Chapter 7: An Invitation from a Beautiful Woman
After a full circuit of the produce section at the Associated Supermarket on Bleecker, Andrew came to the conclusion he'd been slowly circling toward for ten minutes: tomatoes were still the best deal in the store.
He put three good ones in the basket, added a carton of eggs, and moved on.
He was doing the math in his head the way people do when every dollar matters — produce was fine, American grocery prices in 1992 were genuinely reasonable once you were buying raw ingredients instead of prepared food. The seasonings he'd grabbed earlier were going to run him about fifteen dollars all told, which stung a little. Bread, butter, and a jar of jam ought to land under ten. The eggs and tomatoes were practically nothing.
He had a little over fifty dollars left after yesterday's spending, and the weight of it in his pocket felt both more and less than it was — more because it was basically everything, less because the apartment, the court date, and the next two weeks of eating all depended on it lasting.
He pushed the cart through the deli section with the specific deliberateness of someone who had just discovered that most grocery stores put out samples in the afternoon. He moved slowly. He was thorough about it. Protein supplementation, he told himself. Perfectly reasonable.
The prepared foods counter had sliced roast beef, a chicken thing with herbs, and some kind of baked ham. The prices were genuinely steep — labor cost, mostly. The raw cuts a few feet over were a fraction of the price. He was eyeing a package of chuck roast, doing the mental arithmetic on how far it would stretch if he made a stew — potatoes, carrots, maybe an onion — when a cart came around the corner at a brisk clip and nearly took him out.
"Andrew!"
"Monica."
They both grabbed their carts and steadied themselves. Monica Geller was pushing what appeared to be a week's worth of groceries, the kind of haul that suggested she had opinions about meal planning. She looked slightly flushed, the way people do when they've been moving efficiently through a store and have accidentally stopped.
"Do you cook for yourself?" she asked, eyeing his basket with what seemed like genuine interest.
"Yeah, eating out adds up fast." Andrew turned back to the meat case and selected the chuck roast. "And after last night, I'm not exactly rushing back to any street carts."
Monica laughed. "About that — my brother Ross apparently filed a complaint with the city health department and the consumer affairs office about that cart this morning. Turns out the guy didn't even have a vendor's license. He's already cleared out."
"So the three of us were basically the last customers."
"Seems like it."
They drifted together down the aisle in the way people do when a conversation hasn't quite ended but neither of them has somewhere urgent to be. Monica kept pace with Andrew's cart, asking about his cooking, what he was planning to make, whether he'd tried the butcher two blocks over on Hudson. She had, it turned out, very specific opinions about butchers.
Andrew answered and half-listened and tried to figure out why this whole conversation felt faintly familiar in a way he couldn't pin down.
Monica. Monica Geller.
At the checkout, Andrew loaded his items onto the belt, paid, and tucked his bags under his arm. Monica was still working through her cart — considerably more items, considerably more involved transaction. He waited for a natural break.
"Good running into you," he said. "See you around."
"Yeah, see you—" Monica started automatically, and then stopped.
Andrew was already heading for the exit.
She stood there for approximately two seconds, watching him walk away, and then made a decision.
"Hey — Andrew!"
She grabbed her bags, misjudged the weight distribution, leaned forward to catch up, caught her hip on the metal exit barrier, and went down in a spectacularly undignified sprawl. Bags everywhere. Monica Geller, horizontal, surrounded by groceries on the sidewalk outside the Associated Supermarket.
Andrew turned around.
He set his bag carefully against the wall, went over, and helped her up without making a big deal of it. Then he crouched down and started gathering her things, and while he was doing that, he said, "Did you need something?"
Monica accepted a can of crushed tomatoes from him and studied the sidewalk. "Nope. Nothing. Never mind."
Andrew didn't respond for a moment. He collected the rest of her things, got them back into the bags, and stood up. He held them out to her with both hands.
"Monica," he said, and his voice was straightforward, no performance in it. "You and Phoebe went out of your way for me last night. That actually meant something. So if there's ever anything you need from me — I mean that. I won't say no."
Monica took the bags. She looked at him.
A good-looking guy with honest eyes telling her he owed her one. She was competitive by nature and had been running a quiet internal race with Phoebe since yesterday afternoon, but something about the directness of it took the edge off that. Made it feel less like a competition and more like just — a person.
As if that was going to stop her.
"Do you want to come for dinner tonight?" she said. "At my apartment. I cook." She said it the way people say things they're proud of without wanting to seem like they're bragging about it. "And before you say anything — Phoebe lives with me. She'll want to see you."
Andrew hesitated.
It wasn't suspicion. He wasn't reading ulterior motives into it. It was more that the name — Monica Geller, the apartment, Phoebe as her roommate — had just lit up something in the back of his mind that he couldn't quite bring into focus yet. A feeling like he'd heard this before. Seen it before. Like a song playing from another room.
"Sure," he said. "Dinner sounds great."
"Great!" Monica's face did something complicated and pleased. She gave him the address — fourth floor, 90 Bedford, corner of Grove — and picked up her bags with renewed purpose.
"Monica." He said it as she was turning to go.
She looked back.
"Your last name's Geller, right? Monica Geller?"
"...Yes?" She said it with the mildly puzzled expression of someone unsure why that required confirmation. "See you tonight." And she was off down Bedford Street, bags swinging, clearly already planning a menu.
Andrew watched her go.
Monica Geller.
He stood on the sidewalk outside the supermarket in Greenwich Village on a Thursday afternoon in the fall of 1992, holding a bag of groceries and a chuck roast, and felt the pieces arranging themselves into something coherent.
Monica. Phoebe. Ross. Chandler.
The bar on Bedford Street. The apartment on the fourth floor of 90 Bedford. The way Chandler had walked in last night and immediately started doing a bit to fill the silence.
Oh.
Oh no.
I'm in Friends.
He turned this over for a moment.
He was a transmigrator — a man who had died on another Earth and been reborn with no memory of it for twenty-one years, who had then spent a month grieving his father, gotten drunk, and woken up with a skill panel and the complete memories of one James Holloway — standing on a street corner in Greenwich Village two years before one of the most successful sitcoms in television history was going to begin airing on NBC.
And his first instinct was to think: okay, what's the angle here? What can I actually use?
He thought about it honestly for about thirty seconds.
The answer was: not much, directly. This wasn't a story about stock tips or lottery numbers. The show was a sitcom about six friends navigating their twenties in New York — the plots existed to serve the characters, not to generate exploitable opportunities for a seventh person hanging around the edges. Even the things he remembered clearly — and he didn't have a photographic memory, just strong impressions of major beats and personalities — weren't the kind of foreknowledge that translated into leverage.
Ross and Carol were still married right now. That was going to go badly, and there was nothing useful he could do with knowing that.
Chandler hated his job. He'd hated it for a decade and would continue hating it. Not actionable.
Joey was — Andrew paused. He didn't think Joey was in the picture yet, actually. The six of them weren't fully assembled yet in 1992. That was interesting but not particularly useful either.
Let it be, he thought. Don't force it. Don't show up to Monica's dinner tonight with a spreadsheet of what you know about these people. Just be a person.
He'd seen enough of the show to know that the circle had always been porous at the edges — other people drifted in and out, tried to integrate, and eventually drifted back out again. He didn't want to be a footnote. He'd figure out his own story.
He picked up his bag and headed back toward the apartment.
He was almost to the door of 204 when he felt it — that specific prickling at the back of the neck that meant someone was watching him. He turned around.
The hallway was empty.
"Hey, Andrew."
He looked down.
Christie was standing just outside the door to 203, backpack still on from school, looking up at him with those same wide, calm eyes from yesterday. She was holding a juice box and regarding him with the unsettling patience of a child who has learned to wait adults out.
Andrew glanced at the other end of the hall. Two men he didn't recognize were standing near the stairwell — both heavyset, both wearing the specific blank expression of people who are there for a reason and prefer not to be asked about it. The kind of men who had things tucked into waistbands.
His pulse ticked up. He kept his face easy.
"Hey, Christie." He kept his voice normal. "You just get home from school?"
She nodded.
"You hungry? I was about to start some lunch." He held up his grocery bag. "Beef stew. Potatoes and carrots, the whole thing. You like that?"
Christie looked at the bag. Then at him. Then at the bag again.
"Yeah," she said.
"Come on then." Andrew moved to his door, unlocked it, and held it open. He didn't look back at the two men by the stairs. He didn't need to. "Go ahead in and pick a seat."
Christie slipped past him into the apartment without hesitation, like this was perfectly normal, like she'd done it before.
Andrew set his groceries on the counter and started unpacking, keeping his hands steady and his breathing slow.
Through the wall, he could hear low voices from 203.
He turned on the kitchen faucet and started rinsing the vegetables.
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