The Geography of You and Me

Upstairs, they spilled out into the darkened hallway—identical to the one thirteen floors below—both out of breath. Lucy had taken her sandals off somewhere around the eighteenth floor, and she let them dangle now from one hand as she used the other to feel her way along the wall, aware of Owen a few paces behind her, his footsteps light on the carpet. At the door to 24D, she fished the keys from the pocket of her dress, then fumbled with the lock as he leaned against the wall beside her, squinting.

“It’s not easy in the dark,” he said, but she didn’t respond. She’d been opening this door for nearly sixteen years. She knew the incremental movements by heart: the way the key stuck so that you had to jiggle it to the left and the noisy click of the bolt as it finally turned. She could have done this blindfolded. She could have done it in her sleep.

It wasn’t the dark. It was him.

As the lock finally gave and the door swung open, Lucy hesitated. She realized she’d never had a boy in her apartment before. At least not like this. Never alone. And certainly never in the dark.

There had always been friends of her brothers around, cleaning out the refrigerator and playing music so loud it thumped through the walls. But Lucy’s school was all-girls, so she’d never really had any guy friends of her own.

Of course, she’d never really had very many girl friends, either.

Last year, while making a rare and mandatory appearance as a chaperone at the winter formal, her mother had noticed that after a few obligatory dances, Lucy had disappeared into the hallway with a book. After that, she’d suddenly started paying attention to her daughter’s lack of a social life. If Lucy wasn’t hanging out with her brothers, she was usually just wandering the city by herself, neither of which were apparently productive uses of her time. And so she’d begrudgingly agreed to attend a basketball game, where a junior named Bernie, who went to their brother school, approached her at the snack booth to say that he liked her skirt. It was the exact same plaid skirt that every single other girl at the game was wearing, but he seemed nice enough, and she had nobody else to sit with, so she let him buy her a popcorn.

They started meeting behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day after school, doing their homework together just long enough to maintain the illusion that they weren’t only there to make out. But never once had he invited her over to his Fifth Avenue apartment, and never once had she considered inviting him back to hers. Theirs was a relationship built on neutral ground and impartial geography: park benches and stone fountains and picnic blankets. Bringing him into her home would have given the relationship a weight that it was never meant to bear, and it seemed to Lucy that there was no faster way to sink something. Especially something that would so easily sink on its own just two short months later, when Bernie met a different girl in a different plaid skirt at a different game.

But this was a unique situation, an emergency of sorts, and that changed everything. An ordinary afternoon had given way to an evening that felt hazy around the edges, tinged with recklessness and a kind of unfamiliar abandon. This was the first time she’d been left entirely on her own; no parents, no brothers, nobody at all. And now here she was, swinging the door wide open, a boy she barely knew waiting at her back.

From the front hallway, she could see all the way down past the kitchen and into the living room, where at this time of dusk, the windows were usually beginning to reflect the many lights of the city, a seemingly endless grid of yellow squares. But now it was empty, just a pale blue rectangle at the end of a long, black corridor.

Behind her, Owen cleared his throat. He was still standing just outside the door, apparently unsure whether or not he was being invited inside.

“So did you want to just grab the flashlight for me, or…?”

“No,” Lucy said, stepping aside. “Come on in.”

The fading light from the windows didn’t reach this far back into the apartment, so Lucy kept her hands outstretched as she moved tentatively into the kitchen. Owen had wandered into the living room, and she heard a scrape followed by a thud as he tripped over something.

“I’m okay,” he called out cheerfully.