That was how Christmas officially began in their little corner of Manhattan in the middle of the nineteen-nineties: with needles in the carpet, a bruise blooming on Gus's shin, and a fir tree that had, against all architectural logic, agreed to stand up straight after one terrified snip. Outside the apartment windows, light snow drifted past the fire escapes of a Greenwich Village block that smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts from a cart on the corner and faintly of bus exhaust. Inside, the walls were the color of a grape soda left too long in the fridge—purple on purpose, chosen by Wren three years earlier when the three of them had first pooled deposits and decided that adulthood, if it had to happen, might as well happen somewhere ridiculous and warm.
Dez sat in the middle of the orange velvet throw they had dragged upstairs from the coffeehouse couch downstairs—technically borrowed, technically never returned—and watched the tree lights blink in a rhythm that felt like a private joke. He was twenty-eight, which in those days felt both ancient and unfinished. His dark hair fell in a tousled middle part that he insisted was accidental and that Wren insisted he cultivated with the solemnity of a monk. Stubble shadowed his jaw. The green cable-knit sweater he wore had belonged to his father once, and the baggy jeans had belonged to nobody special, only to the decade. He looked, Wren sometimes thought when she let herself think it, like someone who had walked out of a thrift-store dream and forgotten to walk back in.
Wren herself was twenty-eight too, honey-blonde hair layered soft around her face, makeup done with the glam precision she never abandoned even on laundry day: arched brows, winged liner, rosy blush, mauve lips that matched the season without trying too hard. Over a burgundy slip dress she wore a cream cardigan, sleeves pushed to her elbows, a silver charm bracelet ticking softly whenever she lifted her giant mug. She worked as a junior art director at a downtown lifestyle magazine that paid her almost enough and praised her almost enough and kept her late almost enough that Christmas felt like a stolen weekend rather than a holiday.
Gus Pembroke, also twenty-eight—because the universe, Dez liked to say, had a sense of humor about birth years—sat on Wren's other side with his curly auburn hair escaping the neatness he never quite achieved, round glasses fogging slightly from the steam of his cocoa, mustard corduroy blazer open over a flannel shirt that had seen better winters. Gus taught two sections of freshman composition at a community college uptown and spent the rest of his waking hours writing a play nobody had asked for about three roommates in a purple apartment, which he swore was fiction and which Wren and Dez swore was libel. He was the one who had found the coffeehouse job two winters back, the one with the brick walls and the tinsel over the bar and the orange velvet couch that now lived a secret second life upstairs. He still picked up Saturday shifts when the manager begged. He still believed, with a stubbornness that embarrassed him, that Christmas meant something even when the city pretended it didn't.
The tree glowed. The mugs clinked again. Snow thickened against the glass.
And none of them, not yet, said the things that mattered.
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The morning Dez bought the tree had begun, as many of his mornings did, with the radio alarm stuttering through a song from three years earlier and the radiator arguing with itself. He had lain in bed staring at the purple ceiling and thinking about December as a kind of exam he kept failing—failing to feel festive enough, failing to call his aunt enough, failing to tell Wren the thing that sat in his throat like a swallowed ornament. Gus was already up, muttering over a stack of essays at the kitchen table, glasses low on his nose, mustard blazer draped over the chair like a second personality resting.