So old so young, p.1
So Old, So Young, page 1
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For Mac
You are the same and still the same and suddenly one morning two distinct lines, ineradicable, have appeared at the corners of your mouth.
—James Salter
Terminal 3, Heathrow London
April 26, 2024
12:15 PM Mia
Trouble lay ahead of her.
The line to board the plane had stopped moving, leaving Mia stuck next to a galley where two attendants made preflight preparations. One of them, a brunette with a silk scarf tied around her neck, opened a drawer containing a tray of foil-covered meals while her colleague poured water into small plastic cups. Mia watched them work, gathering her belongings in front of her. She had checked no bags. All she had was a small carry-on containing, among other items, a black dress, a leather tote that held her laptop, a paperback novel, a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, a charger for her phone, and an aluminum water bottle. She wore jeans and sneakers and a long wool coat, which she presently took off and draped over her right arm. The flight attendant who had been filling cups of water looked down the aisle. The line still hadn’t moved.
“We’ve got a luggage problem,” he said. His colleague closed the drawer containing the meals and glanced back to where he was gesturing. There Mia saw a man struggling to squeeze a large suitcase into the overhead storage bin. He kept turning it around, pushing it harder, but even from where she was standing Mia could see there was no way the bag was going to fit.
“These idiots,” the flight attendant in the scarf said. “I mean, honestly.”
She smiled at Mia, as if suddenly realizing she was there, then excused herself and slid by her. Threading her way past other passengers, she eventually reached the man and tapped him gently on the shoulder. Mia took her phone from her pocket and opened her photo app. Before boarding began she had been looking through it, trying to find the last picture she had taken of all her friends together. Waiting at the gate, she had told herself that if she could find one, just one, then all of this would have turned out differently. But she hadn’t, so now she found herself scrolling, past shots of Regent’s Park and Broadway Market and her small, empty flat in Islington. When she reached November of last year, the flight attendant had made her way back to where Mia was standing, the bag held high above her head. She looked at her colleague and rolled her eyes. The line moved again.
By the time she settled into her seat Mia was deep in the fall of 2022. She had seen Adam and Richie on New Jersey Transit, and Sasha in a red leotard, and Theo strumming an electric guitar, and her old apartment in Greenpoint, and Lev with his glasses on the end of his nose. None of it was what she was looking for. For nearly a minute her mind drifted, her thoughts loose and scattered. Then, blinking, she opened a new text message, where she typed about to take off, see you tomorrow, and pressed send. A moment later, a response appeared on her screen: Only if you’re up for it. She read it a few times over, then returned to her photos without responding. Beaches, skylines, cones topped with melting ice cream. Rami on a blanket in Fort Greene Park, and Marco with a baby, and the empty, postapocalyptic streets of the pandemic. Mia’s thumb swiped faster and she felt herself starting to sweat. The trip had come together at the last minute—she kept thinking of things she hadn’t done, people she had forgotten to call. She was next to a window, and she leaned her head against it. On the tarmac men in uniforms drove small carts, pulling trains of luggage behind them. Someone in a reflective orange vest directed a nearby plane to a gate. The sky was overcast, thick with gray clouds. Mia swiped her thumb once more and then—at last—she saw it: all of them together on a bright-green lawn. A swimming pool sparkled in the background, and bocce balls lay at their feet. She zoomed in on each of their faces, then looked at the geotag and date on the picture. Amagansett. Labor Day, 2019. She exhaled and waited for some relief.
“Good afternoon to you!”
Glancing up, Mia saw a man standing over her. He was large, well over six feet, and when he finally managed to sit down his knees brushed the seat in front of him. He looked to be about forty-five, which was to say a year or two older than Mia, and his red hair was parted neatly on the side. Mia smiled politely. She put away her phone and pulled the paperback novel out of her bag and read the first page. The sentences were clean and precise and they washed over her without meaning. She reached the bottom of the page, immediately forgetting what she had read, and went back to the beginning to start again.
“They pack us in here bloody tight, don’t they!” the man said.
Mia looked up from the book. He was smiling at her.
“Yes,” she said. “They do.”
“Can’t be too hard for you, though, being small like you are. Me, on the other hand.” The man slapped both of his knees. “Wouldn’t mind a bit more room!”
The plane pulled away from the gate. On the small screen in front of her, Mia watched as the president of Delta welcomed her aboard, and then as a diverse cast of flight attendants performed various safety demonstrations. When they were finished, a handsome man dressed as a pilot invited her to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. The plane swiveled ninety degrees. She heard the engines grow louder, and soon after that they were in the air. Below them, the ground was laced with roads that cut through parking lots and commercial centers and past empty green patches of earth. Mia’s ears popped. The plane began to level out, and she opened the paperback again.
“Good book?” the man asked.
“I’ve just started it.”
“I detect an American accent.”
Mia closed the novel. “Good ear,” she said.
“Going home, then?”
“No. Not really? I moved to London about six months ago.”
The man folded his fingers together. They were large, the knuckles bulbous. Toward the front of the plane, the two flight attendants from earlier began pushing a drink cart down the aisle.
“It’s my first time headed to New York, if you can believe it,” he said.
“Oh?”
“You’ve been, I gather?”
“Yes. I lived there for a long time.”
“Back to the old stomping ground, then?”
“Something like that.”
“Smashing!” He reached into a backpack and pulled out a leather-bound notebook in which he had handwritten an itinerary. “I’m there for business, but I’ve got a mind to sneak in a bit of sightseeing on the side. This is everything that I’ve got planned. What do you think?”
Mia read it over. The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Little Italy, Times Square, The Lion King. Handing it back to him, she said, “Yep, that looks like everything.”
The man returned the notebook to his backpack.
“Not much of a talker, are you.” He frowned, sounding puzzled if not a little hurt.
For a moment Mia felt guilty; she had hardly slept over the past five days, but the man was obviously excited, and she knew the polite thing to do would be to come up with some interesting suggestions. But then the drink cart arrived, interrupting her thoughts. The flight attendant in the silk scarf cleared her throat and widened her smile. She asked the man next to Mia if he would like something to drink.
“A gin and tonic!” he said. “Bloody hell, make it two gin and tonics. One for me, and one for—?”
“Mia. It’s Mia.” She looked at the flight attendant. “Just a club soda, please.”
The flight attendant scooped ice into two cups. Rummaging around in a drawer, she found a small blue bottle of gin, then closed the drawer with her hip.
“Not too celebratory then, either,” the man said.
“I’m sorry, it’s just—”
“We need to liven you up, missy!” He emptied the gin into his cup and took a sip from it. “We’re headed to En Why See! The Big Apple! The Center of the Universe! The City That Never Sleeps! It’s not like someone’s died, now, is it?”
The flight attendant pushed the cart farther down the aisle. Mia drank from her club soda and looked at the man.
“Actually?” she said. “They have.”
Orchard Street December 31, 2007
Richie Fournier: u coming tonite?
11:02 PM Mia
They had run out of mixers.
Standing in someone else’s crowded kitchen, Mia picked up one bottle after another. Club soda: gone. Tonic water: gone. Red Bull: gone. Cokes—original, diet, caffeine-free, cherry: gone. Everything: gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. A man passed behind her, a towering guy in a striped button-down shirt that shone with a synthetic brilliance beneath the light. He yelled, “Yo, Chris!” and Mia’s ears rang; she pressed herself flatter against the counter to make room for him and felt his elbow brush against her spine. Next to a half-eaten bag of pretzels she spotted a can of lime-flavored seltzer water, traces of red lipstick on its opening. She picked it up, gave it a shake, and poured the few drops that remained into a cup of lukewarm vodka. There were fifty-eight minutes left in the year. And from the looks of it, she was going to spend them without a decent drink.
A few feet away from he
“Rachel Goldfarb?”
“Yes.”
“Rachel Goldfarb is a whore.”
“Okay, well, I was there with Chris when Connor Cunningham walked in. I hooked up with him, you know. Then Robert Narducci walked in. I hooked up with him too. They both know about each other, and they both came over to talk to us and when they walked away Chris asked why things seemed weird. Sometimes I swear he was dropped on his head.”
“Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. Are you hooking up with Chris Villanueva? He’s an asshole. He said he was going to pay me two hundred dollars for an essay I wrote him for Texts and Ideas sophomore year and I never saw a cent of it.”
“I think he’s really grown up since then. And also? He’s a pretty good writer now. The sex is great.”
The friend shoved her hand into the bag. “I feel like I just need you to, like, line up all the guys you know and tell me which ones you think are hot.”
“What about Nick Cavanaugh?”
“He got fat.”
“He didn’t get fat-fat. He got dad-bod fat.”
“Dad-bod fat is fat-fat. Also, he’s a loser. He barely graduated, he’s living back in Massapequa, and he doesn’t own a car. I’m not sleeping with a guy who puts away grocery carts at Stop and Shop.”
“What about Joe Rizzi?”
“Joe Rizzi? Are you kidding me?”
“What about him?”
“I saw that kid at Marquee. Kristen and I saw him. He came over to talk to us, and asked about all that crap Jacob told me. I got so mad. Like, I was ready to switch the rings from my fighting hand.”
“Okay, so not Joe Rizzi.”
“What about JJ?”
“You don’t want to sleep with JJ.”
“Why not?”
“Because he got a giant tattoo that says household in Mandarin across his back.”
“No he did not.”
“I swear to God. The week after Thanksgiving Ali Huang and I saw him at The Box and he took off his shirt to show it to us.”
“How did you get into The Box?”
“Ali’s sleeping with the door guy.”
“I feel like everyone is having sex but me.”
“Can I keep going?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.”
“Okay, so JJ—who, by the way, is fat-fat—takes off his shirt and is like, ‘Look at what I got over break.’ Then Ali is all, ‘Uh, that says household.’ JJ is like, ‘Uh, no, it says family.’ Ali goes, ‘I speak Mandarin, you idiot, and it says household.’ JJ gets all white and puts his shirt back on and calls Ali a bitch. And this is all in the bathroom line. He keeps yelling and I tell him to go to hell. We go back to the bar and he follows us, and I say that I would eat his skin off his face if he came near us again.” She whipped her head around to stare at Mia. “Sorry, do you need something?”
The tips of Mia’s ears began to burn. She felt her mouth fill with saliva. “Sorry?”
“You’ve been staring at us for five minutes—do you need something?”
The friend ate another handful of potato chips, working her jaw in slow, deliberate circles.
Mia smiled as brightly as she could.
“You two haven’t found any mixers, have you?” she asked.
Their eyes rolling, the girls turned away. Mia searched the faces in the kitchen for someone else she knew. Bottles of liquor lined the counter alongside the empty mixers. Scattered among them were bowls with crumbs of what had once been in them. Corn chips, potato chips, pita chips, pretzels. A gash of salsa was splattered across the refrigerator door. From the handles of cupboards hung bits of tinsel and gold streamers that swayed when people walked by; two unfurled party horns lay crushed and limp on the floor. Mia sneezed. One of the two girls glared at her with a scrunched-up face.
“Excuse me,” Mia said, and choked down another sip of lukewarm vodka.
* * *
She hadn’t been planning on leaving her apartment that night. She was fighting off a cold, and besides, she had never liked New Year’s. But earlier that afternoon Sasha had knocked on her bedroom door and opened it before Mia could say “Come in.” Leaning against the doorframe, she unpeeled the top from a carton of yogurt, plunged a spoon into it, and told Mia to stop being such a loser.
“I’m serious,” Sasha said. “The only thing lamer than making a big deal about New Year’s is making a big deal about not making a big deal about New Year’s.”
Mia looked up from where she was sitting on the floor amid a scatter of seventeen samples of various men’s colognes in small amber-colored vials. She was wearing the pair of old lacrosse shorts that she had slept in, along with a T-shirt that said “Not Penn State,” and her laptop was warm against the insides of her thighs. Open on the screen were three separate Internet Explorer windows: the first contained a black Theory peacoat she had found on Gilt Groupe and was psyching herself up to buy; the second an article on the best home remedies for ingrown hairs; the third a Gawker story about the Spice Girls reunion tour. She was eating from a block of cheddar cheese.
“I’m not making a big deal out of it, and I’m not not making a big deal out of it. I just don’t want to go out.” She took a bite of cheese. “I thought you were doing something with Theo.”
“Theo’s coming with us.”
“Where are you going?”
“Richie Fournier is having a party at his apartment.”
“That sounds illegal.”
Sasha licked the back of her spoon. “Adam wants to go.”
“Where is Adam?”
“Watching Under the Tuscan Sun on his computer.”
Mia repositioned herself on the red Ikea rug that she had bought sophomore year of college, which was now losing its shag in thick, hairy clumps. Her left leg had fallen asleep.
“Adam’s in love with Richie Fournier. That’s why he wants to go.”
“That’s not my problem.” Sitting on the edge of Mia’s bed, Sasha crossed one long leg over the other. “Please just come?”
She picked up a few strands of Mia’s hair and gently twirled them around her finger. They had met the second week of freshman year, in microeconomics. Their professor, who was Czech, had a problem saying r’s, l’s, and w’s, and after the fourth day of class, Sasha leaned over to Mia and said, “I’m sorry, but what is an ewasticity?” At that point Mia’s only friend was Adam. They had done a pre-orientation camping trip together, where for five days Adam had set up her tent, and purified her water with iodine tablets, and packed her sleeping bag into a small red sack, all while Mia sat on a rock eating handful after handful of gorp.
Now Mia looked up at Sasha again. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and her cheeks were sun-kissed from a Christmas trip to Aruba she had gone on with Theo and his family; a bit of yogurt clung to the corner of her lips. They both knew that Sasha would convince her, and that all of this begging was a charade. Still, Mia appreciated the extent to which Sasha was willing to go along with it, how she was game to make Mia feel important and wanted, so long as the night played out how she envisioned.
Mia coughed lightly into her fist. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sick.”
With her toe Sasha tapped a cup on the floor, where three cigarette butts floated in a shallow pool of brown water.
“I’m sure that helps,” she said.
“Light smoking can actually help you get over a cold. The nicotine shocks your immune system into overdrive.”
“Where did you read that?”
