Crazy in Love

Blair

Chapter 1

There may be no such place as never-never land, but there is a place called New York City, where all kinds of crazy things can happen.

When I was growing up in Boston, during the first fifteen years of my life, I thought New York was just another city, like Cleveland or San Francisco or Dallas. But then my father’s company offered him a promotion.  Being the loyal corporate executive that he is, he eagerly followed golden opportunity, even though it meant dragging his family away from the place they’d always called home.

After just a few short weeks I could see that I’d been wrong about New York. My new school, the neighbors in the thirty-story building that my family moved into, even the people I passed on the street—well, it didn’t take long for me to realize that New York is magic.

All that happened two years ago. A lot has happened since the Spooner family made the big move away from New England. I made some great new friends, went out on my first date, and decided that what I want most out of life is to become a songwriter. I began to think I’d become so cosmopolitan and sophisticated that nothing could faze me anymore. But then something so exciting, so beautiful, so absolutely romantic, happened that I decided that no matter how much living you do, no matter how much you’re exposed to, there is always the possibility of witnessing something so unexpected that you go back to believing in Peter Pan and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy all over again.

I suppose it’s important to mention right at the beginning that the eye-opening experience I’m referring to didn’t happen to me, but to my very best friend in the whole wide world, Rachel Glass. Yes, I know. The first thing anyone ever notices about Rachel and me is the weird combination of our names. Rachel Glass and Sallie Spooner. We sound like characters in a children’s book about kitchen utensils. Despite our last names, however, we don’t share many similarities. At least on the outside. Underneath it all, deep down where it really counts, Rachel and I are so much alike that I sometimes think that if there’s such a thing as reincarnation, we must have been twins in another life.

But since we seem so different on the surface, it took me a while to discover that Rachel and I’d been cut from the same mold. When we first met each other, I didn’t even like her. I was a junior in high school, and it’s funny to think that if I hadn’t twisted my ankle on the stairs of the subway station at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, I probably would never have come into contact with the girl who ended up becoming my blood sister.

Maybe I should go back to the beginning. About a year ago, when I was just starting my junior year of high school, I fell down the stairs of the subway station on my way home from seeing the latest movie at the Coronet, one of the theaters right across the street from Bloomingdale’s, with my younger sister, Jenny. It had been a wonderful day, one of those brisk, bustling Saturdays when the city had just started coming back to life after a dull summer. It must have been a couple of weeks after Labor Day, because school had just gotten going again.

Anyway, I was dragging Jenny down the steps of the station, my mind half caught up in the film I’d just seen and half obsessed with getting us both home on time. It was late, later than it should have been, because Jenny and I’d gotten so involved in a record sale at Alexander’s that we’d missed the two o’clock show and ended up waiting around for the four o’clock. Mom would be worried, I knew; she had never really adjusted to New York and was still constantly afraid that we would be kidnapped off the streets and smuggled away to South America or something. She truly is a New Englander at heart and always will be, I suppose.

All this may seem irrelevant, but it does prove that I had a good reason for being so distracted that I didn’t notice that the set of steps I was running down continued on after stopping at a platform. I turned the corner, and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled across the concrete floor. It didn’t take long for a small crowd to form. I don’t know if those people were sympathetic, or if they were merely annoyed that someone’s body was blocking their way.

At any rate, I was so embarrassed by the whole thing that I felt absolutely no pain until a little old man helped me to my feet with all the gallantry of an English nobleman. It was then that I just went ahead and forced all my weight on my left foot, prepared to continue on my way with at least some dignity.

Instead, I fell to my knees in a way that was just as dramatic and just as mortifying. If it hadn’t been for Jenny’s strong shoulder, I don’t know how I ever would have gotten back up those stairs and into a taxi. For all I know, I might still be lying on the subway platform, a bother to all the commuters hurrying toward the Number Six train or the pretzel stand a few feet away.

To make a long story short, it turned out that my accident was more frightening and more embarrassing than damaging. Once my mother recovered from her initial shock and stopped throwing those I-told-you-New-York-was-no-place-to-raise-two-teenage-girls looks at my father, she talked Dr. Brooks, the husband of one of her friends, into making a Saturday-night house call. He poked around for a few minutes, ignoring agonized look on my face, then concluded that it was nothing more than a mild sprain.

Of course I was relieved. The idea of spending the first few weeks of school in a cast, hobbling around on crutches and developing shoulders like a football player, had been worrying me all along. 

Once I realized that there was no real harm done and that, according to Dr. Brooks, all I had to do was keep off my foot for a few days and then avoid strenuous exercise for a few weeks, I was able to enjoy my new role of invalid. Jenny did all kinds of nice things for me, things that she never would have tolerated otherwise. She would put a stack of my favorite records on the stereo in my bedroom, then come back a few hours later to replace it. She went down to the bookstore the Monday after my fall to pick up some light reading for me, something that wouldn’t tax my poor traumatized brain. She even offered to check in with my teachers to see what I would be missing during my brief vacation from school, but I told her that wouldn’t be necessary. I knew here’d be enough of that once things got back to normal.

Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever, and it wasn’t long before I was pronounced well enough to go back to school. The one limitation was that I skip gym class for at least a month. This was good news, since I’ve never been particularly fond of anything that requires moving any more than two muscles at a time. So while I pretended to be distraught for the sake of my gym teacher, Ms. Mead, I was secretly thrilled.

But another result was that my entire schedule of classes was rearranged. I was transferred into a gym class that met during last period so I could go home earlier each day to rest my foot. And that’s how my chemistry class was changed from seventh period to first period.

My revised schedule didn’t require much of an adjustment, since most of my teachers were the same as they’d been under my original schedule. What was different was the group of kids in my classes. When I limped into my new chemistry class on my first day back at school, I found that I’d been paired off with a lab partner I’d never even heard of, much less met. All I knew about her was her name and the fact that she kept notes in a fabric-covered notebook in an extremely neat handwriting. She even went so far as to underline the important points with a red pen! It was for this reason, trivial as it may seem, that I took an instant dislike to Rachel Glass. Anyone who was that conscientious, I figured, couldn’t possibly be my kind of person.

I suppose I was overreacting, but my distaste for my new lab partner made me very sour. I imagined all kinds of terrible things about Rachel, especially that she was a snob and that she hated me because I was the new kid in the class and I limped and I still had a marked Boston accent that I couldn’t seem to shake, no matter how hard I tried to imitate the other kids’ way of talking. It was silly, I know now, and I guess I even knew it then, but it was still very real. As I get older, I realize more and more that people don’t always do the most reasonable thing. In fact, I’d say that much of the time they end up doing ridiculous things, for reasons that even they don’t understand. And my behavior toward Rachel was the perfect example.

On the very first day of lab, Rachel and I stood hunched together over a Bunsen burner, trying to figure out how the stupid thing worked. I was mad at her, I guess because I figured that anyone who was so careful about keeping notes and underlining in red ink should at least know how to do something as simple as light a Bunsen burner. The fact that I was as lost as she was seemed completely irrelevant. All I did was scowl and sigh deeply, until Dan Meyer, who at the time struck me as about the cutest boy who’d ever walked the face of the earth, took pity on us and came over to show us how.

Of course, once we saw him do it, we felt kind of stupid for not being able to figure out such a simple thing ourselves. I would have been ashamed if I hadn’t already resigned myself to the fact that, at heart, I was a creative person and a romantic to boot. Therefore, I had no need for pointless knowledge like the kind that’s handed down in chemistry classes.

Rachel wasn’t particularly suited to the scientific life either, I quickly found out. She was talented in languages, and while she had had as much difficulty as I did lighting a Bunsen burner, she, at least, could have followed a set of directions if they’d been printed in Spanish, Russian, or Portuguese.

At the time it seemed as if nothing was going right. Here Dan Meyer was thinking that we were both complete idiots, I was cross about my entire situation, my ankle was throbbing, and we still hadn’t gotten started on the actual assignment. We had to start by boiling water, which was done simply enough by setting up a metal ring on a stand above the Bunsen burner and putting a Pyrex beaker of water over the flame. This, at least, my fellow chemist and I managed to do successfully.

Unfortunately patience has never been one of my virtues. When a full thirty seconds had passed and the water still refused to boil, I became frustrated and exclaimed, This stupid thing isn’t working. What’s wrong with it? and I reached for the beaker.

The yelp that followed could probably be heard over in New Jersey. It wasn’t enough that I had a nonfunctional foot; now I had to add red fingers to the list of physical dysfunctions. But Rachel pulled me over to the sink even before the pain had started to register, putting my hand under cold running water.

Once again my face ended up turning red, redder than my burned fingers. As I looked over at Rachel, though, expecting her to tell me what a jerk I was, she grinned and said, Hot glass looks like cold glass, but doesn’t feel the same, claim nine out of ten users.

I burst out laughing then, not only because I was relieved that the ridiculous tension I’d created between was finally gone, but because I’d just discovered that Rachel Glass had the most valuable attribute known to humankind. She had a sense of humor. I think it was then and there that she and I became best friends.

That very same day Rachel and I had lunch together. And then we met again at noon the next day, and the next, and just about every day after. We got to know each other giggling over tuna fish sandwiches and cartons of milk.  As we revealed bits and pieces of ourselves, we both kept exclaiming that we’d been destined to meet. With each story we told, each revelation of a special crush or a secret dream, we became closer and closer.  Before long, we were spending most of our free time together.

One of the things that made me trust Rachel early on was that when I told her that I wanted to be a songwriter, she didn’t laugh. She didn’t even look surprised. And she certainly didn’t give me that lecture on practical skills and making serious career choices that most people, even friends my own age, are always giving me. It was as if she could sense how sacred it was to me, and how by even telling her, I was letting her in on something that was very special to me.

Her secret ambitions were a bit less out there, although she admitted that her math and science teachers rarely appreciated the fact that she was mainly interested in languages and had learned more of them than most people her age. Maybe the fact that she, too, was bent on one particular thing was what made her encourage me. She said she thought it was great that I wanted to be a songwriter and suggested that I find somebody to work with.

I’d thought of that before, of course. As I sat in my bedroom for hours, strumming my guitar and trying to think of a rhyme that made sense or searching for the perfect chord, I’d often wished for a collaborator. While I usually wrote both words and music, I’d to admit that it was writing the lyrics that I was most interested in. My melodies sometimes sounded flat, and while my family and my friends insisted that they were the most beautiful melodies they had heard outside of the Beatles’ songs, I could tell that they needed something to spice them up. Sometimes I knew I could profit from an objective opinion, but the problem was, I just didn’t know anyone who was good at writing music or the least bit interested in forming a musical team.

But once Rachel suggested it, I started thinking about it more and more.  I decided I was definitely going to have to look for someone to work with.