I walk over to her and try to touch the back of her elbow, but my touch is too soft and I only get her coat. She turns to me and I see that she’s still on her cell. I make a gesture that is intended to convey, “Hey, no hurry, talk as long as you’d like,” and probably actually conveys, “Hey, look at me! I have spastic hands.” Jane holds up a finger. I nod. She speaks softly, cutely into the phone, saying, “Yeah, I know. Me too.”
I step backward across the sidewalk and lean against the brick wall between Frenchy’s and a closed sushi restaurant. To my right, Will and Tiny talk. To my left, Jane talks. I pull out my cell as though I’m going to send a text, but I just scroll through my contact list. Clint. Dad. Jane. Mom. People I used to be friends with. People I sorta know. Tiny. Nothing after the T’s. Not much for a phone I’ve had three years.
“Hey,” Jane says. I look up, flip the phone shut, and smile at her. “Sorry about the concert,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s okay,” I answer, because it is.
“Who’s the guy?” she asks, gesturing toward him.
“Will Grayson,” I say. She squints at me, confused. “I met a guy named Will Grayson in that p**n store,” I say. “I was there to use my fake ID, and he was there to meet his fake boyfriend.”
“Jesus, if I’d known that was gonna happen, I would’ve skipped the concert.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to sound annoyed. “Let’s take a walk.”
She nods. We walk over toward Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile, home to all of Chicago’s biggest, chainiest stores. Everything’s closed now, and the tourists who flood the wide sidewalks during the day have gone back to their hotels, towering fifty stories above us. The homeless people who beg off the tourists are gone, too, and it is mostly just Jane and me. You can’t tell the truth without talking, so I’m telling her the whole story, trying to make it funny, trying to make it grander than any MDC concert could ever be. And when I finish there’s a lull and she says, “Can I ask you something random?”
“Yeah, of course.” We’re walking past Tiffany, and I stop for a second. The pale yellow streetlights illuminate the storefront just enough that through triple-paned glass and a security grate, I can see an empty display—a gray velvet outline of a neck wearing no jewelry.
“Do you believe in epiphanies?” she asks. We start walking again.
“Um, can you unpack the question?”
“Like, do you believe that people’s attitudes can change? One day you wake up and you realize something, you see something in a way that you never saw it before, and boom, epiphany. Something is different forever. Do you believe in that?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think anything happens all at once. Like, Tiny? You think Tiny falls in love every day? No way. He thinks he does, but he doesn’t really. I mean, anything that happens all at once is just as likely to unhappen all at once, you know?”
She doesn’t say anything for a while. She just walks. My hand is down next to her hand, and they brush but nothing happens between us. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” she says finally.
“Why do you ask?” I say.
“I don’t know. No reason, really.” The English language has a long and storied history. And in all that time, no one has ever asked a “random question” about “epiphanies” for “no reason.” “Random questions” are the least random of all questions.
“Who had the epiphany?” I ask.
“Um, I think you’re actually, like, the worst possible person to talk to about this,” she says.
“How’s that?”
“I know it was pretty lame of me to go to the concert,” she says randomly. We come to a plastic bench and she sits down.
“It’s okay,” I say, sitting down next to her.
“It’s actually not okay on, like, the grandest possible scale. I guess the thing is that I’m a little confused.” Confused. The phone. The sweet, girly voice. Epiphanies. I finally realize the truth.
“The ex-boyfriend,” I say. I feel my gut sinking down like it’s swimming in the ocean deep, and I learn the truth: I like her. She’s cute and she’s really smart in precisely the right slightly pretentious way, and there’s a softness to her face that sharpens everything she says, and I like her, and it’s not just that I should be honest with her; I want to. Such is the way these things are tied together, I guess. “I have an idea,” I say.
I can feel her looking at me, and I cinch the hood of my coat. My ears feel cold like burning.
And she says, “What’s the idea?”
“The idea is that for ten minutes, we forget that we have feelings. And we forget about protecting ourselves or other people and we just say the truth. For ten minutes. And then we can go back to being lame.”
“I like the idea,” she says. “But you have to start.”
I push my coat sleeve back and look at my watch. 10:42. “Ready?” I ask. She nods. I look at my watch again. “Okay, and . . . go. I like you. And I didn’t know whether I liked you until I thought of you at that concert with some other guy, but now I do know, and I realize that makes me a bitchsquealer, but yeah, I like you. I think you’re great, and very cute—and by cute I mean beautiful but don’t want to say beautiful because it’s cliché but you are—and I don’t even mind that you’re a music snob.”
“It’s not snobbery; it’s good taste. So I used to date this boy and I knew he was going to be at the concert and I wanted to go with you partly because I knew Randall would be there but then I wanted to go even without you because I knew he would be there and then he saw me while MDC was playing ‘A Brief Overview of Time Travel Paradoxes,’ and he was screaming in my ear about how he had an epiphany and he now knows that we’re supposed to be together and I was, like, I don’t think so and he quoted this e. e. cummings poem about how kisses are a better fate than wisdom and then it turns out that he had MDC dedicate a song to me which was the kind of thing that he would never have done before and I feel like I deserve someone who consistently likes me which you kind of don’t and I don’t know.”
“What song?”
“‘Annus Miribalis.’ Uh, he’s the only person who knows my locker combination, and he had them dedicate it to my locker combination, which is just, I mean, I don’t know. That’s just. Yeah.”