2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

1:30 A.M

A church bell chimes. Ben and Sarina finish their pears. They take Second until they reach the dead yards of Fishtown. “You’re a good teacher,” he says. “I can tell by that girl’s face when she looked at you.”

“She’s been through the mill. Her mother died, and her father isn’t the best.” Sarina worries that this heavy thought will tip the ship of the night. “She has people, though,” she adds, “who help.”

“Like you had people.” His tone is suddenly charmless. “Not me, though. I wasn’t there for you.”

“You were a boy, Ben.”

“I was an asshole,” he says.

“Way to make it about you.”

“Just let me say I’m sorry, Miss Greene.”

A smattering of laughter on a rooftop settles on them. The street is filled with warehouses and crack houses, jazz clubs and people having tough conversations. “You’d be surprised by how much it hurts that he didn’t say good-bye.” They have reached the club. Sarina’s expression is a mixture of relief (she is cold) and happiness (they have made it) and pain (she has spoken about her father) when she turns to Ben.

“Do you know,” he says, “I think about you every single day?”

“How could I know that?”

“I’m telling you.”

“We’re here,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

He doesn’t move. “Do you think about me?”

Bundled skinny boys, one whistling off tune, scuffle through the door into the club.

“I’m cold,” Sarina says. “I forget the question.”

“You do not.”

“I think that you’re not free. Even if you are going to be. You’ll lose a year, at least. At the end of it, you’ll be a different person who wants different things. I’ve been through it.”

For the first time, Ben feels the chill anesthetizing his elbows and toes. In one of the warehouses, someone opens a window to clear a stinking room.

“What am I supposed to do,” she says. “Wait?” She wants him to say, Yes, wait. I will be home as soon as I run this one errand. Ben perceives disgust in her tone. Why would anyone wait for him? A boy who didn’t know how to be a prom date, a man who knows what he needs, but too late.

He releases her arm. His voice is professional with sorrow. “You certainly couldn’t do that.” He means because she is precious. Sarina hears that she is snotty and unkind. He means because he is not that lucky; she hears: he is bored.

No one says I want you to wait and no one says I’ll wait.

Ben enters the club and Sarina follows. A concussion of guitar and drums pauses them. “I’m going to …” He points to the bar. She points to the ladies’ room.

In front of the bathroom mirrors, women administer to themselves. One draws her eyebrows on. One bemoans a botched waxing. One says into her phone that she is out of here if he doesn’t show. The hoops I’ve jumped through, she says, balancing the phone and washing her hands. Another woman combs and recombs her bangs. A vase of fake flowers brightens up an old bureau. Sarina slumps against it, sees herself unglossed in the mirror. She removes her coat, her sweater. She finds a compact and tube of lipstick in her bag. She takes down her hair. She puts it back up. She takes it back down.

Do you know I think about you every single day?

“Down,” the woman who has jumped through hoops says to Sarina about her hair.

“You think?”

The woman stabs at her pucker with a shade of peach. “I know.”

Sarina locks herself in a stall and plans. She will find him at the bar. He will be angry — drinking a scotch, neat. She will say his name and pause for the amount of time it takes to unsnap a bra, so he can process her lips, her hair, before she moves into him. She will open his mouth with hers. She will lead him through the club, into the men’s room. He will lift her onto the sink’s counter and slide his hands down her thighs. She will catch glimpses of him in the mirror. Her mind will be her childhood road in early morning; the breeze in the weeping willow.

Back in the club, musicians play on a blue stage. Sarina has never heard music like this. A quick guitar and a bank of drumming. Black coats and red lipstick. The crowd at the bar is three deep. The floor beneath Sarina’s heels pulses.

When she finds him at the bar, Ben is talking to Marcos and a redheaded girl. The night has contained so many chasms it has achieved an echo. An overcologned reprise. This is fucking bullshit, Madeleine had screamed in the principal’s office, and she was right.

My God, Sarina thinks, this terrible night.