The Geography of You and Me (2 page)

“Then I think we’re in the clear,” he said, sitting down, too, his back against the opposite corner. He pulled his phone from his pocket, and in the dim light, his hair glowed green as he bent his head over it. “No signal.”

“It’s usually pretty iffy in here anyway,” Lucy said, reaching for her own phone before realizing she’d left it upstairs. She’d only run down to grab the mail, a quick round trip to the lobby and back, and now it felt like a particularly bad moment to find herself completely empty-handed.

“So,” the boy said, tipping his head back against the wall. “Come here often?”

She laughed. “I’ve logged some time in this particular elevator, yes.”

“I think you’re about to log a lot more,” he said with a rueful smile. “I’m Owen, by the way. I feel like we should probably introduce ourselves so I don’t end up calling you Elevator Girl whenever I tell this story.”

“I could live with Elevator Girl,” she said. “But Lucy works, too. I’m in 24D.”

He hesitated a moment, then gave a little shrug. “I’m in the basement.”

“Right,” she said, remembering too late, and she was glad for the darkness, which hid the flush in her cheeks. The building was like a small country in and of itself, and this was the currency; when you met someone new, you didn’t just give your name but your apartment number as well, only she’d forgotten that the super always lived in the
small two-bedroom flat in the basement, a floor Lucy had never visited.

“In case you’re wondering why I’m on my way up,” he said after a moment, “I’ve figured out that the view’s a whole lot better on the roof.”

“I thought nobody was allowed up there.”

He slipped his phone back into his pocket and pulled out a single key, which he held flat in his palm. “That’s true,” he said with a broad grin. “Technically speaking.”

“So you have friends in high places, huh?”

“Low places,” he said, returning the key to his pocket. “The basement, remember?”

This time she laughed. “What’s up there, anyway?”

“The sky.”

“You’ve got keys to the sky?” she said, and he knitted his fingers together, lifting his arms above his head in a stretch.

“It’s how I impress all the girls I meet in the elevator.”

“Well, it’s working,” she said, amused. Watching him over the past weeks, studying him from afar, she’d imagined he must be shy and unapproachable. But sitting here now, the two of them grinning at each other through the dark, she realized she might have been wrong. He was funny and a little bit odd, which at the moment didn’t seem like the worst kind of person to be stuck with.

“Although,” she added, “I’d be a lot more impressed if you could get us out of here.”

“I would, too,” he said, shifting his gaze to scan the
ceiling. “You’d think the least they could do would be to pipe in some music.”

“If they’re planning to pipe in anything, hopefully it’s some cool air.”

“Yeah, this whole city’s like a furnace,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like September.”

“I know. Hard to believe school starts tomorrow.”

“Yeah, for me, too,” he said. “Assuming we ever get out of here.”

“Where do you go?”

“Probably not the same place as you.”

“Well, I hope not,” she said with a grin. “Mine’s all girls.”

“Then definitely not the same one,” he said. “But I’d already figured that out anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, waving a hand around. “You live here.”

Lucy raised her eyebrows. “In the elevator?”

“In this building,” he said, making a face.

“So do you.”

“I think it would be more accurate to say I live
under
this building,” he joked. “But I’m betting you go to some fancy private school where everyone wears uniforms and worries about the difference between an A and an A-minus.”

She swallowed hard, unsure what to say to this, since it was true.

Taking her silence as an admission, he tilted his head as if to say
I told you so
, then gave a little shrug. “I’m going to the one up on One Hundred and Twelfth that looks like a
bunker, where everyone goes through metal detectors and worries about the difference between a C and a C-minus.”

“I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” she said, and his jaw went tight. Even through the darkness, something about his expression made him seem much older than he’d looked just moments before, bitter and cynical.

“The school or the city?”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re too thrilled about either.”

He glanced down at his hands, which were resting in a knot on top of his knees. “It’s just… this wasn’t really the plan,” he said. “But my dad got offered this job, and now here we are.”

“It’s not so bad,” she told him. “Really. You’ll find things to like about it.”

He shook his head. “It’s too crowded. You can’t ever breathe here.”

“I think you’re confusing the city with this elevator.”

The corner of his mouth twitched, but then he frowned again. “There are no open spaces.”

“There’s a whole park just a block away.”

“You can’t see the stars.”

“There’s always the planetarium,” Lucy said, and in spite of himself, he laughed.

“Are you always so relentlessly optimistic, or just when it comes to New York?”

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” she said with a shrug. “It’s my home.”

“Not mine.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to play the sullen new guy card.”

“It’s not a card,” he said. “I
am
the sullen new guy.”

“Just give it a chance, Bartleby.”

“
Owen
,” he said, looking indignant, and she laughed.

“I know,” she told him. “But you’re sounding just like Bartleby from the story.” She waited to see if he knew it, then pushed on. “Herman Melville? Author of
Moby-Dick
?”

“I know
that
,” he said. “Who’s Bartleby?”

“A scrivener,” she explained. “Sort of a clerk. But throughout the whole story, anytime someone asks him to do something, all he says is ‘I would prefer not to.’ ”

He considered this a moment. “Yup,” he said finally. “That pretty much sums up my feelings about New York.”

Lucy nodded. “You would prefer not to,” she said. “But that’s just because it’s new. Once you get to know it more, I have a feeling you’ll like it here.”

“Is this the part where you insist on taking me on a tour of the city, and we laugh and point at all the famous sights, and then I buy an
I♥NY
T-shirt and live happily ever after?”

“The T-shirt is optional,” she told him.

For a long moment, they eyed each other across the cramped space, and then, finally, he shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I know I’m being a jerk.”

Lucy shrugged. “It’s okay. We can just chalk it up to claustrophobia. Or lack of oxygen.”

He smiled, but there was something strained about it. “It’s just been a really tough summer. And I guess I’m not used to the idea of being here yet.”

His eyes caught hers through the darkness, and the elevator felt suddenly smaller than it had just minutes before. Lucy thought of all the other times she’d been crammed in here over the years: with women in fur coats and men in expensive suits; with little white dogs on pink leashes and doormen wheeling heavy boxes on luggage carts. She’d once spilled an entire container of orange juice on the carpet right where Owen was sitting, which had made the whole place stink for days, and another time, when she was little, she’d drawn her name in green marker on the wall, much to her mother’s dismay.

She’d read the last pages of her favorite books here, cried the whole way up and laughed the whole way down, made small talk to a thousand different neighbors on a thousand different days. She’d fought with her two older brothers, kicking and clawing, until the door dinged open and they all walked out into the lobby like perfect angels. She’d ridden down to greet her dad when he arrived home from every single business trip, and had even once fallen asleep in the corner as she waited for her parents to come home from a charity auction.

And how many times had they all been stuffed in here together? Dad, with his newspaper folded under his arm, always standing near the door, ready to bolt; Mom, wearing a thin smile, seesawing between amusement and impatience
with the rest of them; the twins, grinning as they elbowed each other; and Lucy, the youngest, tucked in a corner, always trailing behind the rest of the family like an ellipsis at the end of a sentence.

And now here she was, in a box that seemed too tiny to hold so many memories, with the walls pressing in all around her and nobody to come to her rescue. Her parents were in Paris, across the ocean, as usual, on the kind of trip that only ever included the two of them. And her brothers—the only friends she’d ever really had—were now thousands of miles away at college.

When they’d left a few weeks ago—Charlie heading off to Berkeley, and Ben to Stanford—Lucy couldn’t help feeling suddenly orphaned. It wasn’t unusual for her parents to be away; they’d always made a habit of careening off to snow-covered European cities or exotic tropical islands on their own. But being left behind was never that bad when there were three of them, and it was always her brothers—a twin pair of clowns, protectors, and friends—that had kept everything from unraveling.

Until now. She was used to being parentless, but being brotherless—and, thus, effectively friendless—was entirely new, and losing both of them at once seemed unfair. The whole family was now hopelessly scattered, and from where she sat—all alone in New York—Lucy felt it deeply just then, as if for the very first time: the bigness of the world, the sheer scope of it.

Across the elevator, Owen rested his head against the
wall. “It is what it is…” he murmured, letting the words trail off at the end.

“I hate that expression,” Lucy said, a bit more forcefully than intended. “Nothing is what it is. Things are always changing. They can always get better.”

He looked over, and she could see that he was smiling, even as he shook his head. “You’re totally nuts,” he said. “We’re stuck in an elevator that’s hot and stuffy and probably running out of air. We’re hanging by a cord that’s got to be smaller than my wrist. Your parents are who-knows-where, and my dad’s in Coney Island. And if nobody’s come to get us by now, there’s a good chance they’ve forgotten about us entirely. So seriously, how are you still so positive?”

Lucy slid out from the wall, folding her legs beneath her and leaning forward. “How come your dad’s in Coney Island?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“That’s not the point.”

“For the roller coasters?”

He shook his head.

“The hot dogs?” she asked. “The ocean?”

“Aren’t you at all worried that nobody’s coming to get us?”

“It won’t help anything,” she said. “Worrying.”

“Exactly,” he said. “It is what it is.”

“Nope,” she said. “Nothing is what it is.”

“Fine,” he said. “It’s not what it isn’t.”

Lucy gave him a long look. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“Or maybe you’d just prefer not to,” he said, sitting forward, and they both laughed. The darkness between them felt suddenly thin, flimsy as tissue paper and even less substantial. His eyes shone through the blackness as the silence stretched between them, and when he finally broke it, his voice was choked.

“He’s in Coney Island because that’s where he first met my mother,” Owen said. “He bought flowers to leave on the boardwalk. He wanted to do it alone.”

Lucy opened her mouth to say something—to ask a question, perhaps, or to tell him she was sorry, a word too small to mean anything at a moment like this—but the silence felt suddenly fragile, and she could think of nothing worthy enough to break it.

His head was bowed so that it was hard to make out the expression on his face, and she felt useless, sitting there without any idea of what to do. But then a faint knock sent her heart up into her throat, and his eyes found hers in the dark.

The sound came again, and Owen stood this time, moving over to the door and pressing his ear against it. He knocked back, and they both listened. Even from where she was still sitting numbly in the middle of the floor, Lucy could hear the muffled voices outside, followed by the scrape of something metal. After a moment, she rose to her feet, too, and without a word, without even looking at each other, they stood there like that, shoulder to shoulder, like a couple of astronauts at the end of a long journey, waiting for the doors to open so they could step out into a dazzling new world.

The day had started in darkness, too
. Owen had woken before the sun was up, just as he had for the last forty-two mornings, jolted out of sleep with the feel of something heavy on his chest, a weight that pressed down on him like a fist. He blinked at the unfamiliar ceiling, the faint cracks that formed a sort of map, and the fly that roved between them, like an X marking some unknowable spot.

In the next room, he could hear the clink of a coffee mug, and he knew his father was awake, too. The last six weeks had turned them into bleary-eyed insomniacs, their days as shapeless as their nights, so that one simply bled into the other. It seemed fitting that they were living underground now; what better place for a couple of ghosts?

His new room was less than half the size of his old one back in their sprawling, sun-drenched house in rural Pennsylvania, where he’d been woken each morning by the sparrows just outside his window. Now he listened to a couple of pigeons squabbling against the narrow panel
of glass near the ceiling, where the protective metal bars made what little light there was fall across his bed in slats.

When he emerged into the hallway that separated his room from his father’s and led back to the small kitchen and sitting area, Owen caught a whiff of smoke, and the intensity of it, the vividness of the memory, almost took his knees out from under him. He followed the scent to the living room, where he found his father sitting on the couch, hunched over a mug that was serving as a makeshift ashtray.

“I didn’t think you’d be up,” he said, stabbing out the cigarette with a guilty expression. He ran a hand through his hair, which was just a shade or two darker than Owen’s, then sat back and rubbed his eyes.