Page 28 of A Very Snowed In New Year
She nudges my arm. “We should get out of here,” she says. “There’s a group of girls over there who’ve spotted you.”
“Oh, I know. Where are we headed now?”
“The New Year’s Eve Wishing Wall on the Broadway Plaza!”
“The what?” I pull the beanie hat out of my coat pocket, put it on, and put my aviators on, even though it’s overcast. Then I hold the door to the sidewalk open for her. “That’s not a thing.”
“Oh, but it is!” She loops her arm through mine, and I can’t believe how tall she is now. “Between 45th and 47th!” We head toward Broadway. “It’s so cute! They have a stand set up all through December, and people can write their wishes on piecesof confetti paper that will get dumped over Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve! It’s nice, because if some stranger reads the wish when the ball drops, they might wish for it to come true for you.”
“Thatiscute.”
“Yup! You can submit your wishes online too. But I think it’s more romantic to actually write it out myself on the confetti.”
“Romantic? I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I mean in the Romanticism sense, like the poets.”
I am about to make a sarcastic comment, but she’s so damn excited, I stop myself. “I actually think Byron and Shelley would love the idea of writing a wish for humanity on confetti that ends up stuck to the bottom of some tourist’s shoe.”
“Yeah, it can be a wish for humanity or to meet Harry Styles…you know, whatever.”
“I definitely don’t like the sound of that.”
“You’re such a cynic.”
“How is it cynical if I don’t want Harry Styles anywhere near my baby sister? What happened to Shawn Mendes?”
“I still like Shawn, but I’m more into Harry now. I’m writing RPF about him now, you know. I don’t post those stories, though, because RPF can be controversial. It’s fun, though.”
“RPF? I don’t understand half the things you say anymore.”
“Real Person Fiction. I told you I’m writing fanfic now.”
“Oh yeah. I blocked that out.”
I get another nudge and an epic eye roll for that. “Deal with it. It’s not a phase.”
We get to the plaza and go to the end of a short queue for the Wishing Wall. It’s not the gigantic wall as tall as a skyscraper I had envisioned when she said the words; it’s a simple pop-up stand with a counter for writing on and a large bulletin board with multicolored pieces of paper pinned to it. But itisa nice idea, and it’s the kind of thing I love about this city.
There are a few young women writing their wishes at the table up ahead right now, but only one of them catches my eye. Dressed in a short plaid miniskirt, tights, and boots, she has the same mass of long dark hair and thick bangs as that girl I saw outside the club in LA earlier this week, except she’s wearing dark-rimmed glasses. Her fair skin looks porcelain in contrast to the cherry-red lipstick on her juicy mouth, but her cheeks and the tip of her nose are pink from the cold air. She’s probably in her early twenties, but there’s something so charming and girlish about the way she’s gently biting her lower lip and concentrating as she writes wish after wish on several pieces of brightly colored paper the size of Post-it notes. I watch her pause to consider before writing on a blue piece of paper. She closes her eyes, and it looks like she’s whispering the wish to herself as she writes out a sentence.
She’s all bundled up for winter, but I can tell her legs are slammin’.
She tilts her head to one side as she inspects what she just wrote, nods, then caps the pen and goes over to pin her confetti to one side of the bulletin wall. The blue one is on top of the little pile of squares. She takes a call on her cell phone and doesn’t even look in my direction before heading uptown. When I accompany my sister to the counter, I casually glance over at the blue square that girl just pinned up and read the carefully written sentence.
I meet HEA face-to-face, and he figures out it’s me he’s been texting with.
That’s interesting.
I am, as Shay just mentioned, an HEA.
But I guess that girl’s talking about her happily-ever-after.
I look around the plaza, but there’s no trace of her.
To prove Rory wrong about my cynicism, I silently hope that hot girl with bangs in the miniskirt and boots gets her wish.
In the car on the way back to my parents’ place, Rory tells me more about fanfiction.
