I finally wrote the section where Amy sneaks away from her parents to spend the day at the MET. This is the chapter I traveled to New York for my birthday to research. I lived a day in Amy's life. Much thanks to all of the writers in my summer workshop who told me I couldn't fake a real New York experience and to my advisor for giving me the push I needed to book a trip to NYC and most of all thanks to my cousin Darby for going to New York and living a day in Amy's life with me and to my wonderful friend Nick for being the best host ever! Hooray for re-writing :)

I could hardly sleep. I just kept waiting for Mom’s alarm. When it finally rang, I nearly peed my pjs.

            I slid out of bed and hunkered down on the floor grabbing my clothes for the day out of my suitcase. Camel colored khaki shorts and a salmon pink fitted tank top. You know, “fitted” to show off my curves—haha—or in real life, fitted to show that I have no boobs. I tiptoed to the bathroom to change and brush my teeth and hair. Dad was out, I assumed, because his blankets were wrapped all over his head and body like a dead person in a body bag.

            After making sure Dad’s body bag was breathing, I glanced back at Keegan on my way to the bathroom. He was twisted up his sheets on the pullout couch. All other blankets piled down on the floor. His arms and legs stuck out at weird angles. His arms looked like he’d been doing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance in his sleep and his feet still stuck out from under the covers from last night when he had to let the lotion dry on them.

            It took me all of fifteen minutes to get ready, grab my purse and quietly open the door and slide out of the room. I don’t think I breathed until I heard the little click of the door closing. I did it! Now to get out onto the street. It was all I could do to not run to the elevator and out the door. Must not attract attention.

            There was a man in jogging cloths riding down the elevator when I got in. “Uh, I-I’m going down to breakfast,” I blurted out as soon as I walked in, my eyes bugging out.

            He just nodded to me and pointed at the headphones in his ears.

When we got to the lobby my elevator partner started running away before he even got out the door, punching his watch as soon as the elevator opened. I could see people settling down to breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant down the hall. A few people sat in the lobby drinking coffee and eating, I don’t know, various muffins and egg sandwiches from the Voltshop in the lobby and reading newspapers. No one even looked at me. I was sure the front desk woman with her big beehive hair and bloody crimson lipstick was going to stop me when my hands first touched the revolving door to escape, but she just said to “have a nice morning!”

Standing out on the sidewalk seemed too easy. Really? I made it? I didn’t even have to use my half lie that I was going to get breakfast. Half lie because I will get breakfast, that’s just not the main reason for me going out.

Out on the street, I realized two things immediately. 1. I hadn’t asked the hotel girl where to get on the four or five subway from the hotel. And 2. I was going to ride the subway wearing shorts and whenever there were days when we were going to ride the subway with Mom, she made us wear pants or capris so that our bare skin didn’t touch anything on the trains.

I turned to go back inside and ask the beehive where the four/five was. Then I turned back toward the street. Did I want her help? Could I trust her? What would she think about me going out alone?

I got out my map; and while unfolding it, a guy stopped and asked if I needed help.

“Uh, no, no it’s—I’m OK,” I said.

“No, really, it’s not a big deal. What are you looking for?” He smiled and took a step closer. He was maybe a college student. He had a book bag and headphones around his neck but not in his ears. He also had a beanie on his head even though it was summer. I don’t get that fashion statement.

Mom always says you can’t trust people in New York. Dad says this isn’t necessarily true. Dad says in Nebraska people are just known for being extraordinarily nice and that’s not the case in most other places. Grandma says people are people no matter where you go. “Where’s the entrance to the four or the five subways?” I asked.

“That’s easy.” He smiled. “Go down to the corner there, cross the street and turn right. It’ll be right there. Not even three minutes away.”

“Thanks,” I said. Stuffing my map back in my purse.

“Good luck with the rest of your travels.”

Lookie there, I thought to myself, people are nice. You just have to ask for help.

I walked down to the corner like he said, crossed the street when the light told me I could and followed a group of business people on cell phones to the subway stop. I’d watched Mom do the money for tickets before. I knew I just needed two entries into the subway, one to get there and one to get back so I put in the exact amount for two trips. No wonder Mom always wanted us to be fully clothed when we came down here. I wished I were wearing gloves when I punched the buttons on the machine and couldn’t help thinking how many other people had touched those buttons and how many thousands of germs and diseases and general dirtiness their fingers had come in contact with. I shivered at the bacteria I imagined to be crawling up my hands and legs.

Deep breath. To the train. To the MET.

I followed the green signs for the four and five trains. I had to take the exit on 86^th street. 86^th, 86^th, 86^th, I repeated in my brain. I could do it. I had gotten on at the Wall Street entrance. I needed to go toward The Bronx, not toward Brooklyn. I could take the four toward Woodlawn or the five toward Eastchester. Follow the greens. I found my platform and the five train toward Eastchester pulled up with me. Perfect timing.

There is a seat in the corner left for me and I slide into it, trying to make myself as small as possible. I have to watch the stops carefully.

No one else is looking around. Most people have their heads down and are reading or looking at their phones or the floor. 86^th Street, 86^th Street, 86^th Street, I repeat to myself. That’s my stop. Right? Oh, crap! That’s it right? I can’t get my map out now. No one else even has to look up from the floor to know when to get off. I can’t get out my map to confirm. 86^th Street. 86^th is right. I can do this.

The man across from is looking down at his shoes and I can see he has some kind of injury on the top of his baldhead. There is toilet paper stuck to it. It looks too deep to be a shaving injury, but I’m not sure why he would put toilet paper on it. I drop my eyes to the ground like everyone else. There are yellow Chuck Taylors planted to the floor, basketball shoes with short/pants/shmants? that almost touched the tops of the high-topped basketball shoes, sandals with green toes, more Chuck Taylors.

Canal Street stop. And bags. Bags galore litter the floor. Everyone has a least one bag. Most have more. Almost no one is talking to each other. They are like me, alone. Those who are in pairs are talking so loudly.

Grand Central Station stop. And pants. Everyone is wearing dark pants—jeans or dark brown. I rub my hands on my white, bare legs. A man with a baby in a stroller boards the train. The baby is so little but he is holding a water bottle. Really? The dad just expects him to hold onto that bottle? The baby has a scab on his knee. He starts to pick the scab. The dad is looking at his phone. A woman is sleeping with her head on the pole, her coffee in hand.

50^th Street stop. A woman starts singing “Amazing Grace” somewhere down at the other end of the train. I can’t see her. A little Asian man sits next to me. I fiddle with the strap on my purse. “You are not from here,” he says to me.

“N-no,” I stammer. My voice sounds so loud in the train. A man with a yamaka bobs his head to the sway of the train.

“Where are you from?” he asks. He is holding onto the seat behind my back and his fingernails are caked in dirt.

“Omaha,” I say. “Nebraska.”

“Ah, that is nice.” He smiles and reveales that most of his teeth are missing. “So in Nebraska are people pretty nice?”

“I-I guess so,” I say. I try to scoot a little farther away from him. He smells like pee.

“Is there a lot of theft in Omaha?” he asks. “Like could you lay down your notebook, leave and would it be there when you got back?”

“I guess so. Maybe, probably. People are pretty nice,” I say. His jean jacket has rust colored stains on it and his shirt, which I assume had once been a bright yellow, has a hole under the left side of his rib cage. I can see his skin.

“So there’s not too much theft,” he says, shifting one of his plastic grocery sacks in his lap. He has three in his lap and two on the floor.

“Well, it’s a city, I mean in Omaha people break into cars and stuff,” I say.

“Yes, but people are generally nice. And if you forgot your notebook, say on a desk at school, it would probably be there when you went back looking for it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“That’s just great. Good people, Nebraskans. It’s not like that here,” he says.

 He continues talking about how nice it must be in Nebraska where you could just leave your notebooks out. Oh, God, I think. He is going to rob me. My stop is next. I’m going to get out of here and look in my purse and everything will be gone. Oh, what was I thinking? I’m an idiot.

We were slowing down for the next stop and I saw that 86^th Street was tiled on the walls flashing by as the train rolled in.

“Uh, this is my stop,” I said, getting up.

“How pleasant it was to chat with you, Nebraska,” he called, smiling as I hurried out of the train.

I didn’t care about social acceptance. I ran up the stairs and out of the subway not paying attention to which exit I took. I just needed to get above ground and back to daylight. Once out on the street, I rifled through my purse. Everything was there. My phone, my wallet, all contents of my wallet. Nothing was missing. I slowed my breath to a normal pace.

Uh, oh. Seven new text messages. Eight missed calls. Four voicemails. I guessed my absence had been noticed.

I sent Dad a text: “hey. went to get breakfast. im ok love you”

Immediately after I pushed send, my mom’s picture popped up on my phone and vibrated with all of her anger in my hand. She was a quick dial. I ignored the call and surveyed my surroundings. OK, I thought, I’m on 86^th Street. I need to be on 83^rd Street. There’s Lexington. Do I need to go right or left? I peered down the street both ways. Left. The numbers got bigger going right.

After I turned left onto Lexington, I stopped in a place that advertised “hot and crusty” so I could pick something up for breakfast to stick with my half lie. I got a cinnamon bagel with blueberry cream cheese to eat while I walked. The numbers continued to get smaller until, my heart almost stopped at the site, there it was! The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art! Bloody hell I’d found it!

The moment was almost religious. I thought I might cry. I crammed what was left of my bagel into the bag and marched across the street. I’d seen the outside before. I’d seen the outside so many times when we’d come to Central Park. Never would Mom let me go in. I took a picture of the outside with my phone and texted it to Bere, Sophia, Grandma and Marcus. I sat down on the front steps and really savored each bit of my bagel, taking in the view of my glorious museum.

After dorking around finishing my bagel and exchanging texts with Grandma—the only person I’d sent the picture to who was awake in Central Time Zone—it was 9:20, only ten more minutes until the museum opened, and I knew I had to do the dirty work. I called Dad.

“Amy! Thank God! Where did you go for breakfast? We’ve been looking all over. I know you aren’t in the hotel,” he said.

“Is that her? Where is she?” I could hear Mom yelling in the background.

“Hey, yeah, I, um, I’m, I decided, I just got done eating breakfast. I’m at the MET,” I said.

“You’re at the MET?” he asked. “How did you get there? Are you OK? Where is that? How far? Did you walk? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I’m fine. I’m here. I’ll be safe in the building,” I said, walking up the steps toward the front door.

“She’s where?” Mom asked in the background. “Give me the phone.”

“I’m going in now and I can’t be talking on the phone when I go in. I’m OK. Love you.” I hung up the phone and stuffed it into my back pocket. It started vibrating a second later and I realized the back pocket would be far too annoying. I couldn’t have my butt buzzing all day long so I turned it on silent after I let Mom’s call go to voicemail and tossed the phone into my purse.

I was in. I entered the MET. Now was the time for that woman to be singing “Amazing Grace,” I thought. I paid the student fee, well, “the student recommended donation,” and grabbed the museum map. I had no desire to see pottery or weapons or musical instruments. Paintings and drawings. Maybe some sculptures.

I found myself first in the American wing looking at paintings of slaves. How American, I thought. Not that a person should feel good about slavery, but I found myself feeling even more uncomfortable with it than ever. I remembered learning that there was no slavery in Nebraska, but now that the apparent “segregation” of my town had been made obvious to me, I wondered if Nebraska people were really as nice as we were rumored to be. It’s like I live in a world where we are all nice to strangers and nice to each other’s faces but only when we’re in our comfort zones. I like Omaha. I like Nebraska. But isn’t our niceness a little fake sometimes if we expect everyone to stay in their little pockets of town?

“We.” What is we? Do I consider myself a part of that we who are nice fakers? I hope not. I hope I’m really nice.

I wandered along and came to a hall with all kinds of freaky kid paintings. You know, like the really old ones where you can’t tell if the boys are boys or girls and they’re all round and hoity-toity looking? Kind of gross. But, really, in all honesty, fascinating. Someone actually got paid to paint these kids like this. Some family displayed these paintings in their home.

The feelings, the pictures, the details, reading the stories—God, nothing at home was as good as this. Nothing could compare. I wanted to sit down with each work and just study every brush or pencil stroke. See each masterpiece: the perfection, the flaws. But then, just like any other museum there were works that didn’t speak to me. Or there were the ones like the freaky kids that spoke negatively to me.

I found Washington Crossing the Delaware and about threw out my back trying to take in the whole thing. It’s so freaking huge! I mean, I knew the dimensions. I’d read about it. But jeez, really seeing the thing. Amazeballs. I can’t even imagine where the artist started. How do you start something that huge? And the proportions were right. I’d have one head this size, one head another size—it’d be a mess. I read that he had to restart twice because the first two were destroyed. That’s dedication. How cool to care so much about your idea that you keep restarting from scratch. I suppose maybe in the 1800’s maybe he didn’t have anything better to do. He didn’t have a hot young artist at art camp distracting him.

I sat down at the bench in front of Washington Crosses the Delaware and just thought for a while. Staring up, neck cranked and my mouth was probably hanging open like a gaping idiot. I didn’t even care. I was at the MET!

I wondered where you’d have to store a canvas that large in the 1800’s so that it didn’t get wet. It’s not like they had workshops like we do now. He probably had it in, like, a barn.

I couldn’t imagine that dad would let me clear out the garage for a few months to work on something that large. Larger than life-sized. Crap. Dad. I checked my phone fourteen missed calls and eight new text messages. And it was noon. I opened the most recent text message from Dad: “where are you? i paid to get in this place and now i cant find you.”

Crap, I thought. They’re here. I hadn’t even see Degas yet. Shooty, shoot, shoot. Well, it’s a big museum. It’ll take him a while to find me. He probably doesn’t even know who or what Degas is.

“im going to see the degas exhibit. meet me there. thats the last thing i really need to see.” I sent back.

I tried to give myself tunnel vision and not pause on my way to find Degas. It was hard. But then there she was. The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer—the reason I could never be a sculptor. How anyone had the bravery to try sculpting after Edgar Degas perfected this little girl was a wonder to me. I love her. I want to be her. I want someone to be so interested in me that they would take the time to create something that perfect in my image. I want to be so inspired by something that I draw countless sketches before the final project is complete. Hell, even Degas’s sketches of this sculpture are famous and hanging in the museum.

Oh, how I love all of his dancers! What a neat form to study—their grace, their angles, their bodies and tutus. Everything is so perfect. The positions of their heads, their feet—you can see their elegance even in the still frame.

“Amy Delancy, you are in so much trouble!”

I jumped and turned back at the sound of Dad’s voice as he came up from behind me. I was standing in front of Three Dancers Preparing for Class. I turned back to the drawing. How could I care about being in trouble when I finally got to see this in real life?

“Dad, look at this,” I said, still staring at the piece. “How could I waste another second of my life not seeing this in person?” My voice was so quiet. I didn’t care. I didn’t care one bit that he was mad. I didn’t care that it wasn’t fair that he was mad. I was there. I was standing in front of Edgar Degas’s drawings. I was surrounded by them. Woman Combing Her Hair, The Dancers, Two Dancers, Sulking—all of them. I was in a room with the very essence of Degas himself.

Dad was talking all the while I was thinking this, but I didn’t hear him.

“Did you know he’s my favorite?” I asked him. “Edgar Degas. He’s my favorite artist. Do you see the rough sketches here and here?” I asked, pointing to some of his initial sketches of later masterpieces. “Do you see how much he cared about each subject? The care he took to get each detail. He’s just amazing.”

I walked over to The Dancing Class. “He spent hours watching his subjects. I wish I had something like that. I wish I were so inspired by something like dancers that I could just spend hours in their classes watching and drawing. Do you love anything that much, Dad?” I finally looked at him. He hadn’t left Three Dancers Preparing for Class.

“Do you like it?” I whispered.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“This sculpture here,” I said gesturing to the middle of the room where The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer stood, poised in a protective glass case, “is one of the most famous sculptures in the world. We’re here getting to see it. Isn’t that cool?

“Degas is French. He lived and worked in Paris from 1834-1917. Most of his work was done in the 1870s. His ones of the dancers are my favorite. The way he studied was that he copied works of Michelangelo and da Vinci. He was friends with Manet, Monet and Renoir and his work was a huge influence on Picasso. Can you imagine? He’s one of the founding artists of the Impressionist movement. His paintings and drawings travel all over the world. I did read somewhere though that he was involved in some controversy that lost him many friends because he was anti-Jewish. I’m not sure I remember all the details. I do remember he said something about how if art weren’t difficult, it wouldn’t be fun. Man, what would it be like for people to remember your work and your words?”

“I like the dancers,” Dad said as we walked toward Woman with a Towel, “but tell me about the naked women combing their hair and bathing.”

“Ooo, I like this one. It’s pastels. That’s what I use when I’m not using pencils, you know. He really liked the female body. During the Impressionist movement, he did a whole exhibit on naked women. Some people loved it, others hated it. The cool thing I know about this piece is how carefully he had to plan the colors. You see he used the pastels with his fingers and all kinds of other utensils like brushes and sticks to smudge and polish the pastel and mixed and layered the colors. The colors didn’t become muddy though. They didn’t mix too much. He was so careful about everything. Each color, each stroke was so planned.”

He just nodded staring at the painting. “So he was just interested in dancers and naked women?” We walked in front of Dancers Pink and Green next.

“I guess so. Can you blame him though? Once you can do something like that, if that’s what inspires you, why not go with it. Who wants to draw something they don’t like?”

“I love this one.”

“Dancers Pink and Green is one of my favorites too. He did one where the dancers are in blue too. It’s in Paris. You see the top hat man?” I asked pointing at the painting. “He’s kind of creepy huh? This one is actually really cool because there are no known sketches of the painting so it’s assumed that he just did it all on canvas with oil paints. I find this really hard to believe with as careful a planner as he was, but maybe he wanted to try something new.”

“You know a lot about him,” Dad said. “I guess that’s like Keegan knowing all about athletes. Hey, when I was coming to find you, I went by some paintings in the rooms before this one that I thought I recognized. Can I show you?”

He took me to Water Lilies by Claude Monet.

“Of course. Everyone recognized Monet. He was another one of the leaders in Paris of Impressionism too. He did, like, dozens of these lily paintings. They kind of became abstract as he went on. My favorite of his, ah, yes! They have it here. The Houses of Parliament. Apparently when he was staying in London he did over a hundred paintings like this at from different angles in different kinds of daylight. That was just his life. He could just stay in London and roam around each day painting. No big deal.”

“It’s not like that for artists any more is it?” Dad asked.

“Well, you know, I think I want to teach art to college kids so that I can get paid to work on my own stuff too. We had a speaker come talk about it. Universities probably let you travel and stuff if it’s for your work. I think this European Paintings exhibit is the best one here, but if you want to look at something else we can,” I said as Dad started wandering toward the next room of European paintings.

I showed him Manet and Goya and Picasso. He was so surprised to see that Picasso didn’t just do the crazy nose-on-the-forehead abstract stuff! We just walked and talked and he listened. He listened and was interested in all the things I had to say.

Then his phone rang. I knew it had to be Mom. No, Dad didn’t know it was almost three o’clock. He was sorry we didn’t call. We would head out right away.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, Dad,” I told him as we walked outside. “Tell me, honestly, what did you think?”

He held out his elbow for me to slip my arm through. “Amy, that was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in New York. Probably because I had such a great tour guide.”

I knew it! But I didn’t say “I told you so.” I just smiled and we walked arm in arm to the subway stop. I lead the way.