Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Patsy's finished falling to pieces, and now it's Merle Haggard's turn to taunt me from the radio. The song is "Always Wanting You," a favorite of Dad's, where cynical, heartsick Merle croons about always wanting but never having his love, and about how hard it will be to face tomorrow cuz he knows he'll just be wanting her again. Doomed.

If I could have stayed in that closet with Nick, I might have figured out new degrees of wanting, tried out new moves, ones Tal never inspired in me. With me and Tal, it was straight Up/Down or In/Out. If Nick had me pinned against a wall right now, I'd be more imaginative than I ever was with Tal, stroking instead of pulling, kneading and threading, groping along with grazing, two hands instead of one, the soft scratch of fingernails included. Maybe I could inspire Nick to be a little imaginative with me, too. When Tris broke up with him, she said she knew she'd broken his heart, but she'd done him a favor, too. She'd sent him back out into the world with skills the women of his future could thank Tris for, because he certainly didn't have them when she discovered him. Fuck Tris and her Tantric knowledge.

Tomorrow is already here and I'm truly feeling Merle's bittersweet song. I shouldn't, but I do. I still want Nick.

I should have trusted him.

A gush of tears streaming down my face have replaced the light sprinkle Patsy's song inspired.

Fuck him. Fuck me.

Happy endings don't happen. Merle Haggard knows it, and now I know it.

Okay, I know one thing I want, something that I can have. I want to conclusively end the Tal regression spiral. So maybe I lost out on Nick. But at least now I know. There are Nicks out there.

I also really want some borscht about now. "Could you please turn the lights back on?" I ask the driver. I direct him to the 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village that's the one place Tris, Caroline, and I ever agreed on. Since we first started coming into the city on our own to hear music-as we've successively stretched parental boundaries until the restrictions and curfews have not only been lifted but banished, because we're big girls now, we might fuck up but we'll figure it all out, eventually-the three of us sometimes cap off our nights out, at least those that don't end in fights or hooking up or passing out, at the restaurant with the great borscht and the clean bathroom. I wonder if we three will ever go to this restaurant together again, or if that era is over, like mine and Tal's, and Nick and Tris's.

"Good choice," the driver tells me. He's been watching Tal's sweeping motions from the window.

I consider taking a catnap for the short drive over to the East Village but my chest is ringing. What the fuck? I forgot I was wearing Nick's-I mean my-jacket. I reach into the chest pocket to pull out a crumpled ten-dollar bill and a small, flip-up cell phone that has a photo-booth sticker of Tris stuck on it. I wouldn't have figured Nick to be the cell phone type, but then I remember, Tris gave him the phone at Christmas. When she wants to keep tabs on a boy, when she's in that mode with him, she means it. I remove the Tris photo sticker from the phone and place it on the city map beneath the taxi's back plastic divider, above the Empire State Building image, in a position so that the building appears to be giving Tris the finger.

I don't know if I should answer Nick's phone. The name flashing is "tHom."

I am a terrible person. I let two strangers take off with my sistah-girl. For all I know, Thom and Scot are the power couple of serial killers, the Ted Bundy and Aileen Wuornos of the garage-band New Jersey punk-rock scene. What if Caroline has woken up and is looking for me, like after her mom died and her dad checked out for a younger model, and Caroline would wake up in the middle of the night, scared and alone, and creep over the fence to my house? No, I shouldn't worry. My instinct may have been wrong that Nick was attracted to me, but it wasn't wrong that his friends were good guys. They'll get her home.

I answer. "Thom? Is Caroline okay?"

"Finally!" he says. "Yes, she's still asleep. Seems happy. Keeps mumbling something about cartoons and Krispy Kremes in the morning. But I've been trying to call Nick for the past hour. Didn't you guys hear the phone? Scot and I got lost coming off the parkway and then, er, we got distracted at the rest stop and the directions on my hand kinda got rubbed off. We're sitting in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. I have no idea where we are or how to get to your house."

I try to talk Thom through it, figure out where he is, but he confuses me more, and I'm lost all over again. The taxi driver slams on his brakes again. I think we're near St. Marks Place now. "Give me that," the driver says, pointing to the phone. I like that he is law-abiding and does not try to use Nick's cell phone while the vehicle is motion.