Author: Cassia Leo

The café is almost empty; just a couple of girls in hipster glasses hanging out at the bar counter overlooking the sidewalk, watching the snowfall. Looks like no one wanted to brave the storm for a cup of the best coffee in Boston. At least we have plenty of room to sit down with our luggage.

The glass pastry case is filled with untouched croissants, muffins, scones, and quiches. I don’t eat this stuff unless Rina brings me something shitty from the local donut shop. People think it’s weird that I’m nineteen and I don’t drive. I don’t understand what’s so weird about that. I don’t trust myself with a car.

Crush clears his throat and I tear my gaze away from the pastries. ‘You hungry?’

‘Are you buying?’

He purses his lips and shrugs adorably, and I finally notice his eyes. They looked dark in the terminal, but they’re actually as green as mine. I’ve never seen anyone with eyes as green as mine, except for Meaghan.

‘I did ask you to come here, so I guess I’m buying,’ he replies.

I turn back to the pastry case and point my gloved finger at a huge muffin with some kind of crumble topping. ‘I’ll take that and an iced mocha with extra caramel sauce,’ I say to the guy behind the counter.

‘Somehow, I am not at all surprised by that order,’ Crush says, shaking his head as he peers over my shoulder into the pastry case. ‘I’ll take a breakfast bagel and a non-fat cappuccino.’

‘Wow. You’re way more boring than I thought you would be.’

He laughs as he pulls his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Just wait until we sit down and I entertain you with the topic of my senior thesis.’

‘That sounds like a threat.’

He shakes his head as he hands the barista his credit card. ‘I guess that depends on how much you enjoy discussing the cross-cultural significance and dimensionality of emotion in music.’

He doesn’t look at me as he waits for the guy to give him back his card. I get a strange feeling like he’s waiting for me to judge him. ‘I’m just a sophomore, so I haven’t chosen my senior thesis.’ And I never will. ‘But I think the study of emotion in music is probably one of the coolest thesis topics I could ever imagine.’

He takes his credit card back from the barista then uses his finger to sign the white computer screen. ‘Maybe I’m as interesting as you thought I’d be.’

Suddenly, my stomach feels jittery and my mouth goes dry. I want to reach into my purse and take a pill from my emergency stash, but something tells me this guy would know they’re not medication. Then it hits me.

What if my parents sent this guy to keep an eye on me?

No, that’s crazy. That’s the kind of thoughts that will get me locked up again. But why else would he be this nice to me? He’s way out of my league. He’s 50 percent rock star and 50 percent Harvard.

‘Are you okay?’ he asks and I nod as I grab the handle of my suitcase and pull it toward the tables in the back of the café.

If I thought I had any chance of keeping up this charade for another two or three days, or however long it will take for this storm to pass, then I’d go home. But I’ve put too much work into this. I’ve been speaking with academic counselors and psychologists for weeks, building this elaborate lie of transferring from Massasoit to Santa Monica College. The purpose of this trip is for a job interview at a local youth center. It would have been easier to do the Federal Work Study program, but I thought they’d think I was more serious about putting the night of the party behind me if I told them I wanted to work with at-risk youth.

I take a seat at a table and it’s a bit dreary in here with the glass ceiling of the patio enclosure covered in snow. Crush sets his guitar against the wall and moves both of our suitcases next to the case so they’re out of our way. He takes a seat across from me and I quickly pull off my gloves and tuck them inside my purse. He removes his gray twill coat, but he keeps his green hoodie on.

He hangs his coat on the back of the chair and sits across from me. He stares at my hands for a few seconds before he looks up. ‘Do we know each other?’

Chapter 5: CRUSH – January 3rd

Mikki sits back in the wooden chair and nothing about the tattoos on her fingers or the color of her eyes, or hair, are familiar. I can’t grasp what it is about her, but I keep feeling as if I recognize something about her that no one would ever notice; like the curve of her neck or the sound of her breath. That’s insane.

She chuckles softly as she crosses her arms over her chest. ‘Is that your best pickup line?’

I smile back at her and shrug. I knew she would think this was a come-on. ‘It doesn’t matter if we know each other. We have plenty of time to rectify that. So what do you do? Do you work, go to school, raise hell?’

‘All of the above. I work in the admin office of the community college where I also go to school.’

‘You didn’t tell me where you raise hell.’

Her eyes fall to the floor as she gently shakes her head. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you do? I mean, it’s pretty obvious that you’re a music major, but is that it?’

‘Actually . . .’

The barista with the shaggy brown hair shows up with our food and coffee. He flashes us a tight smile as he sets everything down on the table.

‘Cream and sugar are over there,’ he says, pointing behind him, then he walks away.

Mikki grabs her iced mocha and takes a long draw from her cold beverage.

‘I guess this is where I ask you why you’re drinking an iced coffee during a blizzard, but I’d rather steer clear of clichés.’

She looks at me as she crudely tears her muffin in half then breaks a piece off the bottom and pops it into her mouth. ‘You still haven’t told me what you do besides school,’ she says through a mouthful of muffin.

I push my bagel and cappuccino aside so I can lean forward and watch her up close as she devours her pastry. ‘I told you, I’d rather steer clear of clichés.’

She takes a long sip of her mocha then sits back to put some more space between us. ‘Are you calling yourself a cliché? What do you do, play guitar at local bars?’ She leaves the top of the muffin untouched then pushes the plate away.

‘You don’t eat the muffin top?’

‘Everybody loves the top of the muffin.’ She casts a scathing glare in the direction of the muffin top. ‘No one ever stops to think about the poor, neglected bottom.’

‘Somehow, I have a feeling you’re not being purposely contradictory.’ Her hands are trembling as she reaches for her drink. ‘Are you cold?’

The café is stiflingly hot, but I don’t bother mentioning this. Something tells me she’s not shaking with cold. She pushes her coffee aside without taking another sip then she eyes the muffin top as if she’s considering compromising her principles to satisfy her hunger.

‘No,’ she replies, tucking her hands under the table.

I’m overcome with an intense urge to reach underneath the wooden surface and grab her hand.

‘Why are you going to L.A.?’ I ask, hoping the change of subject will help her relax. ‘You said the rest of your life is waiting there. Does that mean you’re moving there?’

I say a mental prayer that she’s not going there to meet a guy. Not sure why I should care. I’ve known the girl for thirty seconds.

She stares at the table, a faint smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. ‘A job interview.’

Her smile is hiding something and, truthfully, it looks a bit sinister. When she looks up from the table, she sees my unease and quickly casts her gaze downward as if she’s ashamed. What are you running from? I want to ask.

‘So why are you going to L.A.?’ she asks, still staring at the table.

‘To record a song.’

‘For your thesis or to get rich and famous?’

‘Both and neither.’

Finally, she looks up and in that one second I feel it again. This intense déjà vu.

‘Don’t tell me you’re doing it for artistic purposes?’

I chuckle as I reach for my cappuccino. ‘Do I look like the kind of guy who would do something for artistic purposes?’

‘Are you deliberately trying to confuse me?’

‘Excuse me?’

She shakes her head and looks away from me, toward the snow-covered foliage behind the café. Resting her hands on the table again, she closes her eyes and takes a slow breath.

There it is.

That’s how I know her.

No fucking way. I have to be imagining this.

My chest constricts with the anger I’ve been unable to shake free of for the past three years. Gritting my teeth against the force of the memories, I try to keep myself from wishing it’s her. If this is her, it doesn’t look like she’s coping well.

It can’t be her. That would be way too much of a coincidence.

She opens her eyes and reaches for the purse she hung on the back of her chair. She plunges her delicate, tattooed hand inside and comes up with a prescription bottle of pills. Her hands are still trembling as she opens the bottle and shakes out one blue capsule.

She holds the capsule between her thumb and forefinger and holds it up for me to see. ‘I’m bipolar. Is that sexy?’ She pops the pill into her mouth and guzzles it down with some iced coffee. ‘Why do you look like you just saw a ghost? Have you never heard someone admit to being mentally ill?’

‘You remind me of someone I once knew . . . very briefly.’

I push my cappuccino aside and I can’t even imagine eating the bagel now. I know this girl isn’t her, but I’ve lost my appetite. That’s the way these things go. Once you dredge up the memories you’ve spent years trying to bury, suddenly they’re everywhere. There are two people I’ve been trying to put out of my mind for years: the first is Jordan and the second is her. Though I’ve failed miserably on both counts. Sometimes I wish I never listened to Harlow about going to L.A.

I began writing this song three years ago and worked on it every day for two years, until I gave up on it last year. It will never be perfect. There’s something missing; something I’ll probably never find, which is why I allowed Harlow to set up the meeting with Kane Bentley in L.A. to listen to the demo. It’s time to put this song, and the memories, and the longing to rest – if that’s even possible.

Harlow met Kane at a charity event. Without my consent, she used her irresistible charm and wit – and maybe the promise of some social media seminars – to get me what may be the most important meeting of my career. Kane is a producer who’s worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Lady Gaga. I have exactly four days to record and edit the demo before my meeting with Kane on Saturday. Every day the flights are delayed is one less day I have to record.

So after one year of avoiding certain streets, certain songs, certain people, last week I dug up the song from the archives of my laptop. I dusted off the acoustic-electric guitar that I put in storage because it reminded me too much of her. Then I warmed up my flattened penny and I haven’t slept much since then. That’s the way these things go.

‘You don’t remind me of anyone,’ she says, standing from her chair. She begins scratching her head as she looks around the café. ‘Where’s the restroom?’

She scoops up her purse then disappears through a marked door in the corridor at the bottom of the steps leading to the patio enclosure. I pull my phone out of my pocket and see I have another text from Harlow and one from Bethany: a girl I slept with a couple of days ago, after Aidan’s New Year’s Eve party. I hardly know Aidan, though we shared a dorm last year before I moved off campus. Harlow is the only person who really knows me and not even she knows everything about me. A consequence of losing someone close to you is that you also lose a piece of yourself. And you never really know when it’s safe to give away another piece.