City Love(70)

But yeah. I can essentially stay here after graduation for as long as I want. I can even buy a place like D’s loft if I want to. As long as I decide on a viable career, Daddy would totally be willing to help me out in the home department. The kind of home most people work for their whole lives and never get to have.

“Are you so excited for next week?” I ask Jude. He’s presenting to a few potential investors. One of them will hopefully back his project.

“Either excited or terrified. I can’t really tell.”

“Everyone will love you. How could they not? Your invention is genius.” I’m worried that Jude won’t get funded, but I’m keeping that doubt to myself. He needs nothing but encouragement right now.

After I treat for dinner at ABC Kitchen, we head to the Lower East. Welcome to the Johnsons is packed by the time we get there. Jude knew I’d love this lounge. It’s tricked out like some suburban family’s living room circa 1985. Plastic-covered couches. Pac-Man. Pink flamingoes. The works. I’m in kitsch heaven.

We grab drinks and snag a huge recliner in the corner. There’s a Hawaiian doll in a grass skirt dangling from the pleated lampshade above us.

“Classy,” I say.

“I knew you’d love it.”

“You know all the best places.”

“Stick with me. You’ll be an expert on the best holes in the wall by the end of the summer.”

“How could I resist?”

“I’m hoping you can’t.” Jude gives me an adorable smile that makes my heart melt. Or would make my heart melt if I was on the market to have my heart melted.

“Who were you in high school?” I ask. Rosanna told me how she asked D this question. I immediately acquired it as part of my small talk repertoire.

“Other than myself?”

“I mean what kind of person were you? Were you always the laid-back, go-with-the-flow, artistic-entrepreneurial-genius type?”

“More like the geeked-out, loser, slacker type. The girls couldn’t keep their hands off me.”

“Who was your first crush?”

“Samantha Rutherford in fourth grade. She sat next to me. I kept getting in trouble because my teacher thought I was staring out the window, but I was actually sneaking looks at Samantha. She had the lightest blond hair I’ve ever seen. She looked like an angel.”

“Did she like you back?”

“Circumstances would indicate not so much. But I know she’s been pining for me ever since. She’s probably stalking me online and strategizing how to find me in the park accidentally on purpose.”

“Maybe she was waiting for you to tell her you liked her.”

“You mean when I snuck a love letter in her desk at recess and she showed it to all her friends and never spoke to me again? Yeah, tried that.”

“That’s what you get, falling for a blonde.”

“I was devastated.”

“At least you told her how you felt. That was really brave.”

“You’d think I’d be more cautious about revealing my feelings too soon. But, no. Here I am wearing my heart on my sleeve, transparent as ever.”

“I think it’s sweet. So many guys are obsessed with hiding their feelings. Or playing games. What is it with guys being emotionally unavailable? Who even came up with that? Guys think they’re protecting themselves from getting hurt or hurting someone else, but they’re actually preventing themselves from experiencing so much.”

Jude watches some girls dancing to the next retro track in what I’m sure is a long lineup of throwback jams. “Isn’t that kind of what you’re doing?” he asks.

“What?”

“Protecting yourself? Or . . . preventing yourself?”

How am I supposed to answer that? The last thing I want to do is explain the catalyst for Summer Fun Darcy.

“You know when I wasn’t protecting myself?” I deflect. “When I had more first crushes than I can remember. You’re like, Bam! Samantha Rutherford. But I do remember the first crush I had that mortified me. There was this boy I liked in seventh grade. I doodled his name with hearts all over a practice quiz I thought we were throwing out after class. I almost died when my teacher collected them so we could switch and grade each other’s quizzes. Of course his friend got mine. He saw what I wrote and caught my eye. He taunted me with these menacing snickers all through grading the quizzes. He couldn’t wait to tell my crush. Mortified.”

“At the time it was huge, wasn’t it? I remember how everything was so much larger than life back then. Every little thing was blown out of proportion.”

“I know. I can’t believe I cared about half the stuff that bothered me in high school.”

“I can’t believe anything ever bothered you.”

“Yeah, well.” I lean back on the recliner. My tiny skater dress is hiked up high on my thighs. I don’t pull it down. Let Jude enjoy the view. “That was then.”

“And this is now, where you only focus on the present?”

“Exactly.” Cathartic full-circle moments like this rule. I love how we can talk about memories from back in the day that were devastating at the time, but have now been reduced to funny stories we laugh about. There was the boy I really liked who remained elusive in seventh grade. Then there was the boy who ripped my heart to shreds before I moved here. Now there’s the boy who likes me who wants to be let in. I don’t know what’s going to happen between us. I just know I’m not going to worry about it. Worrying about the future is pointless. All we ever have is the Now. This moment, right here, is the only thing that matters.