People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (best story books to read .TXT) 📕

“Seriously?” I sit up. “You have a Tinder account?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Poppy. Grandpa has a Tinder.”

“Let me see it.”

His ears go red. “No, thanks. I’m not in the mood to get brutally heckled.”

“I can help you, Alex,” I say. “I’m a straight woman. I know how men’s Tinder profiles are received. I can figure out what you’re doing wrong.”

“What I’m doing wrong is trying to find a meaningful connection on a dating app.”

“Well, obviously,” I say. “But let’s see what else.”

He sighs. “Fine.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and hands it to me. “But go easy on me, Poppy. I’m fragile right now.”

And then he makes the face.

17

Seven Summers Ago

NEW ORLEANS.

Alex is curious about the architecture—all those old Crayola-colored buildings with their wrought-iron balconies and the ancient trees writhing up right through the sidewalks, roots sprawling out for yards in every direction, breaking up cement like it’s nothing. The trees predate it, and they’ll outlast it.

I’m excited for alcohol in slushy form and kitschy supernatural shops.

Luckily there is no shortage of any of it.

I’m thrilled to find a large studio apartment not far from Bourbon Street. The floors are stained dark, and the furniture is heavy wood, and colorful paintings of jazz musicians hang on exposed brick walls. The beds are cheap looking, as is the bedding, but they’re queens, and the place is clean, and the air-conditioning game is so strong we have to crank it down so that every time we come in after a day in the heat, our teeth don’t chatter.

All there really is to do in New Orleans, it seems, is walk, eat, drink, look, and listen. This is basically what we do on every trip, but the fact is underscored here by the hundreds of restaurants and bars sitting shoulder to shoulder on every slender street. And the thousands of people milling through the city with tall neon novelty cups and mismatched straws. Every block or so the smells of the city switch from fried and delicious to stinking and rotten, the humidity trapping the sewage and putting it on display.

Compared to most American cities, everything looks so old that I imagine we’re smelling waste from the 1700s, which miraculously makes it more bearable.

“It feels like we’re walking around inside someone’s mouth,” Alex says more than once about the humidity, and from then on, whenever the smell hits, I think of food trapped between molars.

But the thing is, it never lasts. A breeze sweeps through to clear it out, or we wander past another restaurant with all its doors propped open, or we round the corner and stumble onto some beautiful side street where every balcony overhead is dripping with purple flowers.

Besides, I’ve been in New York for five months now, and during the last two months of summer, it’s not like my subway stop has smelled like roses. I’ve seen three different people peeing on the steps inside, and watched one of those people do it a second time a week later.

I love New York, but, wandering New Orleans, I wonder if I could be just as happy here. If maybe I could be happier. If maybe Alex would visit me more often.

So far he’s visited New York once, a few weeks after his first year of grad school ended. He brought a carload of my stuff from my parents’ house to my apartment in Brooklyn, and on the last day of his trip, we compared calendars, talked about when we’d next see each other.

The Summer Trip, obviously. Possibly (but probably not) Thanksgiving. Christmas if I could get time off work at the restaurant where I’m serving. But everyone wants off for Christmas, so instead I floated the idea of New Year’s Eve and we agreed to figure it out later.

So far we haven’t talked about any of that on this trip. I haven’t wanted to think about missing Alex while I’m with him. It seems like a waste.

“If nothing else,” he joked, “we’ll always have the Summer Trip.”

I had to actively decide to see that as comforting.

From morning until hours after dark, we wander. Bourbon Street and Frenchmen, and Canal and Esplanade (Alex is particularly enamored of the stately old houses on this street, with their overflowing flower beds and sun-blanched palms rising up alongside craggy oaks).

We eat fluffy, sugar-dusted beignets in an open-air café and spend hours picking our way through the knickknacks being sold outside the French Market (alligator-head key chains and silver rings set with moonstones), the freshly baked breads and chilled local produce and dense little cakes topped with kiwi and strawberries and bourbon-soaked cherries and pralines (in every imaginable manner) being sold in the booths inside.

We drink Sazeracs and hurricanes and daiquiris everywhere we go, because “Staying on theme matters,” as Alex says dramatically when I try to order a gin and tonic, and from there, we have both our mantra and our alter egos for the week.

Gladys and Keith Vivant are a Broadway power couple, we decide. True performers, to their very cores, and as their matching tattoos read, All the world’s a stage!

They start every day with some acting exercises, stick to one prompt for a whole week at a time, letting it guide their every interaction so as to better inhabit the Character.

And theme, of course, is vital.

Or, you could say, it matters.

“Theme matters!” we scream back and forth, stomping our feet whenever we want each other to do something the other isn’t thrilled about.

There are a whole lot of vintage stores that seem to have never been cleaned before, and Alex is not thrilled about trying on the suede leather pants I pick out for him in one of these, just as I am not thrilled when he wants to spend six hours in an art museum.

“Theme