t think she’s dead. She probably has a life,” I say.
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know. Slaying vampires?”
“Sun’s up. No vampires out. Try again.”
“I’m sure everything is fine. You talked for two hours yesterday.”
“Two hours and twelve minutes,” Dylan corrects. He refills his mug of coffee. He didn’t get a lot of sleep. I woke up to two middle-of-the-night missed FaceTime calls and ten thousand Samantha-related texts.
I really don’t get the coffee thing and I especially don’t get the coffee thing during the summer and I 100 percent don’t get the coffee thing when you’re already having a hard time sleeping. This math doesn’t add up, but girls have this effect on Dylan.