The first time Stacey saw Charlotte in New York, she was sitting in the window of a coffee shop, head propped on her left hand, fingers in her hair, pen cap between her teeth, a stained apron on the counter next to an open book.
Stacey was in a hurry, because Stacey was always in a hurry, and only after, clinging to a pole and falling into the rhythm of the train did she take out the mental picture and examine it again. And she thought, hey. She looks a lot like Charlotte would now. Then she thought about what to have for dinner and if there was anything good on television tonight and how soon it would be until she could take off her bra.
::
Weeks later, between mindlessly refreshing message boards, she thought to look up Charlotte. Stacey typed her name into Google - both with and without quotation marks - but for the most part only found poorly spelled fansites for that one girl from Ghost World.
Well. Perhaps you couldn't find everything on the Internet.
Of course, it was entirely possible that Charlotte was using a different name. She would be in college now, almost finished. Stacey had called herself "Ana" for nearly her entire senior year, until she discovered that her name was not a secret formula that would result in her personal definition. Life was never that simple, letters tumbling through equations to solve the riddles of who you really were.
Emails from Kristy were always signed "Kris" now. A new variable. Stacey was Stacey. Charlotte could be anything.
Stacey sighed, scrolling backwards through the results, a cooling cup of tea pressed to her temple. Perhaps the girl hadn't been Charlotte anyway. She told herself that she wasn't disappointed. She almost believed it.
::
The second time Stacey saw her Charlotte was dancing between the shadows and around the beat, hands ghosting across the hips of the girl in glitter and dark braids. Stacey almost stepped forward, but when Charlotte kissed the girl lightly and slipped towards the bar, Stacey decided it had been a trick of the light.
::
But the third time Stacey saw Charlotte was on a warm weekend afternoon, looking through the one-dollar carts at the Strand, and she didn't have time to wonder or doubt before Charlotte looked up from a 1950s etiquette book and suddenly they were both talking at once, full of How have you been and I can't believe it's you and What are you reading these days?
"We should catch up. Get coffee sometime," Stacey suggested. Brunch, they decided, brunch next Sunday at some tiny place Charlotte knew, some place with a fabulous vegetarian menu. Stacey said that sounded good, even though she wasn't Dawn.
"I know exactly who you are," Charlotte said, and something in her eyes tugged at Stacey, sharp for a moment. "Your number!" she added in quite a different voice. "Just in case." She pulled out a ragged address book. "PDAs scare me," she said, and tucked the loose strands of hair back behind her ear. Details exchanged, Charlotte hugged her fiercely.
"Til Sunday!" Stacey said.
Charlotte smiled, dimples flashing. "It's a date."
::
The fourth time Stacey saw Charlotte she was unaccountably nervous. It had been years. What if she had changed too much? What if she hadn't changed enough? What if they had nothing to say to each other? What if Charlotte didn't even show up? Fear and hope waged a brief tug-of-war.
She arrived at the restaurant to find Charlotte already there, skimming the headlines at the newsstand next door, the childhood reading addiction clearly not outgrown. "You're just in time!" Charlotte took her arm and led her inside.
Then, in spite of Stacey's nervousness and perhaps because of Charlotte's knocking over the water glass, it was perfect. They told happy stories of people they missed and snarky stories of people they didn't, teased out Stacey's discontentment with her job and plotted out Charlotte's projects for the end of the semester, and discovered a disturbing number of near-miss meetings.
In the end, after Stacey had slyly picked up the check and they had both ensured they each had the other's email address and sworn to use them, Charlotte held Stacey tight and whispered low, "I think that's half the reason I came to school in New York, to look for you."
Stacey's head spun, dizzy on the afternoon and the words and scent of Charlotte's hair. Charlotte was tall now, and it made all the difference in the world when she pulled back from the embrace and leaned down to kiss Stacey, soft like the girls at that festival so long ago, all Earl Grey and honey.
"Because," as she said after, "I knew you wouldn't dare."