Valencia and Valentine by Suzy Krause

Author:Suzy Krause [Krause, Suzy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary
ISBN: 9781542092968
Google: H1C_vAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1542092965
Barnesnoble: 1542092965
Goodreads: 42121980
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2019-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When I awoke, my roommates were gone. The sun was shining right on my face like it was trying to wake me up, my locker door was wide open, and my jacket was missing. They’d left my backpack, probably because there was nothing in there that anyone would want unless one of them had forgotten a toothbrush. I was thankful I’d thought to sleep with my purse.

I felt like I’d been asleep for days. Maybe I had. Anything was possible. I imagined going to the front desk and having the manager present me with a bill for three hundred nights. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the wall for a while, thinking about suicide.

Not mine, of course—the girl’s. I wondered why she’d done it and if she’d survived and if I could’ve stopped it. I even considered the absurd possibility that she hadn’t meant to jump, that she’d slipped.

At that point, I hadn’t yet been to a funeral; I hadn’t ever really thought about death. I had a friend when I was a kid who talked about it all the time; she was obsessed with it and cried during class sometimes because she worried about her parents dying while she was at school. Her existence seemed sad to me, thinking about death all the time. (But then, I didn’t—and still don’t—think not thinking about death ever is any better, to be honest. Pretty much everything in life is about balance.)

Eventually, I became hungry. I wondered if it was wrong to be hungry when someone had died. I felt guilty about it. Nevertheless, I changed my clothes, brushed my teeth in the shared bathroom, and headed out again. A woman with neon-pink hair smiled at me. I remember thinking she shouldn’t be smiling; I remember feeling offended on behalf of the dead girl from the bridge. I stared at her until she looked away. The world tilted sideways, and I was in motion again.

My feet walked across the city without much direction on my part. They took me to Central Park. I felt impressed, at the time, that my feet knew how to get somewhere so iconic. (But now I know how big Central Park is compared to the rest of Manhattan, and also how close it is to the hostel to begin with. How had I missed it in my wandering the night before?)

I crossed the street and entered the park with a great sense of purpose and also none at all. At points, I thought I saw the girl in the green jacket, and I realized, finally, that I was looking for her. I kept checking newspaper stands to see if she was mentioned. She was not.

I stood on a rock. I walked down a path. I bought a pretzel from a hot dog cart. I saw a horse pulling a carriage. I crossed a bridge. I went under a bridge. I sat on the edge of a bridge. Who built all these bridges?

The park felt so still, despite the multitudes of people it contained.

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