Chapter 1
Hope got off the bus at Port Authority thanking who knows who for not being in Los Angeles anymore. She had barely been able to afford that last ticket to New York after spending all her savings in not one but two backpacking adventures. But thanks to her mom, she had been able to make ends meet and finally move to her cousin’s in Upper Manhattan. New York had been her dream for as long as she could have remembered and starting college there after a gap year seemed like a great idea. But just like a school sweetheart who might become an endgame after growing up, she knew she had to try other things before settling down for good in her dream city.
After grabbing her luggage from the bus compartiment, she walked down the aisle and left the platform. A boy who had flirted with her during the last part of the trip caught up with her after long steps. Hope had almost paid no attention to him at all during the ride. He had tried to make conversation a bunch of times and at one pint it was just painful to witness so many mediocre attempts to make himself look interesting. Being too aware of not coming off too strong but also trying to be assertive, he had made a mess with words and side smiles. At some point, she just felt pity for him and uttered a few sounds to put him out of his misery. Mistake. He had gained courage and had been talking non stop for the last hour of the bus ride.
“Hey, so… it was nice meeting you” he said in between sighs as he tried to catch his breath. “I was wondering if… you know, if you are new in town like me, we could… hang out, maybe. If that’s ok.”
Hope stopped, looked at him and side-smiled.
“I was being polite with you, kiddo. Not gonna happen.” The boy’s face stiffened. “But had fun watching you try.”
The boy’s grin disappeared and he frowned as if too much had changed in the last three seconds from the picture perfect romanticky scene he had pictured in his air-filled head. Hope walked away, not even thinking about the guy and trying to focus on which aisles she should turn right or left. The boy just stood there. Or at least she thought. She didn’t bother looking back. Boys were such a waste of time. She was pretty, she knew that. All her life, her parents had told her so. Her older brothers had told her so. Her grandma on occasion when she visited LA from Connecticut had told her so. The football team in high school had acted around her so. And senior students and their cheerleader friends had hated her so. She kind of liked the attention at first, but after turning sixteen she grew tired of the compliments on her strawberry lips, her round eyes and her Julia-Roberts-sharp-but-sexy chin. She was not one to care about looks or fashions. She didn’t buy the latest trends or read Teen Vogue magazine. She didn’t date boys from school. Her friend Annabelle barely asked her about the boys she liked at first. Then she realized she should ask about girls, but Hope was so private that even though that became the right question, Annabelle knew she wouldn’t get an answer either. Hope marched to the beat of her own drum and not many people understood that. If they didn’t, she didn’t care. Nothing really mattered to her in terms of acceptance. That she could blame it on the way she looked. Being plain and beautiful seemed less fun for her than being beautiful and mysterious. She liked the latter a lot more. The less people got her, the more she felt like clinging to her books and her scribbles on the school’s textbooks margins. She liked writing. It had helped her built a small universe on her own to run away from stupid comments based on appereance and shaped by Victoria’s Secret TV commercials where some models looked like an older, richer, more obnoxious version of herself. At some point during high school, she decided not to care and so she didn’t. She had made only one good friend there who kind of got her enough to share meaningful conversations and so she didn’t need much else.
Now, she was in NYC to finally start over. Travelling through Europe for four months after school had changed her life. She had come back to L.A to get a crappy job and earn some more money and leave L.A again, this time to see America. Being at home with her mom, alone the two of them, having dinner silently while watching prime time news kind of made her feel interested in local politics. Before uttering big opinions, she felt like she needed to know her country a bit more before becoming much more vocal. She had dubbed her new goal of seeing America as her discovery trip to master the art of empathy. She did it in two months and decided to go back home again, get another crappy job, this time selling screwdrivers and hammers to old men at a small business, earn some more money and write about what she had seen in the last couple of weeks. She had chronicled all her backpacking and the articles that resulted from that earned her a very small column at a local news website. The interest in it grew enough in her community to start getting a few dollars per column and before she knew it she had enough money to move to New York and keep writing. Journalism wasn’t her thing, really. She dreamed of becoming a fiction writer. But as she grew lonelier as Annabelle stayed in college and most of her classmates left town, the idea of undergrad education in something like English or Creative writing became more appealing to her. She became determined to get into NYU and maybe pursue their masters in creative writing once she got her English major. She had heard great things about it. She convinced herself NYU was the best place to go and that nothing else, not even the people who were going to be in New York, had anything to do with her choice. In the meantime, she would live with her cousin, her cousin’s husband and their little three-year-old, Florence.
There the cousin was, Gina, waiting for her at a filthy coffee table not far from Port Authority’s entrance. She smiled big when she saw Hope walk towards her. Gina stood up and hugged her dearly. She was her mom’s older sister's only child and had always had a protective big-sister relationship with Hope. She was the first person Hope had come out with and had guided her through troubling times in her earliest experiences as a queer young girl from a broken home during high school.
“You keep growing up,” she said. “I don’t care if you are twenty, you do”.
“Get out”.
Hope pushed her away jokingly. She was glad she had someone like her to count on. Her two older brothers moved away before she turned thirteen and could even dig deeper into what the three of them might have in common. Now they had families on their own and had forgotten about the one prior. Hope looked at Gina and noticed a few wrinkles and tired eyes, but she knew their bond was still the same. Without saying much else, they jumped inside a cab and made their way uptown.
“Excited?” Gina asked as Hope looked outside the car window.
“Yeah…” she murmured.” A bit scared, to be honest.”
“Oh… you? Scared? Nah, don’t think so.”
Hope had dreamed of New York for so long, she barely remembered anything else that happened prior. And a lot of stuff had happened. Gina had taken a home office day to welcome her into the house and help her get settled. She and her husband Mick had a nice cozy apartment in Manhattan Valley, right next to the Upper East Side. Mick had a good job as a lawyer but was still trying to hay his law school debt. Gina worked as a freelance graphic designer and was in the middle of grad school when she got pregnant. Her thesis, still pending, rested in a forgotten file in her Mac. Little Florence had taken much of their time ever since being born and Gine split her time between designing posters, pocket-sized books and bottle labels and raising her baby. Gina had improvised a bedroom in the attic that had been used mostly as dead storage space before. But Hope liked it when she saw it. The ladder dropped down from the ceiling and she couldn’t stand all the way up with her head hitting the top, but her cousin had made an effort to move all the boxes to the furthest corner of the room and had improvised a comfy bed which consisted on a queen size mattress right under a dusty skylight. When Hope saw it, she made a mental note to clean it up so she could see New York’s sky. She also imagined that a few indoor plants would remind her of her old room, the one place in L.A where she felt safe. A few pictures taken with her analogic camera would also make her feel okay. She also noticed a pile of stuffed cushions and a little desk where Gina assumed she’d feel comfortable writing. She envisioned a tower of books, the one she had in mind buying, stacking up against the wall.
“Did you like your room?”
A little spark lit up in her cousin’s eyes. Hope could tell she had put effort on it.
“I did, thank you so much” she replied with a smile. ”But I don’t want to take much space here. As soon as school begins and I get a decent job, I’ll stop bothering the three of you.”
“Are you kidding?” Gina retorted. ”Florence will be thrilled when she gets back from school and you know Mick loves you too.”
Hope did feel a bit like a burden though. She wished she could start school right away but there were three weeks left still and she hadn’t been able to secure a dorm nearer school. She still dreamed of getting her own apartment near Washington Square Park. Her absent look was caught by her cousin.
“Don’t you have friends in town to see? It could be good for you to talk to them as well.”
The question pinched Hope in her stomach. She had tried her hardest not to think about Amy beginning school in a few weeks, like herself. She promised herself and Annabelle as well -cause she made her to, let’s be honest- that she wouldn’t contact her. Annabelle was now best friends with Molly in Yale and Molly had told her that Amy had met someone. Another girl.
Okay, so the truth is, Hope blamed herself for this. After Nick’s party and graduation, Amy had left for Botswana and they had kept in touch for a bit. At first, they talked like friends but as time went by, Hope had slipped the fact that they could sext for fun. It was silly and innocent at first, but then it kind of gave them an intimacy they weren’t expecting. Amy was clumsy in person, but she was so articulate with words that got the hang of it easily. Hope longed to see her and Amy did as well. When Hope came back from Europe and started working her butt off to earn more money, Amy expected she’d come visit her in Africa. Hope knew that the money would help her pay her trip and her chronicles as well as minor bills if she eventually could get into college. Hope thought that she had let Amy down a bit. She never said anything about it, but their relationship started to fade away. Before Hope had time to process, Molly told Annabelle that Amy started dating this girl from the States that had been volunteering in the same program, but at a different town in Botswana. This came in as a bucket of ice cold water. She didn’t text Amy back and never asked. Her pride and her remorse grew stronger in her, but just like everything else, she swallowed it all in waiting for them to go away. They never did.
“I guess I could call George” Hope whispered absent-mindly, with her eyes fixated on the kitchen counter and still caught up remembering Amy’s text messages. “He’s starting his second year at Tisch this fall.”
“Is he in NYC for the summer?”
“Well, he posted on Insta he’s an understudy for this off-Broadway show so I guess he is…”
“Nice, I’m sure he’d love it if you go see him”
George had said yes right away. Yes, we need to catch up. Yes, you need to know all the amazing things that have happened to me ever since I put my foot in New York. So, after Hope texted him and asked if they could meet, he said that he would be covering one of his castmates after he got food poisoning the following Friday. He also mentioned that this was the first time he had the chance to go on-stage on the show and that all his friends were coming to see him. Hope got excited. The prospect of seeing one familiar face her age had more attraction than she had originally expected. The said Friday came and she put together a cute little outfit to go and boost her self-esteem a bit. In a million years she’d admit it, but she felt nice after prepping a bit to see his former classmate. Her morale had gone down the hill after Amy had moved on faster than expected and sometimes some acts are not desired but necessary to make oneself feel better. She put on a pair of high waisted jeans that made her butt look fierce and her legs endless, a strapless black tank top that revealed her ribcage if she stretched her arms too high, golden earrings and a bunch of little golden necklaces that made her look like a spanish model. She chose flats. She hated being noticed due to her height. She also painted her lips in a shy red tone and added just enough highlighter to look a bit more elegant, but make up wasn’t her strong suit at all.
“Looking good, Kate Moss” Mick teased from the kitchen as Hope clumsily walked down the drop down ladder from the attic.
Gina hit him with a kitchen towel. Little Florence ran towards Hope before she could open the door and clinged to her legs.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Hope told her, while caressing her curly short hair.
“I want my night night story” she sobbed.
“I’ll make two stories for you tomorrow night to make up for tonight.”
Florence opened up her eyes with happiness and surprise.
“She can’t possibly be making up stories for you all the time, darling” Gina warned her daughter from afar.
“Yes, she can,” Mitt claimed. “Especially if that lets us sleep at night, honey.”
Hope knelt before her niece and kissed her goodbye.
“You got money, Hope, right?” Gina asked Hope as she was crossing the door.
Hope raised her hand before leaving and gave her the okay sign. She walked out of the building and got in the subway. This stupid habit had grown in her and that was that everytime she hit the subway, she’d look for Amy in stranger’s faces. She knew Columbia wasn’t far from Gina’s apartment. Chances were not that difficult.
George’s play was downtown. She rode for about forty minutes until she reached her destination. She was fifteen minutes early. Hope lit a cigarette while waiting for the doors to open. The entrance was stained with dry beer but the small marquee shone with color lights and a beautiful drag queen stood right by the door, with her nails amazingly curated and a marvellous violet wig. She smiled at Hope from afar. Hope kept taking puffs at her cigarette while her eyes became fixated of a female figure walking quirkily from the opposite corner. Her mind wandered. The person strut down the street vibrantly talking with her companion, what seemed like another woman. The former was gesticulating awkwardly with her hands as if she was explaining something. Their conversation was vivid and as they came closer, their bodies and their face features became clearer. The said woman, who was not a woman but rather a girl, was wearing an oversize jean jacket over a plain white tank top and tight leather pants. Hope recognized the sneakers. She had seen those sneakers every day during her high school years. The girl whose voice suddenly became silent also had long bright red hair and a face full of freckles.