So Old, So Young

Mia boards a plane at Heathrow, scrolling backward through years of photos on her phone, searching for one image of all her friends together.

Mia boards a plane at Heathrow, scrolling backward through years of photos on her phone, searching for one image of all her friends together. She moved to London six months ago; now she's flying to New York at the last minute. A chatty seatmate recites his tourist itinerary—the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, The Lion King—and announces that nobody's died, so there's no reason to be glum. Mia looks at him and says that, actually, someone has. Before takeoff, she finds what she was looking for: all of them on a bright green lawn in Amagansett, a swimming pool sparkling behind them, bocce balls at their feet. She zooms in on each of their faces and waits for a relief that doesn't come.

Mia meets the man she'll spend seventeen years not getting over

New Year's Eve, 2007. Mia is twenty-four, fighting a cold, dragged to a party on Orchard Street by her roommate Sasha. The apartment belongs to Richie Fournier, a flamboyant college classmate. When Mia can't reach a bottle of Club Soda atop the refrigerator, a man with close-cropped hair and three freckles beneath his left eye retrieves it for her, then points out she contradicted herself by claiming there were no mixers. His name is Marco—Richie's new roommate, just back from a Fulbright in Bogotá. They recognize each other from a Penn psychology class called The Pursuit of Happiness. He asks how hers is going. She tells him to check back in five years. Around them the party throbs—Sasha and their roommate Adam playing quarters, Richie disappearing to the bathroom—but Mia and Marco barely register anyone else.

Marco invents an excuse to keep walking with Mia

They're out of mixers and ice, so Marco volunteers for a bodega run. Mia stubs out her cigarette and joins him. They pass the first bodega—Marco declares its ice is bad, in a way he cannot describe. They keep walking. Mia holds up her hand like a map of Michigan to show him where Lansing is. She tells him about her three much-older brothers and the wooden coat rack her father made for each of them but never built for her. Marco describes Bogotá with the precision of someone who loved a place and left it anyway. They miss midnight inside a fourth bodega, watching the countdown on a television next to yesterday's newspapers. On the stoop of his building, Marco sets the bags of ice on the ground. He kisses her, and she tells him to stop talking and do it again.