Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

“Good morning, Carl,” says Maddy, already pulling a grande cup.

“I’ll have a medium Pike with cream.”

Maddy writes his order and Carl on the cup with a black Sharpie, places it in the queue, rings him up, and waits for him to pay. Carl is a regular. He has arrived in a navy-blue suit and tie every morning since Maddy started working a month ago, and he has yet to exchange any pleasantries or even acknowledge her human existence. Forget about a tip.

“You have a great day,” says Maddy with exaggerated enthusiasm as Carl steps aside, and then addresses her next customer. “Good morning, Shirley. Will it be the usual?”

“Morning, Maddy, yes, thank you.”

She’d never admit this to her mother, who forced her to fill out the job application, but she likes working at Starbucks. It’s not an exciting job, but it’s not boring, either. She enjoys the mental challenge of remembering who drinks what, a fun puzzle to solve with each customer. She’s probably memorized the names and drink orders of at least a hundred people.

She also likes having a schedule. She plugs herself into the structured routine of each day and finds that it recharges her. She’s up every morning at six, rides her bike two miles to be behind the counter at seven, and works until noon or three, depending on the day. She has afternoons to chill out and is in bed every night by ten, tired from having lived the day rather than tired of living the day. She’s well slept and has money in the bank.

And she’s shed most of the weight she gained this past year, no crazy juice cleanses or diet pills necessary. Four miles a day on her bike plus sensible dinners with her family at seven have turned out to be healthier than sitting on her ass in her tiny dorm room all day and polishing off a waffle drenched in hot fudge or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked every night. She wouldn’t say she looks pretty when she checks herself out in the mirror, but her clothes fit again, and she’s no longer disgusted with her reflection. She feels good. Or at least, good enough.

And she likes her coworkers. Bev is sixty-seven and has been working at Starbucks for twelve years, ever since her husband passed away. Her daughter and two grandkids live with her. Calvin is in his late twenties, used to be in the marines, still has the buzz cut, and doesn’t chitchat, so she doesn’t know much of anything about him.

And then there’s her former bestie, Sofia. An engineering student at Tufts, she’s different from the girl Maddy remembers from their childhood. Never one to stand out, she now has a bit of an edge. Her formerly long, sleek black hair is cut short in a pixie, the ends dyed hot pink. Her right eyebrow is pierced with a silver loop, and she wears a stick-on diamond gem at the corner of her left eye. She seems so self-assured and mature. If growing up were a race, Maddy always felt miles ahead of Sofia in high school, but somewhere in the past year, Sofia lapped her, the back of her pink head barely visible in the distance.

Working together behind the small space of a coffee counter felt awkward at first. Sofia was standoffish, her body language stiff and uninviting. But after only a week’s worth of shifts, she softened. They began chatting during lulls and taking breaks together. They haven’t found their way back to being BFFs, but Maddy would say they’re friends again, which mends a part of her heart that she didn’t know needed repair.

Sofia left to use the bathroom ten minutes ago, and they’ve been deep in the weeds since. It started with the pack of teenagers who ordered a bunch of complicated drinks. Three grande iced mocha lattes with caramel cold foam. Two venti iced chais with brown sugar syrup and almond milk. Then there was the woman in the cool denim pantsuit who ordered ten drinks and breakfast sandwiches for her and her office mates. Increasingly impatient people who haven’t yet had their morning coffee are piling up around the pickup counter.

“Where’s my coffee?” asks Carl, interrupting the order of a young mother holding a grumpy toddler on her hip.

“They’ll call you over there when it’s ready,” says Maddy, pointing toward the area she knows Carl is well aware of.

“It takes two seconds to pour mine.”

“There are a number of orders ahead of yours.”

“Stupid bitch can’t pour a cup of coffee,” he mutters but loud enough for Maddy and everyone else to hear.

Maddy steels her face, shielded behind a sticky-sweet smile. Kill them with kindness, Bev always says. She turns her attention back to the young mother.

“I’m sorry about that. What can I get for you?”

She can feel Carl glaring at her, pacing nearby like an angry bull kicking at the dirt, readying to have another go at the matador. Her voice thins out as she tells the young mother to have a nice day, and she can feel her face growing hot, tears rising. Sensing Maddy’s impending meltdown, Bev takes Maddy’s place at the register, and Maddy spins around like a dance partner to switch places with Bev at the cold bar. All without a word exchanged.

By now she’s had plenty of practice with rude customers, but Carl got under her skin. The incident is over, and she has her back to him now, but her body’s not done with the experience, as if she’d been exposed to a toxic pathogen and her physiology has waged an ongoing war against it to protect her, or she’d stubbed her toe and holy hell, it still hurts. Her hands shaking, she spills the top third of a strawberry Refresher. Pink gooey liquid oozes down the back of her hand, finds the webbing between her fingers, and drips onto the counter. Damn it .

She washes her hands and begins a new Refresher. It’s a good thing Bev didn’t do-si-do her over to the hot bar because she’d have a hard time not spitting in Carl’s coffee or accidentally throwing it in his face or telling him to go fuck himself.

Instead, she focuses on the task in front of her. She makes another strawberry Refresher, a Dragon Drink, a peach green tea lemonade. By the time Sofia returns, Maddy’s back in the flow of her team, hands and breath steady. Carl was a boulder in the river, but she’s miles downstream of him now, floating in calm water.

A few minutes later, there’s no line at all, no online orders to fill. A breather. She wipes down the counter and restocks cups, preparing for the next tidal wave. They cycle from chaotic and slammed to stillness and back many times a day. Sofia fills a cup of water, drinks most of it, and leans against the counter next to Maddy.

“Hey, so me and some friends from Tufts are going to a comedy club next Friday in the city,” says Sofia. “You wanna come?”

Maddy pauses. She’s never been to a comedy club.

“Sure, that sounds fun.”

“You have a fake ID?”

“Yeah.”

Three people materialize in line, and Maddy and Sofia resume their posts. Maddy bounces her hips to “Shake It Off” as she makes a venti light-ice pineapple passionfruit Refresher, happy to have reconnected with her old friend and excited to get out of this sleepy suburb for a night.

When her shift ends, Maddy treats herself to a mocha Frappuccino and walks out the back door into the alley behind the building where she parked her bike. She stops cold at the sight of him sitting in a shaded spot on the ground next to her front wheel, his head in his phone. She’s about to pivot and bolt back into the building, but the metal door behind her clinks shut and the noise causes him to look up and see her. She wishes Bev could put her on cold-bar duty for every person she doesn’t want to deal with.

“Hey,” says Adam.

He stands up in front of her bike, a six-foot barrier between Maddy and her means of escape. He’s tan and lean, wearing a Columbia University T-shirt, athletic shorts, Ray-Bans, and flip-flops, his raven-black hair in need of a cut, handsome as ever. She feels thrilled and scared and annoyed by the sight of him, each emotion competing for dominance like preschoolers at a birthday party fighting over the first slice of cake.

“So you’re stalking me now,” she says.

“You won’t answer my texts.”

“Because I don’t want to talk to you.”

“You could’ve blocked me,” he says, a sly smile spreading across his face.

She’d blocked him on every app back in February, denying him access to her via every portal but the easiest. Her phone number. She basically locked and boarded up all the windows to her house but left the front door wide open. She didn’t want to hear from him then. But, in truth, not never again.

He started texting her the week of second-semester finals, each ping on her phone a hit of dopamine, an adrenaline-drizzled thrill, hopeful and dangerous. She never replied, and she can’t say whether her radio silence was motivated by an emotionally mature boundary, declining his invitation for another ride on their relationship roller coaster, or because she was simply upping the ante, knowing he’d surface in person at some point, somewhere.

And here he is.

“How’s your summer going?” he asks.

“Great.”

“I almost applied for a job here, too. That would’ve been funny.”

“Hilarious.”

He steps closer to her.

“You smell good.”

Her arms are sticky with caramel and vanilla syrup, her hair infused with the aroma of fresh ground coffee, but she’s been saturated in these odors for hours and her brain has habituated to them, rendering them undetectable to her.

“I’ve missed you,” he says.

“Good.”

“Do you miss me?”

“No.”

She means it and she doesn’t. It’s subtle, but the tone of her voice betrays this polarity, and he knows her well enough to detect it. She clears her throat and sips her Frappuccino.

“I think you do.”

They started dating when they were fifteen. He was cute, a basketball jock from the other middle school in their town, whose students had combined with the ones from hers in ninth grade, and rolled with the popular crowd. She’d caught him staring at her in Mr. Levine’s math class freshman year. He winked, and she looked away, gluing her eyes to the equations on the chalkboard, trying not to blush or smile, swooning inside, surprised and delighted to be the object of his interest. When she finally worked up the courage to sneak a peek back at him, he was ready, grinning, full of swagger, seemingly pleased to have had this effect on her. She let herself smile back. She felt breathless, as if that wink had been a magical spell, and she was forever transformed. Chosen by Adam White. She had no desire for him before the wink. After the wink, she was smitten.

They were together for the rest of high school. As much as she loved him, she also loved the status that having a boyfriend gave her, how it inoculated her from ever feeling alone. He became her whole world. She poured every molecule of herself into their relationship, forsaking Sofia for a new circle that was his, mostly other guys on the basketball team and their girlfriends. She and Adam were inseparable, the perfect couple. His friends called them Madam, like Brangelina, a portmanteau Maddy loved.

She never saw it coming. He broke up with her two weeks before she left home to start her first year of college. He said he felt that their relationship had run its course and that they both deserved to begin the next chapter of their lives unencumbered. Unattached.

She moved into her dorm room at NYU a zombie with a mangled heart, her body hollowed out from crying, a desiccated husk. First semester of college was supposed to be about meeting new friends, attending classes and parties. But instead, for her, it was all about Adam.

The change was too unexpected, too abrupt. Her brain couldn’t get out of the habit of him. She felt ruined and unable to function, obsessed with the only thing that mattered. Adam. She didn’t make any new friends in this strung-out emotional state and found it almost impossible to focus on anything her professors were teaching.

She spent entire days studying photos of him on her phone. She checked his social media pages several times an hour, desperate to catch a new story or post that might contain clues to his current relationship or overall happiness status, but he hardly ever posted anything. She spent more time on him than on any of her classes. She was majoring in Adam, or more accurately, the memory of him. She knew everything about him up until the first week of August, and then she knew nothing at all.

This admittedly sick obsession was provoked, enabled, and perpetuated by her phone. Their entire relationship was documented in videos and photos, available for viewing any time day or night from the palm of her hand. Breakups must’ve been so much easier in 1990. She felt as if she were living in a modern-day Greek tragedy. She couldn’t live without her phone, but her phone was killing her. She knew she shouldn’t stalk his profile on Instagram, reread the novel-length thread of their text exchanges, zoom in on his Hollywood smile in their prom photo or the way his hand rested on her hip in that post from senior skip day at the beach. But she had to.

She tried to stop. She made a plan. She would allow herself thirty minutes a day to wallow in Adam. Then she’d taper off, five minutes at a time, until she was over him. But the plan was too ambitious. Thirty minutes was a slender but tantalizing slice of pie. By the end of the day, she’d been on her phone for eight, nine hours or more, all of them starring Adam, the entire pie devoured, meringue all over her face and still hungry for more.

She understood that this behavior was poison, not medicine. She felt unwell. But for some sick reason, she welcomed every moment of tormented misery. She wanted to feel bad, as if she were honoring the death of their relationship, and the depth of her mourning needed to match the significance of their love.

But December rolled around, and it all stopped. She deserves no credit or admiration for her willpower or for achieving some wise epiphany after reading a mountain of self-help books and listening to Brené Brown. It was as if she’d been living in monsoon season, every day a torrent of rain and black sky, and suddenly, the sun came out. Her addiction to Adam was a raging hot fire that required constant fuel, and she simply ran out of logs. One night, she was brushing her teeth when she paused, mouth full of minty paste, as she realized she hadn’t checked a single profile or photo all day. It was done, nothing left but a heap of ash and her tired ass.

She didn’t know yet what to do with all those hours previously taken up by him, but the space felt roomy and welcoming. She made it through finals and took the train back to Connecticut for Christmas break, exhausted but centered, ready to put herself back together.

She’d been home less than twenty-four hours when he showed up at the wreathed front door of her parents’ house, sorry and missing her, full of regret, begging her to take him back. She wishes she’d been able to turn him down, or at least make him wait until New Year’s Eve, but she caved instantly. She felt like Woody from Toy Story picked from the shelf, just so damn happy to be chosen, to be his again.

They fell right back into being Adam and Maddy, just like they had been in high school, only more intense. Madam 2.0. Christmas break was a heady blur of sex and passionate late-night texts, each read and responded to immediately, every day closing with sweet dreams and love you and heart emojis. He was her last thought before going to sleep, the star of her dreams, and the first word written on her consciousness in the morning.

The blissful high of being back together transmuted into a nervous neediness as the calendar page flipped from December to January. Her change in temperament, dismissed as crazy and paranoid by Adam, turned out to be spot-on justified. Once they were back on their respective campuses of NYU and Columbia for second semester, her texts to him started going unanswered, at first hours and then days at a time. She knew she was losing him again, but she held on for dear life anyway. Like a rope slipping fast through her bare hands, the tighter she gripped, the more it burned.

He ended it over text a week before Valentine’s. This time, grief took a seat in pajamas and a comfy chair and looked on in grateful relief as hot rage coursed through her like a mighty warrior, vowing to protect her. She blocked him on all social media. She deleted every picture of him in her photo album, all posts of his smiling face captioned with her effusive love and Rumi quotes. Gone. But because every milestone and memory from the last four years of her life was inextricably intertwined with his, it was almost as if she were erasing herself. If she’d ever shown up anywhere during high school without him, she’d been invariably greeted with Where’s Adam? Severed from him now for the second time, she was left wondering, Where’s Maddy? Dizzy with anger, she had no answer.

“Adam, you can’t—”

He interrupts her protest with a kiss. She can block him on social media, ignore his texts, and argue with his words, but as always, she is defenseless against his kisses. Her resentment, fear, and defiance, so pungent only moments ago, dissolve away, as invisible to her now as the vanilla syrup she’s drenched in, and she kisses him back. She sinks into him, her hips pressed against his, her fingers combing through his shaggy hair. He pulls her in closer, and her sudden need for him feels so familiar and intense, a paradox of safety and danger. An electrical current surges through her, flooding every cell like a tropical storm.

One kiss, and she’s back on the carnival ride.