Gen had fourteen freckles on her nose. Nora knew this because she counted them. In fact, Nora could’ve charted a map from Gen’s hairline to her neck and identified the exact location of every landmark on the way. She knew the crooked angles of Gen’s nose, the exact curve of her lips, and the shape and hue of every small spot that made up a constellation of acne scars on her dark cheek.
She’d spent that last summer memorizing it all, starting the moment in May when Gen looked at her over the rim of a strawberry milkshake and said, “I got that internship I applied for. I’m moving to London at the end of August.”
Vanilla and cream curdled and went sour in Nora’s mouth, and the rest of the summer was haunted by the countdown clock she now saw hovering between them.
XXX
Gen never wanted to go home. After all, she was the oldest of six and the only girl. She sometimes joked that her apartment felt like a 19th century tenement, with multiple dirty-faced children to a bed. But it was hardly as bad as she liked to pretend. Whenever Gen talked about “home,” about the parents who called her Genevieve and the five little boys who lived to whine and tug at her clothes, she had love in her eyes and a honey-smile on her brown lips and in her cheeks.
Despite (or maybe because of) the chaos in Gen’s home, Nora envied it. She had no siblings to fill the silence at her place, or to distract her from the quiet and contagious unhappiness of her parents’ marriage. The apartment felt as if it were furnished with her mother’s sad sighs and her father’s barely reserved resentments. When she pushed at the walls, they groaned in her parents’ voices.
Gen always said her family was poor in money but rich in everything else that mattered. Nora’s was fairly rich in money, but so poor in everything else that she didn’t even know what “everything else” was supposed to be.
And so, Nora never wanted to go home either.
Nora thought that if the two were trees, then Gen was a sycamore, and she was a willow planted too close, too late. Gen stood tall and sturdy on her own, with dreams and aspirations that brushed the sky like leaves on upward angled branches. Nora had grown in sideways, into Gen, so inosculated that she struggled to tell which parts of her bark were her own and which she’d borrowed from Gen and grafted onto herself.
Gen was two years older, which meant their friendship existed on the unspoken understanding that one day Gen would enter a phase of her life that Nora couldn’t as quickly follow her into. But even with all that time to prepare herself for the saw of graduations and adulthood that would eventually come to cut through their bark and separate them, Nora didn’t feel ready.
That unreadiness came to a head that summer, after Gen had graduated as part of the class of 2008 and was months away from finally living all the fashion-industry dreams she’d been talking about for as long as Nora knew her. By August, Gen would be playing at her dream-version of adulthood on another continent, and Nora would remain a baby-faced high school junior, stuck in a city that felt empty without her best friend. When she pictured herself in a post-Gen New York, she pictured herself lonely and aimless, choking on the three words she couldn’t get herself to say before it was too late.
That summer, they spent mornings in parks eating fruit stolen from outdoor markets and sucking peach juice from the inside of their wrists, as bites broke to bursts and sugar water spilled over palms and down their arms. Afternoons were for things like eating hot dogs and pretzels from the Sabrett carts outside The Natural History Museum, where Gen and Nora often went to lie on the floor beneath the hanging blue whale model, bathed in blue light and looking up at the underbelly of something big enough to swallow them both whole and barely even notice.
Later, when Nora rolled that summer over and over in her mind—which Gen told her not to do but she couldn’t help—she never could pinpoint the exact moment in which she fell in love with her best friend. Some days she thought that it happened in stages: a little on rooftops drinking liquor stolen from parents, more on empty subway cars between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m., most whenever Gen caught the light.
Other days, she wondered if it even happened at all.
XXX
After Gen had gotten the news that she’d soon be working her dream job and living three and a half thousand miles from home, she started carrying a thick permanent marker around. She used it constantly, etching GEN WAS HERE into whatever surface was being conveniently unpoliced in that moment. By the end of the summer, Gen’s name and proof of her presence were written everywhere. Nora had seen her write it on subway maps and bathroom mirrors, fire escapes and buildings, and more than one step outside of the MET. Gen had even written it on the fridge at a party hosted by a friend in a stranger’s apartment, and then again on both of the stranger’s arms after she found him drunk and barely conscious in the bathroom at the end of the night.
They were in the back of a cab, going back to Nora’s parent’s apartment after it was too late to find reasons to avoid home any longer, when Gen suddenly asked, “If you woke up in the morning and you were the only person in the city, what would you do?”
Nora tried to come up with a goodanswer that Gen would like, but she was tired, and her brain was floating in cheap vodka and cigarette smoke. “I don’t know.”
“That’s a boring answer,” Gen said, though not meanly. Then she uncapped her marker and wrote GEN WAS HERE on the back of the driver’s seat.
XXX
Nora was looking at the bump in Gen’s nose and at the tight curls that had slipped from the oversized snap clips in her hair and were now whipping around in the summer breeze. Her skin was dark. It was even darker now in the night, but something about the way the deep brown of her skin radiated heat made it seem like she had swallowed a sunset and was forever glowing from the inside out. It was one of those moments when Nora had to shut her mouth tight, keep her heart balanced on her tongue, bite back I love yousand please don’t leaves, and pray that none of them would slip through the gap between her two front teeth.
Maybe it was shots they’d taken from Gen’s flask on the train, or the way the blue and purple light of the neon sign above them reflected off Gen’s skin and made her iridescent. For one reason or a hundred, Nora’s tongue faltered then. Her teeth broke on the bite of her confessions and her prayer went unheard.
They were in line for a club, fake IDs in hand and body glitter smeared across their chests and shoulders like they had crushed stars and rolled in the dust. Nora was overwhelmed by the nauseatingly sick and sweet smell of New York in July, and the sound of semi-distant sirens and muffled club music and laughter spilling from groups ahead and behind. Most of all she was overwhelmed by the feeling of Gen’s hand in hers. They were yin and yang in more ways than just visual, and Gen’s hand was hot and hard and holding her as if she knew Nora’s life depended on it. In that moment, Nora felt like it did.
“Don’t go to London.”
Gen was on the tips of toes, trying to see over heads at how far they were from the entrance. Only a group or two. At first, Nora was afraid she was being ignored. But when Gen dropped onto her heels and turned, glistening with glitter and a thin layer of sweat, still smiling excitedly, Nora knew she hadn’t heard her.
“What’d ya say, bubs?”
When Nora imagined asking Gen to stay, she imagined it in all sorts of beautiful ways. She imagined saying it at the gate of the airport, out of breath from running through terminals like the climax of a guilty-pleasure rom-com. She imagined saying it while lying on the rooftop of her building, drunk on Carlo Rossi wine and hiding from the miserable air in her apartment. She’d say it while they were looking up at the sky, pretending they could see stars through the light pollution and making up constellations that they’d name after each other. She imagined breathing it into the chamber of Gen’s mouth, and in return, inhaling a promise to stay as it spilled over Gens lips like an equally desperate exhale. The words would be sweet, like peach Moscato and cherry-cola lip balm.
When she said them now, they tasted bitter, like hairspray and cigarette ash. This wasn’t beautiful or intimate or important like she had imagined. It was clumsy. The disillusionment crashed against her like a wave against a rock and when it rushed up to her head, it flooded her senses and made the whole world suddenly feel like it had been calibrated wrong.
But the dam in her throat was already broken, and she couldn’t stop the words from rushing out of her chest and over her tongue.
“Fuck the internship. You should stay here, in the city, with me.” When Gen said nothing, Nora dug in. “Gen, you’re gonna hate it there.”
In the long seconds before Gen spoke, the smile slipped from her face completely. Even the glitter on her skin seemed to dull as she searched Nora’s face, looking for some kind of take-back or hint that she was kidding. When she found nothing, she dropped Nora’s hand and shook her head in disbelief. “You know how much it means to me. Why would I hate it?”
Nora stumbled over ten bullshit non-answers before she let out a hard breath and dropped her shoulders. Her feeling of a now empty hand pulled her heart deeper into the pit of her stomach. “I just don’t think you should go. I don’t want you to.”
She believed that should’ve been enough.
But Gen looked like she had come to some dark revelation, like she had figured out something about Nora that disgusted her. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded like she wanted to laugh, but she wasn’t amused in the slightest. “What a selfish, fucked up thing to say.”
Nora was too busy feeling her insides atrophy to hear the bouncer ask them for their IDs—the first or the second time. A man two groups behind them pulled her from her implosion when he told them to “hurry the fuck up or get out of the line.” She turned to tell him to piss off, and when she turned back, Gen was gone.
XXX
Nora spent the rest of July in her room with the curtains drawn and a blanket over her head like an addict in their second week of withdrawals. She left sometimes to buy fruit from the market they used to steal from, half hoping that she’d catch Gen there doing the same.
But the first week of August, when she picked a peach off the top of the stack and saw the words GEN WAS HERE written across the skin in ink so fresh it was still wet, Nora knew that it was Gen who’d caught her.
When Nora opened her mouth to apologize—to explain herself with words she didn’t quite have—Gen cut her off by asking if they could “just not talk about it.” Nora agreed, though most of her didn’t want to.
XXX
It was the night before Gen left, in the bathroom of a party hosted by someone Gen only knew vaguely, that Nora finally had an answer. “I’d look for you.”
Gen was sitting on the closed toilet seat lid, ashing her cigarette into a soap dish. “Hm?”
“If I woke up and I was the only person in the city. I’d look for you.”
Gen placed the dish on the counter beside Nora and looked up. “You’re not paying attention. You’re the only person—I’m not there.”
Nora thought of Gen’s black marker, and the thousands of surfaces that she had scribbled her name on. She thought of the fruit market, booths in twenty different pizzerias, half a hundred yellow cabs, and a thousand sidewalks. The words GEN WAS HERE were tucked in corners across the entire island of Manhattan. They were in every place Nora would think to look for them. They were in every place that mattered. “You’d be there.”
Gen was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was equal parts sad and teasing. “I think you and this city will have already forgotten me by the time my plane lands in Heathrow.”
Nora shook her head. “I don’t think we could ever forget you,” she said, looking down at her shoes. After a moment she added, “I’m sure that was your intention.”
Gen grinned at Nora for a moment, and then her smile faded and she shook her head. “It’s not that you don’t actually want me to go to London. I know you’re not that selfish. You’re just scared of what my leaving means.”
“What does it mean?”
“That things are changing.”
She watched Nora quietly, as if waiting for her to say You’re wrong, I really am in love with you or I know, I’m not. But Nora didn’t know which one Gen wanted to hear, or even which one was true, so she opted for saying neither.
Gen responded to Nora’s silence with some of her own, and then after a while leaned forward to pull at the hem of Nora’s tee. “Take off your shirt.”
Nora could feel heat creep from where Gen’s knuckle brushed her hip up to her neck and over her cheeks. “What?”
Gen rolled her eyes and stood up, pinching a smile between her lips. “I’m not gonna do anything weird. Take it off.”
Nora prayed her ears weren’t burning as red as they were hot and began pulling her shirt over her head as Gen rummaged through her tote bag. She watched quietly as Gen pulled out her thick black marker, uncapped it, and then turned back and stepped up close.
The flat side of Gen’s right hand pressed against the cup of Nora’s bra as she pushed the felt tip of her marker against her skin. Her left hand held Nora by the waist, as if she was scared she would run.
In moments like this, when it felt like the air around them had shifted, it was Gen who held her always-confident eye contact while Nora looked away. This time, Nora stared at Gen with unwavering eyes, as if she was trying to sear this moment into her brain. Gen didn’t look up, and Nora couldn’t help but wonder if it was because she was afraid to.
“Okay.” Gen capped her marker and stepped back. “Look.”
Nora turned to face the mirror and, though the letters were backwards, she could still read the bold black words inked over the skin that kept her heart from falling out of her chest and onto the bathroom floor. Or maybe, right into Gen’s open hand.
GEN WAS HERE.
“Corny?” Gen asked.
“Maybe.” Nora suddenly felt like she was going to cry. “I like it though.”
“Yeah,” Gen said quietly. “Me too.”
Nora could’ve sworn, just for a moment, that in the reflection she could see Gen standing behind her, looking as if she might cry. She wasn’t sure though, since Gen quickly turned away, and preoccupied herself with rearranging the contents of her bag. Nora pulled her shirt back on and, when she spoke, she did it to Gen’s back.
“Why did you write it in past tense?”
When Gen turned back around, any hint of wetness in her eyes was gone. Instead, she just smiled in that way that said she knew a thousand things Nora had yet to figure out. “Like I said, bubs, things are changing. Besides, there are eight million people in this city,” she said, putting her tote bag on her shoulder. “And with the way you romanticize everything, I know you’re gonna fall in love with at least half of them.”
XXX
In the morning, Nora didn’t run to the airport to make last minute love confessions. Instead, she lay in bed beside an open window, a hand over the already fading ink on her chest. She listened to the sounds outside—the cars, the indistinct conversations, the ambiguous bangs and clangs of metal. She lay there, not happy but not sad, and tried not to think that every noise the city made sounded like a line in an elegy.
