Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

This, and every other song on this disc, is dedicated to Tris-.

And if this is the soundtrack, my mind and my broken heart collaborate to provide me with the movie-that night she was so tired she said she needed to lie down, so she climbed over the seat and laid out in the back. I thought I'd lost her, but then five minutes later my cell phone rang and it was her, calling me from my own backseat. In a sleepy voice she told me how safe and comfortable she felt, how she was remembering all those late-night drives back from vacation, and how she'd stretch herself out and feel like her parents were driving her bed, nothing unusual about the movement of the road under the wheels and the tree branches waving across the windshield. She said those moments made her feel like the car was home, and maybe that's how I made her feel, too.

Eventually she fell asleep, but I kept the phone against my ear, lulled by her breathing, and her breathing again in the background. And yes, it felt like home. Like everything belonged exactly where it was.

"I so don't need this right now," Norah says. But she doesn't change the song.

"Have you ever thought about their name?" I ask, just to make conversation. "I mean, for what?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The Cure. What do they think they're the cure for? Happiness?"

"This coming from the bassist for The Fuck Offs?"

And I can't help it. I think, Wow, she knows our name.

"Dev's thinking of changing it to The Fuck Ons," I tell her.

"How 'bout simply Fuck On?"

"Maybe one word? Fuckon?"

"The Friendly Fuckons?"

"My Fuckon Or Yours?"

"Why is he such a fucking Fuckon?"

I look at her. "Is that a band name or a statement?"

"He had no right to do that. None."

We break into silence again. I lob a question right into it.

"Who is he, then?"

"An ex," she says, slumping back in the seat a little. "Theex, I guess."

"Like Tris," I say, relating.

She sits up and gives me a purely evil glance. "No. Not like Tris at all. This was real."

I pause for a second, listen to our breakup playing under the conversation.

"That was mean," I say. "You have no idea."

"Neither do you. So let's drop it. I'm supposed to show you a good time."

I take this last sentence as a kind of apology. Mostly because that's what I want it to be.

I'm winding through the Lower East Side now, on the streets that have names and not numbers. The night is still very much young here, hipster congregants exhaling their smoke from sidewalk square to sidewalk square. I find a parking space on the darker side of Ludlow, then convince Norah to retrace Jessie's steps until we're in front of a pink door.

"Camera Obscura?" Norah asks.

I nod.

"Bring on the nuns," she says.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to knock or just open the door. The answer is given to me in the form of a burly bouncer dressed in a Playboy Bunny outfit.

"ID?" he asks.

I reach for my cousin's license from Illinois, won in a particularly intense Xbox challenge.

Norah pats her pockets down. Blankly.

And just as I think, Oh fuck, she says those exact words.

6. NORAH

Oh fuck.FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!

I mailed the letter turning down the acceptance to Brown just this morning. And only now, in the middle of this night or is it morning and why does time cease to tick when I see Tal, only now do I get it. Kibbutz in South Africa: BIG FUCKING MISTAKE. Like, HUGE. What was I thinking? So we've broken up five times over the last three years. Somehow in the back of my mind was the thought that either (1) Tal and I would work things out next time, and what better place to do that than away from our families and friends in a commune on the flip side of the world, or (2) we wouldn't work things out yet again, but I'd be the best freakin' worker that kibbutz had ever seen; and as a bonus, Tal would die of jealousy when I fell madly in love with some beautiful surfer boy from Capetown and left Tal weeding gardens while I bailed on the kibbutz to backpack across the world with my new surfer love who hopefully would have a pretty-looking name like Ndgijo.