If the Shoe Fits (Meant To Be #1) by Julie Murphy

“I think that might be my own personal hell. Airplane food for eternity.”

“Oh, I think my actual personal hell is a party that I can’t seem to leave. Like every door I go through is just a door that takes me back to the same party and no matter how hard I try I can’t get out.”

“So I guess a surprise birthday party is your worst nightmare?”

He shakes his head. “I hate them. My mom threw me one for my thirteenth birthday, and it was mostly adults who came.”

“Didn’t she invite your friends from school?”

“Well, yeah, but I had four or five friends. Not nearly enough for the kind of party Lucy Mackenzie intended to throw. There were waiters on roller skates. And ice sculptures.”

“Ice sculptures?” I ask.

“Of me.”

My jaw hits the floor. “I’m sorry. Did you just say ice sculptures? Of you?”

“Make fun of me all you want, but we were competing with bar mitzvahs so intense that TLC filmed a pilot for a guy in our building called My Ballin’ Bar Mitzvah.”

“Whoa. My thirteenth birthday party was at the neighborhood pool. We rented a picnic table and ate nachos from the snack bar.”

“That’s the kind of party I would gladly attend.”

I laugh at the image of Henry at my dingy old neighborhood pool with all the teenage lifeguards who I thought were so hot but in reality had bacne just like me. “See, parties aren’t all that bad. And hey, you met Sabrina at a party. Aren’t parties sort of a way of life in the circles you run in?” Of course I wish our relationship wasn’t playing out on this TV show, but even if all this was stripped away, our lives are still worlds apart. The elite NYC parties Henry grew up attending are just one example of that. Maybe I should be more thankful for our little reality television bubble.

“Exactly why I hate them,” he says. “And I met Sabrina because I’m always looking for the person who can help me escape the party. The person who wants to take a walk or—”

“Go back to your place?” I ask playfully, but fully serious.

The corner of his mouth turns upward devilishly. “I guess that too…Back when I had time to meet people and I wasn’t trying to dig my family’s company out of the Mariana Trench.”

“Nice. A marine biology reference.”

“Cape Cod Marine Biology camp. Third grade through sixth grade.”

“Sleepaway camp?” I ask. “First boarding school. Now sleepaway camp. That’s rich-kid shit.”

“Well, you gotta dump your kid somewhere while you’re trekking across the globe bouncing from one ayahuasca retreat to the next.”

“Whoa. I didn’t realize Lucy went that hard.”

“Yeah, she’s real hip until the camp nurse is calling because her son broke his arm trying to dive out of a tree because he thinks if he just believes hard enough that he’s an astronaut, gravity will cease to exist. The only adult sober enough to talk was my mom’s assistant’s assistant, and he thought my name was Carson.”

“Okay, I have a lot of questions, but how does anyone get Carson from Henry?” I wish so hard that I still had my dad in my life, but at least when he was alive, he was the kind of dad that Father’s Day was made for. “What about your dad?” I ask. “He’s still around, right?” I remember seeing the picture of the three of them in his office, and it felt so far off and distant that I almost wondered if he was even still in Henry’s life.

He nods. “Roger Mackenzie is Lucy Mackenzie’s number-one fan. He hates clothing, and to this day, she sets an outfit out for him every morning. His parents died when he was young and still living in Edinburgh, so he took what inheritance they’d left him and moved to New York. He fell in love with my mom on the subway before he’d even made it to his hotel. They haven’t spent a night apart since. Neither of them really had family, so they were and are everything for each other.”

“That’s a good love story,” I say.

“It’s no Blockbuster meet-cute.”

I smile.

“I think usually when people have kids, they prepare for their lives to change. Sometimes they leave the city or give up going to the bar on weeknights, but my parents had no such intentions. They just kept on…living. And brought me along when they could and then shipped me off for boarding school when I was old enough. The first one was just outside of London. No one really knew what to make of the half-Scottish, quarter–Puerto Rican kid from America. Anyway, if it’s possible to be the third wheel with your own parents, that’s me.”

“That’s not fair,” I say. “It’s like…the one place you should always belong.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this out loud, but sometimes I think I proposed to Sabrina just to say I’d found my person. I’d found my family without them…. But now suddenly, they need me. And how do you say no? I couldn’t. I guess I need them too in a way.”

I reach across the table and take his hand, offering him the comfort of shared silence.

“I bet you have shitty-parent stories too,” he says, watching our linked hands.

Not really. Even though I could think of a few, they would all involve my teenage angst over Erica trying to assert herself as my mother. That was a rocky transition, to say the least, but guilt twinges in my stomach as I remember all the things I’ve kept from him. He knows my parents are dead, but after all he’s shared, I feel so wrong lying about Erica. “My stepmom is…She’s there for me when I need her. Not perfect, but she tries. And my mom and dad…It’s not that I think dying made them some kind of saints, but I miss them. Especially Dad…even when he was at his worst…which was rare.”