I nod slowly.
“Are you okay? You don’t look okay.” She laughs.
“Neither do you.” I pause. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“I mean, you’ll have to look at his picture and tell me.”
“There’s a picture?” My stomach twists.
“Don’t ever underestimate my internet creepiness.”
“I never do,” says Ethan.
“Shut up. So I had a stroke of inspiration. I was thinking about the whole story with Namrata, and I was like, you know what? I’m searching for Hudson Panini.”
“Um—”
“No, hear me out. So I go to Twitter, and I literally type in Hudson panini—and the first thing that comes up is a guy named @HudsonLikeRiver. So right away, I’ve got chills, because that’s exactly what you said, remember? Hudson, like the river.” She points at me, smiling. “Anyway, this guy HudsonLikeRiver has a tweet from 11:44 in the morning today, and it says craving a panini lol.”
“Okay . . .”
“Arthur, he was craving a panini today, thirty minutes before you ran into him ordering a panini. And his name is Hudson!”
“But how do we know he’s the Hudson? Is he from New York?”
Jessie leans forward, grinning. “I’m not done. Anyway, I check his bio, and it’s super vague, and all of his tweets are vague, too—and they’re bad, they’re bad tweets. Not even funny-bad. And his picture is a bitmoji. So I’m like, fuck. But then I get the idea to check Instagram, because people usually just use the same handle, right? And sure enough. Boom. @HudsonLikeRiver. Public profile, fifty zillion pictures, amazing eyebrows. He’s from New York. Art, I’m freaking out.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“You have to go check it right now,” she says. “We’ll talk to you later, okay?”
She ends the call, and I just sit there, shell-shocked. A boy named Hudson. From New York. With great eyebrows. Who was publicly craving a panini for lunch today. Box Boy would be following him on Instagram, right? At least they’d be tagged in pictures together. Which kind of makes my stomach churn, but whatever.
Deep cleansing breath. I pull up Instagram and type in the handle.
Hudson like river. @HudsonLikeRiver
And I’m there.
Text from Jessie: Is it him??
I can’t even form a reply. God. It’s him. Hudson. Clarendon-filtered, wearing that backward baseball hat. Selfie upon selfie.
But I have to stay calm. Just because he’s Hudson Robinson, random panini boy, doesn’t mean he’s Hudson from the address label. It doesn’t mean anything. For one thing, Box Boy is nowhere. Not a single picture of him in Hudson’s entire feed.
I click through them anyway, starting with the most recent—which is—I’m not even kidding—a picture of his fucking panini. The next one’s a selfie with some girl, adorably named @HarriettThePie, and then a peace sign selfie with the hashtag MovingOn.
Moving on.
It’s from the day I met Box Boy—which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There are lots of ways a person can move on. Hudson could have changed jobs. He could have gotten a haircut. He could have moved on from bread bowls to paninis.
But the comments. One particular comment.
@HarriettThePie: You’re going to be fine without him, my beautiful friend. <3
Him.
Hudson doesn’t need him.
I take a screenshot of the picture and Harriett’s comment, and I text it to Jessie and Ethan. It’s him.
Holy. Shit, writes Jessie.
Whoa, nice work, Ethan chimes in. Followed by three detective emojis, two white boys and a brown girl. As if Ethan—world’s most underachieving online creeper—had anything to do with this breakthrough.
But I’m too nervous to care. I’m cranked up to a thousand. I scoot back in my bed to settle in with the app. Time to take inventory.
@HudsonLikeRiver. 694 posts. 315 followers. 241 following. His bio’s kind of bare. Huds in the house. NYC baby.
I scroll again through his pictures, all 694 of them. There’s not a single one of Box Boy, not even in a group shot, and they definitely don’t follow each other. I check the pictures other people have tagged Hudson in. No trace of Box Boy there either.
I mean, maybe this is all one giant coincidence. Just another Hudson. Another Hudson in New York who dates boys and just had a breakup.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence.
Maybe Hudson and Box Boy deleted every single picture of each other and untagged the ones their friends posted. And of course they unfollowed each other, because they probably can’t stand the sight of each other. Which is why Box Boy was mailing the box in the first place.
Any luck? Jessie writes.
Not yet. Frowny face.
I switch over to Harriett’s profile, since she and Hudson seem close—and even if she’s all for Hudson moving on, she probably knew the ex he’s moving on from.
And. Holy shit. Four thousand posts. Seventy-five thousand followers.
Okay, so Hudson’s friend Harriett is some kind of an Instagram celebrity, and that is . . . pretty fucking cool, actually. She posts a lot of selfies with dramatically contoured cheekbones and intricate eyeliner patterns, and now I can’t stop looking through them. I’m not even a makeup guy, but it’s just so awesomely theatrical. If I didn’t think it would be next-level creepy, I’d follow the hell out of Harriett.
Except—wow. Eye on the prize, Arthur.
I scroll down to some of Harriett’s earlier posts, where there are fewer selfies and more pictures with friends. Lots with Hudson, lots with various girls, and a whole series of a guy with a beard and shimmery unicorn eye makeup. But there are group pictures, too—I pause longer on those, carefully scanning the faces. I keep scaring the crap out of myself by almost liking Harriett’s pictures. Not on purpose. It’s my self-sabotaging fingers and their unstoppable compulsion to pinch and zoom.
By now, I’ve worked my way back to March, and there’s a whole series of group pictures in the snow outside Duane Reade. Mostly action shots—a snowball fight—but I notice Hudson in the background, looking out of frame and laughing.
I swipe sideways. Same snowball fight, but the image is shifted slightly to the right. Now you can see Hudson’s laughing with a guy—but he’s blurry.
I swipe again.
And then I forget how to breathe.
Because it’s the boy. It’s actually him. Center frame, pink-cheeked and smiling self-consciously, while Hudson’s doubled over, cracking up.
Holy. Shit.
I take a screenshot and text it straight to Jessie and Ethan. No caption. No emojis.
As always, Jessie’s the first to reply. Omg Arthur, that’s him? She doesn’t wait for me to reply. He’s beautiful.
That’s a handsome dude, adds Ethan. Multiple winking emojis. Ethan Gerson: my Totally Accepting Straight Bro Friend Who Can’t Be Alone with Me. I’d be totally accepting of him shutting the fuck up.
I turn back to Harriett’s feed and scan the post for Instagram handles. A few people are tagged in the snowball series, but not Box Boy. Or Hudson. Maybe they untagged themselves. I keep scrolling.
For hours.
Every single group post. I click on every single one. I scroll through Harriett’s followers—all seventy-five thousand of them. I scroll through her follow list. I click on everyone tagged in the snowball pictures and check their followers, too.
Nothing.
And not a single other picture of Box Boy.
Still no name. Maybe Box Boy was right. Maybe the universe really is an asshole.
What I need now is chocolate. And I’m not talking about a weak drizzle of Hershey’s sauce on a waffle. I need the hard stuff, like Jacques Torres or one of those giant double-chocolate-chip Levain Bakery cookies. The classic Upper West Side dilemma: when your heart says Levain, but your lazy ass remembers there’s a candy bowl next to the coffeepot.
Emotional blue balls. That’s what it feels like. It’s being handed everything you’ve ever longed for, only for it to slip through your fingers. And there’s no way to fix it. Nothing you can do but slink toward the kitchen counter in a full-body mope.