Becoming A New Yorker

After a bittersweet series of dates in college with a man who told me he wanted to cut my body open like a cadaver, I decided that maybe there was something to this dating thing after all.

I’ll give it another try, I thought to myself. Besides, dating can’t be that hard. It’s just like hooking up, but without all that mind-blowing sex everyone’s always complaining about. And on dates I get more time to brag about myself and that’s kind of a hobby of mine anyway.

I was moving to New York soon and I figured there wasn’t any better place to try my hand at traditional dating than the city that never stops moving.

And, yes, I knew the best thing for me to do was move forward at a relaxed, comfortable pace. There was no reason to expect I would become a famous writer or a husband to some perfect man overnight. I barely knew the city outside of Google Images and my first order of business was supposed to be becoming a New Yorker.

Take your time, I said to myself. Find your bearings. Work on yourself first…

Anyway — I’m writing this story because I found the love of my life within twenty-five minutes of landing in John F. Kennedy Airport.

His name was Jason Friedman. It still is, I assume, but I doubt I’m going to be seeing him again.

There are probably a million different ways I could have approached re-entering the dating world, but I figured that — if I was actually serious about doing it — it was probably best that I go the most traditional route and meet people on Tinder, the way God originally intended.

I don’t know exactly how many times my bags spun around the baggage claim carousel, I just know that when I finally looked up from my phone, mine were the only ones left and I was standing alone in the waiting area. When I grabbed them, I carried both in one arm and walked to my taxi as slowly as I could, Tinder-ing all the way there.

The man of my dreams was, admittedly, different than I imagined. There were three pictures of himself on his profile, each of which showed a tall, lanky hipster-type who had clearly never been able to grow a beard in his life. Just by scrolling through them I knew he had the widest, most giggle-inducing smile I had ever seen on anyone, and a matching sense of humor.

His fourth picture was an image of a raccoon caught in headlights, which only someone as dumb as me would think is funny enough to post to their Tinder profile.

His fifth picture was an uncomfortably close snapshot of Oprah holding a prescription for Xanax.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re really pretty. Especially in that fifth one. Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Thanks,” he said. “You’re pretty handsome yourself. And, yes. This is so embarrassing. I’m the face of O Magazine. I’m kind of a big deal over there…”

The two of us had instant chemistry so, before I had even seen the big city I moved to, or my tiny little apartment, or my best friend who I was moving into it with, I found myself flirting with my future husband in the backseat of a stereotypically-yellow taxi moving closer and closer to the Statue of Liberty.

For the greater portion of a week and a half, Jason alternated between sending me texts that read: “I know this this sounds dumb, but I could not be more excited to meet you,” and, “I’m busy tonight, sorry.”

Like everyone in New York, Jason had a pretty demanding job. He was a television producer who worked late hours, so, although we talked about it almost every day, we didn’t get the chance to meet up until my ninth day in the city.

Something he was working on got cancelled so the two of us made an extremely last-minute decision to spend the day together.

When I saw Jason for the first time, he looked exactly like the pictures on his profile. He had a giant smile, a tall, lanky body, and glasses that fogged up in the rain.

“I feel bad,” he said, rubbing the front of his lenses with his thumbs. “I didn’t realize it was going to rain tonight.” The clouds above the city were starting to gather into a nasty, gray clump, and a heavy mist was gearing up to ruin our first date and my entire life.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not even raining that hard.”

I won’t say there was immediately a giant crack of thunder, but there was immediately a giant crack of thunder. Jason looked up at the sky and started walking a little faster towards Barclay’s Center Subway Station.

Jason was wearing a crisp, blue raincoat because he’s smart and he had the foresight to know that, no matter what the weather app says, it’s probably going to rain on the East Coast. I was wearing an oversized, brown flannel because I figured nothing said “sweep me off my feet” quite like an oversized, brown flannel that was rapidly soaking up two pounds of toxic, New York City rainwater.

“I don’t really have a lot planned,” Jason said, “but you said you wanted to see where I went to school so that’s where we’re going!” He laughed nervously. “I’m sure you’ve seen NYU in pictures, right? At least Washington Square Park?”

“If I have, I don’t remember,” I said, shielding my eyes. The mist from before had turned into diagonal rain so that, along with soaking me, it could blind me too.

“But I’m excited,” I said. “It sounds like fun!”

The two of us looked over at each other with squinty eyes and smiled.

When we got to the station, Jason started pulling out his metro card. He told me he heard the N train pulling in, so he put a hand on the square of my lower back and hurried towards the turnstiles.

“We can probably take that,” he said, holding his Metrocard, ready to swipe.

As he pushed me closer to the turnstile, I quickly realized that I had never used my hands before, so I was completely unprepared for the simple task of removing a bright-yellow card from my wallet. Of course, I’m using the term “wallet” here loosely, because as my fat, chicken fingers started digging through it, I realized it wasn’t so much a “wallet” as it was a portable art collection made up of Starbucks receipts.

Jason swiped his Metrocard like a magical sprite might swipe a flower into existence, but I, on the other hand, crashed into it. Hard.

Fun fact about me: my testicles hang exactly one MTA turnstile from the ground. So, even when I don’t fully crash into it, the swinging bar from hell usually greets me with a cold, hard punch to the plums.

To put it modestly, the experience is extremely uncomfortable. But whenever I look around for sympathy, I see a bunch of tired New Yorkers staring back at me as though their twice-daily sucker-punch to the crotch is the least unpleasant aspect of their commute.

Jason pretended he didn’t see it, but he turned around to stare at me hunched over like an idiot.

It was only ten minutes into our date, and I figured since I was already cold, wet, and reproductively broken, the best two things I could do at that point were to either evaporate from society completely, or pick myself up and pretend like it never happened.

I chose the latter, and when I peeled myself off the turnstile, the two of us walked onto the train and resumed our fairytale date.

Jason leaned into me and held the pole above my head. As it turns out, the man of my dreams was even taller than he said he was in his profile, so, for the first time in my sad dating life, I had to look up at my date as he looked down at me.

The train to NYU was going to take about thirty minutes, but instead of using that time to ask me any of the generic date questions that can be answered by “pizza,” or, “Titanic,” he asked me the most complicated question I think I’ve ever heard.

“So,” he said. “How do you like New York?“

I think I told him “it’s good,” or maybe I told him that one joke I always tell about moving to New York exclusively for the weather. To this day that joke has never gotten a laugh, so that’s probably the one I used on Jason.

Whatever I said, he wasn’t satisfied. I remember he kept asking for my legitimate opinion until I eventually had to formulate one on the spot. This is roughly what I told him:

Let me start by saying New York is everything you were ever told it would be–especially if you were told that New York would be giant, flaming, dumpster-fire of garbage and cigarette smoke. This entire city is exactly as charming as it is disgusting, which is why the only two thoughts I’ve had since moving here are: “wow, I can’t believe I live here,” and “ew, I can’t believe I live here.”

Pick almost any street in New York and you’ll find giant piles of dripping, wet garbage bags propped up on the curb next to steaming food trucks and street performers doing backflips for only a handful of rusted dimes and pennies. If you stand in the subway for even just ten minutes, you’ll find hundreds of jaded New Yorkers, screaming into their phones, rushing past breathtaking musicians giving performances in the middle of the platform.

Of course, these New Yorkers will tell you they have to rush past these performances, because if they stopped to watch every artistic side-show the city had to offer them, they simply wouldn’t have time for anything else — especially not the the long list of demands given to them by their “unlivable” six-figure salaries in The Arts.

And, while it’s true I’ve only lived here for a little over nine days, I’ve learned a lot by watching unsuspecting New Yorkers in their natural habitat.

For example: I’ve learned that, for a lot of New Yorkers, it’s better to fall flat on your face than to hold onto a subway pole.

I’ve learned that a cigarette is sometimes considered a meal, that every part of town is the “seedy part of town,” and that stop signs are only mild suggestions.

Of course, all of these observations take a backseat to my most profound discovery, which is that a New Yorker’s favorite phrase is something to the effect of: “wow, that never happens.”

When I told my roommate I was going to meet up with Jason, she looked away from her computer and turned around on her stool.

“What?” she said. “With who?”

“Jason,” I said. “The guy I matched with on Tinder.”

“The guy that works at HBO?” she asked. “You’re meeting up with him?”

“Yeah. Well, if he’s free tonight. Why are you so shocked?”

To be honest, it made sense. I had hardly even figured out how to work the shower without scalding myself and, yet, here I was, telling her I was meeting up with a stranger in a city I still knew next to nothing about.

“No,” she said. “Not shocked. That just never happens here. Congrats.”

“What never happens here?”

“Meeting up with people. Everyone’s always too busy to socialize.” She took a second and started tapping her finger on the table. “Show me what he looks like again.”

“Did your roommate think I was pretty?” Jason said, interrupting my ridiculous tangent. The train started heading over the bridge to Manhattan and Jason found himself standing in front of a glowing New York City backdrop.

“Yeah,” I said. “My roommate told me if you weren’t gay she’d try to date you herself.

Jason laughed. “If I wasn’t already me, I’d try to date me too.” He poorly choked down a smile. “You’re so lucky I’m already me, Seth. If I wasn’t already me, I’d be taken as hell. I’d have married this handsome dude a long time ago.”

He pretended to push me out of the way and admire his reflection in the window.

“By the way,” he continued. “Your roommate is right. People never meet up here.”

Unfortunately I didn’t need Jason to confirm what I already knew was true.

A day or two into my big New York move I set up a date with an old college friend who moved to the city over a year ago. Jason had been blowing me off for work and since I had some extra time between my very important job applications, I told her we should catch up over lunch.

“Wow,” she said. “This, like, never happens.”

She cut her burger in half and I stared at her blankly. “What never happens?”

“I feel like I don’t meet up with anyone anymore.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Everybody is just out doing their own thing, I guess. I can’t really be mad at them, but, I don’t know. It gets lonely.”

From the way I just wrote it for you, you probably think she said it in a sad way, but at the time I convinced myself that she said it in a tired way. She said it in a way that just meant she was ready for someone to finally follow through on their plans.

“People just get so caught up in the rat race,” she continued. “Everyone is trying to do better than everyone else and you get social anxiety from the comparisons. Sometimes you want to just stay home and cry into your pillow!”

And since we’re on the subject of tone, she said that last part like it was a really good joke that was going split my sides. I think I just stared at her over the brim of the ketchup bottle between us, blinking.

“Oh,” I finally said, grabbing some fries. “Well, not me. I’m not much of a cryer.” I stuffed my gullet with some greasy, overpriced food. “Besides, we’re gonna’ see each other every day.”

“Really?”

“Of course we will,” I said. “We live in the same city!”

I haven’t seen her since.

Throughout our time on the train, I only talked to Jason about myself. I had made that dating mistake before, but this time it wasn’t my fault.

Whenever I asked Jason a question, he found a clever way to throw it back at me. There were several times I asked him about his friends or his family, but every single time I did, I ended up talking about my own.

“Do you have a lot of friends here?” I asked him.

“I do,” he said. “But we only see each other every other weekend. What about you? Do you have friends here?”

“Yes,” I said. “A few. But if I’m being honest, the only person I’ve seen with any regularity is my friend Heather. She’s actually a mutual friend of my roommate. We’re all high school friends but I’m convinced they hate each other.”

“What?” Jason said. “Why do they hate each other?”

My roommate stood by the sink, repeating herself for the hundredth time.

“No, Seth. Again. I like Heather.”

“Then why don’t you two ever hang out?”

“Seth, you’ll see. Even when you want to meet up with people here, you just won’t. Your schedules won’t match up, or you’ll be getting off work and the only thing you’ll want to do is take the hour-long train ride home and sleep.”

I didn’t have a job yet so I was forced to believe her and hang out with Heather on my own.

Heather is a writer, so naturally she’s kind of a douchebag–which is probably why we get along so well. Douchebags like to stick together, and Heather is a walking encyclopedia with opinions.

Heather has already seen or done anything you’ve ever experienced in your life. Remember that time you went into that underground cave in the middle of nowhere? Heather has been there. Twice. She’s vacationing there next summer and you and all your friends are invited to come visit whenever you want.

Heather is nothing if not overly-generous with invitations to huge, exclusive parties that only she and the illuminati were invited to.

But, to set the record straight, Heather is not a bullshitter.

A lot of our mutual friends think that Heather talks out of her ass because she’s pretty and can get away with it. I understand why they think that, but I know from experience that she’s pretty much always telling the truth — even when your brain refuses to believe it.

If she tells you she’s best friends with The Pope, believe her. Because if you hang out with her enough times, she’s eventually going to introduce you to The Pope.

“Yeah,” I imagine her saying. “So this is The Pope or whatever.” In this scenario, the leader of the Catholic Church reaches out a hand to greet you and Heather scrolls through her phone, completely uninterested. “You guys are cute together, you should exchange Instagrams.”

Heather is, admittedly, a handful.

Still, she was one of the first people I wanted to see in New York, so, about three days after setting my bags down in my apartment, the two of us were getting drinks at a Mexican restaurant.

Heather plopped down in the booth and started adjusting herself. “Are we eating or just drinking?”

“I was going to eat,” I said. “I haven’t eaten today.”

“Oh. Well, if you haven’t eaten, you’re going to want to. These margaritas will destroy you.”

The waitress came over and Heather continued.

“Two margs,” she said to the waitress. The waitress didn’t even have her pen out. She was just setting down the menus and got bombarded by Heather’s order. “Seth, are you doing margs? You should do margs. They’re like super cheap and they’re loaded with booze. Margs?“

“Yeah,” I said. Part of me feels like I didn’t even need to answer. “I can do a margarita.”

“Okay. So two margs and–” she scanned the menu for an imaginary item she had already decided she wanted before she woke up that morning “–and a chicken burrito for me.” She closed her menu and sipped her water through an obnoxiously long straw.

The waitress scribbled down Heather’s order and looked over at me. “And what about you?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “We just sat down, I haven’t looked at it yet. Um. Let’s see…”

I started flipping through the menu for all of three seconds.

“You should get the chicken burrito,” I heard Heather say from the other side of my menu. “It’s really good. And a good deal too. A lot of food. I get it all the time. Chicken burrito. Super cheap.”

I lowered the menu. Behind it, Heather was looking at me the way a mother looks at her favorite child on their first day of kindergarten.

“I’ll take the burrito,” I said. I closed my menu and gave it to the waitress.

The two of us talked for awhile and downed a couple of margaritas until we were just beginning to slur words and really open up. Heather told me how she landed herself a pretty legitimate job in a publishing house, and then proceeded to tell me how she was getting out of New York as soon as possible.

“Ugh,” she said. “It’s just not for me.”

“Publishing?” I asked. I ordered us two more margaritas.

“No,” she said. “Just–New York. I’m ready to chill out. I think I’m going to move to California. I’m talking to a guy out there anyway.”

She reached over the table and put her phone in my face.

“Look at him,” she said, showing me a picture of a bafflingly stunning man. He had washboard abs and that pouty lip that only models have.

“Wow,” I said. “He’s handsome.”

“I know,” she said, stirring her drink aggressively. “What about you? What have you got going on?”

“Well,” I said. I took a deep breath and chugged my margarita. I told her about Jason and how we matched on Tinder and how he was always too busy to meet up. I told her how funny he was, and how “the fifth picture on his profile was Oprah holding a prescription for Xanax.”

“What?” Heather screamed, holding a napkin to her mouth and reading a text message.

“Yeah,” I said. “So I was like ‘you’re super cute, especially in that fifth one. Do I know you from somewhere?’” I started choking on my burrito, laughing to myself because Heather wasn’t listening.

“Oh my god!” she said, looking up from her phone. “Seth, what’re you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Jason’s probably busy. Why?”

“Seth, you have to come to this party. I’m friends with some university astrophysicists and, like, every other month they close down their school’s observatory for a wild night of debauchery.”

“Is that an invite?” I asked her. I definitely slurred my words when I said it. “Because if it is, sure. I’m down.”

“Ok good,” she started feverishly typing in her phone. “This is like the most exclusive thing in New York.” She rolled her eyes when she said it and kept typing. “I went to the last one. It was awesome.”

I’m not sure how many margaritas I had over dinner, I just know my brain was tingling in the front and that the thought of seeing stars and wiggling my noodle arms to loud music sounded wonderful.

“Great,” Heather said after a storm of typing. She put her phone down and asked for the check. “Let’s wait for my friends and we’ll all go together.”

The night went exactly as planned, as it always does with Heather. When we got to the university, the observatory was shut down, fairy lights were strung up all over the place, and there were telescopes pointed at different stars.

At one point towards the end of the night, I drunkenly hobbled over to one and looked through the eyepiece. All I saw were clouds.

“You can’t really see anything in these anymore.”

I looked up to find the source of the voice and saw one of the students hovering over my shoulder, smiling. In the distance, I could see Heather and some of her friends grinding against some nerds in a pile of empty beer cans.

“Anymore?” I repeated, focusing back on the student.

“Yeah,” he said. “This school was built before–well–like–” he drunkenly stumbled for his words.”This school was built before New York was like New York.” He waved his hands in the air when he said it. “All the ambient light keeps you from really seeing anything nowadays.”

I looked around, confused. I pointed to the telescope. “So these are just for show?”

“Kind of,” he said, blushing. “Nobody ever looks in them when they come here. On a really clear night you can see some stuff, but that never happens.”

I think he could tell I was disappointed, so, after a few seconds of intoxicated silence, he grabbed my hand and walked me past the telescope. “I can show you something cooler, though.”

He took me down some makeshift, wooden stairs towards the entrance of the observatory where he struggled to push open a big metal door.

When it opened, the two of us found ourselves on the roof of the university. There was a big gust of wind and when I turned around I saw the city skyline for the first time since being here.

From where we were standing, the buildings couldn’t be any closer without ruining the width of the view. I’m sure it was a breathtaking image, but I was so drunk at the time that I very dramatically thought — and shouted — that I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

“This is amazing!” I yelled. There was cold, wet breeze, and I had chills from head to toe.

“Really,” I continued. “I’m serious. I can’t stop looking at it. Thank your for showing me this. I feel like I’ve wanted to see this my whole life.”

We stayed there for about five minutes, or however long it took me to get bored of the most amazing view in the world. As we were leaving, we noticed some people had followed us onto the roof. One of them was a girl sloppily making out with what I assume was her boyfriend. She stopped kissing him and looked at the skyline.

“What do you think they’re doing in there?” she asked.

Her boyfriend looked where she was looking. “In where?”

“All those lit up rooms. Who’s in there? What are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said, somewhat annoyed by the question. “But they’re probably richer than us and they’re probably doing something a lot cooler that this.”

“Like what?” she asked.

He started to answer, but then he leaned his head against the wall behind him and closed his eyes as if he was altogether too drunk to answer.

She put her head on his chest and when I looked back at the city, it looked different to me. It wasn’t so much a beautiful postcard as it was a solemn reminder that I’m not the most successful person in the entire world.

In two seconds, the same skyline that had been the subject of my most beautiful memory, became the inescapable foundation of a question that started to plague me.

What were they doing in those buildings? Do they wish they were here?

The student and I eventually climbed back into the observatory and I spent the rest of the night in a mental state I like to call “teleport-drunk,” where I remember being in vastly different places without any idea how I traveled between those places. My memory of the night is still a poorly constructed blur of hiccups and strange, religious statues. At any given moment, Heather and I were rolling around in a random square of grass we found in the university courtyard, sitting in a church, taking selfies with an ancient statue, or threatening the cab driver.

“Ay’ dude!” Heather yelled, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know where you’re going but you’re going the wrong way. Don’t start taking unnecessary turns. I’m extremely close to throwing up!”

Heather curled up next to the door and after a while she opened one eye and looked at me.

“I hope you had fun tonight,” she said. She closed her eye again.

“I really did,” I said back to her. I kept trying to close my eyes too, but every time I did I got the spins. When we got to the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked at the skyline through some fog in the window and I felt some kind of beautiful, sweet emptiness.

“What do you think these people do?”

“Don’t start making comparisons,” Heather said. “That’s a good way to start crying in a Whole Foods.”

“I’m not a cryer,” I said, defending myself for the second time since being in New York. “Even when I’m sad I can’t bring myself to tears.”

Heather opened her eye again. “Just wait.”

Jason and I climbed up the stairs of the subway station. We walked in the rain for about half a mile until we reached a giant arch in what appeared to be The Middle of Nowhere, Manhattan.

“So that’s it!” he shouted over the storm. “That’s NYU!”

I looked around trying to find the campus he was talking about. Behind the arch there was a big fountain and literally nothing else but trees, lights, and and a heavy sheet of glowing, white rain.

“That’s it?” I yelled. “That’s NYU?”

“Well, that’s Washington Square Park! I don’t really know what to show you because the buildings are spread out all over the city, and, you know — it’s raining!”

“It is?” I looked up at the sky like I had only just noticed. Jason ignored me.

“I could show you the library? It’s right over there! They just installed some cool, copper railings to keep students from jumping to their death!”

I don’t think I said anything.

“Or I could show you my favorite bar?”

The two of us sat down at his favorite bar and ordered whatever beer they were trying to sell that day. From the amount of Jason look-alikes, I could immediately tell we were in a hipster bar and that literally everyone inside it went to NYU. The entire place had an orangey glow and there was a candle between us that Jason kept almost blowing out with his laugh.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “My laugh is so breathy. Whenever I come here with my friends they just countdown the minutes until I laugh the candle away.”

“At least that’s cute,” I said, sipping my beer. “So you work in television?”

“Yeah,” he said. “This is going to sound so pretentious, but it’s really uncommon for someone my age to be in the position I’m in.”

“I bet,” I said. I didn’t tell Jason this, but I have enough experience in the entertainment industry to know that a “young” producer is like thirty years old. Certainly not twenty-five or however old he was. “How old are you again?”

“Twenty-one,” he said, raising his glass.

“Twenty-one?” I nearly fainted. “You’re younger than me? How in the world did you land this job?”

“Honestly, Seth? It was just luck. When I graduated NYU I got a job as an assistant to some small show, and when it was cancelled, HBO swept us up and asked us to interview. I literally didn’t even go three days without a job. And I got a promotion!”

He almost blew the candle out with his laugh and I drank my beer in a hard, concentrated gulp. I could have sworn he was older than me. Twenty-three at least.

“So–what do you do?” Jason asked, throwing the question back at me.

“I don’t. Well–not yet anyway. I just moved here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jason said. “But when?”

“Nine days ago.”

“Nine days ago?” The two of us plowed through the rain on our way to another bar. I decided I needed heavier drinks somewhere around the time he told me he directed a pilot for a television show when he was only twenty years old. “You did everything you just told me in nine days?”

“Yep!” I shouted over the rain and sirens. “Nine days! Actually, while we’re on the subject, I matched with you on my taxi ride from JFK!”

“Wait–what? I thought you had already been here for like a month at least! You must have some insane connections!” At this point, Jason’s raincoat was doing as much for him as my sponge-like flannel was doing for me. He held up one of the collars of his coat. “Where are you taking me?”

“Maria’s!” I shouted. My phone was dripping wet and refusing to cooperate. “It’s in the West Village… or at least I think it is. Are we even going the right way?”

“Oh no,” Jason said, wiping his face and rolling his eyes. “The West Village?”

The West Village is the historically gay part of New York– well–all of New York is the historically gay part of New York, but according to Heather, West Village is where the old Broadway gays go to congregate.

“It’s simple,” Heather said. “Do you have a pen?” Heather grabbed a pen off my kitchen counter and ripped a page out of one of my notebooks.

“Never go out in the Upper East Side unless you want to die a death of complete and total boredom.” She started aggressively scribbling down as fast as she could. “Spanish Harlem, no. Yorkville, no. Central Park, obviously not. Midtown East is fun but it’s a bunch of rich white moms. You should probably go to the Upper West Side If you’re looking for a husband. The West Side is Gaytown.”

“Gaytown? Isn’t this entire city Gaytown?”

“Shh,” she said. “I’m trying to teach you something. Hell’s Kitchen is exactly what is sounds like. A lot of clubbing to do there. A lot of theatre tourists, too. The Meatpacking District is a bunch of things. A lot of Google people and ‘all-natural’ mommy bloggers. There’s a lot of drunk Eurotrash and old gay sluts too–you’ll probably love it there. The West Village is just… the West Village. That’s where all the gayness mixes into one. The Stonewall is there. Fat Cat Bar. Marie’s is there too. We went there. You remember Marie’s, right?

“Marie’s!” I shouted at Jason. “Oh my god. It’s not Maria’s! It’s Marie’s!” I searched my phone for Marie’s and it came up in seconds. “Yep! We’re going the wrong way! Turn around!”

I turned us around and when I told Jason to cross the street, a woman in heels ran in front of us.

“Taxi!” she yelled with her hand and foot in the air. She climbed into a cab that materialized out of nowhere.

“Did you see that?” Jason said, looking behind us.

I pulled him onto the sidewalk to keep him from getting run over. “See what?

“That woman!” He kept looking behind us. “Did you see how she just hailed that taxi?”

“Yeah!” I yelled. “What about it?”

“With the arm and the leg like that! Taxi!” he repeated. “Nobody actually does that! That never happens!”