New Orleans trip

The New Orleans trip is a week-long excursion in which Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen transform sightseeing into a shared game—and discover, through play, how singular their bond has become. They give themselves theatrical alter egos, follow the city’s music and food from morning until night, and make a private world out of public streets. Beneath the comedy of costumes and cocktail rules, the trip brings Poppy to a new understanding of intimacy: with Alex, she can feel known and accompanied rather than sealed inside her own loneliness.

Setting and Shared Performance

The episode takes place seven summers before the novel’s present. Alex is drawn to New Orleans’s architecture: brightly colored old buildings, wrought-iron balconies, and ancient trees whose sprawling roots break through the sidewalks. Poppy is eager for frozen drinks and kitschy supernatural shops. Their different enthusiasms establish the trip’s characteristic rhythm: Alex attends closely to the city’s age and structure, while Poppy seeks its playful, offbeat pleasures.

They spend the days wandering Bourbon Street, Frenchmen Street, Canal Street, and Esplanade. Alex especially admires Esplanade’s old houses, overflowing flower beds, palms, and craggy oaks. They eat sugar-dusted beignets at an open-air café and browse the French Market, where the stalls offer alligator-head key chains, moonstone rings, fresh produce, breads, small fruit-topped cakes, and pralines. The itinerary is less a checklist than an invitation to keep moving together; they wander from morning until hours after dark.

Food and drink become part of the week’s invented theatrical system. When Poppy tries to order a gin and tonic, Alex insists, “Staying on theme matters,” and their repeated commitment to the theme gives them both a mantra and new identities. They decide they are Gladys and Keith Vivant, a Broadway power couple whose matching tattoos declare, “All the world’s a stage!” Each morning begins with acting exercises; for a week at a time they adopt a prompt and let it shape their interactions. Their self-conscious performance does not distance them from one another. Instead, it gives their friendship a playful form in which each can encourage the other to be more openly strange.

That encouragement becomes explicit when Poppy tells Alex, “I love when you get weird.” He answers, “You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.” Poppy replies that he makes her weird too, then jokes about getting real tattoos of their theatrical motto. The exchange marks the performance as something particular to their relationship: the personas are invented, but the permission they give each other is real. Their attachment appears not as a general ease with people, but as a rare freedom they share together.

The City as a Stage

The theme becomes a running argument as well as a game. Poppy shouts “Theme matters!” when Alex resists entering a bar whose band consists entirely of saxophones. Alex returns the refrain when Poppy objects to matching shirts labeled Drunk Bitch 1 and Drunk Bitch 2, which parody the numbered shirts sold at theme parks. They leave the shop wearing the shirts over their clothes. The joke depends on their willingness to commit to a bit even when it is embarrassing, and on the ease with which each can pull the other further into it.

Later, they encounter a brass band playing in the street, with horns and drums, and stop to watch couples dance. Alex offers Poppy his hand and twirls her into a close, sleepy dance. They giggle and sway out of time; he spins her away and back, attempts a dip, nearly drops her, then catches her and swings her upright. The clumsy sequence matters precisely because it is not polished: the trip’s theatricality gives way to unselfconscious physical closeness. Poppy imagines that even Jason Stanley and the other bullies from her past could be there mocking her, and she would still keep dancing with Alex. The public audience has become irrelevant to the private ease between them.

When Alex puts a strand of dirty beads over Poppy’s neck, she thanks him for touching them and tells him she loves them. His beaming response prompts a private realization: she loves him more than ever, and the feeling keeps growing. She asks to take a picture together, wanting to preserve the moment; in the photograph Alex has widened his eyes at the last second, apparently to keep himself from looking sleepy. The comic image does not cancel the tenderness. It makes the memory theirs: affectionate, silly, and difficult to hold still.

The Story Alex Shares

The trip’s intimacy also takes the form of reading. Poppy asks whether Alex has a novel she could read during his shower, and he tosses her a pillow before going into the bathroom. What he gives her is a nine-page story about a boy born with wings. Other people insist the boy must fly; afraid, he eventually jumps from a two-story roof, falls, and breaks both his legs and his wings. His bones heal in a misshapen form, and people finally stop telling him that he was born to fly. At last, he is happy.

Poppy cries when Alex returns. The story reaches an old fear she has carried since childhood: that no one can know her completely, because no one can look directly into another person’s mind. Reading Alex’s story makes her feel, for the first time, as though she is no longer confined within her own body. She imagines herself and Alex as distinct colors moving freely together inside a shared bubble. The image does not erase their differences; it makes connection feel possible without requiring either person to become the other.

Her tears are relief as well as emotion. Poppy understands that the lonely nights of her childhood no longer define the limits of her future: as long as Alex is in her life, she will not be alone in the same way again. The story’s ending, in which the boy becomes happy after others stop imposing an identity on him, resonates with the ease Poppy and Alex have made possible for each other. Their private game is not a demand to perform correctly; it is a space where each can be unusual without being rejected.

Consequences and Continuing Bond

A later conversation at a resort echoes the change Poppy experiences in New Orleans. Alex says that he hates thinking of her as lonely, recalling her feeling alone when she goes to the airport. Poppy answers that she is not really so lonely anymore and explains that his written words, which she holds on Post-it notes, make her feel accompanied. Her response gives the earlier realization a lasting, concrete form: connection persists not only in shared travel but also in the words Alex leaves for her.

Alex then tells her that he felt he barely existed before she asked who he was, and that no one really knew him before her. He promises that even if things between them change, she will never be alone and he will always love her. Poppy tells him she knows and returns the declaration of love. This later exchange should not be confused with a spoken romantic confession during the New Orleans week; instead, it reveals how deeply the trip’s recognition has endured. New Orleans gives their friendship a language of shared performance, private understanding, and dependable presence. Its lasting significance lies in the discovery that each has become a home-like presence for the other, even before either can resolve what that love means for their relationship.