Rachel Cohn - Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

"Do you really think it's getting worse?" I ask. "I mean, aren't we better off than we were twenty years ago? Or a hundred?"

"We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing."

"You're right," I say.

"Excuse me?"

"I said, 'You're right.'"

"But nobody ever says, 'You're right.' Just like that."

"Really?"

"Really."

She leans into me a little then. Not accidental. But still somehow it feels like an accident-us being here, this night. As if she's reading my mind, she says, "I appreciate it." Then her head falls to my shoulder, and all I can feel is her fitting there. I look up, trying to find the sky behind the building, trying to find at least a trace of the stars. When I can't, I close my eyes and try to conjure my own, glad that Norah's not reading my mind just now, because I don't know how I'd react if anyone knew me like that. As we sit in that city silence, which is not so much silence as light noise, my mind drifts back a few minutes, thinking about what she said.

Then it hits me.

"Maybe we're the pieces," I say.

Norah's head doesn't move from my arm. "What?" she asks. I can tell from her voice that her eyes are still closed.

"Maybe that's it," I say gently. "With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces."

She doesn't reply, but I can tell she's listening carefully. I feel like I'm understanding something for the first time, even if I'm not entirely sure what it is yet.

"Maybe," I say, "what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking."

Tikkun olam.

Nick and I have fallen silent again but I don't think it's the uncomfortable variety of silence. I think it's dawn closing in and we're both as sleepy as we are stimulated, and as Saturday rolls into Sunday, it's almost mesmerizing to look up the canyon to the clouds, murky gray and yellow from the city lights, while on the ground the banking and secretarial types smoke outside the building lobbies as Lincoln Town Cars idle at the curb, waiting to take the overnight workers home. The scions of the financial world here do not appear to notice or care that time could stop at any moment, so why not obey that 'on the seventh day ye shall rest' thing? At least, go out and enjoy your life. Like I am now, watching you.

But I am so greedy to learn more about Nick that I can't bear the silence, even if it's a nice one. Maybe the way to find out more about him is to tell him more about me. So I inform him, "I get my flannel in the men's department at Marshalls."

"My mom loves that store," he says.

"Your mom is smart."

I wait. Will he tell me more about his mom?

While my mind plays through the information I've compiled about him so far on this night, my mouth is talking stupid fucking Marshalls because my head is still getting around Nick's words about tikkun olam: Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces.

Because I am trying to put together the pieces that make up this guy. Let's review. Straight-edge guy who survived a six-month relationship with Tris. Bassist in a queercore band, promising lyricist. Can get profound (at least for a goyim) in the matters of tikkun olam. And he's a fucking great kisser-but one who said NO to the no-strings-attached sex that was basically offered to him by an idiot girl in a closet at a Where's Fluffy show a couple hours ago, and yet somehow he still managed to pop up at Veselka for her later (pretty fucking sexy move); but then he didn't make a move on her on the 6 train when opportunity and ambience were just so converging as the lights dimmed and the train lurched their bodies together. What am I supposed to do with this guy?

As I lean my head on Nick's arm, I can smell him up close and personal without the club haze of beer and smoke, and he smells faintly of either a cologne spritz or like he had an aromatherapy massage at some spa before this night started, which strikes me as a disturbingly high-maintenance scent for a punk boy. His scent sends the pieces in my mind together, into finally making sense of him.

I may have to issue a retraction to Randy from Are You Randy?

There's no fucking way this Nick guy is one hundred percent straight.

As if to prove my suspicion, Nick takes some Chapstick from his jeans pocket and rubs it on his lips. I'm a Blistex whore myself, so it's not the Chapstick that alerts me; it's the cherry flavor.

If he turns out to be gay, I will be furious. They get all the good ones! I will have no choice but to take it personally. The loss of Nick to the other team would be a huge blow, like, up there with the losses of Scottie "not-at-all" Gross, in whom I invested five solid years of preteen Sunday school crushing and who would have been my first kiss the night of my bat mitzvah if stupid fucking Ethan Weiner hadn't gotten to Scottie first, and also babelicious George Michael, my ultimate tragedy-to-redemption Behind the Music icon, who in a just and good world would have been my older man�Lolita secret fling experience. SO NOT FAIR!

Then again. Maybe the simple diagnosis of either hetero or homo is misleading. Maybe there's just sexuality, and it's bendable and unpredictable, like a circus performer, which I used to want to be, and hey, that could be a good option worth pursuing now that I fucked up my college admissions and the kibbutz thing sure ain't gonna happen. I'd like to be bendy like a circus performer. Maybe Tris would come see my show sometime and I could find out more about her groupie bitch skills.

Wherever Nick's sexuality lies (lays?�— whatever, same diff), the bottom line is: This Nick guy is too good to be true. He writes amazing songs. He is so fucking cute. He's damn smart. And damn sensitive. He's given me more adventure and confusion in one night than I've had in a lifetime. My heart is aching again, scared, because I want to know EVERYTHING about him now. The more he gives me, the more I want. I want to know about his plans for the future, about his family, about his music, his dreams, his sorrows, all that sentimental bullshit.

I wonder if he shares my feeling that the Fluffy track "Hideous Becomes You" is just the most beautiful love song ever, and would he ever sing that one to me sometime? Because I already sang his noticing song back to him, and I told him about tikkun olam, which seems like such a random thing but it's really important and sacred to me, and I'm thinking if we name our first son Salvatore, that's not the name of a fruit or a month, and lots of not 100�% straight people procreate, right?

What's of more concern: If I don't shut down my brain soon, my imagination will take off so far about what could be with this guy, that nothing will ever be able to just be.

Nick is right, the Olsen twins do have a worrisome codependent relationship. I understand those bitches, though, I really do. Much as I want to learn more about Nick, I also want to take a time-out so I can tell Caroline about him. If Caroline were here, we could dissect Nick via My So-Called Life script/ Jordan Catalano moments.

Rayanne:

I think part of him is partly interested in you. Definitely. I mean, he's got other things on his mind.

Angela:

But that's the part that's so unfair. I have nothing else on my mind. How come I have to be the one sitting around analyzing him in like microscopic detail, and he gets to be the one with other things on his mind.

Rickie:

That is deep.

I feel like I could sit here on stupid fucking Park Avenue talking to him all night. And I hate Midtown, and I particularly hate the East Side.