“I didn’t know people actually thought about the word ‘ri-donk-ulous,’” I retorted.
Jesse grinned and gave me a shove. “You started it.”
“Seriously, though, this apartment is crazy, but yours? Is bonkers.”
“That’s one word for it.”
I decided to risk it and say something very nerdy. “Are Roux’s parents home? Like, is there a responsible adult on the premises?”
“Nah, they travel a lot,” Jesse said. “Her nanny used to show up at all the school events, but, you know, then we grew up. No one has nannies anymore. And besides, her parents are still married. Roux won the lottery.”
I thought about my family as we went down in the elevator and strolled past the doorman. I hadn’t spent a night away from my parents in my entire life. They were always home when I came home, and I was pretty sure that even if they weren’t spies, they’d be able to tell if I stumbled home wasted. And then I thought about Roux in her echoing, empty apartment and felt kind of sad for her. Growing up with spies, I always had someone to count on.
I wondered if maybe Roux was counting on me.
Jesse and I walked down Eighty-Second Street toward Central Park, me shivering in my turtleneck and jeans. “Spies don’t wear a coat?” he asked me.
“What?” I gasped. “What are you talking about?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your costume.”
“Oh.” And that concludes this week’s heart attack. “I think I left mine at your place. If anyone took it, I’m going to be pissed.”
“Here,” he said, and started to shrug out of his tuxedo jacket. “My good deed of the day.”
“Thanks,” I said. It smelled a little musty, but it also smelled like Jesse. Focus, I thought to myself. Go in for the kill.
“So,” I said as we passed the banners outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t have a chance with the magical karaoke machine.”
Okay, not my strongest kill shot, but I was new to this sort of conversation. You know, alone. With a boy. Alone.
“Neither did you,” he said.
I laughed and tucked my hair behind my ears. It had come unpinned somewhere around hour four of the party, when Roux had been busy showing me her favorite wine. For the third time. “Well, I only karaoke to ‘Bootylicious’ but you didn’t have it.”
“Want to do it right here?”
I looked up at him. “Are you insane?”
“C’mon, it’s just this bodega.” Jesse waved his arm to indicate the small store on the corner. “Your audience is small.”
“I was kidding!” I cried. “I don’t even sing in the shower, much less in public!” I had spent my entire life trying to blend in with the people around me, and I was fairly certain that singing like Beyoncé on a Manhattan street corner would ruin that whole effect.
Jesse was starting to hum and shake his own booty, though, wiggling his eyebrows at me. “You know you want to,” he sang.
Time for a distraction.
“You know what I do want?” I replied. “Ice cream.”
“What?”
“Ice cream,” I told him. “To quote Kanye, ‘Me likey.’”
“Ice cream,” Jesse repeated.
“Cherry Garcia.”
Jesse glanced down at me. “That is a brilliant idea.”
A few minutes later, Jesse emerged from the store with a paper sack, two plastic spoons, and a small plastic package that he tossed at me. “Here,” he said. “Don’t get excited, it’s not a real ruby.”
I put the cherry-flavored Ring Pop on my left hand and hugged it close. “I’ll never take it off,” I promised.
“C’mon,” he said, nodding down the street. “Let’s find a stoop.”
Which was how we came to sit on the front stoop of some brownstone at one in the morning, passing the pint of ice cream back and forth. The autumn air was even chillier now, but Jesse’s jacket was surprisingly warm and the ice cream tasted so good that I didn’t even mind how cold it was.
“You know what would be cool?” I said as I passed the ice cream back to him.
“If that ring was real so we could auction it at Sotheby’s and split the profits? Sixty-forty, of course, since I did buy it for you.”
I giggled. The candy looked ridiculously huge on my hand, but I didn’t want to take it off. “Nope. Try again.”
“If Radiohead played at my next birthday party?”
“Haven’t they already done that?”
Jesse passed the pint back to me. “No. Selfish bastards.”
“Shame. But what I was going to say was that it’d be cool if we could keep hanging out like this.” I dug into the ice cream, then glanced at Jesse. “Are you eating all the cherries out of this?”
“No. And yeah, that’d be cool.” He was totally stealing all the cherries, that liar.
“Yeah?” My heart was sort of pounding, but I told myself that it was just the sugar and leftover adrenaline from the party earlier than night.
“Yeah.” He looked up at me and grinned. “Maybe we could skip the part where we carry Roux’s drunk ass upstairs, though.”
“Maybe we can do something easier next time,” I replied. “Like scale the Empire State Building one-handed.”