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first
Zoe and Oscar break up on January 2nd, still very upset at each other, and both pretending very hard not to be. Neither of them know it at the time, but it is their last break up, the one that lasts for good, and it would have been a happier event if either of them had known.
(And they would be downright ecstatic if they had known what could have happened that night. But Theo had been a little more patient, and Zoe had been a little more sober, and the ring had exchanged hands without much bitterness, and Zoe hadn’t even been that annoyed at the idea of Theo buying her a new one.)
Oscar stops hanging out with them for a few weeks after that. He tells them he’s visiting his mother in Texas, and Tim is the only one who figures out that he simply can’t stand to see Zoe. Theo awkwardly slots into their group, not quite taking Oscar’s place—as if anyone could—shy but decent enough. There’s a lot less fighting, at least.
And Oscar’s back by April anyways, and he seems mostly okay, especially when Zoe awkwardly coughs up an apology about what she had said about his father and his father’s job. It’s probably the first time Zoe Cassidy has ever apologized in her life, and Mabel can’t help but rub it in a bit, something about wanting to see Zoe live through a day without the help, and Tim rolls his eyes at the whole exchange. Oscar accepts the apology with a genuine “thank you,” the solemnity unfamiliar but not out-of-place on his bright face.
Zoe and Oscar don’t get back together. Everyone is much better for it.
Theo and Zoe do end up dating for real, and to the surprise of everyone, the relationship lasts. He does end up buying her a ring, eight years removed from that New Year’s Eve—a cheap one, purchased with what he could with his own money, now that Theo was no longer in the family business. And Zoe, who had stopped caring what other people thought of her and started thinking a little bit more about other people, accepted.
Their friends are happy for them. Tim sends his congratulations from Switzerland, where he’s recently found a job he loves. Oscar, who might have been jealous once upon a time, helps Mabel throw the Dimas-Cassidy engagement party, and is even comfortable enough to invite the guy he had been seeing from the yoga studio downtown.
another life
Zoe and Oscar never date in the first place. He tries, at first, to flirt with her. Because who wouldn’t? She’s beautiful and fun and wealthy (and flighty, and rude), but Zoe turns him down. Oscar is good-looking enough, Zoe says with her nose upturned, but he’s really not her type.
He almost starts yelling at her right there in the lobby, diving to defend his family, when he catches her eyes sliding towards Mabel. So instead, Oscar just laughs and wishes Zoe luck. Mabel loves oil paints and Neopets, and crime novels, and pepperoni sliders, but Oscar knows that Mabel still hasn’t figured out why she had turned so red that one time the pretty bassoonist held the elevator open for her.
It’s not his place to say. Mabel will figure it out eventually, and Oscar is content to watch Zoe flit around the dark-haired girl. Zoe showers Mabel in compliments— you’re so pretty, do you want to hold hands, I love your hair color— but Mabel doesn’t catch on. She just smiles in that awkward closed-mouth way of hers, looking like she doesn’t know what to do with herself.
Tim and Oscar start taking bets. Tim says it’ll take Zoe eight months. Oscar shakes his head and suggests four.
(Mabel ends up confessing her feelings to Zoe six months into the bet, which technically means that neither Tim nor Oscar come out on top, so the boys settle for splitting a cheese pizza and a couple of garlic knots.)
They break up once, when Mabel is 23 and the rest of them are 22. Mabel wants to move to Arizona for an internship, and Zoe refuses to go any further west than Chicago. Oscar lets Zoe cling to his arm, a box of tissues ready just in case, but Zoe never starts crying.
It takes another year, but Zoe eventually gets fed up with moping around and missing Mabel. She pleads as much money as she can from her mom, packs up her Mulberry suitcases, and moves out to Phoenix.
The next time Oscar sees them, Mabel’s hair is streaked with red, and Zoe’s covered in so many freckles she looks almost tan, and neither of them have ever been happier.
or another
Zoe is kind of interested in Oscar, but then he starts dating a cute girl from his college, and Zoe shrugs her shoulders and moves on. It’s not hard to; Oscar’s girlfriend is from Thailand and not totally unfashionable, and besides, Zoe has tougher things to work through.
Like, impossible questions.
Is Tim...hot?
Zoe rubs her eyes, and then goes back to squinting at her friend. Tim’s not as tall as Oscar is, but he’s better dressed, and his hair is always neatly arranged, and Zoe can appreciate that Tim gets his eyebrows done biweekly. There are too many boys who think eyebrow maintenance isn’t important, and Zoe has been raised to have very high standards, thank you very much.
Is Tim hot? Facewise, he’s pretty enough, Zoe thinks. He has nice, sharp features to go with that nice, sharp voice and his not-so-nice, sharp words. Tim has a lot of money and a good internship—both elements Zoe finds very attractive. And he’s kind of a dick, but he’s never been a dick to her. Or at least, not enough of one for her to care.
Zoe asks Mabel if Tim is hot, but Mabel pulls a face like Zoe’s asked her to drink vinegar. Zoe knows Mabel’s opinion isn’t dependable on this subject anyways; Mabel seems Tim like a brother, and besides, Mabel’s girlfriend probably wouldn’t be happy with her if she agreed with Zoe.
(Zoe doesn’t really like Mabel’s girlfriend, by the way. She’s not as fun as Oscar’s girlfriend is, and she dresses shitty even though Zoe’s pretty sure her family has money.)
Is Tim hot? Zoe gets fed up and asks it outloud, outright to Tim himself at the fundraiser for something-or-other. It’s been two years of this question rattling around in her brain, and she’s done with it. She has more important things to think about, like how to make Oscar’s moving-to-Thailand party themed without being racist about it, or how to get Mabel to break up with her shitty girlfriend.
So, is Tim hot?
“I don’t know,” Tim says, in that funny, pointy voice of his. He sounds very pompous all the time, like an owl in a charcoal suit, but now, he sounds amused. “I don’t care.”
Zoe thinks okay, that’s pretty hot, and decides to just get all the bullshit out of the way and just kiss him.
and another
Zoe is already going out with Theo Dimas by the time Mr. Torres and his son move into the building. It’s a quiet summer, the one before their junior year; Tim is in Japan for the entire summer, and Mabel doesn’t want to keep hanging around Theo and Zoe. She only knows how to sign hello, thank you, and M-A-B-E-L in sign language, and besides, she can only watch them kiss for so long. Mabel is there when Mr. Torres moves in, and she thinks Oscar is the kind of guy Zoe would like, all tall and muscular, but Zoe’s too busy signing something to Theo to notice him.
Oscar is nice. Really nice. He’s not like all the pretentious, wealthy bastards in the Arconia (and yes, Mabel is including Zoe and Tim among them), but he’s not like her cousins from Long Island either. He’s a little calmer, more inclined to enjoy the little things in life, like ice cream and cute squirrels and blue skies, and Mabel finds herself drawn to the way he speaks. He’s from Manhattan, Oscar says, but his parents divorced and his mom had wanted him to spend a couple of years in Texas before moving back.
He talks about things in a way Mabel wishes she could write down or draw. But she knows that preserving the imagery that comes out of his mouth would ruin them and make them less special for her. Oscar and Mabel sit on the rooftop one freezing November evening, and Mabel doesn’t even feel the cold, so lost in his descriptions of his mother’s house along the Gulf of Mexico.
Maybe it’s those stories of his that convince Mabel to look for a school outside of the same fifty miles of New York she’s been bouncing between all of her life. They’re all excited for her when she announces she's gotten the scholarship to the school in Texas—even Zoe, who’d broken up with Theo the week before—but no one is happier than Oscar.
He stays in New York with Zoe, and Tim goes to an Ivy League on the east coast, of course, but Mabel doesn’t feel lonely in Texas. She sketches down by the coastline, smelling the salt water in the air, liking the way the wind stings her face.
She sets down her drawing pad and reaches into her coat (priceless, someone had once said) for a letter. It’s unopened, stamped with a New York ZIP code, and Mabel can’t stop the smile that spreads across her face when she opens it.
one more
Zoe swears off dating forever after a particularly nasty break up. The other girl had been too old for her, Tim knew, and she had been unpleasant in the way that Tim knew he was, but worse. He was glad that Zoe wasn’t seeing her anymore, if only because the bonfire that Mabel and Zoe had had when they had burned all of the girl’s shit was fun to watch.
(He watched it happen through a recording, of course. Tim wasn’t going to aggravate his asthma, especially not when he needed to give a presentation in History that next week.)
It had been a surprise, then, when Zoe showed up to the Hardy Boys’ ice cream outing with some random guy trailing behind her. Mabel had raised an eyebrow and Tim had rolled his eyes, until Zoe stomped her foot on the ground.
“Ugh, dummies, he’s not my date! He’s Mr. Torres’ kid, and he said he’d help me put spiders in Kenna’s apartment if I bought him ice cream.”
Mabel welcomed Oscar very warmly into their group very openly after that, but Tim was less trusting. Oscar seemed nice, sure, but he was also—unusually open. Such in a way that Tim couldn’t help but distrust him. It wasn’t because Oscar’s family was from a lower socioeconomic standpoint; Mabel had pretty much wrangled the outright prejudice from Tim in the years they had known each other.
Oscar was fun, like Zoe, and he was creative, like Mabel, and he was honest, like Tim. There was no way in hell a guy like that wasn’t hiding some sort of dark secret. The thought of it kept Tim up late into the evening, his eyes tracing random shapes into the ceiling, wondering the hell what was up with Oscar. It was simply because the boy was too suspicious, and not because Oscar’s smile lit up a room, or because he always smelled of fresh linen.
Mabel and Zoe don’t believe Tim whenever he casts doubts upon Oscar. They seem to find it incredibly funny, in fact, which Tim disliked, because Tim has never in his life been funny. Oscar was funny.
Which, of course, only makes him less trustworthy.
They’re going to a New Year’s Eve party on the roof of the building tonight. Zoe and Mabel are getting ready in the bathroom, and Tim sulks in the living room, watching as Oscar fumbles with his tie over and over again.
It’s very frustrating to watch someone struggle with something so simple. Tim gets up and swiftly takes Oscar’s tie into his hands, feels the cheap fabric against his fingers, and looks up to meet Oscar’s handsome eyes, and thinks—
Oh, fuck.
Tim knew he shouldn’t have trusted Oscar.
last
Zoe and Oscar date for like, two weeks when they’re nineteen, and then decide to stop. Oscar wants to focus on his business classes, and Zoe’s kind of doing well in school for once, even though the thing she seems to be studying most these days is TimandMabel.
It’s not Tim or Mabel—both of which, on their own, are not too interesting, but TimandMabel, in the rushed way that Mabel’s aunt calls out for them when it gets too late. Even though they’re well into college, and Zoe and Oscar have been Hardy Boys for six years, Mabel’s aunt never seems to remember their names.
But she always remembers TimandMabel. Zoe would be insulted if the woman didn’t make the best damn cocktails she’s ever had in her life.
TimandMabel, the poor dummies they are, don’t seem to notice how they’ve become a joint unit, even though it’s exceedingly obvious to everyone who lives in the building, even the excitable old guy who walks his ugly dog around in a stroller. Zoe had been waiting for an elevator alongside him, and they’d both watched as TimandMabel exited the elevator talking about some stupid murder podcast, and the old guy with the ugly dog had sighed wistfully.
“Young love,” old guy had said, giving Zoe a knowing glance, and Zoe had flipped him off. He was being annoying and weird, and a little bit because she wanted to show off her manicure, but mostly because TimandMabel were still too stupid to realize that they pretty much had a fairytale romance. Mabel was fucking learning Japanese for Tim’s family, and Tim had met every one of Mabel’s weird cousins, and they were still just friends.
And it’s so obvious. It’s so obvious, because Tim only smiles whenever Mabel’s around, and Mabel draws so many pictures of Tim, but every time Zoe brings it up, Mabel looks at her like she’s crazy.
Oscar agrees with Zoe, and it’s one of those rare times where they’re the two that have something in common between them. She’s spent more than one night with Oscar at the bar near the Arconia, both of them slightly tipsy, in total agreement about the utter idiocy of their two friends. They have a running tab there, one Zoe swears she’ll pay off one day but never quite gets around to doing.
It’s a completely normal day in April, the year after her college graduation. Zoe’s trying to figure out which of her gold earrings make her look the most journalist-y for work when TimandMabel practically knock down her front door.
She glances at their flushed faces for one second and gasps.
“Are you guys—” Zoe starts, but then she glances down to their interlocked hands, which is normal enough, and then to the ring on Mabel’s finger, and then to the RING ON TIM’S FINGER.
Zoe loses it and throws her earrings at the both of them, not caring a bit that they’re probably lost to the carpet forever, because the two morons had the audacity to confess their feelings, get engaged, and elope all within the past twenty-four hours.
Without her.
Once she’s calmed down enough to stop crying, Zoe tells them that they’re both stupid in so many ways, that they owe her for her years of emotional suffering, and that she’s very, very happy for them.