this shit and his—boyfriend? husband?—was over it. Without discussing it, we walked a few feet down the platform to give them some space. That must be the hard part about being in New York—you had to live your life in public, no cars to duck into when you needed to cry or yell at someone.
“So I don’t know anything about Mateo,” I pointed out after a few more minutes of silence, mostly to distract myself. The train still hadn’t arrived, which was beginning to worry me. We still had a lot of time, but I was realizing that when I’d done the time math, I’d planned on things like trains arriving immediately. “Besides the fact that he’s a freshman at Columbia.”
Stevie brushed her hair back from her face and shrugged. “I don’t know much more than that either.”
I let my eyes drift over the platform and gave Brad’s head a scratch. “Why do you think they’re acting like this now? Mateo and Mallory, I mean.” Stevie never talked much about her stepsiblings, but I’d now met one and was about to meet another, and I was having trouble squaring their behavior—Mallory’s cheek-kissing and effusiveness and Mateo’s immediate offer to help—with the people who seemed to want nothing to do with her.
“Like what?”
“Like suddenly they’re being nice after acting so unfriendly to you.” Stevie looked fixedly at the train tracks, and I shook my head. “Not unfriendly,” I corrected. “I mean, I know they were never outright rude or anything. Just… unwelcoming, right? But now he’s willing to help?”
“I don’t know,” Stevie said, still looking at the train tracks littered with trash. I was about to ask a follow-up, but something in her tone stopped me. It was the same tone I heard whenever the subject of the divorce or her dad came up. Like there was suddenly caution tape around a subject, a blinking neon NO TRESPASSING sign. And I didn’t feel like it was just there to keep me out—it was like Stevie didn’t even want to go there herself.
“Well, we’re getting to know a lot more about Mallory tonight,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “She has a dog named Brad and a super with a cute nephew.”
“I knew you were flirting with him!” Stevie said, finally looking at me and doing a tiny victorious hop. “I can always tell. But don’t you mean he’s supercute?”
I groaned. Stevie laughed. “Do you think he’s cute, though?”
Stevie shrugged one shoulder. “He’s too short for me.”
“You’re short!”
She gasped theatrically, and I laughed. “How dare you. I am not short,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height—which, in her heels, was admittedly almost the same height as me. “I’m shorter than you, but that doesn’t mean I’m short.”
“You do have a thing for tall guys, though,” I pointed out. “Beckett was, like, six feet.”
“Six-two.”
“I rest my case.”
“Seriously, Cary’s all yours,” Stevie said, arching an eyebrow at me.
“I don’t want him to be all mine. I don’t even know the guy! I was just saying that I appreciated his… aesthetic qualities. And I wanted to flirt with him before my hair totally fell.”
“It still looks good,” Stevie assured me as she pulled out her phone.
“You’ve got pretty good reception down here,” I said as I reached for Ophelia.
“Wait—” Stevie said, trying to pull her phone back from me.
“What?”
“Just let me—Teri’s calling.” Her screen was buzzing and lighting up, and I let go of the phone just as Stevie tried to yank it away, and then everything went wrong, all at once.
The phone flew up, turning end over end in the air. Stevie grabbed for it, but her fingers closed around nothing, and as I watched, helpless, the phone hit the platform, bounced off, and then fell straight down, until it landed with a muted thud on the subway tracks.
Stevie and I looked at each other in horror. I set Brad down as I leaned forward to look. There was Ophelia, faceup next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a Skittles wrapper. This was Stevie’s phone and it was lying on a subway track. It was so awful, and so not what was supposed to be happening, that I couldn’t even get my head around it.
“Oh no,” I breathed.
“My phone,” Stevie said, her voice high and panicky. “I can’t—what are we supposed to do?”
I held out Brad’s leash to her and she took it. I leaned over more, looking down onto the subway tracks. It wasn’t that far, really—and weren’t