You Are Here

by David Nicholls

She was not one of those girls who hired a nightclub for her birthday but she’d easily filled a room above a pub for her twenty-first, a long table in an Italian restaurant for her thirtieth. For her fortieth she thought she might go for a walk in the park with a friend or two, a once popular band obliged to play ever smaller venues.

Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment.

Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world, but she knew that this, too, was a trap, that unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood. It was no good. She would have to go outside.

Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.

After all, it was not an unhappy childhood, not exactly, just steady, suburban, as constant as the thermostat in the hall that she was forbidden to touch, and if she sometimes wished that she was an orphan, it was only for the narrative possibilities.

to gauge how she might look if surprised by a steam-roller on the way to a date.