By the time I can no longer fight off how tired I am, I take an Uber back to our hotel, and—for the first time in weeks—fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The worst thing that happens the next couple of days is that none of us can agree on what kind of fun to have. Ava prefers to sleep late and go clubbing. Poppy prefers to be up early, and can’t stop talking about going to Saville Row to shop for clothes for Cyrus. I want to see some museums and libraries, but I quickly discover that going to either of those things with people who don’t want to be there is worse than not going at all.
We hit the breaking point on the fourth of our five days in London. Poppy sets it off by trying to literally drag Ava out of bed, still drunk from the night before. I wasn’t happy about getting up at 7am, either, but I’ve never quite figured out how to say no to my best friend.
It’s not a problem for Ava, though, and within a minute all three of us are talking over each other and saying all the things we had so far managed to leave unsaid. It gets dark, but before anyone says anything friendship-ending, Ava actually comes up with the solution: today will be a “split up” day. Poppy doesn’t like it, but I’m pretty sure it’s just because she wants to keep an eye on me.
I already know everything I want to do, and it starts with a trip to Notting Hill, which is everything I saw in the Hugh Grant movie, and more.
London tends toward the posh and sophisticated. It’s easy imagining every man in a suit going to a high-pressure City job. And I’m the least well-dressed woman on every block I walk down. Notting Hill is the opposite of all that. More than anything, it reminds me of the Nashville Farmer’s Market. A mind-boggling amount of tents choke the city streets, selling everything from antique books to tie-dyed shirts and hemp beanies. Mouth-watering smells waft by from every direction, and at the exact moment I no longer smell delicious food, another cluster of street vendors making Afro-Caribbean chicken and rice appears, and I cave to temptation.
I’m not quite sure why I’ve kept Sterling’s copy of The Great Gatsby in my backpack. I threw it in my bag at the last second of packing, I think because I wanted something to look at if I decided I still needed to understand where it all went wrong. And it’s just stayed there ever since. I’ve had twenty chances to take it out, and every time I forget it’s there I see it again and hear the waitress’s advice about not letting them see you bleed.
I can’t help myself, though. With my paper plate rapidly disintegrating from the effects of steaming hot rice and chicken jus, I pull out the dog-eared paperback and flip to a page at random. Sterling’s clean, neat scrawl fills about half the margin on both pages, and it’s almost as interesting to read his notes as it is to read Fitzgerald himself.
One passage reads: “It understood you just as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
And in the margin beside it: “Never understood this. Probably b/c I don’t care what impression I convey. Except maybe to Francie. Some of the looks I get from her are *almost* like this. But is that because I don’t want her to suffer from worry about me—which amounts to doing her a kindness? Or because I’ve never had anyone whose opinion of me was better than my own (which is saying a lot, but also nothing at all)?”
Sterling’s note is heart-breaking and infuriating all at once. On one hand, I wonder how he doesn’t even seem to be aware of using the margins of The Great Gatsby like a journal. But how else would he process things? A poor, abused kid who lost his family, bounced around the foster system, and never had anyone to relate to? Sterling was a scared little kid when he wrote this, but it might have been less than a year ago for all I know. Sterling never seems vulnerable in person. But the boy who wrote in the margins of this