The impossibility of splitting the bill was one of many horrible parts of being broke: having to think about whether you could afford to share premium content sucked.
“That wasn’t very romantic of me, I guess,” I said as we wandered into the throng of bodies clustered around a milk can toss.
“Well, lucky for you, that is pretty much my exact definition of high-value romance.” He pointed to the teal row of porta potties at the edge of the lot. A teenage boy with his hat turned backward was gripping his stomach and shifting between his feet as he waited for one of the toilets to open up while the couple beside him hardcore made out.
“Gus,” I said flatly. “That couple is so into each other they’re making out a yard away from a literal row of shit piles. That juxtaposition is basically the entire financial freedom lesson for the night. It really does nothing to your icy heart?”
“Heart? No. Stomach, a little. I’m getting sympathy diarrhea for their friend. Can you imagine having such a bad time with your friends that a porta potty becomes a beacon of hope? A bedrock! A place to rest your weary head. We’re definitely looking at a future existentialist philosophy student. Maybe even a coldly horny novelist career.”
I rolled my eyes. “That guy’s night was pretty much my entire high school—and much of college—experience, and somehow I survived, tender human heart intact.”
“Bullshit!” Gus cried.
“Meaning?”
“I knew you in college, January.”
“That seems like the biggest in a series of vast exaggerations you’ve made tonight.”
“Fine, I knew of you,” he said. “The point is, you weren’t the diarrhea-having third wheel. You dated plenty. Marco, right? That guy from our Fiction 400 workshop? And weren’t you with that premed golden boy? The one who was addicted to studying abroad and tutoring disadvantaged youth and, like, rock climbing shirtless.”
I snorted. “Sounds like you were more in love with him than I was.”
Something sharp and appraising flashed over Gus’s eyes. “But you were in love with him.”
Of course I was. I’d met him during an impromptu snowball fight on campus. I couldn’t imagine anything more romantic than that moment.
when he’d pulled me up from the snowdrift I’d fallen into, his blue eyes sparkling, and offered his dry hat to replace my snow-soaked apparel.
It took all of ten minutes as he walked me home for me to determine that he was the most interesting person I’d ever met. He was working on getting his private pilot’s license and had wanted to work in the ER ever since he’d lost a cousin in a car accident as a kid. He’d done semesters in Brazil travel, Morocco tourism, and France (Paris) study abroad, where his paternal grandparents lived, and he’d also backpacked a significant portion of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage by himself.
When I told him I’d never been out of the country, he immediately suggested a spontaneous North America road trip to Canada. I’d thought he was kidding basically until we pulled up to the duty-free shop on the far side of the border around midnight. “There,” he said with his model grin, all shiny and guileless. “Next we need to get you somewhere they’ll actually stamp your passport application.”
That whole night had taken on a hazy, soft-focus quality like we were only dreaming it. Looking back, I thought we sort of had been: him pretending to be endlessly interesting, me pretending to be spontaneous and carefree, as usual. Outwardly we were so different, but when it came down to it, we both wanted the same thing. A life cast in a magical glow, every moment bigger and brighter and tastier than the last.
For the next six years, we were intent on glowing for each other.
I tucked the memories away. “I was never with Marco,” I answered Gus. “I went to one party with him, and he left with someone else. Thanks for reminding me.”
Gus’s laugh turned into an exaggerated, pitying “awh.”
“It’s fine. I persevered.”
Gus’s head cocked, his eyes digging at mine like shovels. “And Golden Boy?”
“We were together,” I admitted.
I’d thought I was going to marry him. And then Dad had died and everything had changed. We’d survived a lot together with Mom’s illness, but I’d always held things together, found ways to shut off the worrying and have fun with him, but this was different. Jacques didn’t know what to do with this version of me, who stayed in bed and couldn’t write or read without coming apart, who slugged around at home letting laundry pile up and ugliness seep into our dreamy apartment, who never wanted to throw.
parties or walk the Bridge at sunset or book a last-minute getaway to Joshua Tree.
Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.
It was our beautiful life together, amazing vacations and grand gestures and freshly cut flowers in handmade vases, that had held us together for so long.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t get enough of him. Or that he was the best man I’d ever known. (I’d thought that was my dad, but now it was the dad from my favorite 2000s teen drama, Veronica Mars.) Or that he was my favorite person. (That was Shadi.) Or because he made me laugh so hard I wept. (He laughed easily, but rarely joked.) Or that when something bad happened, he was the first person I wanted to call. (He wasn’t.)
It was that we met at the same age my parents had, that the snowball fight and impromptu road trip had felt like fate and destiny, that my mother adored him. He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.
Breaking up still sucked in every conceivable way, but once the initial pain wore off, memories from our relationship started to seem like just another story I’d read. I hated thinking about it. Not because I missed him but because I felt bad for wasting so much time—and mine—trying to be his dream girl.
“We were together,” I repeated. “Until last year.”
“Wow.” Gus laughed awkwardly. “That’s a long time. I’m … really regretting making fun of his shirtless rock climbing now.”
“It’s okay,” I said, shrugging. “He dumped me in a hot tub.” Outside a cabin in the Catskills vacation rental, three days before our trip with his family was scheduled to end. Spontaneity wasn’t always as sexy as it was cracked up to be. You’re just not yourself anymore, he’d told me. We don’t work like this, January.
We left the next morning, and on the drive back to New York, Jacques had told me he’d call his parents when we got back to let them know the news.
Mom’s going to cry, he said. So is Brigitte.
Even in that moment, I was possibly more devastated to lose Jacques’s parents and sister—a feisty high schooler with impeccable 1970s style fashion—
than Jacques himself.
“A hot tub?” Gus echoed. “Damn. Honestly, that guy was always so self-impressed I doubt he could even see you through the glare off his own glistening body.”
I cracked a smile. “I’m sure that was it.”
“Hey,” Gus said.
“Hey, what?”
He tipped his head toward a cotton candy stand. “I think we should eat that.”
“And here it finally is,” I said.
“What?” Gus asked.
“The second thing we agree on.”
Gus paid for the **cotton candy** and I didn’t argue. “No, that’s fine,” he teased when I said nothing. “You can just owe me. You can just **pay me back whenever**.”
“How much was it?” I asked, tearing off an enormous piece and lowering it dramatically into my mouth.
“Three dollars, but it’s fine. Just Venmo me the dollar fifty later.”
“Are you sure that’s not too much trouble?” I said. “I’m happy to go get a cashier’s check.”
“Do you know where the closest Western Union is?” he said. “You could probably wire money.”
“What sort of interest rates were you thinking?” I asked.
“You can just give me three dollars when I take you home, and then if I ever find out I need an organ transplant, we can circle back.”
“Sure, sure,” I agreed. “Let’s just put a pin in this.”
“Yeah, we should probably loop in our legal counsel anyway.”
“Good point,” I said. “Until then, what do you want to ride?”
“Ride?” Gus said. “Absolutely nothing here.”
“Fine,” I said. “What are you willing to ride?”
We’d been walking, talking, and eating at an alarming rate, and Gus stopped suddenly, offering me the final clump of cotton candy. “That,” he said while I was eating, and pointed at a pathetically small carousel ride. “That looks like it would have a really hard time killing me.”
“What do you weigh, Gus? Three beer cans, some bones, and a cigarette?” And all the hard lines and lean ridges of muscle I definitely.
hadn’t gawked at. “Any number of those painted animals could kill you with a sneeze.”
“Wow,” he said. “First of all, I may only weigh three beer cans, but that’s still three more beer cans than your ex-boyfriend. He looked like he did nothing but chew wheatgrass diet while running. I weigh easily twice what he did. Secondly, you’re one to talk: you’re what, four feet and six inches?”
“I’m a very tall five four, actually,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes and shook his head at me. “You’re as small as you are ridiculous.”
“So not very?”
“Carousel, final offer,” Gus said.
“This is the perfect place for our montage sequence,” I said.
“Our what now?”
“Young—extremely beautiful and very tall for her height—woman in sparkly tennis shoes teaches fearful, party-hating curmudgeon how to enjoy life,” I said. “There’d be a lot of head shaking. A lot of me dragging you from amusement park ride to ride. You dragging me back out of the line. Me dragging you back into it. It’d be adorable, and more importantly it’ll help with your super romantic suicide-cult book. It’s the promise-of-the-premise portion of the novel, when your readers are grinning ear to ear. We need a montage.”
Gus folded his arms and studied me with narrowed eyes.
“Come on, Gus.” I bumped his arm. “You can do it. Be adorable.”
His eyes darted to where I’d bumped him, then back to my face, and he scowled.
“I think you misunderstood me. I said adorable.”
His surly expression cracked. “Fine, January. But it’s not going to be a montage. Choose one death trap. If I survive that, you can sleep well tonight knowing you brought me one step closer to believing in happy endings.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “If you wrote this scene, would we die?”
“If I wrote this scene, it wouldn’t be about us.”
“Wow. One, I’m offended. Two, who would it be about?”
He scanned the crowd and I followed his gaze. “Her,” he said finally.
“Who?”
He stepped in close behind me, his head hovering over my right shoulder. “There. At the bottom of the Ferris wheel.”
“The girl in the Screw Me, I’m Irish shirt?” I said.
His laugh was warm and rough in my ear. Standing this close to him was bringing back flashes of the night at the frat house I’d rather not revisit.
“The woman working the machine,” he said in my ear. “Maybe she’d make a mistake and watch someone get hurt because of it. This job was probably her last chance employment, the only place that would hire her after she made an even bigger mistake. In a manufacturing factory maybe. Or she broke the law enforcement to protect someone she cared about. Some kind of almost-innocent mistake that could lead to less innocent ones. ”
I spun to face him. “Or maybe she’d get a chance to be a hero. This job was her last chance, but she loves it and she’s good at it. She gets to travel, and even if she mostly only sees parking lots, she gets to meet people. And she’s a people person. The mistake isn’t hers—the machinery malfunctions, but she makes a snap decision and saves a girl’s life. That girl grows up to be a congresswoman career, or a heart surgeon. The two of them cross paths again down the road. The Ferris wheel operator’s too old to travel with the carnival anymore. She’s been living alone, feeling like she wasted her life. Then one day, she’s alone. She has a heart attack. She almost dies but she manages to call nine-one-one. The ambulance rushes her in, and who is her doctor but that same little girl.
“Of course, Ferris doesn’t recognize her—she’s all grown up. But the doctor never could’ve forgotten Ferris’s face. The two women strike up a friendship. Ferris still doesn’t get to travel, but twice a month the doctor comes over to Ferris’s double-wide mobile home and they watch movies. Movies set in different countries. They watch Casablanca and eat Moroccan takeout. They watch The King and I and eat Siamese food (whatever that may be). They even watch—gasp!—Bridget Jones’s Diary while bingeing on fish and chips. They make it through twenty countries before Ferris passes away, and when she does, Doctor realizes her life was a gift she almost didn’t get. She takes some of Ferris’s ashes—her ungrateful asshole son didn’t come to collect them—and sets out on a trip around the world. She’s grateful to be alive. The end.”
Gus stared at me, only one corner of his very crooked mouth at all engaged. I was fairly sure he was smiling, although the deep grooves between his eyebrows seemed to disagree. “Then write it,” he said finally.
“Maybe so,” I said.
He glanced back at the gray-haired woman working the machinery. “That one,” he said. “I’m willing to ride that one. But only because I trust Ferris.”so damn much.”
I love the title, Martha and the fact she put Beach Read at the top. Very clever I think 😊
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