Page 107 of Guy's Girl
Finch’s jaw snaps shut.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Ginny pushes past him and over to the bathroom door. She twists the handle and steps inside. Finch doesn’t call after her.
The door bangs shut. She presses her back against it, palms flat on the wood. It’s a tiny bathroom, so tiny that her strangledexhales ruffle the plastic shower curtain less than a foot away. Tears flow freely down her face now. She wants to collapse to the floor. She wants to curl herself up into the tiniest version of herself, one free from wide thighs and rolls of fat and breasts that block her arms from crossing over her chest. She wants to fall asleep and make it all disappear.
But she can’t. Instead of sliding down the door, she steps away from it. Instead of folding over herself, she straightens up. Rolls her shoulders back. And instead of turning away from the mirror, the way she so often does when washing her hands, she pivots to face the mirror head-on.
She looks at herself. At her newly rounded face. At her generous breasts. At her collarbone, now slightly buried beneath skin. At the soft line of her shoulders.
And that’s the first time she thinks it:
This is what I look like when I’m healthy.
The tears run faster, turning her cheeks a glowing pink. Her lips part. Her nose starts to run. She gasps for air:please, more, fill my body. She doesn’t look beautiful; she looks peeled back, raw. All soft angles and wide eyes. As if every protective layer has been shed from her body. As if the only thing left is her.
This is what I look like when I’m healthy, she thinks.
This is what I look like.
Adrian stares at the note for a long time. He follows the loops and curves of hisnagyanya’s handwriting. Studies the blank spaces, each one in turn, as if they might obscure some hidden message. As if the card were really a cipher.
Abruptly, he drops the card and picks up his phone. With shaking hands, he unlocks the screen and selects Messages. He scrolls until he finds Clay’s contact.
ADRIAN:Has she left yet?
He sets the phone and waits. He shakes out his shoulders, as if the action can release the tension in his body. Clay’s answer arrives within seconds.
CLAY:No. Just finished packing.
CLAY:She’s leaving soon, tho
CLAY:So if you have something you want to say...
Adrian doesn’t bother to reply. He jumps up, grabs his keys off the bedside table, and hurries out the door.
Down on the street, he hails the first taxi he finds. Normally, he would order an Uber, but he can’t waste time waiting for it to arrive. “One sixteen Sullivan Street,” he tells the driver, and they’re off.
They turn onto Seventh Avenue and immediately hit traffic. Adrian’s foot taps rapidly, his thigh drumming against the seat. He takes out his phone and opens Safari. He stares intently at the screen, typing things here and there. He loads a new page, a longer one, and fills in more boxes. When he reaches the end of the page, he presses a button. A set of terms and agreements appears, which he ignores, pressing yet another button. When he reaches the final page, he clicks off his phone and shoves it into his pocket.
The car inches forward a few feet, then a few feet more. In his pocket, Adrian’s phone vibrates once, then twice, then three times. He doesn’t check it. He doesn’t want to know if he’s already too late. He wants to make it all the way there, regardless of the outcome.
Five minutes pass. Adrian feels like he’s going to explode out of his skin. His foot is tapping so fast and so loudly that it’s a wonder the cabdriver hasn’t told him to stop. He rolls the window down and sticks his head out. The traffic seems to go on for ages, maybe even all the way down to the Freedom Tower.
“Fuck this,” he mutters. He thrusts a few dollars into the compartment in the driver’s protective glass. The driver unlocks the door, then Adrian is out, and he’s running.
He weaves through the sedans and semis backed up on Seventh Avenue. He weaves around rearview mirrors and jumps over steaming grates. When he spots a gap in the biker’s lane, he veers left and bounds up onto the sidewalk. He doesn’t slow. He keeps running. He passes West 4th Street, then Bleecker. He elbows through a crowd of drunk underage kids gathered outside Caliente Cab Co. His phone is buzzing in his pocket; he thinks it’s a call this time. He doesn’t stop to pull it out. He skirts around a woman with a baby stroller, narrowly avoiding falling into an open cellar door outside a coffee shop. He’s breathing hard now. Three runs in one day, his legs are screaming at him. Finally, finally, he spots the intersection of Seventh and Houston in the distance. He pushes even harder, reaching Houston just as the walk light disappears. He curses and runs across anyway, causing half a dozen drivers to lay on their horns. He reaches the other side unharmed and hangs a left. He passes Sixth Avenue, reaching the blessedly short blocks of SoHo. Just MacDougal to pass, and then—
And then—
There it is. Sullivan. Adrian leans forward, pumps his arms. He can hardly breathe now, but he’s so close. Ginny could be waiting just around that corner. Or it could be too late, she could be gone, and all this will have been for—
Ginny.
There she is, standing by the curb, surrounded by Clay, Tristan, and someone Adrian can only assume is her sister. A smile spreads wide across his face. But then she turns to the side and looks right at him, and the smile disappears, because he’s here now, and God help him, he doesn’t know what he’s going to say.
Adrian and Ginny stand three feet apart, halfway down Sullivan Street. Ginny is frozen, one hand resting on her suitcase, the other covering her mouth. Adrian is bent double, breathing so heavily he cannot speak.
“Oh, God.” Ginny steps away from her suitcase. She looks for somewhere to hide—behind Clay, behind a lamppost, anywhere. She doesn’t want him to see her like this. She doesn’t want him to see how much weight she’s gained, to witness the new body in which she is living. Even if she’s started to accept it for herself, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to show it off to the world. “You can’t— I don’t—”
