The restaurant feels peaceful even though almost all the tables are occupied. There’s no music playing, only the murmur of voices, and the light is perfect, not too bright. The hostess appears with three menus and leads us to a corner table, Violet right behind her, Mark and I following.
“Should I disappear?” Mark whispers. “This place seems kind of romantic.”
I shake my head. “I want you here,” I say. “I need you.”
“Whoa,” he says. “I’m flattered, but you know I don’t think about you that way, right?”
I jab him in the ribs with my elbow and he yelps. Violet turns to us and raises an eyebrow.
I smile. Mark shrugs.
We take our seats. I am grateful that the table is round so we don’t have to decide who sits next to whom.
I want to sit next to her, but I’m afraid to. I want to feel her close, but I want to see her face.
Our waitress arrives with tea and fills our little cups. As soon as she turns away, Mark pulls out his phone and positions it above the table.
“Oh no,” Violet says. “You’re one of those people? You can’t just drink your tea—you have to Instagram or tweet or Facebook it?”
“No,” he says. “I just have to text it.”
“Text it to who?” I ask.
“You know who.”
“Seriously?”
“Who’s you know who?”
“Ryan,” I say. “His best friend slash sort-of boyfriend.”
“Oh!” Violet says, eyeing him. “I did not call that one. But okay. Sort-of boyfriend. Tell me about that.”
“Not even sort-of boyfriend,” Mark says. “Former sort-of boyfriend.”
“Ouch. Go on.”
He looks at me, and I’m not sure why, until I realize that the beginning to this story involves last Saturday night when I was supposed to be meeting Violet but instead found myself watching Mark dance almost naked in a bar.
“I want to apologize,” I say. “Last Saturday got … complicated for me.”
She smiles, but I can see some hurt behind it.
“Yeah,” she says. “From Shelbie’s house to the Facetime Mansion. I guess I assumed you’d have a story to tell me someday.”
“Yes,” I say. “Someday. But for now, I’ll just say that I found myself, by chance, in a bar during an underwear-only dance contest, of which our friend Mark here was crowned the winner.”
And from there the story unfolds and expands, stretching into the far past, how they met, how it felt, and the more recent past, how they kissed, how it felt—and the future Mark saw for them until Saturday night, when the sight of Ryan dancing in the bar shattered it.
“This is heartbreaking,” Violet says. “Really. I feel for you. But please, please do not send this boy a picture of tea.”
“You think it’s pathetic?” Mark asks. “I know, I know: I should be ignoring him. He’ll probably get this text and just wish it was a text from Taylor. He’ll barely look at it.” He lifts the cup and smells it. Sets it back down without sipping. “But the thing is that Ryan really likes tea. Especially green tea. And I never drink this stuff. So maybe it’ll get his attention or something.”
“Right,” I say. “Like he’ll wonder who you’re with. Or in what ways you’re changing. You’ll become mysterious.”
“Kate. Mark. Seriously. Tea is not going to make you mysterious. This is what I want you to do. Think of one sentence—just one. It has to be the truth. It has to come from your heart. Now go ahead and write it, but don’t press send yet.”
As he’s thinking, the waitress returns and we place our orders. When she leaves, Mark enters something into his phone.
“Okay,” Violet says. “There is something you should know about me. I tell stories with morals. I am going to begin one now.”
Mark and I nod our approval.
“So there was this guy I knew in the troupe. Lars. He was maybe in his thirties and he was a lion tamer. A real natural with the animals; he was never even afraid. In addition to being fearless, he was a romantic. One night he told me about this girl he once knew and loved when he was a little kid. Like a long time ago, when he was eleven or twelve. Her name was Greta, and in the beginning of spring she told their class that her family was moving away, that that was her last day there. She cried as she told everyone, and he felt overcome by his love for her. He went home and he wrote her a poem and he delivered it to her on her doorstep. He can recite the whole thing, but I only remember one line, which translates into Your silky flaxen hair glints golden. It sounds terrible, I know. He assured me it just loses its effect in the translation, but I’m not so sure. Anyway. In every town we stopped in for a circus show, somewhere close to the fairgrounds where we’d set up camp, that line would appear spray-painted on a wall somewhere. I finally asked him about it. I said, ‘What if Greta sees it one day and she remembers it, remembers you, and she wants to find you, but she can’t?’ Most of the performers didn’t use their real names, and Lars was one of them. If she tried to look him up she would have found him untraceable. And I thought, if he still thinks about this girl from his childhood so much that he’s scattered notes for her on buildings all across Europe—if he wants to reach her that badly—why wouldn’t he leave her some kind of clue so she could find him?”