Rules for Being a Girl - Candace Bushnell Page 0,13
like you should write yourself a Post-it,” I tease him.
“If I thought Post-its were enough to get my life in order I’d literally buy stock in 3M,” Bex says with a grimace. Then a thought seems to occur to him.
“Actually,” he continues as we pull out of the parking lot, “are you in a hurry to get home right now? We could go pick it up on the way.”
That surprises me. “You don’t have to do that,” I say cautiously. On one hand it’s not like I’m not curious about where he lives—I’m super curious, actually—but on the other I don’t want to be a pain in the ass. “You can just bring it to me on Monday, right?”
He stops at a traffic light, fixing me with a dubious look. “Monday, possibly next week. Or next year. Maybe the year after.”
“I mean, point taken,” I say with a laugh. “Let’s go.”
Bex lives in a romantically dilapidated Victorian house carved up into three or four apartments. When we pull up to the curb he tilts his head toward the front walk. “Come on in,” he says, turning off the engine. “It’s freezing out here.”
“Oh!” I was fully expecting to wait in the car, peering up at the mismatched windows and trying to figure out which one belonged to him; the thought of seeing the actual inside of his apartment has my heart doing backflips inside my chest. There’s a part of me that wants to text Chloe right this second. Another part of me never wants to tell her at all. “Um, okay.”
The hallway inside the house is overwarm and violently wallpapered, cabbage roses in aggressive pinks and fuchsias. A dusty chandelier casts dim, dramatic light across his face.
“Watch yourself,” he says as I follow him up the staircase, nodding at a place where the maroon carpet is peeling up off the tread. “My mom won’t even come visit me here anymore. She thinks she’s going to break her leg or get lead poisoning or something. She sends me real estate listings for these renovated, dorm-looking condos like every single day.”
“Aw,” I say. An image has started to form in my head of Bex’s parents: stern and mostly humorless, the kind of classic New England WASPs we read about in The Wapshot Chronicle at the beginning of the year. I feel like he’s probably lonely in a family like that. “I think it’s great.”
As promised, the Franzen book is sitting on the table in Bex’s tiny foyer. He hands it over, and I tuck it into my backpack, but instead of herding me back out onto the sidewalk like I’m expecting, he slings his messenger bag over a teetering coatrack and shrugs out of his jacket.
“You hungry?” he asks, putting a hand on my shoulder for the briefest of moments before heading toward the narrow kitchen. “I’m just gonna grab something to drink before we go.”
I shake my head. “I’m okay,” I say, letting a tiny breath out as I hear him open the refrigerator. I don’t want him to catch me gawking, but I can’t stop looking around, wanting to commit all of it to memory: the worn leather sofa and the antique desk strewn with papers, the shelves and shelves of books. He’s got actual art on his walls—real paintings by actual artists, nothing like the scrolly Live Laugh Love canvases my mom is always buying at HomeGoods and hanging on every available surface. A wine crate full of records sits next to a turntable by the window.
I creep farther into the living room, pulling an album out of the pile and turning it over: Nina Simone Sings the Blues. The sleeve has gone slightly fuzzy around the corners from being handled. I don’t know anything about her, but I make a mental note to google her so I can drop her into conversation later on.
“Whatcha looking at?” Bex asks, coming into the room behind me and peering over my shoulder, a bottle of flavored fizzy water in one hand. His whole house smells like him, coffee and something that might be incense; there are more books stacked in the fireplace, a basket of New Yorkers overflowing on the hearth.
I hold up the record, turning to face him. “Do you actually listen to these?” I ask.
Bex smirks. “Yeah, smarty-pants,” he says. “Sound quality is way better than Spotify or whatever.”
“Is that true?” I ask. “Or is it just, like, what they tell you at Urban Outfitters to make you