Page 41 of Stuck With the Best Man

I nod. “It’s very meaningful. Black tourmaline, I mean. Gram usually slips it into the pockets of those who are going through periods of growth or change. It’s supposed to offer a sense of balance and inner peace. To keep you grounded.”

“You’re a veritable fortune teller.”

“Not at all. It’s just a side effect of being related to the local wise woman.”

Ben chuckles. “Why would she give those stones to me, though? There’s no way she knows anything about what my life is like or what I might be going through.”

“Honestly, I’ve known the woman for twenty-six years and I still haven’t puzzled out exactly how she seems to know everything. The only explanation that I can come up with is that magic might actually be real.”

I expect Ben to laugh at that, acknowledging how ridiculous that is.

Instead, he nods thoughtfully. “Maybe magicisreal. It just doesn’t work the way we think it does.”

A smile dances on my lips. “Now I understand why you like poetry. You talk like a fool.”

Ben reaches out blindly and pinches my arm. A surprised laugh escapes me as I squirm away from him. I drop the stones into the cupholder and settle back in my seat. We lapse into silence with nothing but the sound of crashing rain and howling wind. For the first time since I got into the car earlier today, I feel… comfortable. I mean, I’m still riddled with anxiety and barely keeping myself together, but there’s also this discordant sense of peace that’s starting to overwhelm me. Like, no matter what, I can be assured that everything is going to be okay. Probably.

As long as I get back to New York tonight.

The storm beats down on us as we finally make our way into Connecticut. I check the map on my phone and confirm that we’re still about two and a half hours away from my apartment in downtown Manhattan—in perfect weather, that is.

It’s half past seven in the evening. We’ve been traveling for over seven hours but have barely made it a hundred and fifty miles. Yet, I still have hope that I can make it home by midnight. That will give me enough time to shower, squeeze in about six hours of sleep, and then wake up for my morning class. I already have plenty of clean leotards and tights neatly tucked away in my closet and a reliable pair of pointe shoes in my dance bag hanging off the coat rack by the door. All I’ll need to do is grab a protein bar and a green juice from the fridge and hop on the 1 train to midtown.

Thank goodness for being a highly organized person.

I scroll mindlessly on my phone, checking the news to try to make myself feel more assured about this current situation.

Except, almost as soon as I open the X app and flip over to the “for you” trending tab, I see an update that states the NYC mayor has declared a shelter-in-place order for all five boroughs. I become absorbed in all the related comments and replies, showing videos of the downpour currently terrorizing the streets of the city. Trash bins are flying around like tumbleweeds in the wind, traffic is sloshing through inches of standing water in lower Manhattan, and tons of power outages have already been reported.

Shelter in place? Seriously? Is it really that bad?

One article, posted just two minutes ago, reads:Tropical Storm pushing boundaries, potential to be classified as hurricane.

A hurricane? Let’s not be dramatic about this. It’s just… raining. Really hard. It’s super windy, yes, but it’s not like we’re at risk of being tossed off the side of the road.

Even as I have the thought, a particularly strong gust slams into the side of Ben’s car. Only his careful maneuvering keeps us traveling in a straight line.

“Oh, shoot,” he mutters.

I glance up from my phone. I don’t know how long I was absorbed in it, but it was apparently long enough for the somewhat optimistic traffic situation to change for the worse.

I squint at the glare of red lights ahead of us—a never-ending sea of braked cars on the two-lane highway. Ben rolls to a stop. The cars aren’t moving. Not even inching forward.

“What’s going on?”

“Probably an accident up ahead,” he murmurs, reaching over to turn on the car radio. He scans the channels until it lands on a local news station.

“—several major road closures as severe flooding continues to escalate in the region…”

I tune out the rest of the radio announcer’s sentence.

The road is closed. That’s why the cars aren’t moving. They’re being redirected, probably very slowly, to an alternative route.

It’s eight o’clock. This journey through hell is never going to end.

Eventually, the cars start rolling forward, little by little. I am too annoyed, too horrified, to do anything other than sit silently and watch as the darkly shadowed forest outside the window goes by. Ben keeps the radio on, which delivers increasingly pessimistic updates about the storm’s progress.

I get a text from Gram, asking me if I made it back to the city safely. I don’t have it in me to lie, if only so she won’t worry, so I tell her the truth.

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