Rachel Cohn - Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Once we're outside and I can breathe again, can feel the cold of the early spring-morning air, I am less on hate and more on tired. It's just me and Tris out here, and the smokers and the users against the nearby wall, and it's quiet except for Lars L.'s bassline thumping through the walls and the honking taxis on the street. Finally, I can hear myself, and I am saying, "Why?" to Tris, but actually I'm shouting "WHY?" because my ears haven't yet adjusted to the lower decibel. But already my heart rate is acclimating, slowing down, easing up, released from the suffocation of that club and that noise and so many people inside, who surely all know of my humiliation and my regret.

She's the reason I could not break through to Nick, and I want to know why.

Tris leans against the building wall and rubs her eyes. "I'm so fucking tired," she says. "And you don't fucking have to yell." Caroline is right, that bitch does go pleather, because otherwise no way would Tris mess with a real leather skirt by sliding her ass down the wall and falling to the ground. Tris rests against the building, hugging her knees, her face pressed into her knees.

I sit down next to her. I ask her again, "Why?" and she says, "Nick?" and I say, "Yeah."

She looks like she's going to fall asleep. Her eyes flutter and she almost looks likable, now that she is freed of the club's confines. This is how she is. She'll take you to her personality's farthest reaches of annoying, then manage a late ninth-inning turnaround to being an almost comforting presence.

Caroline and I have known her since Girl Scouts, but she was never a major irritation until high school, after not even the Quakers could tolerate Caroline and I followed Caroline from Friends Country Day to Sacred Heart for junior and senior year. Tris thought our arrival at her school meant the arrival of kindred spirits for her, and she followed us around like a puppy dog, wanting in on our Manhattan music scene. She didn't get that Caroline and I have always strictly been a Gang of Two. Tris thinks she's one of us since she likes the same music and no one at that school would have her, a freak like me and Caroline. We have let her be Two and a Half on occasion; she does have decent radar for good bands, even if odds are she'll make a fool of herself-dancing like a maniac, singing along off-key-whenever we take her along to a music club. But get Tris alone at Starbucks, and she's normal, at least tolerable-she's not laughing too loud, trying too fucking hard. She's my savior with the stick that says negative.

I want to-but I can't-hate her.

She opens one eye at me. "Are you on a fucking date with him or something? Do you like him?"

"Yes," I say, because I don't want to lie, and then "Not really," I amend, because I don't want to lie, and finally, "No," because I don't want to lie. Nick is-was-this thing, this person, I discovered out of nowhere and then discovered I wanted-and once I tasted it, I yearned for it-but I know I must accept defeat because this whole night was an accident, clearly. My heart literally aches, that shit is not made up; it hurts for an unexpected, brief time warp of suddenly wanting and longing and believing, but then not having. Who am I kidding? The best parts of Nick were ones he doesn't even know I know he has-the lyrics, the playlists, the loyalty-and all of them, dedicated to Tris.

"Did you tell him about me?" she says. Because at school, in the cafeteria, with all the sweet little Catholic girls lined up like plaid dominoes at the tables, and then me, Caroline, and Tris, with our piercings and goth colors and C and T's (but not mine) uniform blouses ordered two sizes too tight, Tris brags about all the guys she dates, the clubs she gets into, the fucking backstage pass of it all, because she wants to impress Caroline. But when it's just the two of us in class, Tris is showing me the mixes Nick made her, the songs he wrote her, the admissions essay he helped her write for FIT.

"No, I didn't tell him," I say. I'm glad I didn't. I didn't want to be the girl trying to know him, but all him knowing of me is what I knew of Tris. "Why did you do it anyway?" I don't know which why I want the answer to-why she cheated on him, or why she let him go.

"I'm hungry," Tris states, and I have to agree, "Me too." She stands up, and I take the hand she offers to help lift me up and I don't think this is about a prisoner exchange anymore.

We walk to the 24-hour Korean grocery across the street, and it's like some primal instinct because we both go right to the cookie section and she opens up a bag of Chips Ahoy and I open a bag of Oreos and we are chomping in the aisle, and the owner at the counter is like, "You have to pay for that!" and Tris and I are both like, "WE KNOW!"

She leans her head against a display of Fig Newtons and says, "It's like this. I met Nick. And I wanted him and I had him but he didn't want to let go, and he was such a fucking great guy, I couldn't let him go, even if there were other guys in the picture." She places her thumb inside her mouth, removing a piece of chocolate chip stuck between her teeth. "But then it got to this point where he's making college choices based on me, thinking we have a future, I mean he's ready to turn down all these great fucking schools to go to Rutgers so he can be near me, and I am thinking, this cannot be happening, he cannot do this. Because he said 'I love you' and, you know, I was just not feeling that back. And I know it must suck to say that and not have the other person say it back, but I felt like now was the time to set him free, so he could find someone else, someone who could say that back to him, because someone should say that back to him. I figured it would hurt him much worse later if I had let him believe he had something he didn't, so I took the brutal route. I didn't say 'I love you' back. I said, 'It's over.' I'm eighteen, about to move to the city for school, start my life. I want to have fun. I don't want commitment and 'I love you.'"

She pauses to wolf down another Chips Ahoy. Once she's swallowed it, she says, "Was I like just profound or what?"

Nietzsche fucking Tris may be on to something. Tal told me he loved me, and told me and told me, but you don't tell someone that and then tell them they're not experienced enough in bed and should read a book or something to learn, or they should try wearing deep-red lipstick and tight skirts to look hot like their best friend once in a while. If Tal hadn't lied to me when he said he loved me, I might not be without a future right now, a sucker who was so chickenshit she allowed herself to believe a false dream from a false god. I'm not sure I ever even liked Tal, much less loved him, and by the way, Tal, I believe the Palestinians should have their own state.

For once in my life, I am speechless. I have just eaten my thirteenth consecutive Oreo in under five minutes. When I do speak, I know from the security mirror hanging behind Tris and in front of me that I am speaking from a mouth blackened by Oreo bits. "You have to tell him why, Tris. He deserves to know. And he's gonna be damaged goods until he does know."

So Nick won't be going through my rehabilitation program. That's okay. He'll make some girl, the right girl, a great boyfriend one day. He'll be the love of some lucky girl's life, and maybe after I've had some sleep after this epic night, I'll be glad for him and the future he's waiting to grab, once Tris truly sets him free. So I won't be part of his life other than as this footnote "date." So I have a lifetime of loneliness ahead of me. That's okay, too. There are lots of careers for frigid girls. I can dedicate myself to good deeds. I'll become some U.N. humanitarian (hey, Tal, I fucking believe in the United Nations, too, asshole). I do have two years of Catholic school behind me. I could become a nun even if I am a non-believer. I'll learn to fake it like Nick just did with me. I will minister the gospel of compassion and kindness and please, always use a condom, from famine-stricken nations to war-torn dead zones. It's possible I might become a nun who kisses other nuns-hell, I can look up Becca Weiner from summer camp and see if she wants in on the action-but I know that a few hundred years from now when the post-apocalyptic pope is deciding whether to canonize me, s/he will look the other way on those indiscretions and figure, Hey, Saint Norah was hard up-it happens to all of us. And I will be floating over my heaven-hell dimension, probably in close proximity to my home base Arctic Circle, knowing that the saintly person I became was all because of this night. So I should be thanking Nick, not hating him.