Chapter Text
Lara Jean Song-Covey
New York was prettier on paper.
I don't mean that it wasn't pretty in real life. It was. Sometimes.
There were mornings when the sun caught between the buildings just right, turning every hue gold, and evenings when the little restaurants below my apartment switched on their string lights and everyone rushed out onto the sidewalks like they had somewhere important to be. There were flower stands on corners and brownstones with window boxes and girls who somehow managed to look put together while carrying massive tote bags and overpriced iced coffees onto the subway.
Those were the parts of New York I had imagined.
I hadn't imagined the garbage bags, the smell, or the man who yelled at me during my second day living here because I stopped walking in the middle of the sidewalk to check Google Maps. I'd apologized profusely, but he'd yelled at me again and told me, “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”. When I told Kitty on FaceTime, she thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened to me and immediately burst out into laughter.
You can't apologize to New Yorkers, Lara Jean. They can smell fear like how sharks smell blood.
I saved that text, but not because it was particularly sentimental. If anything, it was a perfectly normal Kitty response. She’d probably say something meaner by tomorrow, actually. I just happened to like it, so I'd copied it onto the bottom of a page in my pink polka-dot notebook and folded the corner over.
I had always done that. Folded corners meant “keep this”, whether it was because I thought it was important, memorable, funny, or because it brought me some amount of joy, love, or sadness. I wanted to take note of all these things: a recipe Mommy had written down, a sentence in a book that made my chest ache, Margot's first address in Scotland, a doodle Kitty made of Dad that looked more like a potato with glasses.
Peter used to tease me about it. Peter Kavinsky, I mean. It was so strange that I had to specify now, even inside my own head, because for so long, Peter had just been Peter. My Peter. Now he was three thousand miles away, and he wasn't mine anymore. The image of the letter I had written to him before my shift at work today flashed in my mind: the contents of the paper a swirled mix of confusion over how we ended up like this and immense heartache over how lonely it felt. I remember pressing my thumbnail along the bent corner of the page until it was sharp. Then, I unfolded it because I was trying to stop doing that. Not folding corners, I didn't think I could stop that, but going backward. That was what Margot called it when I called her the week after Peter and I broke up.
"You're allowed to be sad," she consoled. "Just don't confuse being sad about something ending with thinking it shouldn't have ended."
Which was a very Margot thing to say: annoyingly sensible.
Peter and I hadn't had some terrible breakup, yet I think deep down I wished we had. It would have been easier if he'd done something awful I could never forgive him for, or if I’d crossed a line we couldn’t come back from. I’d almost be relieved if one of us could be angry enough to make the other person smaller in our memories. Instead, we'd tried as hard as we could. Truly tried to salvage our relationship and all the history between us. Stanford and NYU looked manageable when they were pins on a map.
I made a schedule, had plans, never missed a video call date, and mapped out Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break with him. Peter said California wasn't that far away if you really thought about it. The reality was that it was farther than anticipated. At first, we called every night, then every other night, then I'd stay awake because he had practice, and he'd wake up early because I had class, and both of us would insist that we didn't mind.
Eventually, we started saying tomorrow a lot.
I'll call you tomorrow.
We'll watch it tomorrow.
Tell me tomorrow.
Tomorrow became Friday, and Friday became Sunday, and one night at the end of August, after an endless loop of both of us saying some version of I don't know, Peter finally said, very quietly, "I don't want us to start hating each other."
I sobbed my eyes out, and he cried too, although he denied it until I pointed out that I could see him wiping his face, which only made me cry harder. There was something deeply unfair about breaking up with someone while you were both still in love. I'd always thought love was supposed to be the difficult part, that once you obtained that, you could get through anything. Apparently, love was the easy part, and everything else around it was much more complicated.
"You're doing it again."
I looked up, and Mrs. Russo stood on the other side of the counter with both hands on her hips.
"Doing what?"
"Staring at the same cupcake for five minutes."
I moved my gaze downwards to find a ruined cupcake. What was supposed to be a dainty buttercream rose had become a white blob with six increasingly desperate petals.
"Oh," I replied sheepishly with a frown.
Mrs. Russo leaned over to inspect it.
"Modern art."
"I'm sorry."
"Stop apologizing."
"Sorry."
She glared at me as I instantly shut my mouth.
Mrs. Russo was sixty-two years old, wore red lipstick every single day, and had owned The Little Tart for longer than I'd been alive. I knew all of this because she'd told me during my interview, along with the fact that she hated fondant, online reviews, and customers who ordered coffee at a bakery when there was "a perfectly good coffee shop ten feet away”. The coffee shop was actually closer to twenty feet away, which I knew because I had measured it with my steps once. I didn't dare correct her.
The Little Tart was tucked between a bookstore and the coffee shop Mrs. Russo hated, on a street that was always bustling except for the odd pocket of time between dinner and everything that came after it. I found the HELP WANTED sign during my second week at NYU, and I'd really only meant to buy a croissant when I walked in. Thirty minutes later, after a few vague questions, I had a job. Dad said it was fate, and Kitty said it was because I had "the face of someone who would voluntarily wake up at five in the morning to make bread”.
Both were probably true.
I liked it here. I enjoyed measuring things and knowing that if you folded butter into dough enough times, it became something completely different. I had fun lining pastries in neat rows and tying string around white boxes and writing people's names carefully across the top. Mostly, I just liked having somewhere to be.
College had turned out to contain a surprising amount of empty space. My afternoons were bare, no one sat next to me in class, and my previous phone wallpaper of me and Peter had been replaced with a random picture of flowers I found online. I had Gen, but we were in different majors and she was a busy bee between socializing, attending clubs, and her scattered class times. At least at the bakery, there was always something that needed doing, and it worked as an S-tier distraction.
"You can take those home," Mrs. Russo suggested, nodding toward the table.
I fiddled with the edge of the cupcake tray.
"All of them?"
"If they're here tomorrow, I'll eat them. My doctor told me I’m supposed to avoid joy."
I smiled. "I don't think that's exactly what he said."
"Were you there?"
"No."
"Then you don't know."
She disappeared into the back, and with a giggle between my lips, I fixed the sad cupcake to the best of my ability before putting it into the box.
At nine fifteen, Mrs. Russo left. At nine twenty, I turned the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. At nine twenty-four, I remembered the chalkboard.
"Shit."
I wasn't supposed to say shit. Dad didn't care anymore, but somehow I still heard Mom’s voice whenever I did.
“Lara Jean!”
Just my name was enough to make me cower.
I grabbed my knit cardigan and the chalkboard sign for tomorrow and stepped outside. September in New York was confusing. It had been hot all afternoon, but now the wind tunneled between the buildings hard enough that I immediately regretted not bringing a jacket. I set the chalkboard against the window.
TOMORROW:
RASPBERRY DANISH
LEMON TARTS
HONEY CAKE
The little raspberry I'd drawn beside the danish looked more like a deformed tomato, so I crouched down, erasing the edges with my fingers and redoing them. A gust of wind caught the papers tucked underneath my arm, and before I knew it, they were one with the air.
"Wait sorry, no, no, no-"
My schedule flew first, followed by a flyer and a sheet I'd spent half of my break covering in possible ideas for Dad's birthday present. I stomped to catch the flyer with my shoe while the schedule slapped against the bakery window, but the birthday list sailed directly toward the street.
"Oh my God."
I chased after it, but someone else got there first. A hand shot out and caught it just before it went underneath a parked car. For a second, I only saw the flapping paper, and then my attention was trained on the hand holding it, marred with scraped knuckles and a fading bruise near the wrist.
"Think this is yours."
He was about my age. Maybe a little older, but to be honest, I couldn’t tell. Brown hair curled messily over his forehead like he'd pushed his fingers through it one too many times. He wore an old blue sweatshirt and carried a backpack over one shoulder that looked like it had survived several natural disasters, and most noticeably, he looked super tired. He wasn’t sleepy; there was a difference. I knew because I'd spent the last month telling everyone I was sleepy.
"Thank you," I remarked.
He held the paper out to me, and I took it carefully, realizing which side was facing up.
DAD???
Underneath it I'd written:
watch?
new record player?
that weird grill thing he keeps looking at
DO NOT let Kitty choose
There were three tiny heart doodles beside record player and a very bad drawing of a turntable. The boy glanced away so quickly it was almost polite.
"Sorry," he stated. "I wasn't reading it."
"You were."
"I caught like three words."
"Four."
He looked back at the page.
"I feel like looking again would make this more awkward."
It totally did, so I folded the paper in half.
"Thank you for catching it."
"Yeah. Sure."
For a moment, neither of us moved, and it reminded me that this was the part of meeting new people that I hated. There was always a moment when a conversation had clearly ended but neither person had officially ended it, so you were both trapped there trying to decide whether saying goodbye would be more embarrassing than simply walking away. His eyes drifted toward the bakery window before moving past it and toward the coffee shop next door. Something changed in his face, but it happened so quickly I almost thought I'd imagined it. His shoulders went still.
Through the coffee shop window, a girl was wiping down the counter. Dark hair pulled back, headphones around her neck. I'd seen her before: we'd smiled at each other a few times while taking out the trash. The boy looked at her for maybe two seconds, and it wasn’t like someone people-watching or seeing a stranger. It was like someone who'd seen something he wasn't supposed to want anymore.
I knew that look all too well because I'd been avoiding mirrors so I wouldn’t have to see it in my own reflection.
"You okay?"
The words came out before I decided whether I should say them, and I’m sure my lips tried their best to provide a half-smile.
His gaze lifted from his shoes.
"Yeah."
Too quickly.
Then, softer, "Yeah. Sorry."
"You don't have to apologize."
There was a tiny pause as an emotion almost like amusement passed over his face.
"You just apologized to a piece of paper."
"I did not."
"You said ‘wait sorry, no, no, no' to it."
"It wasn’t an apology."
"Sounded pretty sentimental."
I stared at him with wide eyes and a slightly curved mouth, and he returned a smile. It wasn't a big smile by any means, nor did it erase the tiredness written all over him, but it changed him. He looked a lot younger.
“You have a good night," I breathed out, slowly walking backwards toward the bakery.
"Good night," he chimed, his playful nature lingering between us.
I turned fully away before I could see him leave.
"Lara Jean?"
I stopped in my tracks and whipped back around. He was looking at the chalkboard, and when I glanced down, my name tag was still pinned to my cardigan.
Duh.
"Your raspberry looks like a tomato."
Looking intently at the chalkboard and back at him, I answered, "I know."
"Okay."
"I was fixing it before my entire life blew into the street."
"Right. Sorry."
He took two steps backward teasingly, then pointed at the board.
"I think it has potential."
"It's a raspberry."
"Yeah. No, I got that."
"You just said it looked like a tomato."
"I was trying to be supportive."
"You're not very good at it."
That earned me another grin, and this one felt real.
"Working on it."
As I stood there overanalyzing my tomato-esque raspberry, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt and strolled away. I watched him go for exactly three seconds, and then I went inside. I didn't know his name or a single fact about him, and I doubted I’d ever see him again.
Later, when I opened my notebook upstairs that night and tucked Dad’s birthday list between two pages, I almost didn't fold the corner.
Almost.
But there was a tiny black smudge near the bottom of the paper where his thumb had caught it before it disappeared beneath the car. I peered at it for a moment, debated… and I folded the corner.