Just One Day

One

AUGUST

Stratford-upon-Avon, England

What if Shakespeare had it wrong?

To be, or not to be: that is the question. That’s from Hamlet’s—maybe Shakespeare’s—most famous soliloquy. I had to memorize the whole speech for sophomore English, and I can still remember every word. I didn’t give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words right and collect my A. But what if Shakespeare—and Hamlet—were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

The thing is, I don’t know if I would have asked myself that question—how to be—if it wasn’t for Hamlet. Maybe I would have gone along being the Allyson Healey I had been. Doing just what I was supposed to do, which, in this case, was going to see Hamlet.

_ _ _

“God, it’s so hot. I thought it wasn’t supposed to get this hot in England.” My friend Melanie loops her blond hair into a bun and fans her sweaty neck. “What time are they opening the doors, anyhow?”

I look over at Ms. Foley, who Melanie and pretty much the rest of our group has christened Our Fearless Leader behind her back. But she is talking to Todd, one of the history grad students co-leading the trip, probably telling him off for something or other. In the Teen Tours! Cultural Extravaganza brochure that my parents presented to me upon my high school graduation two months ago, the Todd-like graduate students were called “historical consultants” and were meant to bolster the “educational value” of the Teen Tours! But so far, Todd has been more valuable in bolstering the hangovers, taking everyone out drinking almost every night. I’m sure tonight everyone else will go extra wild. It is, after all, our last stop, Stratford-upon-Avon, a city full of Culture! Which seems to translate into a disproportionate number of pubs named after Shakespeare and frequented by people in blaring white sneakers.

Ms. Foley is wearing her own snow-white sneakers—along with a pair of neatly pressed blue jeans and a Teen Tours! polo shirt—as she reprimands Todd. Sometimes, at night, when everyone else is out on the town, she will tell me she ought to call the head office on him. But she never seems to follow through. I think partly because when she scolds, he flirts. Even with Ms. Foley. Especially with Ms. Foley.

“I think it starts at seven,” I say to Melanie. I look at my watch, another graduation present, thick gold, the back engraved Going Places. It weighs heavy against my sweaty wrist. “It’s six thirty now.”

“Geez, the Brits do love to line up. Or queue. Or whatever. They should take a lesson from the Italians, who just mob. Or maybe the Italians should take a lesson from the Brits.” Melanie tugs on her miniskirt—her bandage skirt, she calls it—and adjusts her cami-top. “God, Rome. It feels like a year ago.”

Rome? Was it six days ago? Or sixteen? All of Europe has become a blur of airports, buses, old buildings, and prix-fixe menus serving chicken in various kinds of sauce. When my parents gave me this trip as a big high-school graduation present, I was a little reluctant to go. But Mom had reassured me that she’d done her research. Teen Tours! was very well regarded, noted for its high-quality educational component, as well as the care that was taken of its students. I would be well looked after. “You’ll never be alone,” my parents had promised me. And, of course, Melanie was coming too.

And they were right. I know everyone else gives Ms. Foley crap for the eagle eye she keeps on us, but I appreciate how she is always doing a head count, even appreciate how she disapproves of the nightly jaunts to local bars, though most of us are of legal drinking age in Europe—not that anyone over here seems to care about such things anyway.

I don’t go to the bars. I usually just go back to the hotel rooms Melanie and I share and watch TV. You can almost always find American movies, the same kinds of movies which, back at home, Melanie and I often watched together on weekends, in one of our rooms, with lots of popcorn.

“I’m roasting out here,” Melanie moans. “It’s like middle of the afternoon still.”

I look up. The sun is hot, and the clouds race across the sky. I like how fast they go, nothing in their way. You can tell from the sky that England’s an island. “At least it’s not pouring like it was when we got here.”

“Do you have a pony holder?” Melanie asks. “No, of course you don’t. I bet you’re loving your hair now.”

My hand drifts to the back of my neck, which still feels strange, oddly exposed. The Teen Tour! had begun in London, and on the second afternoon, we’d had a few free hours for shopping, which I guess qualifies as culture. During that time, Melanie had convinced me to get my hair bobbed. It was all part of her precollege reinvention scheme, which she’d explained to me on the flight over: “No one at college will know that we were AP automatons. I mean, we’re too pretty to just be brainiacs, and at college, everyone will be smart. So we can be cool and smart. Those two things will no longer be mutually exclusive.”

For Melanie, this reinvention apparently meant the new heavy-on-skimp wardrobe she’d blown half her spending money on at Topshop, and the truncating of her name from Melanie to Mel—something I can’t quite remember to do, no matter how many times she kicks me under the table. For me, I guess it meant the haircut she talked me into.

I’d freaked out when I’d seen myself. I’ve had long black hair and no bangs for as long as I can remember, and the girl staring back at me in the salon mirror didn’t look like anything like me. At that point, we’d only been gone two days, but my stomach went hollow with homesickness. I wanted to be back in my bedroom at home, with my familiar peach walls, my collection of vintage alarm clocks. I’d wondered how I was ever going to handle college if I couldn’t handle this.

But I’ve gotten used to the hair, and the homesickness has mostly gone away, and even if it hasn’t, the tour is ending. Tomorrow, almost everyone else is taking the coach straight to the airport to fly home. Melanie and I are catching a train down to London to stay with her cousin for three days. Melanie is talking about going back to the salon where I got my bob to get a pink streak in her hair, and we’re going to see Let It Be in the West End. On Sunday, we fly home, and soon after that, we start college—me near Boston, Melanie in New York.

“Set Shakespeare free!”

I look up. A group of about a dozen people are coming up and down the line, handing out multicolored neon flyers. I can tell straightaway that they’re not American—no bright white tennis shoes or cargo shorts in sight. They are all impossibly tall, and thin, and different looking, somehow. It’s like even their bone structure is foreign.

“Oh, I’ll take one of those.” Melanie reaches out for a flyer and uses it to fan her neck.

“What’s it say?” I ask her, looking at the group. Here in touristy Stratford-upon-Avon, they stand out like fire-orange poppies in a field of green.

Melanie looks at the flyer and wrinkles her nose. “Guerrilla Will?”

A girl with the kind of magenta streaks Melanie has been coveting comes up to us. “It’s Shakespeare for the masses.”

I peer at the card. It reads Guerrilla Will. Shakespeare Without Borders. Shakespeare Unleashed. Shakespeare For Free. Shakespeare For All.

“Shakespeare for free?” Melanie reads.

“Yeah,” the magenta-haired girl says in accented English. “Not for capitalist gain. How Shakespeare would’ve wanted it.”

“You don’t think he’d want to actually sell tickets and make money from his plays?” I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but I remember that movie Shakespeare in Love and how he was always owing money to somebody or other.

The girl rolls her eyes, and I start to feel foolish. I look down. A shadow falls over me, momentarily blocking out the glare of the sun. And then I hear laughter. I look up. I can’t see the person in front of me because he’s backlit by the still-bright evening sun. But I can hear him.

“I think she’s right,” he says. “Being a starving artist is not so romantic, maybe, when you’re actually starving.”

I blink a few times. My eyes adjust, and I see that the guy is tall, maybe a full foot taller than I am, and thin. His hair is a hundred shades of blond, and his eyes so brown as to almost be black. I have to tilt my head up to look at him, and he’s tilting his head down to look at me.

“But Shakespeare is dead; he’s not collecting royalties from the grave. And we, we are alive.” He opens his arms, as if to embrace the universe. “What are you seeing?”

“Hamlet,” I say.

“Ah, Hamlet.” His accent is so slight as to be almost imperceptible. “I think a night like this, you don’t waste on tragedy.” He looks at me, like it’s a question. Then he smiles. “Or indoors. We are doing Twelfth Night. Outside.” He hands me a flyer.

“We’ll think about it,” Melanie says in her coy voice.

The guy raises one shoulder and cocks his head toward it so his ear is almost touching his very angular shoulder blade. “What you will,” he says, though he’s looking at me. Then he saunters off to join the rest of his troupe.

Melanie watches them go. “Wow, why are they not on the Teen Tours! Cultural Extravaganza? That’s some culture I could get into!”

I watch them leave, feeling a strange tug. “I’ve seen Hamlet before, you know.”

Melanie looks at me, her eyebrows, which she has overly plucked into a thin line, raised. “Me too. It was on TV, but still . . .”

“We could go . . . to this. I mean, it would be different. A cultural experience, which is why our parents sent us on this tour.”

Melanie laughs. “Look at you, getting all bad! But what about Our Fearless Leader? It looks like she’s gearing up for one of her head counts.”

“Well, the heat was really bothering you . . . ” I begin.

Melanie looks at me for a second, then something clicks. She licks her lips, grins, and then crosses her eyes. “Oh, yeah. I totally have heatstroke.” She turns to Paula, who’s from Maine and is studiously reading a Fodor’s guide. “Paula, I’m feeling so dizzy.”

“It’s way hot,” Paula says, nodding sympathetically. “You should hydrate.”

“I think I might faint or something. I’m seeing black spots.”

“Don’t pile it on,” I whisper.

“It’s good to build a case,” Melanie whispers, enjoying this now. “Oh, I think I’m going to pass out.”

“Ms. Foley,” I call.

Ms. Foley looks up from ticking names off her roll-call sheet. She comes over, her face so full of concern, I feel bad for lying. “I think Melanie, I mean Mel, is getting heatstroke.”

“Are you poorly? It shouldn’t be much longer now. And it’s lovely and cool inside the theater.” Ms. Foley speaks in a strange hybrid of Britishisms with a Midwestern accent that everyone makes fun of because they think it’s pretentious. But I think it’s just that she’s from Michigan and spends a lot of time in Europe.

“I feel like I’m going to puke.” Melanie pushes on. “I would hate to do that inside the Swan Theatre.”

Ms. Foley’s face wrinkles in displeasure, though I can’t tell if it is from the idea of Melanie barfing inside the Swan or using the word puke in such close proximity to the Royal Shakespeare Company. “Oh, dear. I’d better escort you back to the hotel.”

“I can take her,” I say.

“Really? Oh, no. I couldn’t. You should see Hamlet.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll take her.”

“No! It’s my responsibility to take her. I simply couldn’t burden you like that.” I can see the argument she’s having with herself play out over her pinched features.

“It’s fine, Ms. Foley. I’ve seen Hamlet before, and the hotel is just over the square from here.”

“Really? Oh, that would be lovely. Would you believe in all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never seen the Bard’s Hamlet done by the RSC?”

Melanie gives a little moan for dramatic effect. I gently elbow her. I smile at Ms. Foley. “Well, then, you definitely shouldn’t miss it.”

She nods solemnly, as though we are discussing important business here, order of succession to the throne or something. Then she reaches for my hand. “It has been such a pleasure traveling with you, Allyson. I shall miss you. If only more young people today were like you. You are such a . . .” She pauses for a moment, searching for the right word. “Such a good girl.”

“Thank you,” I say automatically. But her compliment leaves me empty. I don’t know if it’s because that’s the nicest thing she could think to say about me, or if it’s because I’m not being such a good girl right now.

“Good girl, my ass.” Melanie laughs once we are clear of the queue and she can give up her swooning act.

“Be quiet. I don’t like pretending.”

“Well, you’re awfully good at it. You could have a promising acting career of your own, if you ask me.”

“I don’t ask you. Now, where is this place?” I look at the flyer. “Canal Basin? What is that?”

Melanie pulls out her phone, which, unlike my cell phone, works in Europe. She opens the map app. “It appears to be a basin by the canal.”

A few minutes later, we arrive at a waterfront. It feels like a carnival, full of people hanging about. There are barges moored to the side of the water, different boats selling everything from ice cream to paintings. What there isn’t is any kind of theater. Or stage. Or chairs. Or actors. I look at the flyer again.

“Maybe it’s on the bridge?” Melanie asks.

We walk back over to the medieval arched bridge, but it’s just more of the same: tourists like us, milling around in the hot night.

“They did say it was tonight?” Melanie asks.

I think of that one guy, his eyes so impossibly dark, specifically saying that tonight was too nice for tragedy. But when I look around, there’s no play here, obviously. It was probably some kind of joke—fool the stupid tourist.

“Let’s get an ice cream so the night’s not a total write-off,” I say.

We are queuing up for ice cream when we hear it, a hum of acoustic guitars and the echoey beat of bongo drums. My ears perk up, my sonar rises. I stand on a nearby bench to look around. It’s not like a stage has magically appeared, but what has just materialized is a crowd, a pretty big one, under a stand of trees.

“I think it’s starting,” I say, grabbing Melanie’s hand.

“But the ice cream,” she complains.

“After,” I say, yanking her toward the crowd.

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

The guy playing Duke Orsino looks nothing like any Shakespearian actor I’ve ever seen, except maybe the movie version of Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio. He is tall, black, dreadlocked, and dressed like a glam rock-star in tight vinyl pants, pointy-toed shoes, and a sort of mesh tank top that shows off his ripped chest.

“Oh, we so made the right choice,” Melanie whispers in my ear.

As Orsino gives his opening soliloquy to the sounds of the guitars and bongo drums, I feel a shiver go up my spine.

We watch the entire first act, chasing the actors around the waterfront. When they move, we move, which makes it feel like we are a part of the play. And maybe that’s what makes it so different. Because I’ve seen Shakespeare before. School productions and a few plays at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre. But it’s always felt like listening to something in a foreign language I didn’t know that well. I had to force myself to pay attention, and half the time, I wound up rereading the program over and over again, as if it would impart some deeper understanding.

This time, it clicks. It’s like my ear attunes to the weird language and I’m sucked fully into the story, the same way I am when I watch a movie, so that I feel it. When Orsino pines for the cool Olivia, I feel that pang in my gut from all the times I’ve crushed on guys I was invisible to. And when Viola mourns her brother, I feel her loneliness. And when she falls for Orsino, who thinks she’s a man, it’s actually funny and also moving.

He doesn’t show up until act two. He’s playing Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, thought dead. Which makes a certain sense, because by the time he does arrive, I am beginning to think he never really existed, that I’ve merely conjured him.

As he races through the green, chased after by the ever-loyal Antonio, we chase after him. After a while, I work up my nerve. “Let’s get closer,” I say to Melanie. She grabs my hand, and we go to the front of the crowd right at the part where Olivia’s clown comes for Sebastian and they argue before Sebastian sends him away. Right before he does, he seems to catch my eye for half a second.

As the hot day softens into twilight and I’m sucked deeper into the illusory world of Illyria, I feel like I’ve entered some weird otherworldly space, where anything can happen, where identities can be swapped like shoes. Where those thought dead are alive again. Where everyone gets their happily-ever-afters. I recognize it’s kind of corny, but the air is soft and warm, and the trees are lush and full, and the crickets are singing, and it seems like, for once, maybe it can happen.

All too soon, the play is ending. Sebastian and Viola are reunited. Viola comes clean to Orsino that she’s actually a girl, and of course he now wants to marry her. And Olivia realizes that Sebastian isn’t the person she thought she married—but she doesn’t care; she loves him anyway. The musicians are playing again as the clown gives the final soliloquy. And then the actors are out and bowing, each one doing something a little silly with his or her bow. One flips. One plays air guitar. When Sebastian bows, he scans the audience and stops dead on me. He smiles this funny little half smile, takes one of the prop coins out of his pocket, and flips it to me. It’s pretty dark, and the coin is small, but I catch it, and people clap for me too, it now seems.

With the coin in my hand, I clap. I clap until my hands sting. I clap as if doing so can prolong the evening, can transform Twelfth Night into Twenty-Fourth Night. I clap so that I can hold on to this feeling. I clap because I know what will happen when I stop. It’s the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie—one that I’ve lost myself to—which is that I’ll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie all over again just to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn’t make any sense.

But there’s no restarting tonight. The crowd is dispersing; the actors drifting off. The only people left from the show are a couple of musicians passing around the donation hat. I reach into my wallet for a ten-pound note.

Melanie and I stand together in silence. “Whoa,” she says.

“Yeah. Whoa,” I say back.

“That was pretty cool. And I hate Shakespeare.”

I nod.

“And was it me, or was that hot guy from the line earlier, the one who played Sebastian, was he totally checking us out?”

Us? But he threw me the coin. Or had I just been the one to catch it? Why wouldn’t it have been Melanie with her blond hair and her camisole top that he’d been checking out? Mel 2.0, as she calls herself, so much more appealing than Allyson 1.0.

“I couldn’t tell,” I say.

“And he threw the coin at us! Nice catch, by the way. Maybe we should go find them. Go hang out with them or something.”

“They’re gone.”

“Yeah, but those guys are still here.” She gestures to the money collectors. “We could ask where they hang out.”

I shake my head. “I doubt they want to hang out with stupid American teenagers.”

“We’re not stupid, and most of them didn’t seem that much older than teenagers themselves.”

“No. And besides, Ms. Foley might check in on us. We should get back to the room.”

Melanie rolls her eyes. “Why do you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“Say no to everything. It’s like you’re averse to adventure.”

“I don’t always say no.”

“Nine times out of ten. We’re about to start college. Let’s live a little.”

“I live just plenty,” I snap. “And besides, it never bothered you before.”

Melanie and I have been best friends since her family moved two houses down from ours the summer before second grade. Since then, we’ve done everything together: we lost our teeth at the same time, we got our periods at the same time, even our boyfriends came in tandem. I started going out with Evan a few weeks after she started going out with Alex (who was Evan’s best friend), though she and Alex broke up in January and Evan and I made it until April.

We’ve spent so much time together, we almost have a secret language of inside jokes and looks. We’ve fought plenty, of course. We’re both only children, so sometimes we’re like sisters. We once even broke a lamp in a tussle. But it’s never been like this. I’m not even sure what this is, only that since we got on the tour, being with Melanie makes me feel like I’m losing a race I didn’t even know I’d entered.

“I came out here tonight,” I say, my voice brittle and defensive. “I lied to Ms. Foley so we could come.”

“Right? And we’ve had so much fun! So why don’t we keep it going?”

I shake my head.

She shuffles through her bag and pulls out her phone, scrolls through her texts. “Hamlet just let out too. Craig says that Todd’s taken the gang to a pub called the Dirty Duck. I like the sound of that. Come out with us. It’ll be a blast.”

The thing is, I did go out with Melanie and everyone from the tour once, about a week into the trip. By this time, they’d already gone out a couple times. And even though Melanie had known these guys only a week—the same amount of time I’d known them—she had all these inside jokes with them, jokes I didn’t understand. I’d sat there around the crowded table, nursing a drink, feeling like the unlucky kid who had to start a new school midway into the year.

I look at my watch, which has slid all the way down my wrist. I slide it back up, so it covers the ugly red birthmark right on my pulse. “It’s almost eleven, and we have to be up early tomorrow for our train. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to take my adventure-averse self back to the room.” With the huffiness in my voice, I sound just like my mom.

“Fine. I’ll walk you back and then go to the pub.”

“And what if Ms. Foley checks in on us?”

Melanie laughs. “Tell her I had heatstroke. And it’s not hot anymore.” She starts to walk up the slope back toward the bridge. “What? Are you waiting for something?”

I look back down toward the water, the barges, now emptying out from the evening rush. Trash collectors are out in force. The day is ending; it’s not coming back.

“No, I’m not.”

Two

Our train to London is at eight fifteen—Melanie’s idea, so we will have maximum shopping time. But when the alarm clock starts beeping at six, Melanie pulls the pillow over her head.

“Let’s get a later train,” she moans.

“No. It’s already all arranged. You can sleep on the train. Anyway, you promised to be downstairs at six thirty to say good-bye to everyone.” And I promised to say good-bye to Ms. Foley.

I drag Melanie out of bed and shove her under the hotel’s weak excuse for a shower. I brew her some instant coffee and quickly talk to my mom, who stayed up until one in the morning Pennsylvania time to call. At six thirty, we trudge downstairs. Ms. Foley, in her jeans and Teen Tours! polo shirt as usual, shakes Melanie’s hand. Then she embraces me in a bony hug, slips me her business card, and says I shouldn’t hesitate to call if I need anything while in London. Her next tour starts on Sunday, and she’ll be there too until it begins. Then she tells me she’s arranged a seven-thirty taxi to take me and Melanie to the train station, asks once again if we’re being met in London (yes, we are), tells me yet again that I’m a good girl, and warns me against pickpockets on the Tube.

I let Melanie go back to bed for another half hour, which means she skips her usual primp time, and at seven thirty I load us into the waiting taxi. When our train arrives, I drag our bags onto it and find a pair of empty seats. Melanie slumps into the one next to the window. “Wake me when we get to London.”

I stare at her for a second, but she’s already snuggled up against the window, shutting her eyes. I sigh and stow her shoulder bag under her feet and put my cardigan down on the seat next to hers to discourage any thieves or lecherous old men. Then I make my way to the café car. I missed the hotel’s breakfast, and now my stomach is growling and my temples are starting to throb with the beginnings of a hunger headache.

Even though Europe is the land of trains, we haven’t taken any on the tour, only airplanes for the long distances and buses to get us everywhere in between. As I walk through the cars, the automatic doors open with a satisfying whoosh, and the train rocks gently under my feet. Outside, the green countryside whizzes by.

In the café car, I examine the sad offerings and wind up ordering a cheese sandwich and tea and the salt and vinegar crisps I’ve become addicted to. I get a can of Coke for Melanie. I put the meal in one of those cardboard carriers and am about to go back to my seat when one of the tables right next to the window opens up. I hesitate for a second. I should get back to Melanie. Then again, she’s asleep; she doesn’t care, so I sit at the table and stare out the window. The countryside seems so fundamentally English, all green and tidy and divvied up with hedges, the fluffy sheep like clouds mirroring the ever-present ones in the sky.

“That’s a very confused breakfast.”

That voice. After listening to it for four acts last night, I recognize it immediately.

I look up, and he’s right there, grinning a sort of lazy half smile that makes him seem like he just this second woke up.

“How is it confused?” I ask. I should be surprised, but somehow, I’m not. I do have to bite my lip to keep from grinning.

But he doesn’t answer. He goes to the counter and orders a coffee. Then he gestures with his head toward my table. I nod.

“In so many ways,” he says, sitting down opposite me. “It is like a jet-lagged expatriate.”

I look down at my sandwich, my tea, my chips. “This is a jet-lagged expatriate? How do you get that from this?”

He blows on his coffee. “Easy. For one, it’s not even nine in the morning. So tea makes sense. But sandwich and crisps. Those are lunch foods. I won’t even mention the Coke.” He taps the can. “See, the timing is all mixed up. Your breakfast has jet lag.”

I have to laugh at that. “The doughnuts looked disgusting.” I gesture toward the counter.

“Definitely. That’s why I bring my own breakfast.” He reaches into his bag and starts unwrapping something from a wrinkled piece of waxed paper.

“Wait, that looks suspiciously like a sandwich too,” I say.

“It’s not, really. It’s bread and hagelslag.”

“Hachuh what?”

“Hach-el-slach.” He opens the sandwich for me to see. Inside is butter and some kind of chocolate sprinkles.

“You’re calling my breakfast confused? You’re eating dessert for breakfast.”

“In Holland, this is breakfast. Very typical. That or uitsmijter, which is basically fried egg with ham.”

“That won’t be on the test, will it? Because I can’t even begin to try to say that.”

“Out. Smy. Ter. We can practice that later. But that brings me to my second point. Your breakfast is like an expatriate. And, go ahead, eat. I can talk while you eat.”

“Thank you. I’m glad you can multitask,” I say. Then I laugh. And it’s all just the weirdest thing, because this is just happening, so naturally. I think I am actually flirting, over breakfast. About breakfast. “What do you even mean, an expatriate?”

“Someone who lives outside of their native country. You know, you have a sandwich. Very American. And the tea, very English. But then you have the crisps, or chips, or whatever you want to call them, and they can go either way, but you’re having salt and vinegar, which is very English, but you’re eating them for breakfast, and that seems American. And Coke for breakfast. Coke and chips, is that what you eat for breakfast in America?”

“How do you even know I’m from America?” I challenge.

“Aside from the fact that you were in a tour group of Americans and you speak with an American accent?” He takes a bite of his hagu-whatever sandwich and drinks more of his coffee.

I bite my lip to keep from grinning again. “Right. Aside from that.”

“Those were the only clues, really. You actually don’t look so American.”

“Really?” I pop open my crisps, and a sharp tang of artificial vinegar wafts through the air. I offer him one. He declines it and takes another bite of his sandwich. “What looks American?”

He shrugs. “Blond,” he says. “Big . . .” He mimes boobs. “Soft features.” He waves his hands in front of his face. “Pretty. Like your friend.”

“And I don’t look that way?” I don’t know why I bother to ask this. I know what I look like. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sharp features. No curves, not much in the boob department. A little of the fizz goes out of my step. Was all this just buttering me up so he could hit on Melanie?

“No.” He peers at me with those eyes of his. They’d looked so dark yesterday, but now that I’m up close, I can see that they have all kinds of colors in them—gray, brown, even gold dancing in the darkness. “You know who you look like? Louise Brooks.”

I stare at him blankly.

“You don’t know her? The silent film star?”

I shake my head. I never did get into silent films.

“She was a huge star in the nineteen twenties. American. Amazing actress.”

“And not blond.” I mean for it to come out as a joke, but it doesn’t.

He takes another bite of his sandwich. A tiny chocolate sprinkle sticks to the corner of his mouth. “We have lots of blondes in Holland. I see blond when I look in a mirror. Louise Brooks was dark. She had these incredible sad eyes and very defined features and the same hair like you.” He touches his own hair, as tousled as it was last night. “You look so much like her. I should just call you Louise.”

Louise. I like that.

“No, not Louise. Lulu. That was her nickname.”

Lulu. I like that even better.

He reaches out his hand. “Hi, Lulu, I’m Willem.”

His hand is warm, and his grasp is firm. “Nice to meet you, Willem. Though I could call you Sebastian if we’re taking on new identities.”

When he laughs, little crinkles flower along his eyes. “No. I prefer Willem. Sebastian’s kind of, what’s the word . . . passive, when you think about it. He gets married to Olivia, who really wants to be with his sister. That happens a lot with Shakespeare. The women go after what they want; the men wind up suckered into things.”

“I don’t know. I was glad when everyone got their happy ending last night.”

“Oh, it’s a nice fairy tale, but that’s what it is. A fairy tale. But I figure Shakespeare owes his comedy characters those happy endings because he is so cruel in his tragedies. I mean, Hamlet. Or Romeo and Juliet. It’s almost sadistic.” He shakes his head. “Sebastian’s okay, he’s just not really in charge of his own destiny so much. Shakespeare gives that privilege to Viola.”

“So you’re in charge of your own destiny?” I ask. And again, I hear myself and can hardly believe it. When I was little, I used to go to the local ice-skating rink. In my mind, I always felt like I could twirl and jump, but when I got out onto the ice, I could barely keep my blades straight. When I got older, that’s how it was with people: In my mind, I am bold and forthright, but what comes out always seems to be so meek and polite. Even with Evan, my boyfriend for junior and most of senior year, I never quite managed to be that skating, twirling, leaping person I suspected I could be. But today, apparently, I can skate.

“Oh, not at all. I go where the wind blows me.” He pauses to consider that. “Maybe there’s a good reason I play Sebastian.”

“So where is the wind blowing you?” I ask, hoping he’s staying in London.

“From London, I catch another train back to Holland. Last night was the end of the season for me.”

I deflate. “Oh.”

“You haven’t eaten your sandwich. Be warned, they put butter on the cheese sandwiches here. The fake kind, I think.”

“I know.” I pull off the sad wilted tomatoes and smear off some of the excess butter/margarine with my napkin.

“It would be better with mayonnaise,” Willem tells me.

“Only if there was turkey on it.”

“No, cheese and mayonnaise is very good.”

“That sounds foul.”

“Only if you’ve never had the proper sort of mayonnaise. I’ve heard the kind they have in America is not the proper sort.”

I laugh so hard that tea comes spurting out my nose.

“What?” Willem asks. “What?”

“The proper sort of mayonnaise,” I say in between gasps of laughter. “It makes me think that there’s, like, a bad-girl mayonnaise who’s slutty and steals, and a good-girl mayonnaise, who is proper and crosses her legs, and my problem is that I’ve never been introduced to the right one.”

“That is exactly correct,” he says. And then he starts laughing too.

We are both cracking up when Melanie trudges into the café car, carrying her stuff, plus my sweater. “I couldn’t find you,” she says sullenly.

“You said to wake you in London.” I look out the window then. The pretty English countryside has given way to the ugly gray outskirts of the city.

Melanie looks over at Willem, and her eyes widen. “You’re not shipwrecked after all,” she says to him.

“No,” he says, but he’s looking at me. “Don’t be mad at Lulu. It’s my fault. I kept her here.”

“Lulu?”

“Yes, short for Louise. It’s my new alter ego, Mel.” I look at her, my eyes imploring her not to give me away. I’m liking being Lulu. I’m not ready to give her up just yet.

Melanie rubs her eyes, like maybe she’s still sleeping. Then she shrugs and slumps into the seat next to Willem. “Fine. Be whoever you want. I’d like to be someone with a new head.”

“She’s new to this hangover thing,” I tell Willem.

“Shut up,” Melanie snaps.

“What, you want me say that ‘it’s old hat for you’?”

“Aren’t you Miss Sassy-pants this morning.”

“Here.” Willem reaches into his backpack for a small white container and shakes out a few white balls into Melanie’s hand. “Put these under your tongue to dissolve. You’ll feel better soon.”

“What is this?” she asks suspiciously.

“It’s herbal.”

“Are you sure it’s not some date-rape drug?”

“Right. Because he wants you to pass out in the middle of the train,” I say.

Willem shows the label to Melanie. “My mother is a naturopathic doctor. She uses these for headaches. I don’t think to rape me.”

“Hey, my father is a doctor too,” I say. Though the opposite of naturopathic. He’s a pulmonologist, Western medicine all the way.

Melanie eyes the pills for a second before finally popping them under her tongue. By the time the train chugs into the station ten minutes later, her headache is better.

By some unspoken agreement, the three of us disembark together: Melanie and I with our overstuffed roller bags, Willem with his compact backpack. We push out onto the platform into the already-hot summer sun and then into the relative cool of Marylebone Station.

“Veronica texted that she’s running late,” Melanie says. “She says to meet her by the WHSmith. Whatever that is.”

“It’s a bookstore,” Willem says, pointing across the interior of the station.

The inside of the station is pretty and redbricked, but I’m disappointed that it’s not one of those grand stations with the clattering destination boards I was hoping for. Instead, there’s just a TV departure monitor. I go over to look at it. The destinations are nowhere that exotic: places like High Wycombe and Banbury, which might be very nice for all I know. It’s silly, really. I’ve just finished up a tour of big European cities—Rome, Florence, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Edinburgh, and now I’m in London again—and for most of it, I was counting the days until we went home. I don’t know why now all of a sudden I should be struck with wanderlust.

“What’s wrong?” Melanie asks me.

“Oh, I was just hoping for one of those big departure boards, like they had at some of the airports.”

“Amsterdam’s Centraal Station has one of those,” Willem says. “I always like to stand in front of it and just imagine I can pick any place and go.”

“Right? Exactly!”

“What’s the matter?” Melanie asks, looking at the TV monitors. “Don’t like the idea of Bicester North?”

“It’s not quite as exciting as Paris,” I say.

“Oh, come on. You’re not still moping about that?” Melanie turns to Willem. “We were supposed to go to Paris after Rome, but the air traffic controllers went on strike and all the flights got canceled, and it was too far to go on the bus. She’s still bummed out about it.”

“They’re always on strike for something in France,” Willem says, nodding his head.

“They subbed Budapest in for Paris,” I say. “And I liked Budapest, but I can’t believe I’m this close to Paris and not going.”

Willem looks at me intently. He twists the tie on his backpack around his finger. “So go,” he says.

“Go where?”

“To Paris.”

“I can’t. It got canceled.”

“So go now.”

“The tour’s over. And anyhow, they’re probably still striking.”

“You can go by train. It takes two hours from London to Paris.” He looks at the big clock on the wall. “You could be in Paris by lunchtime. Much better sandwiches over there, by the way.”

“But, but, I don’t speak French. I don’t have a guidebook. I don’t even have any French money. They use euros there, right?” I’m giving all these reasons as if these are why I can’t go, when in truth, Willem might as well be suggesting I hop a rocket to the moon. I know Europe is small and some people do things like this. But I don’t.

He’s still looking at me, his head tilted slightly to the side.

“It wouldn’t work,” I conclude. “I don’t know Paris at all.”

Willem glances at the clock on the wall. And then, after a beat, he turns to me. “I know Paris.”

My heart starts doing the most ridiculous flippy things, but my ever-rational mind continues to click off all the reasons this won’t work. “I don’t know if I have enough money. How much are the tickets?” I reach into my bag to count my remaining cash. I have some pounds to get me through the weekend, a credit card for emergencies, and a hundred-dollar bill that Mom gave me for absolute emergencies if the credit card wouldn’t work. But this is hardly an emergency. And using the card would alert my parents.

Willem reaches into his pocket, pulls out a fistful of foreign currencies. “Don’t worry about that. It was a good summer.”

I stare at the bills in his hand. Would he really do that? Take me to Paris? Why would he do that?

“We have tickets for Let It Be tomorrow night,” Melanie says, assuming the Voice of Reason. “And we’re leaving on Sunday. And your mom would freak out. Seriously, she’d kill you.”

I look at Willem, but he just shrugs, like he cannot deny the truth to this.

And I’m about to back down, say thanks for the offer, but then it’s like Lulu grabs the wheel, because I turn to Melanie and say, “She can’t kill me if she doesn’t find out.”

Melanie’s scoffs. “Your mom? She’d find out.”

“Not if you covered for me.”

Melanie doesn’t say anything.

“Please. I’ve covered for you plenty on this trip.”

Melanie sighs dramatically. “That was at a pub. Not in an entirely different country.”

“You just criticized me for never doing things like this.”

I have her there. She switches tacks. “How am I supposed to cover when she calls my phone looking for you? Which she’ll do. You know she will.”

Mom had been furious that my cell phone didn’t work over here. We’d been told it would, and when it didn’t, she called the company up in a tizzy, but apparently there was nothing to be done, something about it being the wrong band. It didn’t really matter in the end. She had a copy of our itinerary and knew when to get me in the hotel rooms, and when she couldn’t manage that, she called Melanie’s cell.

“Maybe you could leave your phone off, so it goes to voice mail?” I suggest. I look at Willem, who still has the fistful of cash spilling out of his hand. “Are you sure about this? I thought you were going back to Holland.”

“I thought so too. The winds are maybe blowing me in a different direction.”

I turn to Melanie. It’s on her now. She narrows her green eyes at Willem. “If you rape or murder my friend, I will kill you.”

Willem tsk-tsks. “You Americans are so violent. I’m Dutch. The worst I will do is run her over with a bicycle.”

“While stoned!” Melanie adds.

“Okay, maybe there’s that,” Willem admits. Then he looks at me, and I feel a ripple of something flutter through me. Am I really going to do this?

“So, Lulu? What do you say? You want to go to Paris? For just one day?”

It’s totally crazy. I don’t even know him. And I could get caught. And how much of Paris can you see in just one day? And this could all go disastrously wrong in so many ways. All of that is true. I know it is. But it doesn’t change the fact that I want to go.

So this time, instead of saying no, I try something different.

I say yes.

Three

The Eurostar is a snub-nosed, mud-splattered, yellow train, and by the time we board it, I am sweaty and breathless. Since saying good-bye to Melanie and hastily exchanging plans and info and meeting places for tomorrow, Willem and I have been running. Out of Marylebone. Down the crowded London streets and into the Tube, where I got into some sort of duel with the gates, which refused to open for me three times, then finally did, before snapping shut on my suitcase, sending my Teen Tours! baggage tag flying underneath the automatic ticket machine. “I guess I’m really going rogue now,” I joked to Willem.

At the cavernous St. Pancras station, Willem pointed out the destination boards doing that shuffling thing before hustling us to the Eurostar ticket lines, where he worked his charm on the ticket agent and managed to exchange his ticket home for a ticket to Paris and then used far too many of his pound notes to buy me mine. Then we rushed through the check-in process, showing our passports. For a second, I was worried that Willem would see my passport, which doesn’t belong to Lulu so much as to Allyson—not just Allyson, but fifteen-year-old Allyson in the midst of some acne issues. But he didn’t, and we went downstairs to the futuristic departure lounge just in time to go back upstairs to our train.

It’s only once we sit down in our assigned seats on the train that I catch my breath and realize what I’ve done. I am going to Paris. With a stranger. With this stranger.

I pretend to fuss with my suitcase while I steal looks at him. His face reminds me of one of those outfits that only girls with a certain style can pull off: mismatched pieces that don’t work on their own but somehow all come together. The angles are deep, almost sharp, but his lips are pillowy and red, and there are enough apples in his cheeks to make pie. He looks both old and young; both grizzled and delicate. He’s not good-looking in the way that Brent Harper, who was voted Best Looking in the senior awards, is which is to say predictably so. But I can’t stop looking at him.

Apparently I’m not the only one. A couple of girls with backpacks stroll down the aisle, their eyes dark and drowsy and seeming to say, We eat sex for breakfast. One of them smiles at Willem as she passes and says something in French. He replies, also in French, and helps her lift her bag into the overhead bin. The girls sit across the aisle, a row behind ours, and the shorter one says something, and they all laugh. I want to ask what was said, but all at once, I feel incredibly young and out of place, stuck at the children’s table for Thanksgiving.

If only I’d studied French in high school. I’d wanted to, at the start of ninth grade, but my parents had urged me to take Mandarin. “It’s going to be the Chinese century; you’ll be so much better able to compete if you speak the language,” Mom had said. Compete for what? I’d wondered. But I’ve studied Mandarin for the last four years and am due to continue next month when I start college.

I’m waiting for Willem to sit down, but instead he looks at me and then at the French girls, who, having deposited their things, are sashaying down the aisle.

“Trains make me hungry. And you never ate your sandwich,” he says. “I’ll go to the café for more provisions. What would you like, Lulu?”

Lulu would probably want something exotic. Chocolate-covered strawberries. Oysters. Allyson is more of a peanut-butter-sandwich girl. I don’t know what I’m hungry for.

“Whatever is fine.”

I watch him walk away. I pick up a magazine from the seat pocket and read a bunch of facts about the train: The Channel Tunnel is fifty kilometers long. It opened in 1994 and took six years to complete. The Eurostar’s top speeds are three hundred kilometers per hour, which is one hundred and eighty-six miles per hour. If I were still on the tour, this would be exactly the kind of Trivial-Pursuit fodder Ms. Foley would read to us from one of her printouts. I put the magazine away.

The train starts to move, though it’s so smooth that it’s only when I see the platform is pulling away from us, as though it’s moving, not the train, that I realize we’ve departed. I hear the horn blow. Out the window, the grand arches of St. Pancras glitter their farewell before we plunge into a tunnel. I look around the car. Everyone else seems happy and engaged: reading magazines or typing on laptops, texting, talking on their phones or to their seatmates. I peer over my seat back, but there is no sign of Willem. The French girls are still gone too.

I pick up the magazine again and read a restaurant review that I don’t absorb at all. More minutes tick by. The train is going faster now, arrogantly bypassing London’s ugly warehouses. The conductor announces the first stop, and an inspector comes through to take my ticket. “Anyone here?” he asks, gesturing to Willem’s empty seat.

“Yes.” Only his things aren’t there. There’s no evidence he ever was here.

I glance at my watch. It’s ten forty-three. Almost fifteen minutes since we left London. A few minutes later, we pull into Ebbsfleet, a sleek, modern station. A crowd of people get on. An older man with a briefcase stops next to Willem’s seat as if to sit there, but then he glances at his ticket again and keeps moving up the aisle. The train doors beep and then shut, and we are off again. The London cityscape gives way to green. In the distance, I see a castle. The train greedily gobbles up the landscape; I imagine it leaving a churned-up pile of earth in its wake. I grip the armrests, my nails digging in as if this were that first endlessly steep incline up one of those lunch-losing roller coasters that Melanie loves to drag me on. In spite of the blasting AC, a line of perspiration pearls along my brow.

Our train passes another oncoming train with a startling whoomp. I jump in my seat. After two seconds, the train is speeding past us. But I have the weirdest sensation that Willem is on it. Which is impossible. He would’ve had to fast-forward to another station to get that train.

But that’s not to say he’s on this train.

I look at my watch. It’s been twenty minutes since he went to the café car. Our train had not yet left the platform. He might’ve gotten off with those girls even before we departed. Or at this last station. Maybe that’s what they were saying. Why don’t you ditch that boring American girl and hang out with us?

He is not on this train.

The certainty hits me with that same whoomp as the oncoming train. He changed his mind. About Paris. About me.

Taking me to Paris was an impulse buy, like all those useless gadgets grocery stores put at the checkout aisle so you’re out the door before you realize what a piece of crap you just bought.

But then another thought hits me: What if this is all some sort of master plan? Find the most naïve American you can and lure her onto a train, then ditch her and send in the . . . I don’t know . . . the thugs to nab her? Mom DVR’d a segment about something just like this on 20/20. What if that’s why he was looking at me last night, that’s why he sought me out earlier today on the train from Stratford-upon-Avon? Could he have chosen easier prey? I’ve seen enough of those Animal Planet nature shows to know that the lions always go for the weakest gazelles.

And yet, as unrealistic as this possibility is, on a certain level, there’s a nugget of cold comfort in it. The world makes sense again. That at least would explain why I am on this train.

Something lands on my head, soft and crackly, but in my panic, it makes me jump.

And there’s another one. I pick up the projectile, a packet of Walker’s salt-and-vinegar crisps.

I look up. Willem has the guilty grin of a bank robber, not to mention loot spilling out of his hands: a candy bar, three cups of assorted hot beverages, a bottle of orange juice under one armpit, a can of Coke under the other. “Sorry about the wait. The café is at the other end of the train, and they wouldn’t open it until the train left St. Pancras, and there was already a queue. Then I wasn’t sure if you liked coffee or tea, so I got you both. But then I remembered your Coke from earlier, so I went back for that. And then on the way back, I stumbled onto a very cranky Belgian and spilled coffee all over myself, so I had to detour to the loo, but I think I just made things worse.” He plunks down two of the small cardboard cups and the can of soda on the tray table in front of me. He gestures to the front of his jeans, which now have a huge wet splodge down the front of them.

I am not the sort of person to laugh at fart jokes or gross-out humor. When Jonathan Spalicki let one rip in physiology last year and Mrs. Huberman had to let the hysterical class out early, she actually thanked me for being the only one to exhibit any self-control.

So it’s not like me to lose it. Over a wet spot.

And yet, when I open my mouth to inform Willem that I actually don’t like soda, that the Coke before was for Melanie’s hangover, what comes out is a yelp. And once I hear my own laughter, it sets off fireworks. I’m laughing so hard, I am gasping for air. The panicked tears that were threatening to spill out of my eyes now have a safe excuse to stream down my face.

Willem rolls his eyes and gives his jeans a yeah-yeah look. He grabs some of the napkins from the tray. “I didn’t think it was so bad.” He dabs at his jeans. “Does coffee leave a stain?”

This sends me into further paroxysms of laughter. Willem offers a wry, patient smile. He is big enough to accept the joke at his expense.

“I’m. Sorry.” I gasp. “Not. Laughing. At. Your. Pants.”

Pants! In her tutorial of British English versus American English, Ms. Foley had informed us that the English call underwear pants and pants trousers, and we should be mindful of announcing anything to do with pants to avoid any embarrassing misunderstandings. She went pink as she explained it.

I am doubled over now. When I manage to sit upright, I see one of the French girls coming back down the aisle. As she edges behind Willem, she rests a hand on his arm; it lingers there for a second. Then she says something in French, before slipping into her seat.

Willem doesn’t even look at her. Instead, he turns back to me. His dark eyes dangle question marks.

“I thought you got off the train.” The admission just slips out on the champagne bubbles of my relief.

Oh, my God. Did I actually say that? The giggles shock right out of me. I’m afraid to look at him. Because if he didn’t want to leave me on the train before, I’ve remedied that now.

I feel the give of the seat as Willem sits down, and when I gather up the courage to peer over at him, I’m surprised to find that he doesn’t look shocked or disgusted. He just has that amused private smile on his face.

He begins to unpack the junk food and pulls a bent baguette out of his backpack. After he’s laid everything out over the trays, he looks right at me. “And why would I get off the train?” he asks at last, his voice light and teasing.

I could make up a lie. Because he forgot something. Or because he realized he needed to get back to Holland after all, and there wasn’t time to tell me. Something ridiculous but less incriminating. But I don’t.

“Because you changed your mind.” I await his disgust, his shock, his pity, but he still looks amused, maybe a little intrigued now too. And I feel this unexpected rush, like I just took a hit of some drug, my own personal truth serum. So I tell him the rest. “But then for a brief minute, I thought maybe this was all some sort of scam and you were going to sell me into sex slavery or something.”

I look at him, wondering if I’ve pushed too far. But he is smiling as he strokes his chin. “How would I do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know. You’d have to make me pass out or something. What’s that stuff they use? Chloroform? They put it on a handkerchief and put up against your nose, and you fall asleep.”

“I think that’s just in movies. Probably easier for me to drug your drink like your friend suspected.”

“But you got me three drinks, one of them unopened.” I hold up the can of Coke. “I don’t drink Coke, by the way.”

“My plan is foiled then.” He exaggerates a sigh. “Too bad. I could get good money for you on the black market.”

“How much do you think I’m worth?” I ask, amazed at how quickly fear has become fodder.

He looks me up and looks me down, appraising me. “Well, it would depend on various factors.”

“Like what?”

“Age. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

He nods. “Measurements?”

“Five feet four. One hundred and fifteen pounds. I don’t know metric.”

“Any unusual body parts or scars or false limbs?”

“Does that matter?”

“Fetishists. They pay extra.”

“No, no prosthetic limbs or anything.” But then I remember my birthmark, which is ugly, almost like a scar, so I usually keep it hidden under my watch. But there’s something oddly tempting about exposing it, exposing me. So I slide my watch down. “I do have this.”

He takes it in, nodding his head. Then casually asks, “And are you a virgin?”

“Would that make me more or less valuable?”

“It all depends on the market.”

“You seem to know a lot about this.”

“I grew up in Amsterdam,” he says, like this explains it.

“So what am I worth?”

“You didn’t answer all the questions.”‘

I have the strangest sensation then, like I’m holding the belt to a bathrobe and I can tie it tighter—or let it drop. “No, I’m not. A virgin.”

He nods, stares in a way that unsettles me.

“I’m sure Boris will be disappointed,” I add.

“Who’s Boris?”

“The thuggish Ukrainian who’s going to do the dirty work. You were just the bait.”

Now he laughs, tilting his long neck back. When he comes up for air, he says, “I usually work with Bulgarians.”

“You tease all you want, but there was a thing on TV about it. And it’s not like I know you.”

He pauses, looks straight at me, then says: “Twenty. One point nine meters. Seventy-five kilos, last time I checked. This,” he points to a zigzag scar on his foot. Then he looks me dead in the eye. “And no.”

It takes me a minute to realize that he’s answering the same four questions he asked me. When I do, I feel a flush start to creep up my neck.

“Also, we had breakfast together. Usually the people I have breakfast with, I know very well.”

Now the flush tidal-waves into a full-on blush. I try to think of something quippy to say back. But it’s hard to be witty when someone is looking at you like that.

“Did you really believe I would leave you on the train?” he asks.

The question is oddly jarring after all that hilarity about black-market sex slavery. I think about it. Did I really think he’d do that?

“I don’t know,” I answer. “Maybe I was just having a minor panic because doing something impulsive like this, it’s not me.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asks. “You’re here, after all.”

“I’m here,” I repeat. And I am. Here. On my way to Paris. With him. I look at him. He’s got that half smile, as if there’s something about me that’s endlessly amusing. And maybe it’s that, or the rocking of the train, or the fact that I’ll never see him again after the one day, or maybe once you open the trapdoor of honesty, there’s no going back. Or maybe it’s just because I want to. But I let the robe drop to the floor. “I thought you got off the train because I was having a hard time believing you’d be on the train in the first place. With me. Without some ulterior motive.”

And this is the truth. Because I may be only eighteen, but it already seems pretty obvious that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. The people things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things. The Lulus and the Allysons.

It never occurred to me that by pretending to be Lulu, I might slip into that other column, even for just a day.

I turn to Willem, to see what he’ll say to this, but before he responds, the train plunges into darkness as we enter the Channel Tunnel. According to the factoids I read, in less than twenty minutes, we will be in Calais and then, an hour later, Paris. But right now, I have a feeling that this train is not just delivering me to Paris, but to someplace entirely new.

Four

Paris

Immediately, there are problems. The luggage storage place in the basement of the train station is shuttered; the workers who run the X-ray machines the bags have to pass through before they go into storage are on strike. As a result, all the automated lockers large enough for my bag are full. Willem says there’s another station that’s not so far from here we might try, but if the baggage handlers are on strike, we might have the same problem there too.

“I can just drag it behind me. Or toss it into the Seine.” I’m joking, though there is something appealing about abandoning all vestiges of Allyson.

“I have a friend who works in a nightclub not so far from here. . . .” He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a battered leather notebook. I’m about to make a joke about it being his little black book, but then I see all the names and numbers and email addresses scrawled in there, and he adds, “She does the books, so she’s usually there in the afternoons,” and I realize that it actually is a little black book.

After finding the number he’s after, he pulls out an ancient cell phone, presses the power key a few times. “No battery. Does yours work?”

I shake my head. “It’s useless in Europe. Except as a camera.”

“We can walk. It’s close to here.”

We head back up the escalators. Before we get to the automatic doors, Willem turns to me and asks, “Are you ready for Paris?”

In all the stress of dealing with my luggage, I’d sort of forgotten that the point of all this was Paris. Suddenly, I’m a little nervous. “I hope so,” I say weakly.

We walk out the front of the train station and step into the shimmering heat. I squint, as if preparing for blinding disappointment. Because the truth of it is, so far on this tour, I’ve been let down by pretty much everywhere we went. Maybe I watch too many movies. In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald’s at the base of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays. The same thing happened in Prague, where I’d been yearning for some of the bohemianism of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a café, but then his cell phone rang and he started talking in a loud Texas twang.

And London. Melanie and I got ourselves completely lost on the Tube just so we could visit Notting Hill, but all we found was a fancy, expensive area full of upscale shops. No quaint bookstores, no groups of lovable friends I’d want to have dinner parties with. It seemed like there was a direct link between number of movies I’d seen about a city and the degree of my disappointment. And I’ve seen a lot of movies about Paris.

The Paris that greets me outside Gare du Nord is not the Paris of the movies. There’s no Eiffel Tower or fancy couture stores here. It’s just a regular street, with a bunch of hotels and exchange bureaus, clogged with taxis and buses.

I look around. There are rows and rows of old grayish-brown buildings. They are uniform, seeming to ripple into one another, their windows and French doors thrown open, flowers spilling out. Right across from the station are two cafés, catty-corner. Neither one is fancy, but both are packed—people clustered at round glass tables, under the awnings and umbrellas. It’s both so normal and so completely foreign.

Willem and I start walking. We cross the street and pass one of cafés. There’s a woman sitting alone at one of the tables, drinking pink wine and smoking a cigarette, a small bulldog panting by her legs. As we walk by, the dog jumps up and starts sniffing under my skirt, tangling me and him in his leash.

The woman must be around my mom’s age, but is wearing a short skirt and high-heeled espadrilles that lace up her shapely legs. She scolds the dog and untangles the leash. I bend over to scratch behind its ears, and the woman says something in French that makes Willem laugh.

“What did she say?” I ask as we walk away.

“She said her dog is like a truffle hog when it comes to beautiful girls.”

“Really?” I feel flush with pleasure. Which is a little silly, because it was a dog, and also I’m not entirely sure what a truffle hog is.

Willem and I walk down a block full of sex shops and travel agencies and turn a corner onto some unpronounceable boulevard, and for the first time, I understand that boulevard is actually a French word, that all the big streets called boulevards at home are actually just busy roads. Because here is a boulevard: a river of life, grand, broad, and flowing, a plaza running down the middle and graceful trees arcing out toward one another overhead.

At a redlight, a cute guy in a skinny suit riding a moped in the bike lane stops to check me out, looking me up and down until the moped behind him beeps its horn for him to move on.

Okay, this is, like, twice in five minutes. Granted, the first one was a dog, but it feels significant. For the past three weeks, it’s been Melanie getting the catcalls—a result of her blond hair and LOOK AT ME wardrobe, I cattily assumed. Once or twice, I huffed about the objectification of women, but Melanie rolled her eyes and said I was missing the point.

As this lightness buoys me, I wonder if maybe she was right. Maybe it’s not about looking hot for guys, but about feeling like a place acknowledged you, winked at you, accepted you. It’s strange because, of all the people in all the cities, I’d have thought that to Parisians I’d be invisible, but apparently I’m not. Apparently, in Paris, not only can I skate, but I practically qualify for the Olympics!

“It’s official,” I declare. “I love Paris!”

“That was fast.”

“When you know, you know. It’s just become my favorite city in the whole world.”

“It tends to have that effect.”

“I should add that there wasn’t much competition, seeing as I didn’t actually enjoy most of the places on the tour.”

And again, it just slips out. Apparently when you only have one day, you can say anything and live to tell. The trip has been a bust. How good it feels to finally admit this to someone. Because I couldn’t tell my parents, who had paid for what they believed was the Trip of a Lifetime. And I couldn’t tell Melanie, who really was on the Trip of a Lifetime. And not Ms. Foley, whose job it was to ensure I had the Trip of a Lifetime. But it’s true. I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to have fun—and failing.

“I think maybe traveling is a talent, like whistling or dancing,” I continue. “And some people have it—you seem to. I mean, how long have you been traveling?”

“Two years,” he says.

“Two years with breaks?”

He shakes his head. “Two years since I’ve been back to Holland.”

“Really? And you were supposed to go back today? After two years?”

He throws his arms up into the air. “What’s one more day after two years?”

I suppose to him, not a lot. But to me, maybe something else. “That just proves my point. You have the talent for traveling. I’m not sure that I do. I keep hearing everyone go on about how travel broadens your horizons. I’m not even sure what that means, but it hasn’t broadened anything for me, because I’m no good at it.”

He’s mostly silent as we walk over a long bridge spanning dozens of railroad tracks, graffiti everywhere. Then he says, “Traveling’s not something you’re good at. It’s something you do. Like breathing.”

“I don’t think so. I breathe just fine.”

“Are you sure? Have you ever thought about it?”

“Probably more than most people. My father’s a pulmonologist. A lung doctor.”

“What I mean is, have you ever thought about how it is that you do it? Day and night? While you sleep. While you eat. While you talk.”

“Not so much.”

“Think about it now.”

“How do you think about breathing?” But then all of sudden I do. I get tangled up in thoughts about breathing, the mechanics of it, how is it that my body knows to do it even when I’m sleeping, or crying, or hiccupping. What would happen if my body somehow forgot? And sure enough, my breath grows a little labored, as if I’m walking uphill, even though I’m walking down the slope of the bridge.

“Okay, that was weird.”

“See?” Willem asks. “You thought too hard. Same with travel. You can’t work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.”

“I’m supposed to walk in front of a bus and then I’ll have a good time?”

Willem chuckles. “Not those accidents. The little things that happen. Sometimes they’re insignificant; other times, they change everything.”

“This all sounds very Jedi. Can you be more specific?”

“A guy picks up a girl hitchhiking in a faraway country. A year later, she runs out of money and winds up on his doorstep. Six months after that, they get married. Accidents.”

“Did you marry a hitchhiker or something?”

His smile unfurls like a sail. “I’m giving examples.”

“Tell me a real one.”

“How do you know that’s not real?” he teases. “Okay, this happened to me. Last year when I was in Berlin, I missed my train to Bucharest and caught a ride to Slovakia instead. The people I rode with were in a theater troupe, and one of the guys had just broken his ankle and they needed a replacement. On the six-hour ride to Bratislava, I learned his part. I stayed with the troupe until his ankle got better, and then a while after that, I met some people from Guerrilla Will, and they were in desperate need of someone who could do Shakespeare in French.”

“And you could?”

He nods.

“Are you some kind of language savant?”

“I’m just Dutch. So I joined Guerrilla Will.” He snaps his fingers. “Now I’m an actor.”

This surprises me. “You seemed like you’d been doing it a lot longer.”

“No. It’s just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That’s how life works.”

Something quickens in my chest. “Do you really think that’s how it works? That life can change justlikethat?”

“I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don’t put yourself in the path of it, you miss it. When you travel, you put yourself out there. It’s not always great. Sometimes it’s terrible. But other times . . .” He lifts his shoulders and gestures out to Paris, then sneaks me a sidelong glance. “It’s not so bad.”

“So long as you don’t get hit by a bus,” I say.

He laughs. Then gives me the point. “So long as you don’t get hit by a bus,” he says back.

Five

We arrive at the club where Willem’s friend works; it seems completely dead, but when Willem pounds on the door, a tall man with blue-black skin opens up. Willem speaks to him in French, and after a minute, we’re allowed into a huge dank room with a small stage, a narrow bar, and a bunch of tables with chairs stacked on them. Willem and the Giant confer a bit more in French and then Willem turns to me.

“Céline doesn’t like surprises. Maybe it’s better if I go down first.”

“Sure.” In the hushed dim, my voice seems to clang, and I realize I’m nervous again.

Willem heads to a staircase at the back of the club. The Giant resumes his work polishing bottles behind the bar. Obviously, he didn’t get the message that Paris loves me. I take a seat on the barstool. They twirl all the way around, like the barstools at Whipple’s, the ice-cream place I used to go to with my grandparents. The Giant is ignoring me, so I just sort of spin myself this way and that. And then I guess I do it a little fast, because I go spinning and the barstool comes clear off its base.

“Oh, shit! Ow!”

The Giant comes out to where I am sprawled on the floor. His face is a picture of blasé. He picks up the stool and screws it back in, then goes back behind the bar. I stay on the floor for a second, wondering which is more humiliating, remaining down here or getting back on the stool.

“You are American?”

What gives it away? Because I’m clumsy? Aren’t French people ever clumsy? I’m actually pretty graceful. I took ballet for eight years. I should tell him to fix the stool before someone sues. No, if I say that, I’ll definitely sound American.

“How can you tell?” I don’t know why I bother to ask. Since the moment our plane touched down in London, it’s like there’s been a neon sign above my head, blinking: TOURIST, AMERICAN, OUTSIDER. I should be used to it. Except since arriving in Paris, it felt like it had maybe dimmed. Clearly not.

“Your friend tells me,” he says. “My brother lives in Roché Estair.”

“Oh?” Am I supposed to know where this is? “Is that near Paris?”

He laughs, a big loud belly laugh. “No. It is in New York. Near the big lake.”

Roché Estair? “Oh! Rochester.”

“Yes. Roché Estair,” he repeats. “It is very cold up there. Very much snow. My brother’s name is Aliou Mjodi. Maybe you know him?”

I shake my head. “I live in Pennsylvania, next to New York.”

“Is there much snow in Penisvania?”

I suppress a laugh. “There’s a fair amount in Penn-syl-vania,” I say, emphasizing the pronunciation. “But not as much as Rochester.”

He shivers. “Too cold. Especially for us. We have Senegalese blood in our veins, though we both are born in Paris. But now my brother he goes to study computers in Roché Estair, at university.” The Giant looks very proud. “He does not like the snow. And he says, in summer, the mosquitoes are as big as those in Senegal.”

I laugh.

The Giant’s face breaks open into a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “How long in Paris?”

I look at my watch. “I’ve been here one hour, and I’ll be here for one day.”

“One day? Why are you here?” He gestures to the bar.

I point to my bag. “We need a place to store this.”

“Take it downstairs. You must not waste your one day here. When the sun shines, you let it shine on you. Snow is always waiting.”

“Willem told me to wait, that Céline—”

“Pff,” he interrupts, waving his hand. He comes out from behind the bar and easily hoists my bag over his shoulder. “Come, I take it downstairs for you.”

At the bottom of the stairs is a dark hallway crowded with speakers, amplifiers, cables, and lights. Upstairs, there’s rapping on the door, and the Giant bounds back up, telling me to leave the bag in the office.

There are a couple of doors, so I go to the first one and knock on it. It opens to a small room with a metal desk, an old computer, a pile of papers. Willem’s backpack is there, but he’s not. I go back in the hall and hear the sound of a woman’s rapid-fire French, and then Willem’s voice, languid in response.

“Willem?” I call out. “Hello?”

He says something back, but I don’t understand.

“What?”

He says something else, but I can’t hear him so I crack open the door to find a small supply closet full of boxes and in it, Willem standing right up close to a girl—Céline—who even in the half darkness, I can see is beautiful in a way I can never even pretend to be. She is talking to Willem in a throaty voice while tugging his shirt over his head. He, of course, is laughing.

I slam the door shut and retreat back toward the stairs, tipping over my suitcase in my haste.

I hear something rattle. “Lulu, open the door. It’s stuck.”

I turn around. My suitcase is lodged underneath the handle. I scurry back to kick it out of the way and turn back toward the stairs as the door flies open.

“What are you doing?” Willem asks.

“Leaving.” It’s not like Willem and I are anything to each other, but still, he left me upstairs to come downstairs for a quickie?

“Come back.”

I’ve heard about the French. I’ve seen plenty of French films. A lot of them are sexy; some of them are kinky. I want to be Lulu, but not that much.

“Lulu!” Willem’s voice is firm. “Céline refuses to hold your bags unless I change my clothes,” he explains. “She says I look like a dirty old man coming out of a sex shop.” He points to his crotch.

It takes me a minute to understand what she means, and when I do, I flush.

Céline says something to Willem in French, and he laughs. And fine, maybe it’s not what I thought it was. But it’s still pretty clear that I’ve intruded upon something.

Willem turns back to me. “I said I will change my jeans, but all my other shirts are just as dirty, so she is finding me one.”

Céline continues yapping away at Willem in French, and it’s like I don’t even exist.

Finally, she finds what she’s looking for, a heather-gray T-shirt with a giant red SOS emblazoned on it. Willem takes it and yanks off his own T-shirt. Céline says something else and reaches out to undo his belt buckle. He holds his hands up in surrender and then undoes the buttons himself. The jeans fall to the floor and Willem just stands there, all miles and miles of him, in nothing but a pair of fitted boxer shorts.

“Excusez-moi,” he says as he brushes past me so close his bare torso slides up against my arm. It’s dark in here, but I’m fairly certain Céline can tell I’m blushing and has marked this as a point against me. A few seconds later, Willem returns with his backpack. He digs in it for a rumpled-but-stain-free pair of jeans. I try not to stare as he slips them on and threads his worn brown leather belt through the loops. Then he puts on the T-shirt. Céline glances at me looking at him, and I look away as though she’s caught me at something. Which she has. Watching him get dressed feels more illicit than seeing him strip.

“D’accord?” he asks Céline. She appraises him, her hands on her hips.

“Mieux,” she says back, sounding like a cat. Mew.

“Lulu?” Willem asks.

“Nice.”

Finally, Céline acknowledges me. She says something, gesticulating wildly, then stops.

When I fail to answer, one of Céline’s eyebrows shoots up into a perfect arch, while the other one stays in neutral. I’ve seen women from Florence to Prague do this same thing. It must be some skill they teach in European schools.

“She is asking you if you have ever heard of Sous ou Sur,” Willem says, pointing to the SOS on the shirt. “They are a famous punk-rap band with strong lyrics about justice.”

I shake my head, feeling like a double loser for not having heard of the cool French anarchist whatever justice band. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”

Céline looks disdainful. Another stupid American who can’t be bothered to learn any other languages.

“I speak a little Mandarin,” I offer hopefully, but this fails to impress.

Céline deigns to switch to English: “But your name. Lulu, it is French, non?”

There’s a small pause. Like at a concert in between songs. A perfect time to say, ever so casually, “Actually, my name is Allyson.”

But then Willem answers for me. “It’s short for Louise.” And he winks at me.

Céline points at my suitcase with a manicured purple fingernail. “That is the bag?”

“Yes. This is it.”

“It is so big.”

“It’s not that big.” I think about some of the bags other girls brought on the tour, the hair dryers and adapters and three changes of clothes per day. I look at her in her black mesh tunic that stops at her thighs, a tiny black skirt that Melanie would pay too much for, and suspect this knowledge would fail to impress her.

“It can live in the storage room, not in my office.”

“That’s fine. Just so long as I can get it tomorrow.”

“The cleaner will be here at ten o’clock. And here, we have so many extra, you can have one too,” she says, handing me the same T-shirt she gave Willem, only mine is at least a size larger than his.

I’m about to open my suitcase and stuff it in, but then I visualize the contents: the sensible A-line skirts and T-shirts that Mom picked out for me. My travel journal, the entries I hoped would be breathless accounts of adventure but wound up reading like a series of telegrams: Today we went to the Prague Castle. Stop. Then we saw The Magic Flute at the State Opera House. Stop. Had chicken cutlets for dinner. Stop. The postcards from Famous European Cities, blank because after I’d mailed the obligatory few to my parents and grandmother, I’d had no one left to send them to. And then there’s the Ziploc bag with one lone piece of paper inside. Before the trip, my mom made me a master inventory of all the things to bring and then she made copies, one for every stop, so each time I packed, I could check off each item, to ensure I didn’t leave anything behind. There is one sheet left for my supposed last stop in London.

I stuff the T-shirt into my shoulder bag. “I’ll just hang on to this. To sleep in tonight.”

Céline’s eyebrow shoots up again. She probably never sleeps in a T-shirt. She probably sleeps in the silky nude, even on the coldest of winter nights. I get a flash of her sleeping naked next to Willem.

“Thanks. For the shirt. For storing my bag,” I say.

“Merci,” Céline says back, and I wonder why it is that she’s thanking me, but then I realize she wants me to say thank you in French, so I do, only it comes out sounding like mercy.

We go upstairs. Céline is nattering away to Willem. I’m beginning to understand how his French got so fluent. As if this didn’t make it clear enough that she was a dog and Willem her hydrant, when we get upstairs, she links arms with him and walks him slowly to the front of the bar. I feel like waving my arms and saying “Hello! Remember me?”

When they do that cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, I feel so much of the excitement from earlier dwindle. Next to Céline, with her mile-high stilettos, her black hair, the underneath dyed blond, her perfectly symmetrical face, which is both marred and enhanced by so many piercings, I feel short as a midget and plain as a mop. And once again, I wonder, Why did he bring me here? Then I think of Shane Michaels.

All through tenth grade, I’d had a huge crush on Shane, a senior. We’d hang out, and he’d flirt with me and invite me lots of places and pay for me even, and he’d confide all kinds of personal things, including, yes, about the girls he was dating. But those relationships never lasted more than a few weeks, and I’d told myself that all the while, he and I were growing closer and that he’d eventually fall for me. When months went by and nothing happened between us, Melanie said it was never going to happen. “You have Sidekick Syndrome,” she said. At the time, I thought she was jealous, but of course, she was right. It hits me that, Evan notwithstanding, it might be a lifetime affliction.

I can feel myself shriveling, feel the welcome Paris bestowed on me earlier fading away, if it even really happened. How stupid to think a dog sniffing my crotch and a quick look from some random guy meant anything. Paris adores girls like Céline. Genuine Lulus, not counterfeits.

But then, just as we’re at the door, the Giant comes out from behind the bar and takes my hand and, with a jaunty “à bientôt,” kisses both my cheeks.

A warm feeling tickles my chest. This is the first time on the trip a local has been unabashedly nice to me—because he wanted to, not because I was paying him to. And it doesn’t escape my notice that Willem is no longer looking at Céline but is watching me, a curious expression lighting up his face. I’m not sure if it’s these things or something else, but it makes that kiss, which I get was just platonic—a friendly, cheek-handshake thing—feel momentous. A kiss from all of Paris.

Six

Lulu, we have something very important to discuss.”

Willem looks at me solemnly, and I feel my stomach bottom out in anxiety over another unpleasant surprise.

“What now?” I ask, trying not to sound nervous.

He crosses his arms in front of his chest and then he strokes his chin. Is he going to send me back? No! I’ve already had that freak-out once today.

“What?” I ask again, my voice rising in spite of my best efforts.

“We lost an hour coming to France, so it’s after two o’clock. Lunchtime. And this is Paris. And we just have the day. So we must consider this very seriously.”

“Oh.” I exhale relief. Is he trying to mess with me now? “I don’t care. Anything except chocolate and bread, please. Those might be your staples, but they don’t seem particularly French,” I snap, not entirely sure why I’m so peeved except that even though we’ve now walked several blocks away from Céline’s club, it’s like she’s following us somehow.

Willem feigns offense. “Bread and chocolate are not my staple foods.” He grins. “Not the only ones. And they are very French. Chocolate croissants? We can have those for breakfast tomorrow.”

Breakfast. Tomorrow. After tonight. Céline beings to feel a little farther away now.

“Unless, that is, you prefer crisps for breakfast,” he continues. “Or pancakes. That’s American. Maybe crisps with your pancakes?”

“I don’t eat chips for breakfast. I do occasionally eat pancakes for dinner. I’m a rebel that way.”

“Crêpes,” he says, snapping his fingers. “We will have crêpes. Very French. And you can be rebellious.”

We walk along, menu-browsing the cafés until we find one on a quiet triangle corner that serves crêpes. The menu is hand-scrawled, in French, but I don’t ask Willem to translate. After that whole thing with Céline, my lack of fluency is starting to feel like a handicap. So I stumble through the menu, settling on citron, which I’m pretty sure means lemon, or orange, or citrus of some kind. I decide on a citron crêpe and a citron pressé drink, hoping it’s some kind of lemonade.

“What are you getting?” I ask.

He scratches his chin. There is a tiny patch of golden stubble there. “I was thinking of getting a chocolate crêpe, but that is so close to chocolate and bread that I’m afraid you’ll lose respect for me.” He flashes me that lazy half smile.

“I wouldn’t sweat it. I already lost respect for you when I found you undressing for Céline in her office,” I joke.

And there’s that look: surprise, amusement. “That wasn’t her office,” he says slowly, drawing out his words. “And I would say she was more undressing me.”

“Oh, never mind, then. By all means, order the chocolate.”

He gives me a long look. “No. To repent, I will order mine with Nutella.”

“That’s hardly repenting. Nutella is practically chocolate.”

“It’s made from nuts.”

“And chocolate! It’s disgusting.”

“You just say that because you’re American.”

“That has nothing to do with it! You seem to have a bottomless appetite for chocolate and bread, but I don’t assume it’s because you’re Dutch.”

“Why would it be?”

“Dutch Cocoa? You guys have the lock on it.”

Willem laughs. “I think you have us confused with the Belgians. And I get my sweet tooth from my mother, who’s not even Dutch. She says she craved chocolate all through her pregnancy with me and that’s why I like it so much.”

“Figures. Blame the woman.”

“Who’s blaming?”

The waitress comes over with our drinks.

“So, Céline,” I begin, knowing I should let this go but am somehow unable to. “She’s, like, the bookkeeper? At the club.”

“Yes.”

I know it’s catty, but I’m gratified that it’s such a dull job. Until Willem elaborates. “Not the bookkeeper. She books all the bands, so she knows all these musicians.” And if that’s not bad enough, he adds, “She does some of the artwork for the posters too.”

“Oh.” I deflate. “She must be very talented. Do you know her from the acting thing?”

“No.”

“Well, how did you meet?”

He plays with the wrapper from my straw.

“I get it,” I say, wondering why I’m bothering to ask what is so painfully clear. “You guys were an item.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Oh.” Surprise. And relief.

And then Willem says, ever so casually, “We just fell in love once.”

I take a gulp of my citron pressé—and choke on it. It turns out it’s not lemonade so much as lemon juice and water. Willem hands me a cube of sugar and a napkin.

“Once?” I say when I recover.

“It was a while ago.”

“And now?”

“We are good friends. As you saw.”

I’m not sure that’s exactly what I saw.

“So you’re not in love with her anymore?” I run my fingers along the rim of my glass.

Willem looks at me. “I never said I was in love with her.”

“You just said you fell in love with her once.”

“And I did.”

I stare at him, confused.

“There is a world of difference, Lulu, between falling in love and being in love.”

I feel my face go hot, and I’m not entirely sure why. “Isn’t it just sequential—A follows B?”

“You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn’t the same as being in love.” Willem peers at me from under his lashes. “Have you ever fallen in love?”

Evan and I broke up the day after he mailed in his college tuition deposit. It wasn’t unexpected. Not really. We had already agreed we would break up when we went to college if we didn’t wind up in the same geographical area. And he was going to school in St. Louis. I was going to school in Boston. The thing I hadn’t expected was the timing. Evan decided it made more sense to “rip the bandage off” and break up not in June, when we graduated, or in August, when we’d leave for school, but in April.

But the thing is, aside from being sort of humiliated by the rumor that I’d been dumped and disappointed about missing prom, I wasn’t actually sad about losing Evan. I was surprisingly neutral about breaking up with my first boyfriend. It was like he’d never even been there. I didn’t miss him, and Melanie quickly filled up whatever gaps he’d left in the schedule.

“No,” I reply. “I’ve never been in love.”

Just then the waitress arrives with our crêpes. Mine is golden brown, wafting with the sweet tartness of lemon and sugar. I concentrate on that, cutting off a slice and popping it in my mouth. It melts on the tip of my tongue like a warm, sweet snowdrop.

“That’s not what I asked,” Willem says. “I asked if you’ve ever fallen in love.”

The playfulness is his voice is like an itch I just can’t scratch. I look at him, wondering if he always parses semantics like this.

Willem puts down his fork and knife. “This is falling in love.” With his finger, he swipes a bit of the Nutella from inside his crêpe and puts a dollop on the inside of my wrist. It is hot and oozy and starts to melt against my sticky skin, but before it has a chance to slither away, Willem licks his thumb and wipes the smear of Nutella off and pops it into his mouth. It all happens fast, like a lizard zapping a fly. “This is being in love.” And here he takes my other wrist, the one with my watch on it, and moves the watchband around until he sees what he’s looking for. Once again, he licks his thumb. Only this time, he rubs it against my birthmark, hard, as if trying to scrub it off.

“Being in love is a birthmark?” I joke as I retract my arm. But my voice has a tremble in it, and the place where his wet thumbprint is drying against my skin burns somehow.

“It’s something that never comes off, no matter how much you might want it to.”

“You’re comparing love to a . . . stain?”

He leans so far back in his seat that the front legs of his chair scrape off the floor. He looks very satisfied, with the crêpe or with himself, I’m not sure. “Exactly.”

I think of the coffee stain on his jeans. I think of Lady Macbeth and her “Out, damned spot,” stain, another speech I had to memorize for English. “Stain seems like an ugly word to describe love,” I tell him.

Willem just shrugs. “Maybe just in English. In Dutch, it’s vlek. In French, it’s tache.” He shakes his head, laughs. “No, still ugly.”

“How many languages have you been stained in?”

He licks his thumb again and reaches across the table for my wrist, where he missed the tiniest smudge of Nutella. This time he wipes it—me—clean. “None. It always comes off.” He scoops the rest of the crêpe into his mouth, taking the dull edge of his knife to scrape the Nutella off the plate. Then he runs his finger around the rim, smearing the last of it away.

“Right,” I say. “And why get stained when getting dirty is so much more fun?” I taste lemons in my mouth again, and I wonder where all the sweetness went.

Willem doesn’t say anything. Just sips his coffee.

Three women wander into the café. They are all impossibly tall, almost as tall as Willem, and thin, with legs that seem to end at their boobs. They are like some strange race of human-giraffes. Models. I’ve never seen one in the wild before, but it is obvious what they are. One of them is wearing a tiny pair of shorts and platform sandals; she checks Willem out, and he gives her his little half smile, but then it’s like he catches himself and looks back at me.

“You know what it sounds like to me?” I ask. “It sounds like you just like to screw around. Which is fine. But at least own that about yourself. Don’t make up some bogus distinctions about falling in love versus being in love.”

I hear my voice. I sound like Little Miss Muffet, all goody-two-shoes and sanctimonious. So not like Lulu. And I don’t know why I’m upset. What is it to me if he believes in falling in love versus being in love, or if he believes that love is something the tooth fairy shoves under your pillow?

When I look up, Willem’s eyes are half lidded and smiling, like I’m his court jester here to amuse him. It makes me feel covetous, a toddler about to tantrum for being refused something outrageous—a pony—she knows she can’t have.

“You probably don’t even believe in love.” My voice is petulant.

“I do.” His voice is quiet.

“Really? Define love. What would ‘being stained’”—I make air quotes and roll my eyes—“look like?”

He doesn’t even pause to think about it. “Like Yael and Bram.”

“Who’s that? Some Dutch Brangelina? That doesn’t count, because who knows what it’s really like for them?” I watch the herd of models disappear inside the café, where they will no doubt feast on coffee and air. I imagine them one day fat and ordinary. Because nothing that beautiful lasts forever.

“Who’s Brangelina?” Willem asks absently. He reaches into his pocket for a coin and balances it between two knuckles, then flips it from knuckle to knuckle.

I watch the coin, watch his hands. They are big, but his fingers are delicate. “Never mind.”

“Yael and Bram are my parents,” he says quietly.

“Your parents?”

He completes a revolution with the coin and then tosses it into the air. “Stained. I like how you put it. Yael and Bram: Stained for twenty-five years.”

He says it with both affection and sadness, and something in my stomach twists.

“Are your parents like that?” he asks quietly.

“They’re still married after nearly twenty-five years, but stained?” I can’t help but laugh. “I don’t know if they ever were. They were set up on a blind date in college. And they’ve always seemed less like lovebirds than like amiable business partners, for whom I’m the sole product.”

“Sole. So you are alone?”

Alone? I think he must mean only. And I’m never alone, not with Mom and her color-coded calendar on the fridge, making sure every spare moment of my time is accounted for, making sure every aspect of my life is happily well managed. Except when I pause for a second and think about how I feel, at home, at the dinner table with Mom and Dad talking at me, not to me, at school with a bunch of people who never really became my friends, I understand that even if he didn’t mean to, he got it right.

“Yes,” I say.

“Me too.”

“Our parents quit while they were ahead,” I say, repeating the line Mom and Dad always use when people ask if I’m an only child. We quit while we were ahead.

“I never understand some English sayings,” Willem replies. “If you’re ahead, why would you quit?”

“I think it’s a gambling term.”

But Willem is shaking his head. “I think it’s human nature to keep going when you’re ahead, no matter what. You quit while you’re behind.” Then he looks at me again, and as if realizing that he has maybe insulted me, he hastily adds, “I’m sure with you it was different.”

When I was little, my parents had tried to have more children. First they went the natural route, then they went the fertility route, Mom going through a bunch of horrible procedures that never worked. Then they looked into adoption and were in the process of filling out all the paperwork when Mom got pregnant. She was so happy. I was in first grade at the time, and she’d worked since I was a baby, but when the baby came, she was going to go on an extended leave from her job at a pharmaceutical company, then maybe only go back half time. But then in her fifth month, she lost the baby. That’s when she and Dad decided to quit while they were ahead. That’s what they told me. Except even back then, I think I’d recognized it as a lie. They’d wanted more, but they’d had to settle with just me, and I had to be good enough so that we could all pretend that we weren’t actually settling.

“Maybe you’re right,” I tell Willem now. “Maybe nobody quits while they’re really ahead. My parents always say that, but the truth is, they only stopped with me because they couldn’t have any more. Not because I was enough.”

“I’m sure you were enough.”

“Were you?” I ask.

“Maybe more than enough,” he says cryptically. It almost sounds like he’s bragging, except it doesn’t look like he’s bragging.

He starts doing the thing with the coin again. As we sit silently, I watch the coin, feeling something like suspense build in my stomach, wondering if he’ll let it fall. But he doesn’t. He just keeps spinning it. When he finishes, he flips it in the air and tosses it to me, just like he did last night.

“Can I ask you something?” I say after a minute.

“Yes.”

“Was it part of the show?”

He cocks his head.

“I mean, do you throw a coin to a girl at every performance, or was I special?”

Last night after I got back to the hotel, I spent a long time examining the coin he’d tossed me. It was a Czech koruna, worth about a nickel. But still, I’d put it in a separate corner of my wallet, away from all the other foreign coins. I pull it out now. It glints in the bright afternoon sun.

Willem looks at it too. I’m not sure if his answer is true or just maddeningly ambiguous, or maybe both. Because that’s exactly what he says: “Maybe both.”

Seven

When we leave the restaurant, Willem asks me the time. I twist the watch around my wrist. It feels heavier than ever, the skin underneath itchy and pale from being stuck under the piece of chunky metal for the past three weeks. I haven’t taken it off once.

It was a present, from my parents, though it was Mom who’d given it to me on graduation night, after the party at the Italian restaurant with Melanie’s family, where they told us about the tour.

“What’s this?” I’d asked. We were sitting at the kitchen table, decompressing from the day. “You already gave me a graduation present.”

She’d smiled. “I got you another.”

I’d opened the box, seen the watch, fingered the heavy gold links. Read the engraving.

“It’s too much.” And it was. In every way.

“Time stops for no one,” Mom had said, smiling a little sadly. “You deserve a good watch to keep up.” Then she’d snapped the watch on my wrist, shown me how she had an extra safety clasp installed, pointed out that it was waterproof too. “It’ll never fall off. So you can take it to Europe with you.”

“Oh, no. It’s way too valuable.”

“It’s fine. It’s insured. Besides, I threw away your Swatch.”

“You did?” I’d worn my zebra-striped Swatch all through high school.

“You’re a grown-up now. You need a grown-up watch.”

I look at my watch now. It’s almost four. Back on the tour, I’d be breathing a sigh of relief, because the busy part of the day would be winding down. Usually we had a rest around five, and most nights, by eight o’clock, I could be back in my hotel room watching some movie.

“We should probably start seeing some of the sights,” Willem says. “Do you know what you want to do?”

I shrug. “We could start with the Seine. Isn’t that it?” I point to a concrete embankment, underneath which is a river of sorts.

Willem laughs. “No, that’s a canal.”

We walk down the cobblestoned pathway, and Willem pulls out a thick Rough Guide to Europe. He opens to a small map of Paris, points out, more or less, where we are, an area called Villette.

“The Seine is here,” he says, tracing a line down the map.

“Oh.” I look out at the boat, which is stuck now between two big metal gates; the area is filling up with water. Willem explains that this is a lock, basically an elevator that lifts and drops the boats down differing depths of the canals.

“How do you know so much about everything?”

He laughs. “I’m Dutch.”

“So that means you’re a genius?”

“Only about canals. They say ‘God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland.’” And then he goes on to tell me about how so much of the country was reclaimed from the sea, about riding your bike along the low embankments that keep the water out of Holland. How it’s an act of faith to ride your bike around, with the dikes above you, knowing somehow, even though you’re below sea level, you’re not under water. When he talks about it, he seems so young that I can almost see him as a towheaded little kid, eyes wide, staring out at the endless waterways and wondering where they all led to.

“Maybe we can go on one of those boats?” I ask, pointing to the barge we just watched go through the lock.

Willem’s eyes light up, and for a second, I see that boy again. “I don’t know.” He looks inside the guidebook. “It doesn’t really cover this neighborhood.”

“Can we ask?”

Willem asks someone in French and is given a very complicated answer full of hand gestures. He turns to me, clearly excited. “You’re right. He says that they have boat rides leaving from the basin.”

We go along the cobblestoned walkway until it lets out in a large lake, where people are paddling in canoes. Off to one side, next to a cement pier, a couple of boats are moored. But when we get over there, we find out that they’re private boats. The tourist boats have left for the day.

“We can take a boat along the Seine,” Willem says. “It’s much more popular, and the boats run all day.” His eyes are downcast. I can see he’s disappointed, as if he let me down.

“Oh, no big deal. I don’t care.”

But he’s staring wistfully out at the water, and I see that he cares. And I know I don’t know him, but I swear the boy is homesick. For boats and canals and watery things. And for a second, I think of what it must be like—away from home for two years, and here he postponed his return for another day. He did that. For me.

There’s a row of boats and barges tied up, bobbing in the breeze that’s kicked up. I look at Willem; a melancholy expression is deepening the lines on his face. I look back at the boats.

“Actually, I do care,” I say. I reach into my bag for my wallet, for the hundred-dollar bill folded inside. I hold it up in the air and call out, “I’m looking for a ride down the canals. And I can pay.”

Willem’s head jerks toward me. “Lulu, what are you doing?”

But I’m walking away from him. “Anyone willing to give us a lift down the canals?” I call. “I got good old-fashioned American greenbacks.”

A pock-faced guy with sharp features and a scrubby goatee pops onto the side of a blue-canopied barge. “How many greenbacks?” he asks in a very thick French accent.

“All of them!”

He takes the C-note and stares at it up close. Then he smells it.

It must smell legit, because he says, “If my passengers agree, I will take you down the canal to Arsenal, close to Bastille. It is where we dock for the night.” He gestures to the back of the boat where a quartet of gray-haired people are sitting around a small table, playing bridge or something. He calls out to one of them.

“Aye, Captain Jack,” the man answers. He must be sixty. His hair is white, and his face is burnished red from the sun.

“We have some hitchhikers who want to come aboard with us.”

“Can they play poker?” one of the women asks.

I used to play seven-card stud for nickels with my grandfather before he died. He said I was an excellent bluffer.

“Do not bother. She gave all her money to me,” Captain Jack says.

“How much is he charging you?” one of the men asks.

“I offered him a hundred dollars,” I say.

“To go where?”

“Down the canals.”

“This is why we call him Captain Jack,” one of the men says. “Because he’s a pirate.”

“No. It is because my name is Jacques, and I am your captain.”

“A hundred dollars, Jacques?” a woman with a long gray braid and startlingly blue eyes asks. “That seems a little much, even for you.”

“She offered this much.” Jacques shrugs. “Also, now I will have more money to lose to you in poker.”

“Ahh, good point,” she says.

“Are you leaving now?” I ask.

“Soon.”

“When is soon?” It’s after four. The day is speeding by.

“You cannot rush these things.” He flicks his hand in the air. “Time is like the water. Fluid.”

Time doesn’t seem fluid to me. It seems real and animate and hard as a rock.

“What he means,” says the guy with the ponytail, “is that the trip to Arsenal takes a while and we were just about to open a bottle of claret. Come on, Captain Jack, let’s shove off. For a hundred bucks, you can have your wine later.”

“We’ll continue with this fine French gin,” the braided lady says.

He shrugs and then pockets my bill. I turn to Willem and grin. Then I nod at Captain Jack. He reaches out for my hand to escort me onboard.

The four passengers introduce themselves. They are Danish, retirees, and every year, they tell us, they rent a barge and cruise a European country for four weeks. Agnethe has the braid and Karin has short spiked hair. Bert has a shock of white hair and Gustav has the bald spot and the rat’s tail of a ponytail and is sporting the ever-stylish socks-with-sandals look. Willem introduces himself, and almost automatically, I introduce myself as Lulu. It’s almost as if I’ve become her. Maybe I have. Never in a million years would Allyson have done what I just did.

Captain Jack and Willem untie the line, and I’m about to say that maybe I should get some of my money back if Willem is going to play first mate but then I see that Willem is bounding about, having a blast. He clearly knows his way around a boat.

The barge chugs out of the broad basin, giving a wide view of a white-columned old building and a silver-domed modern-looking one. The Danes return to their poker game.

“Don’t lose all your money,” Captain Jack calls to them. “Or you won’t have any left to lose to me.”

I slip away to the bow of the boat and watch the scenery slip by. It’s cooler down here in the canals, under the narrow arched footbridges. And it smells different too. Older, mustier, like generations of history are stored in the wet walls. If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they’d tell.

When we get to the first lock, Willem clambers to the side of the barge to show me how the mechanism works. The ancient-looking metal gates, rusted the same brackish color as the water, close behind us, the water drains out from beneath us, the gates reopen to a lower section.

This part of the canal is so narrow that the barge takes up almost the entire width. Steep embankments lead up to the streets, and above those, poplar and elm trees (per Captain Jack) form an arbor, a gentle respite from the hot afternoon sun.

A gust of wind shakes the trees, sending a scrim of leaves shimmying onto the deck. “Rain is coming,” Captain Jack says, sniffing the air like a rabbit. I look up and then over at Willem and roll my eyes. The sky is cloudless, and there hasn’t been rain in this part of Europe for ten days.

Up above, Paris carries on, doing her thing. Mothers sip coffee, keeping eyes on their kids as they scooter along the sidewalks. Vendors at outdoor stalls hawk fruits and vegetables. Lovers wrap their arms around each other, never mind the heat. A clarinet player stands atop the bridge, serenading it all.

I’ve hardly taken any pictures on this trip. Melanie teased me about it, to which I always said I preferred to experience something rather than obsessively record it. Though, really, the truth of it was, unlike Melanie (who wanted to remember the shoe salesman and the mime and the cute waiter and all the other people on the tour), none of that really mattered to me. At the start of the trip, I took shots of the sights. The Colosseum. Belvedere Palace. Mozart Square. But I stopped. They never came out very well, and you could get postcards of these things.

But there are no postcards of this. Of life.

I snap a picture of a bald man walking four bushy-haired dogs. Of a little girl in the most absurdly frilly skirt, plucking petals off a flower. Of a couple, unabashedly making out on the fake beach along the waterside. Of the Danes, ignoring all of this, but having the time of their lives playing cards.

“Oh, let me take one of the two of you,” Agnethe says, rising, a little wobbly, from the game. “Aren’t you golden?” She turns to the table. “Bert, was I ever that golden?”

“You still are, my love.”

“How long have you been married?” I ask.

“Thirteen years,” she says, and I’m wondering if they’re stained, but then she adds, “Of course, we’ve been divorced for ten.”

She sees the look of confusion on my face. “Our divorce is more successful than most marriages.”

I turn to Willem. “What kind of stain is that?” I whisper, and he laughs just as Agnethe takes the picture.

A church bell rings in the distance. Agnethe hands back the phone, and I take a picture of her and Bert. “You will send me that one? All of the ones?”

“Of course. As soon as I have reception.” I turn to Willem. “I’ll text them to you too, if you give me your number.”

“My phone is so old, it doesn’t work with pictures.”

“When I get home, then, I’ll put the pictures on my computer and email them to you,” I say, though I’ll have to figure out a place to hide the pictures from Mom; it wouldn’t be beyond her to look through my phone—or computer. Though, I realize now, only for another month. And then I’ll be free. Just like today I’m free.

He looks at one of the pictures for a long time. Then he looks at me. “I’ll keep you up here.” He taps his temple. “Where you can’t get lost.”

I bite my lip to hide my smile and pretend to put the phone away, but when Captain Jack calls to Willem to take the wheel while he visits the head, I pull it back out and scroll through the photos, stopping at the one of the two of us that Agnethe took. I’m in profile, my mouth open. He’s laughing. Always laughing. I run my thumb over his face, halfway expecting it to emanate some sort of heat.

I put the phone away and watch Paris drift by, feeling relaxed, almost drunk with a sleepy joy. After a while, Willem returns to me. We sit quietly, listening to the lapping of the water, the babble of the Danes. Willem pulls a coin out and does that thing, flipping it from knuckle to knuckle. I watch, hypnotized by his hand, by the gentle rocking of the water. It’s peaceful until the Danes start bickering, loudly. Willem translates: Apparently they’re hotly debating whether some famous French actress has ever made a pornographic film.

“You speak Danish too?” I ask.

“No, it’s just close to Dutch.”

“How many languages do you speak?”

“Fluently?”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry I asked.”

“Four fluently. I get by in German and Spanish too.”

I shake my head, amazed.

“Yes, but you said you speak Chinese.”

“I wouldn’t say I speak it so much as murder it. I’m kind of tone deaf, and Mandarin is all about tone.”

“Let me hear.”

I look at him. “Ni zhen shuai.”

“Say something else.”

“Wo xiang wen ni.”

“Now I hear it.” He covers his head. “Stop. I’m bleeding from my ears.”

“Shut up or you will be.” I pretend to shove him.

“What did you say?” he asks.

I give him a look. No way I’m telling.

“You just made it up.”

I shrug. “You’ll never know.”

“What does it mean?”

I grin. “You’ll have to look it up.”

“Can you write it too?” He pulls out his little black book and opens to a blank page near the back. He rifles back into his bag. “Do you have a pen?”

I have one of those fancy roller balls I swiped from my dad, this one emblazoned BREATHE EASY WITH PULMOCLEAR. I write the character for sun, moon, stars. Willem nods admiringly.

“And look, I love this one. It’s double happiness.”

“See how the characters are symmetrical?”

“Double happiness,” Willem repeats, tracing the lines with his index finger.

“It’s a popular phrase. You’ll see it on restaurants and things. I think it has to do with luck. In China, it’s apparently big at weddings. Probably because of the story of its origin.”

“Which is?”

“A young man was traveling to take a very important exam to become a minister. On the way, he gets sick in a mountain village. So this mountain doctor takes care of him, and while he’s recovering, he meets the doctor’s daughter, and they fall in love. Right before he leaves, the girl tells him a line of verse. The boy heads off to the capital to take his exam and does well, and the emperor’s all impressed. So, I guess to test him further, he says a line of verse. Of course, the boy immediately recognizes this mysterious line as the other half of the couplet the girl told him, so he repeats what the girl said. The emperor’s doubly impressed, and the boy gets the job. Then he goes back and marries the girl. So, double happiness, I guess. He gets the job and the girl. You know, the Chinese are very big on luck.”

Willem shakes his head. “I think the double happiness is the two halves finding each other. Like the couplet.”

I’d never thought of it, but of course that’s what it is.

“Do you remember how it goes?” Willem asks.

I nod. “Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze’s chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.”

_ _ _

The final section of the canal is underground. The walls are arched, and so low that I can reach up and touch the slick, wet bricks. It’s eerie, hushed but echoey down here. Even the boisterous Danes have shushed. Willem and I sit with our legs dangling over the edge of the boat, kicking the side of the tunnel wall when we can.

He nudges my ankle with his toe. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For arranging this.” He gestures to the boat.

“My pleasure. Thank you for arranging this.” I point above us, to where Paris is no doubt going about its business.

“Any time.” He looks around. “It’s nice, this. The canal.” He looks at me. “You.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the canals.” But I flush in the musty, rich darkness.

We stay like that for the rest of the ride, swinging our legs against the side of the boat, listening as the odd bit of laughter or music from Paris seeps underground. It feels like the city is telling secrets down here, privy only to those who think to listen.

Eight

Arsenal Marina is like a parking lot for boats, tightly packed into cement piers on both sides of the water. Willem helps Captain Jack guide the barge into its narrow mooring, hopping out to tie the lines in complicated knots. We bid farewell to the Danes, who are now truly soused, and I take down Agnethe’s cell phone number, promising to text her the pictures as soon as I can.

As we get off, Captain Jack shakes our hands. “I feel a little bad to take your money,” he says.

“No. Don’t feel bad.” I think of the look on Willem’s face, of being in the tunnel. That alone was worth a hundred bucks.

“And we’ll take it off you soon enough,” Gustav calls.

Jacques shrugs. He kisses my hand before he helps me off the boat, and he practically hugs Willem.

As we walk away, Willem taps my shoulder. “Did you see what the boat is named?”

I didn’t. It’s right on the back, etched in blue lettering, next to the vertical red, white, and blue stripes of the French flag. Viola. Deauville.

“Viola? After Shakespeare’s Viola?”

“No. Jacques meant for it be called Voilà, but his cousin painted it wrong, and he liked the name, so he registered her as Viola.”

“Okaaay—that’s still a little weird,” I say.

As always, Willem smiles.

“Accidents?” Immediately, a strange little tremor goes up my spine.

Willem nods, almost solemnly. “Accidents,” he confirms.

“But what does it mean? Does it mean we were meant to take that boat? Does it mean something better or worse would’ve happened to us if we hadn’t taken that boat? Did taking that boat alter the course of our lives? Is life really that random?”

Willem just shrugs.

“Or does it mean that Jacques’s cousin can’t spell?” I say.

Willem laughs again. The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it’s like, for the first time in my life, I understand that this is the point of laughter, to spread happiness.

“Sometimes you can’t know until you know,” he says.

“That’s very helpful.”

He laughs and looks at me for a long moment. “You know, I think you might be good at traveling after all.”

“Seriously? I’m not. Today is a total anomaly. I was miserable on the tour. Trust me, I didn’t flag down a single boat. Not even a taxi. Not even a bicycle.”

“What about before the tour?”

“I haven’t traveled much, and the kind I’ve done . . . not a lot of room for accidents.”

Willem raises a questioning eyebrow.

“I’ve been places. Florida. Skiing. And to Mexico, but even that sounds more exotic than it is. Every year, we go to this time-share resort south of Cancún. It’s meant to look like a giant Mayan temple, but I swear the only clue that you’re not in America is the piped-in mariachi Christmas carols along the fake river waterslide thing. We stay in the same unit. We go to the same beach. We eat at the same restaurants. We barely even leave the gates, and when we do, it’s to visit the ruins, but we go to the same ones every single year. It’s like the calendar flips but nothing else changes.”

“Same, same, but different,” Willem says.

“More like same, same, but same.”

“Next time when you go to Cancún, you can sneak out into the real Mexico,” he suggests. “Tempt fate. See what happens.”

“Maybe,” I allow, just imagining my mom’s response if I suggested a little freelance traveling.

“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico one day,” Willem says. “I’ll bump into you, and we’ll escape into the wilds.”

“You think that would happen? We’d just randomly bump into each other?”

Willem lifts his hands up in the air. “There would have to be another accident. A big one.”

“Oh, so you’re saying that I’m an accident?”

His smile stretches like caramel. “Absolutely.”

I rub my toe against the curb. I think of my Ziploc bags. I think of the color-coded schedule of all my activities that we’ve kept tacked to the fridge since I was, like, eight. I think of my neat files with all my college application materials. Everything ordered. Everything planned. I look at Willem, so the opposite of that, of me, today, also the opposite of that.

“I think that might possibly be one of the most flattering things anyone has ever said to me.” I pause. “I’m not sure what that says about me, though.”

“It says that you haven’t been flattered enough.”

I bow and give a sweeping be-my-guest gesture.

He stops and looks at me, and it’s like his eyes are scanners. I have that same sensation I did on the train earlier, that he’s appraising me, only this time not for looks and black-market value, but for something else.

“I won’t say that you’re pretty, because that dog already did. And I won’t say you’re funny, because you have had me laughing since I met you.”

Evan used to tell me that he and I were “so compatible,” as if being like him was the highest form of praise. Pretty and funny—Willem could stop right there, and it would be enough.

But he doesn’t stop there. “I think you’re the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren’t even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don’t let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.”

He stops then. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out and there’s a lump in my throat and for one small second, I’m scared I’m going to cry.

Because I’d hoped for baubles, trinkets, fizzy things: You have a nice smile. You have pretty legs. You’re sexy.

But what he said . . . I did once turn in forty dollars I found at the food court to mall security. I have cried in every single Jason Bourne movie. As for the last thing he said, I don’t know if it’s true. But I hope more than anything that it is.

“We should get going,” I say, clearing my throat. “If we want to get to the Louvre. How far is it from here?”

“Maybe a few kilometers. But it’s fast by bike.”

“You want me to wave one down?” I joke.

“No, we’ll just get a Vélib’.” Willem looks around and walks toward a stand of gray bicycles. “Have you ever heard of the White Bicycle?” he asks.

I shake my head, and Willem starts explaining how for a brief time in Amsterdam in the 1960s, there used to be white bicycles, and they were free and everywhere. When you wanted a bike, you grabbed one, and when you were done, you left it. But it didn’t work because there weren’t enough bikes, and people stole them. “In Paris, you can borrow a bike for free for a half hour, but you have to lock it back up, or you get charged.”

“Oh, I think I just read they started something like this back home. So, it’s free?”

“All you need is a credit card for the deposit.”

I don’t have a credit card—well, not one that doesn’t link back to my parents’ account, but Willem has his bank card, though he says he isn’t sure if there’s enough. When he runs it through the little keypad, one of the bikes unlocks, but when he tries it again for a second bike, the card is declined. I’m not entirely disappointed. Cycling around Paris, sans helmet, seems vaguely suicidal.

But Willem’s not replacing the bike. He’s wheeling it over to where I’m standing and raising the seat. He looks at me. Then pats the saddle.

“Wait, you want me to ride the bike?”

He nods.

“And you’ll what? Run alongside me?”

“No. I’ll ride you.” His eyebrows shoot up, and I feel myself blush. “On the bike,” he clarifies.

I climb onto the wide seat. Willem steps in front of me. “Where exactly are you going to go?” I ask

“Don’t worry about that. You just get comfortable,” he says, as if it’s possible in the current situation, with his back inches from my face, so close I can feel the heat radiating off of him, so close I can smell the new-clothes aroma of his T-shirt mingling with the light musk of his sweat. He puts one foot on one of the pedals. Then he turns around, an impish grin on his face. “Warn me if you see police. This isn’t quite legal.”

“Wait, what’s not legal?”

But he’s already pushed off. I shut my eyes. This is insane. We’re going to die. And then my parents really will kill me.

A block later, we’re still alive. I squint an eye open. Willem is leaning all the way forward over handlebars, effortlessly standing on the pedals, while I lean back, my legs dangling alongside the rear wheel. I open my other eye, release my clammy grip on the hem of his T-shirt. The marina is well behind us, and we are on a regular street, in a bike lane, cruising along with all the other gray bicycles.

We turn onto a choked street full of construction, half the avenue blocked by scaffolding and blockades, and I’m looking at all the graffiti; the SOS, just like on the T-shirt for that band Sous ou Sur is scrawled there. I’m about to point it out to Willem, but then I turn in the other direction and there’s the Seine. And there’s Paris. Postcard Paris! Paris from French Kiss and from Midnight in Paris and from Charade and every other Paris film I’ve ever seen. I gape at the Seine, which is rippling in the breeze and glimmering in the early-evening sun. Down the expanse of it, I can see a series of arched bridges, draped like expensive bracelets over an elegant wrist. Willem points out Notre Dame Cathedral, just towering there, in the middle of an island in the middle of a river, like it’s nothing. Like it’s any other day, and it’s not the freaking Notre Dame! We pass by another building, a wedding-cake confection that looks like it might house royalty. But, no, it’s just City Hall.

It’s funny how on the tour, we often saw sights like this as we whizzed by on a bus. Ms. Foley would stand at the front of the coach, microphone in hand, and tell us facts about this cathedral or that opera house. Sometimes, we’d stop and go in, but with one or two days per city, most of the time, we drove on by.

I’m driving by them now too. But somehow, it feels different. Like, being here, outside, on the back of this bike, with the wind in my hair and the sounds singing in my ears and the centuries-old cobblestones rattling beneath my butt, I’m not missing anything. On the contrary, I’m inhaling it, consuming it, becoming it.

I’m not sure how to account for the change, for all the changes today. Is it Paris? Is it Lulu? Or is it Willem? Is it his nearness that makes the city so intoxicating or the city that makes his nearness so irresistible?

A loud whistle cuts through my reverie, and the bike comes to an abrupt halt.

“Ride’s over,” Willem says. I hop off, and Willem starts wheeling the bicycle down the street.

A policeman with a thin mustache and a constipated expression comes chasing after us. He starts yelling at Willem, gesticulating, wagging a finger at me. His face is turning a bright red, and when he pulls out his little book and starts pointing to me and Willem, I get nervous. I thought Willem had been joking about the illegal thing.

Then Willem says something to the cop that stops the tirade cold.

The cop starts nattering on, and I don’t understand a word, except I’m pretty sure he says “Shakespeare!” while holding a finger up in an aha motion. Willem nods, and the cop’s tone softens. He still wagging his finger at us, but the little book goes back into his satchel. With a tip of his funny little hat, he walks away.

“Did you just quote Shakespeare to a cop?” I ask.

Willem nods.

I’m not sure what’s crazier: That Willem did that. Or that the cops here know Shakespeare.

“What did you say?”

“La beauté est une enchanteresse, et la bonne foi qui s’expose à ses charmes se dissout en sang,” he says. “It’s from Much Ado About Nothing.”

“What does it mean?”

Willem gives me that look of his, licks his lips, smiles. “You’ll have to look it up.”

We walk along the river and onto a main road full of restaurants, art galleries, and high-end boutiques. Willem parks the bike in a stand, and we take off on foot under a long portico and then make a few more turns into what, at first, seems like it should be a presidential residence or a royal palace, Versailles or something, the buildings are so huge and grand. Then I spot the glass pyramid in the middle of the courtyard, so I know we have arrived at the Louvre.

It’s mobbed. Thousands of people are flooding out of the buildings, like they’re evacuating it, clutching poster tubes and large black-and-white shopping bags. Some are energized, chatty, but many more look shell-shocked, weary, glazed after a day spent ingesting epic portions of Culture! I know that look. The Teen Tours! brochure bragged that it offered “young people the full-on European immersion experience! We’ll expose your teen to a maximum number of cultures in a short period of time, broadening their view of history, language, art, heritage, cuisine.” It was supposed to be enlightening, but it mostly felt exhausting.

So when we discover that the Louvre just closed, I’m actually relieved.

“I’m sorry,” Willem says.

“Oh, I’m not.” I’m not sure if this qualifies as an accident or not, but I’m happy either way.

We do an about-face and cross over a bridge and turn up the other bank of the river. Alongside the embankment there are all kinds of vendors selling books and old magazines, pristine issues of Paris Match with Jackie Kennedy on the cover and old pulp paperbacks with lurid covers, titled in both English and French. There’s one vendor with a bunch of bric-a-brac, old vases, costume jewelry, and in a box on the side, a collection of dusty vintage alarm clocks. I paw through and find a vintage SMI in Bakelite. “Twenty euro,” the kerchiefed saleslady says to me. I try to keep a poker face. Twenty euro is about thirty bucks. The clock is easily worth two hundred dollars.

“Do you want it?” Willem asks.

My mom would go nuts if I brought this home, and she’d never have to know where it was from. The woman winds the clock, to show me that it works, but hearing it tick, I’m reminded of what Jacques said, about time being fluid. I look out at the Seine, which is now glowing pink, reflecting the color of the clouds that are rolling in. I put the clock back in the box.

We head up off the embankment, into the twisty, narrow warren of streets that Willem tells me is the Latin Quarter, where students live. It’s different over here. Not so many grand avenues and boulevards but alley-like lanes, barely wide enough for even the tiny, space-age two-person Smart Cars that are zooming around everywhere. Tiny churches, hidden corners, alleys. It’s a whole different Paris. And just as dazzling.

“Shall we take a drink?” Willem asks.

I nod.

We cross onto a crowded avenue, full of cinemas, outdoor cafés, all of them packed, and also a handful of small hotels, not too expensive judging by the prices advertised on the sandwich boards. Most of the signs say complet, which I’m pretty sure means full, but some don’t, and some of the rooms we might be able to afford if I were to exchange the last of my cash, about forty pounds.

I haven’t been able to broach tonight with Willem. Where we’re staying. He hasn’t seemed too worried about it, which has me worried our fallback is Céline. We pass an exchange bureau. I tell Willem I want to change some money.

“I have some money left,” he says. “And you just paid for the boat.”

“But I don’t have a single euro on me. What if I wanted to, I don’t know, buy a postcard?” I stop to spin a postcard caddy. “Also, there’s drinks and dinner, and we’ll need somewhere for, for . . .” I trail off before getting the courage to finish. “Tonight.” I feel my neck go warm.

The word seems to hang out there as I wait for Willem’s response, some clue of what he’s thinking. But he’s looking over at one of the cafés, where a group of girls at a table seem to be waving at him. Finally, he turns back to me. “Sorry?” he asks.

The girls are still waving. One of them is beckoning him over. “Do you know them?”

He looks over at the café, then back at me, then back at the restaurant. “Can you wait here for a minute?”

My stomach sinks. “Yeah, no problem.”

He leaves me at a souvenir shop, where I spin the postcard caddy and spy. When he gets to the group of girls, they do the cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing—three times, though, instead of twice like he did with Céline. He sits down next to the girl who was gesturing to him. It’s clear they know each other; she keeps putting her hand on his knee. He throws darting glances in my direction, and I wait for him to wave me over, but he doesn’t, and after an endless five minutes, the touchy girl writes something down on a bit of paper and gives it to him. He jams the slip deep into his pocket. Then he stands up, and they do another cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, and he strides back to me, where I am feigning a deep interest in a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard.

“Let’s go,” he says as he grabs my elbow.

“Friends of yours?” I ask, jogging to keep up with his long stride.

“No.”

“But you know them?”

“I knew them once.”

“And you just randomly bumped into them?”

He spins toward me, and for the first time today, he’s annoyed. “It’s Paris, Lulu, the most touristy city in the world. It happens.”

Accidents, I think. But I feel jealous, possessive, not just over the girl—whose number, I suspect, he now has in his hip pocket if he hasn’t already transcribed it into his little black book—but over accidents. Because today it has felt like accidents belonged solely to us.

Willem softens. “They’re just people I knew from Holland.”

Something in Willem’s whole demeanor has changed, like a lamp whose bulb is dimming before it burns out. And it’s then that I notice the final and defeated way he says Holland, and it makes me realize that all day along, not once has he said he was going home. And then another thought hits me. Today, he was meant to be going home—or to Holland, where he’s from—for the first time in two years.

In three days, I will go home, and there will be a crowd at the airport. Back at my house, there will be a welcome-home banner, a celebratory dinner I’ll probably be too jet-lagged to eat. After only three weeks on a tour in which I was led around like a show pony, I’ll be given a hero’s welcome.

He’s been gone two years. Why isn’t Willem getting a hero’s welcome? Is anyone even waiting for him?

“When we were at Céline’s,” I ask him now, “did you call anyone?”

He turns to me, his dark eyes furrowed and confused. “No. Why?”

Because how does anyone know you’re delayed? Because how do they know to postpone your hero’s welcome until tomorrow?

“Isn’t anyone expecting you?” I ask.

Something happens to his face, for just the slightest of moments, a slip of his jaunty mask, which I hadn’t realized was a mask until I see how tired, how uncertain—how much like me—he looks underneath it.

“You know what I think?” Willem asks.

“What?”

“We should get lost.”

“I’ve got news for you, but I’ve been lost all day.”

“This is different. This is getting on purpose lost. It’s something I do when I first come to a new city. I’ll go into the metro or on a tramline and randomly pick a stop and go.”

I can see what he’s doing. He’s changing the scenery, changing the subject. And I get that, in some way, he needs to do this. So I let him. “Like traveler’s pin the tail on the donkey?” I ask.

Willem gives me a quizzical look. His English is so good that I forget not everything computes.

“Is this about accidents?” I ask.

He looks at me, and for half a second, the mask slips again. But then just like that, it’s back in place. It doesn’t matter. It slipped, and I saw. And I understand. Willem is alone, like I am alone. And now this ache that I can’t quite distinguish as his or mine has opened up inside of me.

“It’s always about the accidents,” he says.

Nine

I pick a doozy.

Using the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey strategy, I close my eyes and spin in front of the Metro map and land my finger on the benign-sounding Château Rouge.

When we come out of the Metro, we are in yet another Paris altogether, and there’s not a chateau, rouge or otherwise, in sight.

The streets are narrow, like in the Latin Quarter, but grittier. Tinny, drum-heavy music blares out from the shop windows, and there’s such an onslaught of smells, my nose doesn’t know what to breathe first: curry coming out of the patisseries, the ferric tang of blood from the giant animal carcasses being trundled through the street, the sweet and exotic smell of incense smoke, exhaust from the cars and motos, the ubiquitous smell of coffee—though there aren’t so many of the big cafés here, the kind that take up an entire corner, but more smaller, ad-hoc ones, bistro tables shoved onto the sidewalk. And they’re all packed with men smoking and drinking coffee. The women, some wearing full black veils with only their eyes showing through the slits, others in colorful dresses, sleeping babies tied to their backs, bustle in and out of the stores. We are the only tourists in this area, and people are looking at us, not menacingly, but just curiously, like we’re lost. Which we are. This is precisely why, on my own, I would never in a million years do this.

But Willem is loving it here. So I try to take a cue from him and relax, and just gape at this part of Paris meets Middle East meets Africa.

We go past a mosque, then a hulking church, all spires and buttresses, that seems like it landed in this neighborhood the same way we did. We twist and turn until we wind up in some sort of park: a quadrangle of grass and paths and handball courts sandwiched in between the apartment buildings. It’s packed with girls in head scarves playing some version of hopscotch and boys on the handball courts and people walking dogs and playing chess and sitting out for a smoke at the end of a summer afternoon.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” I ask Willem.

“I am as lost as you are.”

“Oh, we are so screwed.” But I laugh. It feels kind of nice to be lost, together.

We flop down under a stand of trees in a quiet corner of the park under a mural of children playing in the clouds. I slide off my sandals. I have tan lines made from dirt and sweat. “I think my feet are broken.”

Willem kicks off his flip-flops. I see the zigzag scar running up his left foot. “Mine too.”

We lie on our backs as the sun throws shadows down between the clouds that are really starting to roll in on the cooling breeze, bringing with them the electric smell of rain. Maybe Jacques was right, after all.

“What time is it?” Willem asks.

I shut my eyes and stick my arm out for him to see. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

He takes my arm, checks the time. But then he doesn’t let go. He examines my wrist, rotating it forward and back, as if it were some rare object, the first wrist he has ever seen.

“That’s a very nice watch,” he says finally.

“Thank you,” I say dutifully.

“You don’t like it?”

“No. It’s not that. I mean, it was a really generous gift from my parents, who’d already given me the tour, and it’s a very expensive watch.” I stop myself. It’s Willem, and something compels me to tell him the truth. “But, no, I don’t really like it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s heavy. It makes my wrist sweaty. And it ticks loudly, like it’s always trying to remind me that time is passing. Like I can’t ever forget about time.”

“So why do you wear it?”

It’s such a simple question. Why do I wear a watch that I hate? Even here, thousands of miles from home, with no one to see me wearing it, why do I still wear it? Because my parents bought it for me with the best of intentions. Because I can’t let them down.

I feel the gentle pressure of Willem’s fingers on my wrist again. The clasp opens, and the watch falls away, leaving a white ghost imprint. I can feel the refreshing breeze tickle against my birthmark.

Willem examines the watch, the Going Places engraving. “Where are you going, exactly?”

“Oh, you know. To Europe. To college. To medical school.”

“Medical school?” There’s surprise in his voice.

I nod. That’s been the plan ever since eighth grade, when I gave the Heimlich maneuver to some guy who was choking on his lamb shank at the next table. Dad had been out front, answering a call from the service when I’d seen the guy next to us go purple. So I just got up and calmly put my arms around the guy’s diaphragm and pushed until a piece of meat arced out. Mom was beyond impressed. She’d started talking about my becoming a doctor like Dad. After a while, I started talking about it too.

“So you’ll take care of me?”

His voice has the usual teasing tone, so I get that he’s joking, but this wave comes over me. Because who takes care of him now? I look at him, and he makes everything seem effortless, but I remember that feeling before—a certainty—that he is alone.

“Who takes care of you now?”

At first I’m not sure I said it aloud and, if I did, that he heard me, because he doesn’t answer for a long time. But then finally, he says, “I take care of me.”

“But what about when you can’t? When you get sick?”

“I don’t get sick.”

“Everybody gets sick. What happens when you’re on the road and you get the flu or something?”

“I get sick. I get better,” he replies, waving the question away.

I prop myself up on my elbow. This weird chasm of feeling has opened in my chest, making my breath come shallow and my words dance like scattered leaves. “I keep thinking about the double happiness story. That boy was traveling alone and got sick, but someone took care of him. Is that what happens to you when you get sick? Or are you alone in some gross hotel room?” I try to picture Willem in a mountain village, but all I get is an image of him in a dingy room. I think of how I get when I’m sick, that deep sadness, that aloneness that strikes—and I have Mom to take care of me. What about him? Does anyone bring him soup? Does anyone tell him about the green trees against the sky in the spring rain?

Willem doesn’t answer. In the distance, I can hear the pop of the handball slamming against the wall, the coquettish sound of women’s laughter. I think of Céline. The girls on the train. The models at the café. The slip of paper in his pocket. There’s probably no shortage of girls wanting to play nurse with him. I get a weird feeling in my stomach. I’ve made a wrong turn, like when I am skiing and I accidentally swerve onto a black-diamond run full of moguls.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s probably just the doctor in me coming out. Or the Jewish mother.”

Willem gives me a peculiar look. Another wrong turn. I keep forgetting that in Europe, there are hardly any Jewish people, so jokes like that don’t make sense.

“I’m Jewish, and apparently that means when I get older, I’m doomed to fuss about everyone’s health,” I hastily explain. “That’s what ‘Jewish mother’ means.”

Willem lies on his back and holds my watch up to his face. “It’s strange you mention the double happiness story. Sometimes I do get sick and wind up puking into squat toilets, and it’s not so nice.”

I wince at the thought of it.

“But there was this one time, I was traveling from Morocco to Algeria by bus, and I got dysentery, a pretty bad case. So bad I had no choice but to get off the bus in the middle of nowhere. It was some town at the edge of the Sahara, not even mentioned in any book. I was dehydrated, hallucinating, I think, stumbling around for a place to stay when I saw a hotel and restaurant called Saba. Saba was what I used to call my grandfather. It seemed like a sign, like he was saying ‘go here.’ The restaurant was empty. I went straight to the toilets to throw up again. When I came out, there was a man with a short gray beard wearing a long djellaba. I asked for some tea and ginger, which is what my mother always uses for upset stomachs. He shook his head and told me I was in the desert now and had to use desert remedies. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a grilled lemon, cut in half. He sprinkled it with salt and told me to squeeze the juice into my mouth. I thought I would lose it again, but in twenty minutes, my stomach was okay. He gave me some terrible tea that tasted like tree bark and sent me upstairs, where I slept maybe eighteen hours. Every day, I came downstairs, and he would ask how I was feeling and then prepare me a meal specifically based on my symptoms. After that we would talk, just as I had done with Saba as a child. I stayed there for a week, in this town on the edge of the map that I am not even sure exists. So it is a lot like your story from before.”

“Except he didn’t have a daughter,” I say. “Or you’d be married by now.”

We are on our sides, facing each other, so close I can feel the warmth radiating off him, so close it’s like we are breathing the same air.

“You be the daughter. Tell me that couplet again,” he says.

“Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze’s chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.”

The last word, kiss, hangs in the air.

“Next time I get sick, you can tell that to me. You can be my girl in the mountains.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be your mountain girl and take care of you.”

He smiles, like it’s another joke, another volley in our flirtation, and I smile back, even though I’m not joking.

“And in return, I will relieve you of the burden of time.” He slips my watch onto his lanky wrist, where it doesn’t seem quite so much like a prison shackle. “For now, time doesn’t exist. It is, what did Jacques say . . . fluid?”

“Fluid,” I repeat, like an incantation. Because if time can be fluid, then maybe something that is just one day can go on indefinitely.

Ten

I fall asleep. And then I wake up, and everything feels different. The park is quiet now. The sound of laughter and echoes of handballs have disappeared into the long dusky twilight. Fat, gray rainclouds have overtaken the darkening sky.

But something else has shifted, something less quantifiable yet somehow elemental. I feel it as soon as I wake; the atoms and molecules have rearranged themselves, rendering the whole world irrevocably changed.

And that’s when I notice Willem’s hand.

Willem has also fallen asleep; his long body is curved in the space around mine like a question mark. We aren’t touching at all except for his one hand, which is tucked into the crease of my hip, casually, like a dropped scarf, like it blew there on the soft breeze of sleep. And yet now that it’s there, it feels like it belongs there. Like it’s always belonged there.

I hold myself perfectly still, listening to the wind rustle through the trees, to the soft in-out of Willem’s rhythmic breathing. I concentrate on his hand, which feels like it’s delivering a direct line of electricity from his fingertips into some core part of me I didn’t even know existed until just now.

Willem stirs in his sleep, and I wonder if he’s feeling this too. How can he not? The electricity is so real, so palpable, that if someone waved a meter around, it would spin off the dial.

He shifts again, and his fingertips dig in right there into that tender flesh in the hollow of my hip, sending a shock and a zing so deliciously intense that I buck, kicking his leg behind me.

I swear, somehow I can feel his eyelashes flutter open, followed by the heat of his breath against the back of my neck. “Goeiemorgen,” he says, his voice still pliant with sleep.

I roll over to face him, thankful that his hand remains slung over my hip. His ruddy cheeks bear little indentations from the grass, like tribal initiation scars. I want to touch them, to feel the grooves of his otherwise smooth skin. I want to touch every part of him. It’s like his body is a giant sun, emitting its own gravitational pull.

“I think that means good morning, though technically it’s still evening.” My words come out sounding gaspy. I’ve forgotten how to talk and breathe at the same time.

“You forget, time doesn’t exist anymore. You gave it to me.”

“I gave it you,” I repeat. There’s such delicious surrender in the words, and I feel myself slipping away to him. Some small part of me warns against this. This is just one day. I am just one girl. But the part that can resist, that would resist, I woke up finally liberated of her.

Willem blinks at me, his eyes dark, lazy, and sexy. I can feel us kissing already. I can feel his lips all over me. I can feel the jut of his sharp hipbones against me. The park is almost deserted. There are a couple of younger girls in jeans and head scarves talking to some guys. But they are off in a corner of their own. And I don’t care about propriety.

My thoughts must be like a movie projected on a screen. He watches it all. I can tell by his knowing smile. We inch closer to each other. Beneath the chirp of cicadas, I can practically hear the energy between us humming, like the power lines that buzz overhead in the countryside.

But then I hear something else. At first, I don’t know how to place it, so discordant is it from the sounds in this bubble of electricity we are generating. But then I hear it a second time, cold and jagged and bracingly clear, and I know exactly what it is. Because fear needs no translation. A scream is the same in any language.

Willem jumps up. I jump up. “Stay here!” he commands. And before I know what has happened, he is striding away on those long legs of his, leaving me whiplashed between lust and terror.

There’s another scream. A girl’s scream. Everything seems to slow down then, like a slow-motion sequence in a movie. I see the girls, the ones with the head scarves, there are two of them, only now one isn’t wearing her scarf anymore. It is on the ground, revealing a fall of black hair that is wild and staticky, as if her hair is frightened too. She is huddled with the other girl, as if trying to disappear from the boys. Who I now see aren’t boys at all, but are men, the kind who sport shaved heads, and combat fatigues, and big black boots. The essential wrongness of these men with these girls in this now-quiet park hits me all at once. I pick up Willem’s backpack, which he’s just abandoned there, and creep closer.

I hear the soft cries of one of the girls and the men’s guttural laughter. Then they speak again. I never knew French could sound so ugly.

Just as I’m wondering where he went, Willem steps between the men and the girls and starts saying something. He’s speaking softly, but I can hear him all the way over here, which must be a kind of actor’s trick. But he’s also speaking in French, so I have no idea what he’s saying. Whatever it is, it’s gotten the skinheads’ attention. They answer him back, in loud staccato voices that echo off the empty handball courts. Willem replies in a voice as calm and quiet as a breeze, and I strain to understand just a word of it, but I can’t.

They go back and forth and as they do, the girls use the cover as it was intended and slip away. The skinheads don’t even notice. Or don’t care. It’s Willem they are interested in now. At first, I think that Willem’s powers of charm must know no bounds. That he has even made friends with skinheads. But then my ear attunes to the tone of what he is saying as opposed to the words. And I recognize the tone because it’s one I’ve been privy to all day. He’s teasing them. He is mocking them in that way that I’m not even sure they fully recognize. Because there are three of them and one of him, and if they knew what he was doing, they wouldn’t still be standing there talking.

I can smell the sickly sweet odor of booze and the acrid tang of adrenaline, and all at once, I can feel what they are going to do to Willem. I can feel it as if they are going to do it to me. And this should paralyze me with fear. It doesn’t. Instead it fills me with something hot and tender and vicious.

Who takes care of you?

Without even thinking about it, I’m reaching into Willem’s bag and grabbing the thickest thing I can find—the Rough Guide—and I’m striding toward them. No one sees me coming, not even Willem, so I have the element of surprise on my side. Also, apparently, some serious fight-or-flight strength. Because when I hurl that book at that guy closest to Willem, the one holding a beer bottle, it hits him with such force that he drops the bottle. And when he raises his hand to his brow, there’s a welt of blood blooming like a red flower.

I know I should be scared, but I’m not. I’m oddly calm, happy to be back in Willem’s presence after those interminable seconds apart. Willem, however, is staring at me wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The skinheads are looking right past me, surveying the park, as if they can’t quite believe that I could be the source of the attack.

It’s their moment of confusion that saves us. Because in that moment, Willem’s hand finds mine. And we run.

Out of the park, past the church, and back into that crazy mishmash neighborhood, past the tea shops and cafés and the animal carcasses. We leap over the overflowing gutters, past the congregation of motorcycles and bicycles, dodging delivery vans disgorging racks of clothing heavily bejeweled with glitter and sparkles.

The neighborhood’s residents stop to watch us, parting to let us through like we are a spectator sport, an Olympic event—the Crazy-White-People Chase.

I should be scared. I am being chased by angry skinheads; the only person who’s ever run after me before is my dad when we’ve gone out jogging. I can hear the clomp of their boots beat in time with the heartbeat in my head. But I’m not scared. I feel my legs magically lengthen, allowing me to match Willem’s long stride. I feel the ground undulating under our feet, as if it too is on our side. I feel like we are barely touching the earth, like we might just take off into the sky and run right over the Paris rooftops, where no one can ever touch us.

I hear them shouting behind us. I hear the sound of glass breaking. I hear something whizz past my ear and then something wet on my neck, as if my sweat glands have all opened up and released at once. And then I hear more laughter and the boot steps abruptly stop.

But Willem keeps going. He pulls me through the tiny jigsaw streets until they open up onto a large boulevard. We dash across as the light changes, running by a police car. It’s crowded now. I’m pretty sure we aren’t being chased. We are safe. But still, Willem carries on running, yanking me this way and that down a series of smaller, quieter streets until, like a bookcase revealing a secret door, a gap in the streetscape emerges. It’s the keypadded opening to one of those grand apartment houses. An old man with a wheeled cart leaves the inner courtyard just as Willem skids us into the entryway. Our momentum crashes from sixty to zero as we slam together against a stone wall just as the door clicks shut behind us.

We stand there, our bodies pressed together, barely an inch of space separating us. I can feel the fast, steady thud of his heart, the sharp in-out of his breath. I can see the rivulet of perspiration trickling down his neck. I feel my blood, thrumming, like a river about to spill over its banks. It’s as if my body can no longer contain me. I have become too big for it somehow.

“Willem,” I begin. There is so much I need to say to him.

He puts a finger up to my neck, and I fall silent, his touch at once calming and electrifying. But then he removes his finger and it’s red with blood. I reach up to touch my neck. My blood.

“Godverdomme!” he swears under his breath. With one hand, he reaches into his backpack for a bandanna, and with the other, he licks the blood on his finger clean.

He holds the bandanna against the side of my neck. I’m definitely bleeding, but not badly. I’m not even sure what happened.

“They threw a broken bottle at you.” Willem’s voice is pure fury.

But it doesn’t hurt. I’m not hurt. Not really. It’s just a little nick.

He’s standing so close to me now, gently pressing the bandanna against my neck. And then the cut on my neck is not the point of exit for blood, but the point of entry for this weird line of electricity that is surging between us.

I want him, all of him. I want to taste his mouth, his mouth that just tasted my blood. I lean into him.

But he pushes me away, pulls himself back. His hand drops from my neck. The bandanna, now clotted with blood, hangs there limply.

I look up then, into his eyes. All the color has drained out of them, so they just seem black. But more disconcerting is what I see in them, something instantly recognizable: fear. And more than anything, I want to do something, to take that away. Because I should be scared. But today, I’m not.

“It’s okay,” I begin. “I’m okay.”

“What were you thinking?” he interrupts, his voice icy as a stranger’s. And maybe it’s that or maybe it’s just relief, but now I feel like I might cry.

“They were going to hurt you,” I say. My voice breaks. I look at him, to see if he understands, but his expression has only hardened, fear having been joined by its twin brother, anger. “And I promised.”

“Promised what?”

An instant replay runs through my head: No punches had been exchanged. I hadn’t even been able to understand what they’d been saying. But they were going to hurt him. I could feel it in my bones.

“That I’d take care of you.” My voice goes quiet as the certainty drains out of me.

“Take care of me? How does this take care of me?” He opens his hand, which is stained with my blood.

He takes a step away from me, and with the twilight blinking between us now, it hits me how utterly wrong I have gotten this. I haven’t just skied onto the diamond run; I’ve flown off the face of the cliff. It was a joke, this request to take care of him. When have I ever taken care of anybody? And he certainly never said he needed taking care of.

We stand there, the silence curdling around us. The last of the sunlight slips away, and then, almost as if waiting for cover of darkness to sneak in, the rain starts to fall. Willem looks at the sky and then looks at his watch—my watch—still snug around his wrist.

I think of those forty pounds I have left. I imagine a quiet, clean hotel room. I think of us in it, not as I imagined it an hour before in that Paris park, but just quiet, listening to the rain. Please, I silently implore. Let’s just go somewhere and make this better.

But then Willem is reaching into his bag for the Eurostar schedule. And then he’s unclasping my watch. And then I realize, he’s giving time back to me. Which really means he’s taking it away.

Eleven

There are two more trains back to London tonight. Willem tells me it’s after nine, so there’s probably not enough time for me to exchange my ticket and get on the next one, but I can definitely catch the last train. Because I gain an hour back going to England, I should get to London just before the Tube stops running. Willem tells me all this in a friendly helpful way, like I’m a stranger on the street who stopped him for directions. And I nod along, like I’m the kind of person who actually takes the Tube alone, day or night.

He is oddly formal as he opens the door to the apartment courtyard for me, like he’s letting the dog out for its nightly pee. It’s late, the night edge of the long summer twilight, and the Paris I walk out into seems wholly changed from the one I left a half hour ago, though once again, I know that it’s not the rain or all the lights that have come on. Something has shifted. Or maybe shifted back. Or maybe it never shifted in the first place and I was just fooling myself.

Still, seeing this new Paris, it brings tears to my eyes that turn all the lights into a big red scar. I wipe my face with my dampening cardigan, my returned watch still grasped in my hand. Somehow I cannot bear to put it back on. It feels like it would hurt me, far more than the cut on my neck. I attempt to walk ahead of Willem, to put space between us.

“Lulu,” he calls after me.

I don’t answer. That’s not me. It never was.

He jogs to catch up. “I think Gare du Nord is that way.” He takes me by the elbow, and I steel myself against the zing, but, like tensing against a doctor’s shot, that only makes it worse.

“Just tell me how to get there.”

“I think you follow this street for a few blocks and then turn left. But first we have to go to Céline’s club.”

Right. Céline. He’s acting so normal now, not normal like Willem, but normal compared to how he was twenty minutes ago, the fear gone out of his eyes, replaced with some kind of relief. The relief of unloading me. I wonder if this was always the plan. Drop me off and circle back for Céline for the evening shift. Or maybe it’s the other girl, the one whose number is sitting snugly in his hip pocket. With so many options, why would he choose me?

You’re a good kid. That’s what my crush, Shane Michaels, had told me when I’d come as close as I ever would to admitting my feelings for him. You’re a good kid. That’s me. Shane used to hold my hand and say flirty, sweet things. I’d always thought it meant something. And then he went off with some other girl and did things that actually did mean something.

We follow a large boulevard back toward the station, but after a few blocks, we turn back off into the smaller streets. I look for the club, but this isn’t an industrial neighborhood. It’s residential, full of apartment houses, their flowering window boxes soaking up the rain, their fat cats happily dozing inside closed windows. There’s a restaurant on the corner, its fogged-up windows glowing. Even from across the street, I can make out the sound of laughter and silverware clanking against plates. People, dry and warm, enjoying a Thursday-night dinner in Paris.

The rain is coming down harder now. My sweater is soaking through to my T-shirt. I pull the sleeves down over my fists. My teeth start to chatter; I clench my jaw to keep it from showing, but that just detours the shivering to the rest of my body. I pull the bandanna off my neck. The bleeding has stopped, but my neck is now grimy with blood and sweat.

Willem looks at me with dismay, or maybe it’s disgust. “We need to clean you up.”

“I have clean clothes in my suitcase.”

Willem peers at my neck and winces. Then he takes my elbow and crosses the street and opens the door to the restaurant. Inside, candlelight flickers, illuminating the wine bottles lined up against a zinc bar and the menus scribbled on little chalkboards. I stop at the threshold. We don’t belong in here.

“We can clean your cut here. See if they have an emergency kit.”

“I’ll do it on the train.” Mom packed me a first-aid kit, naturally.

We just stand there, facing off. A waiter appears. I expect him to ream us out for letting in the chilly air, or for looking like dirty, bloodied riffraff. But he ushers me inside like he’s the host to a party, and I’m the guest of honor. He sees my neck, and his eyes go wide. Willem says something in French, and he nods at once, gesturing to a corner table.

The restaurant is warm, the air tangy with onions and sweet with vanilla, and I am too defeated to resist. I slump down into a chair, covering my cut with one hand. My other hand relaxes and releases my watch onto the white cloth, where it ticks malevolently.

The waiter returns with a small, white first-aid box and a blackboard menu. Willem opens the kit and pulls out a medicated wipe, but I snatch it from him.

“I can do it myself!” I say.

I dab the wound with ointment and cover it with an oversize bandage. The waiter returns to check my work. He nods approvingly. Then he says something to me in French. “He’s asking if you want to hang your sweater in the kitchen so it can dry,” Willem says.

I have to fight the urge to bury my face into his long, crisp, white apron and weep with gratitude for his kindness. Instead, I hand over my soaked sweater. Underneath, my damp T-shirt clings to me; there are bloodstains on the collar. I have the T-shirt Céline gave me, the same obscure, too-cool-for-school band T-shirt Willem is wearing, but I’d rather parade around in my bra than put that on. Willem says something else in French, and moments later, a large carafe of red wine is delivered to our table.

“I thought I had a train to catch.”

“You have time to eat a little something.” Willem pours a glass of wine and hands it to me.

I am technically of age to drink all over Europe, but I haven’t, not even when, at some of the prepaid lunches, wine was offered as a matter of course and some of the kids sneaked glasses when Ms. Foley wasn’t looking. Tonight, I don’t hesitate. The wine glints shades of blood in the candlelight, and drinking it is like receiving a transfusion. The warmth goes from my throat to my stomach before setting to work on the chill that has settled in my bones. I drain half a glass in one go.

“Easy there,” Willem cautions.

I gulp the rest of it and thrust out my glass like a middle finger. Willem appraises me for a second, then fills the glass to the rim.

The waiter returns and makes a formal show of handing us a chalkboard menu and a basket of bread with a small silver ramekin.

“Et pour vous, le pâté.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I mean, merci.”

He smiles. “De rien.”

Willem breaks off a piece of bread and spreads it with the brown paste and offers it to me. I just glare at him.

“Better than Nutella,” he teases in an almost singsong voice.

Maybe it is the wine or the prospect of getting rid of me, but Willem, the Willem I’ve been with all day, is back. And somehow, this makes me furious. “I’m not hungry,” I say, even though I am, in fact, famished. I haven’t eaten anything since that crêpe. “And it looks like dog food,” I add for good measure.

“Just try.” He holds the bread and pâté up to my mouth. I snatch it from his hands, take a tiny sample. The flavor is both delicate and intense, like meat butter. But I refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing me enjoy it. I nibble a bite and make a face. Then I put the bread back down again.

The waiter returns, sees our emptying wine carafe, gestures to it. Willem nods. He returns with a full one. “The sole is . . . it is finis,” he says in English, wiping the entry off the chalkboard. He looks at me. “You are cold and have lost blood,” he says, as if I hemorrhaged or something. “I recommend something with force.” He makes a fist. “The beef bourguignon is excellent. We also have a fish pot au feu, very good.”

“Just keep it coming,” I say, gesturing to the wine.

The waiter frowns slightly and looks to me, then Willem, like I am somehow their joint responsibility. “May I suggest to start, a salad with some asparagus and smoked salmon.”

My traitorous stomach gurgles. Willem nods, then orders for both of us, the two things that the waiter recommended. He doesn’t even bother to ask me what I want. Which is fine, because right now all I want is wine. I reach out for another glass, but Willem puts his hand on top of the opening of the carafe. “You have to eat something first,” he says. “It’s from duck, not pig.”

“So?” I shove a whole piece of baguette and pâté into my mouth, defiantly and noisily chomping on it, hiding any satisfaction I’m actually taking from it. Then I hold out my glass.

Willem looks at me for a long moment. But he does oblige with a refill and then that lazy half smile. In one day, I’ve come to love that smile. And now I want to murder it.

We sit in silence until the waiter returns to deliver the salad with a flourish befitting the beautiful dish: a still life of pink salmon, green asparagus, yellow mustard sauce, and toast points scattered around the side of the plate like blossoms. My mouth waters, and it’s like my body is waving the white flag, telling me to just give in, to quit while I’m ahead, to accept the nice day I had, which really, is far more than I had any right to hope for. But there’s another part of me that is still hungry, hungry not just for food, but for everything that’s been laid out in front of me today. On behalf of that hungry girl, I refuse the salad.

“You’re still upset,” he says. “It’s not so bad as I thought. It won’t even scar.”

Yes, it will. Even if it heals up next week, it’ll scar, although maybe not in the way he means. “You think I’m upset about this?” I touch the bandage on my neck.

He won’t look at me. He knows damn well I’m not upset about that. “Let’s just eat something, okay?”

“You’re sending me back. Do what you have to do, but don’t ask me to be happy about it.”

Over the dancing candlelight, I see his expressions pass by like fast clouds: surprise, amusement, frustration, and tenderness—or maybe it’s pity. “You were going to leave tomorrow, so what’s the difference?” He brushes some bread crumbs off the tablecloth.

The difference, Willem? The difference is the night.

“Whatever,” is my stellar reply.

“Whatever?” Willem asks. He runs his finger along the rim of his glass; it makes a low sound, like a foghorn. “Did you think about what would happen?”

It’s all I’ve been thinking about, and all I’ve been trying not to think about: What would happen tonight.

But again, I’ve misunderstood him. “Did you think about what would happen if they caught us?” he continues.

I could feel what they wanted to do to him. I could taste their violence in my own mouth. “That’s why I threw the book at them; they wanted to hurt you,” I say. “What did you say to them to get them so angry?”

“They were already angry,” he says, evading my question. “I just gave them a different reason.” But by his answer and the look on his face, I can tell that I’m not wrong. That they were going to hurt him. What I felt about that, at least, was real.

“Can you imagine if they’d caught us? You?” Willem voice is so quiet I have to lean in to hear him. “Look what they did.” He reaches over as if to touch my neck, but then pulls back.

In the adrenaline of the chase and the weird euphoria that followed, I hadn’t thought about them catching me. Maybe because it hadn’t seemed possible. We had wings on our feet; they had leaden boots. But now, here, with Willem sitting across from me, wearing this strange, somber expression, with his bloody bandanna crumpled into a ball on the side of the table, I can hear those boots getting closer, can hear them stomping, can hear bones cracking.

“But they didn’t catch us.” I swallow the tremble in my voice with another gulp of wine.

He finishes his wine and stares at the empty glass for a moment. “This is not what I brought you here for.”

“What did you bring me here for?” Because he never answered that. Never said why he asked me to come to Paris with him for the day.

He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hands. When he removes his hands, he looks different somehow. Stripped bare of all the masks. “Not for things to get out of control.”

“Well, a little late for that.” I’m trying to be flip, to summon whatever dregs of Lulu I have left. But when I say it, the truth of it wallops me in the stomach. We, or at least, I, have long since passed the point of no return.

I look back at him. His eyes lock on mine. The current clicks back on.

“I suppose it is,” Willem says.

Twelve

Maybe Jacques was right, and time really is fluid. Because as we eat, my watch sits there on the table and seems to bend and distort like a Salvador Dalí painting. And then at one point, somewhere between the beef bourguignon and crème brûlée, Willem reaches for it and looks at me for a long moment before slipping it back on his wrist. I feel this profound sense of relief. Not just that I’m not being sent back to London tonight, but that he is taking charge of time again. My surrender is now complete.

It is late when we spill out onto the streets, and Paris has turned into a sepia-toned photograph. It’s too late to get a hotel or youth hostel, and there’s no money left, anyhow. I gave the rest of my cash, my forty pounds, to Willem to help pay for dinner. The waiter protested when we paid, not because we gave him a grab-bag of euros and pounds, but because we gave him the equivalent of a twenty-five-dollar tip. “Too much,” he protested.” Wholly insufficient, I thought.

But now here I am: No money. No place to stay. It should be my worst nightmare. But I don’t care. It’s funny the things you think you’re scared of until they’re upon you, and then you’re not.

And so we walk. The streets are quiet. It seems to be just us and street sweepers in their bright-green jumpsuits, their twig-like neon-green brooms looking like they were plucked from a magical forest. There’s the flash of headlights as cars and taxis pass by, splashing through the puddles left by the earlier downpour, which has now softened to a misty drizzle.

We walk along the quiet canals and then along the park with the lake where we hitched a ride earlier in the day. We walk under the elevated railroad tracks.

Eventually, we wind up in a small Chinatown. It’s closed up for the night, but the signs are all lit up.

“Look,” I say to Willem, pointing to one. “It’s double happiness.”

Willem stops and looks at the sign. His face is beautiful, even reflected in the bright neon glow.

“Double happiness.” He smiles. Then he takes my hand.

My heart somersaults. “Where are we going?”

“You never got to see any art.”

“It’s one in the morning.”

“It’s Paris!”

We wend deeper into Chinatown, cutting up and down the streets until Willem finds what he’s looking for: a series of tall, dilapidated buildings with barred windows. They all look the same except for the building on the far right; it is covered in red scaffolding from which hangs a series of very modern, very distorted portraits. The front door is completely covered in colorful graffiti and flyers.

“What is this place?”

“An art squat.”

“What’s that?”

Willem tells me about squats, abandoned buildings that artists or musicians or punks or activists take over. “Usually, they’ll put you up for the night. I haven’t slept here, but I’ve been inside once, and they were pretty nice.”

But when Willem tries the heavy steel front door, it’s locked and chained from the outside. He steps back to look at the windows, but the whole place, like the surrounding neighborhood, is tucked in for the night.

Willem looks at me apologetically. “I thought someone would be here tonight.” He sighs. “We can stay with Céline.” But even he looks less than thrilled at that prospect.

I shake my head. I would rather walk all night in the pouring rain. And, anyway, the rain has stopped. A thin sliver of moon is dodging in and out of the clouds. It looks so fundamentally Parisian hanging over the slanting rooftops that it’s hard to believe this is the same moon that will shine in my bedroom window back home tonight. Willem follows my gaze up to the sky. Then his eyes lock on something.

He walks back toward the building, and I follow him. Along one corner, a piece of scaffolding runs up to a ledge that leads to an open window. A curtain billows in the breeze.

Willem looks at the window. Then at me. “Can you climb?”

Yesterday I would’ve said no. Too high. Too dangerous. But today I say, “I can try.”

I sling my bag over my shoulder and step onto the ladder Willem has made with the loop of his hands. He heaves me halfway up, and I get a foothold in a groove in the plaster and use the scaffolding to get myself to the ledge. I sort of belly-slide across it and grab at the spiral railings by the window, heaving myself through headfirst.

“I’m okay!” I call. “I’m fine.”

I poke my head out the window. Willem is standing just below. He has that private little half smile again. And then as effortlessly as a squirrel, he shimmies up, steps upright onto the ledge, crosses it with his arms out like a tightrope walker, bends his knees, and slips into the window.

It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but once they do, I see white everywhere: white walls, white shelves, white desk, white clay sculptures.

“Someone left us a key,” Willem says.

We are both quiet. I like to think it’s a moment of thanksgiving for the providence of accidents.

Willem pulls out a small flashlight. “Shall we explore?”

I nod. We set off, examining a sculpture that looks like it’s made of marshmallows, a series of black-and-white photos of naked fat girls, a series of oil paintings of naked skinny girls. He shines the flashlight around a giant sculpture, very futuristic, metal and tubes, all twisted and turning, like an artist’s rendition of a space station.

We pad down the creaking stairs to a room with black walls and enormous photographs of people floating in deep blue water. I stand there and can almost feel the soft water, the way the waves caress when I sometimes go swimming in Mexico at night to escape the crowds.

“What do you think?” Willem asks.

“Better than the Louvre.”

We go back upstairs. Willem clicks off the flashlight.

“You know? One day one of these might be in the Louvre,” he says. He touches an elliptical white sculpture that seems to glow in the darkness. “You think Shakespeare ever guessed Guerrilla Will would be doing his plays four hundred years later?” He laughs a little, but there’s something in his voice that sounds almost reverent. “You never know what will last.”

He said that earlier, about accidents, about never knowing which one is just a kink in the road and which one is a fork, about never knowing your life is changing until it’s already happened.

“I think sometimes you do know,” I say, my voice filling with emotion.

Willem turns to me, fingers the strap on my shoulder bag. For a second, I can’t move. I can’t breathe. He lifts my bag and drops it to the floor. An eddy of dust flies up and tickles my nose. I sneeze.

“Gezondheid,” Willem says.

“Hagelslag,” I say back.

“You remember that?”

“I remember everything from today.” There’s a lump in my throat as I understand just how true this is.

“What will you remember?” He drops his backpack next to my messenger bag. They slump into each other like old war buddies.

I lean back against the worktable. The day flashes before me: From Willem’s playful voice over my breakfast on the first train to the exhilaration of making my strange admission to him on the next train to the Giant’s amiable kiss in the club to the cooling stickiness of Willem’s saliva on my wrist at the café to the sound of secrets underneath Paris to the release I experienced when my watch came off to the electricity I felt when Willem’s hand found me to the shattering fear of that girl’s scream to Willem’s brave and immediate reaction to it to our flight through Paris, which felt just like that, like flight, to his eyes: the way they watch me, tease me, test me, and, yet, somehow understand me.

That’s what I see before my eyes when I think of this day.

It has to do with Paris, but more than that, it has to do with the person who brought me here. And with the person he allowed me to become here. I’m too overcome to explain it all, so instead I say the one word that encapsulates it: “You.”

“And what about this?” He touches the bandage on my neck. I feel a jolt that has nothing to do with the wound.

“I don’t care about that,” I whisper.

“I care,” he whispers back.

What Willem doesn’t know—what he can’t know, because he didn’t know me before today—is that none of that matters. “I wasn’t in danger today,” I tell him in a choked voice. “I escaped danger today.” And I did. Not just getting away from the skinheads, but I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn’t even known I was in. “I escaped,” I repeat.

“You escaped.” He comes closer so he towers over me. My back is pressed into the worktable, and my heart starts to pound because there’s no escaping this. I don’t want to escape this.

As if disconnected from the rest of my body, my hand raises in the air and goes to touch his cheek. But before it arrives, Willem’s hand whips around and grabs my wrist. For one confused second, I think I’ve misread the situation again, am about to be refused.

Willem holds my wrist for a long moment, looking at that birthmark. Then he lifts it to his mouth. And though his lips are soft and his kiss is gentle, it feels like a knife jamming into the electrical socket. It feels like the moment when I go live.

Willem kisses my wrist, then moves upward, along the inside of my arm to the tickly crook of my elbow, to my armpit, to places that never seemed deserving of kisses. My breath grows ragged as his lips graze my shoulder blade now, stopping to drink at the pool of my clavicle before turning their attention to the cords of my neck, to the area around the bandage, then gently to the top of the bandage. Parts of my body I never even realized existed come alive as the circuits click on.

When he finally kisses my mouth, everything goes oddly quiet, like the moment of silence between lightning and thunder. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi.

Bang.

We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I’ve had in my life has been wrong.

I tangle my hands into that hair of his and pull him toward me. Willem cups the back of my neck, runs his fingers along the little outcroppings of my vertebrae. Ping. Ping. Ping, go the electric shocks.

His hands encircle my waist as he boosts me onto the table, so we are face-to-face, kissing hard now. My cardigan comes off. Then my T-shirt. Then his. His chest is smooth and cut, and I bury my head in it, kissing down the indentation at his centerline. I’m unbuckling his belt, tugging down his jeans with hunger I don’t recognize.

My legs loop around his waist. His hands are all over me, migrating down to the crease of my hip where they’d rested during our nap. I make a sound that doesn’t seem like it could come from me.

A condom materializes. My underwear is shimmied down over my sandaled feet and my skirt is bunched into a petticoat around my waist. Willem’s boxers fall away. Then he lifts me off the table. And then I realize that I was wrong before. Only now is my surrender complete.

After, we fall to the floor, Willem on his back, me resting next to him. His fingers graze my birthmark, which feels like it is flashing heat, and mine tickle his wrist, the hairs so soft against the heavy links of my watch.

“So this is how you’d take care of me?” he jokes, pointing to a red mark on his neck where I think I bit him.

Like with everything, he’s turned my promise into something funny, something to tease me with. But I don’t feel like laughing, not now, not about this, not after that.

“No,” I say. “That’s not how.” Part of me wants to disavow the whole thing. But I won’t. Because he asked me if I’d take care of him, and even if it was a joke, I made a promise that I would, and that wasn’t a joke. When I said I’d be his mountain girl, I knew I wasn’t going to see him again. That wasn’t the point. I wanted him to know that when felt alone out there in the world . . . I was there too.

But that was yesterday. With a clench of my chest that makes me truly understand why it’s called heartbreak, I wonder if it’s not him being alone that I’m worried about.

Willem fingers the fine film of white clay dust that covers my body. “You’re like a ghost,” he says. “Soon you disappear.” His voice is light, but when I try to catch his eye, he won’t meet my gaze.

“I know.” There’s a lump in my throat. If we keep talking about this, it’ll become a sob.

Willem wipes off a bit of the dust and my darker, tour-tanned skin reemerges. But other things, I now realize, won’t come off so readily. I take Willem’s chin in my hands and turn him to face me. In the wispy glow of the streetlamp, his planes and angles are both shadowed and illuminated. And then he looks at me, really looks at me, and the expression on his face is sad and wistful and tender and yearning, and it tells me everything I need to know.

My hand shakes as I raise it to my mouth. I lick my thumb and rub it against my wrist, against my birthmark. Then I rub again. I look up, look him right in his eyes, which are as dark as this night I don’t want to end.

Willem’s face falters for a moment, then he grows solemn, the way he did after we were chased. Then he reaches over and rubs my birthmark. It’s not coming off, is what he is telling me.

“But you leave tomorrow,” he says.

I can hear the drumbeat of my heart echo in my temples. “I don’t have to.”

For a second, he looks confused.

“I can stay for another day,” I explain.

Another day. That’s all I’m asking. Just one more day. I can’t think beyond that. Beyond that things get complicated. Flights get delayed. Parents go ballistic. But one more day. One more day I can swing with minimal hassle, without upsetting anyone but Melanie. Who will understand. Eventually.

Part of me knows one more day won’t do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.

“What do you think?” I ask Willem. “One more day?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he flips me under him. I sink into the cement floor, submitting to the weight of him. Until something sharp jabs into my rib cage.

“Ow!”

Willem reaches under me and pulls out a small metal chisel.

“We should find somewhere else to stay,” I say. “Not with Céline.”

“Shh.” Willem quiets me with his lips.

Later, after we have taken our time, exploring every hidden crease of each other’s bodies, after we have kissed and licked and whispered and laughed until our limbs are heavy and the sky outside has started to purple with predawn light, Willem pulls a tarp over us.

“Goeienacht, Lulu,” he says, his eyes fluttering with exhaustion.

I trace the creases of his face with my fingers. “Goeienacht, Willem,” I reply. I lean into his ear, push the messy bramble of his hair aside and whisper, “Allyson. My name is Allyson.” But by then, he is already asleep. I rest my head in the crook between his arm and shoulder, tracing the letters of my true name onto his forearm, where I imagine their outlines will remain until morning.

Thirteen

After a ten-day heat wave, I’m used to waking up sweaty, but I wake up to a cool breeze gusting through an open window. I reach for a blanket, but instead of getting something warm and feathery, I get something hard and crinkly. A tarp. And in that hazy space between wake and sleep, it all comes back to me. Where I am. Who I’m with. The happiness warms me from the inside.

I reach for Willem, but he’s not there. I open my eyes, squinting against the gray light, bouncing off the bright white of the studio walls.

Instinctively, I check my watch, but my wrist is bare. I pad over to the window, pulling my skirt around my naked chest. The streets are still quiet, the stores and cafés still shut. It’s still early.

I want to call to him, but there’s a church-like hush, and to disrupt it feels wrong. He must be downstairs, maybe in the bathroom. I could sort of use it myself. I pull on my clothes and tiptoe down the stairs. But Willem isn’t in the bathroom, either. I quickly pee and throw water on my face and try to drink away the beginnings of my hangover.

He must be exploring the studios by daylight. Or maybe he went back up the staircase. Calm down, I tell myself. He’s probably back upstairs right now.

“Willem?” I call.

There’s no answer.

I run back upstairs to the studio we slept in. It’s messy. On the floor is my bag, its contents spilling out. But his bag, his stuff, is all gone.

My hearts starts to pound. I run over to my bag and open it up, checking for my wallet and passport, my minimal cash. Immediately I feel stupid. He paid for me to come over here. He isn’t going to rip me off. I remind myself of the tizzy I got myself into yesterday on the train.

I run up and down the stairs, calling his name now. But it just echoes back to me—Willem, Willem!—like the walls are laughing at me.

Panic is coming. I try to push it away with logic. He went out to get us something to eat. To find us somewhere to sleep.

I go stand next to the window and wait.

Paris begins to wake. Store grates go up, sidewalks are swept. Car horns start honking, bicycles chime, the sound of footfalls on the rainy pavement multiply.

If stores are open, it must be nine o’clock? Ten? Soon the artists will arrive, and what will they do when they find me squatting in their squat like Goldilocks?

I decide to wait outside. I put on my shoes and sling my bag over my shoulder and head to the open window. But in the cold light of day, without wine emboldening me or Willem helping me, the distance between the second floor and the ground seems like an awfully long way to fall.

You got up, you can get back down, I chastise myself. But when I hoist myself onto the ledge and reach for the scaffolding, my hand slips and I feel dizzy. I imagine my parents getting the news of me falling to my death from a Paris building. I collapse back into the studio, hyperventilating into the cave of my hands.

Where is he? Where the hell is he? My mind pinballs through rationales for his delay. He went to get more money. He went to fetch my suitcase. What if he fell going out the window? I jump up, full of twisted optimism that I will find him sprawled underneath the drain pipe, hurt but okay, and then I can make good on my promise to take care of him. But there’s nothing under the window except a puddle of dirty water.

I sink back down onto the studio floor, breathless with fear, which is now on an entirely different Richter scale than my little scare on the train.

More time goes by. I hug my knees, shivering in the damp morning. I creep downstairs. I try the front door, but it’s locked, from the outside. I have the sense that I’m going to be trapped here forever, that I’ll grow old and wither and die locked in this squat.

How late can artists sleep? What time is it? But I don’t need a clock to tell me Willem has been gone too long. With each passing minute, the explanations I keep concocting ring increasingly hollow.

Finally, I hear the clank of the chain and keys jangle in the locks, but when the door swings open, it’s a woman with two long braids carrying a bunch of rolled up canvases. She looks at me and starts talking to me in French, but I just spring past her.

Out on the street, I look around for Willem, but he’s not here. It seems like he would never be here, on this ugly stretch of cheap Chinese restaurants and auto garages and apartment blocks, all gray in the gray rain. Why did I ever think this place was beautiful?

I run into the street. The cars honk at me, their horns strange and foreign sounding, as if even they speak another language. I spin around, having absolutely no idea where I am, no idea where to go, but desperately wanting to be home. Home in my bed. Safe.

The tears make it hard to see, but somehow I stumble across the street, down the sidewalk, ricocheting from block to block. This time no one is chasing me. But this time I am scared.

I run for several blocks, up a bunch of stairs and onto a square of sorts, with a rack of those gray-white bicycles, a real estate agency, a pharmacy, and a café, in front of which is a phone booth. Melanie! I can call Melanie. I take some deep breaths, swallow my sobs, and follow the instructions to get the international operator. But the call goes straight to voice mail. Of course it does. She left the phone off to avoid calls from my mother.

An operator comes on the line to tell me I can’t leave a message because the call is collect. I start to cry. The operator asks me if she should call the police for me. I hiccup out a no, and she asks if perhaps there is someone else I might call. And that’s when I remember Ms. Foley’s business card.

She picks up with a brisk “Pat Foley.” The operator has to ask her if she’ll accept the collect call three times because I start crying harder the minute she answers, so she can’t hear the request.

“Allyson. Allyson. What’s the matter? Are you hurt?” she asks over the line.

I’m too scared, too numb to be hurt. That will come later.

“No,” I say in the tiniest of voices. “I need help.”

Ms. Foley manages to pull the basics out of me. That I went to Paris with a boy I met on the train. That I’m stuck here, lost, with no money, no clue where I am.

“Please,” I beg her. “I just want to go home.”

“Let’s work on getting you back to England, shall we?” she says calmly. “Do you have a ticket?”

Willem bought me a round trip, I think. I rifle through my bag and pull out my passport. The ticket is still folded neatly inside. “I think so,” I tell Ms. Foley in a quivery voice.

“When is the return booked for?”

I look at it. The numbers and dates all swim together. “I can’t tell.”

“Top left corner. It’ll be in military time. The twenty-four-hour clock.”

And there I see it. “Thirteen-thirty.”

“Thirteen-thirty,” Ms. Foley says in that comfortingly efficient voice of hers. “Excellent. That’s one-thirty. It’s just past noon now in Paris, so you have time to catch that train. Can you get yourself to the train station? Or to a Metro?”

I have no idea how. And no money. “No.”

“How about a taxi? Take a taxi to the Gare du Nord?”

I shake my head. I don’t have any euros to pay for a taxi. I tell Ms. Foley that. I can hear the disapproval in her silence. As if nothing I’ve told her before has lowered me in her esteem, but coming to Paris without sufficient funds? She sighs. “I can order you a taxi from here and have it prepaid to bring you to the train station.”

“You can do that?”

“Just tell me where you are.”

“I don’t know where I am,” I bellow. I paid absolutely no attention to where Willem took me yesterday. I surrendered.

“Allyson!” Her voice is a slap across the face, and it has just the intended effect. It stops my caterwauling. “Calm down. Now put the phone down for a moment and go write down the nearest intersection.”

I reach into my bag for my pen, but it’s not there. I put the phone down and memorize the street names. “I’m at Avenue Simon Bolivar and Rue de l’Equerre.” I’m butchering the pronunciation. “In front of a pharmacy.”

Ms. Foley repeats back the information, then tells me not to move, that a car will be there within a half hour and that I’m to call her back if one doesn’t arrive. That if she doesn’t hear from me, she will assume that I will be on the one-thirty train to St. Pancras, and she will meet me in London right at edge of the platform at two forty-five. I’m not to leave the train station without her.

Fifteen minutes later, a black Mercedes cruises up to the corner. The driver holds a sign, and when I see my name—Allyson Healey—I feel both relieved and bereft. Lulu, wherever she came from, is truly gone now.

I slide into the backseat, and we take off for what turns out to be all of a ten-minute drive to the train station. Ms. Foley has arranged for the driver to take me inside, to show me right where to board. I’m in a daze as we make our way through the station, and it’s only when I am slumped into my seat and I see people wheeling bags through the aisles that I realize that I’ve left my suitcase at the club. All my clothes and all the souvenirs from the trip are in there. And I don’t even care. I have lost something far more valuable in Paris.

I keep it together until the train goes into the Tunnel. And then maybe it’s the safety of the darkness or the memory of yesterday’s underwater journey that sets everything loose, but once we leave Calais and the windows darken, I again start to quietly sob, my tears salty and endless as the sea I’m traveling through.

At St. Pancras, Ms. Foley escorts me to a café, stations me at a corner table, and buys me tea that grows cold in its cup. I tell her everything now: The underground Shakespeare play in Stratford-upon-Avon. Meeting Willem on the train. The trip to Paris. The perfect day. His mysterious disappearance this morning that I still do not understand. My panicked flight.

I expect her to be stern—disapproving, for deceiving her, for being such a not-good girl—but instead she is sympathetic.

“Oh, Allyson,” she says.

“I just don’t know what could’ve happened to him. I waited and waited for a few hours at least, and I got so scared. I panicked. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve waited longer.”

“You could’ve waited until next Christmas, and I scarcely imagine it would have done a spot of good,” Ms. Foley says.

I look at her. I can feel my eyes beseeching.

“He was an actor, Allyson. An actor. They are the worst of the lot.”

“You think the whole thing was an act? Was fake?” I shake my head. “Yesterday wasn’t fake.” My voice is emphatic, though I’m no longer sure who I’m trying to convince.

“I daresay it was real in the moment,” she says, measuring her words. “But men are different from women. Their emotions are capricious. And actors turn it on and turn it right back off.”

“It wasn’t an act,” I repeat, but my argument is losing steam.

“Did you sleep with him?”

For a second, I can still feel him on me. I push the thought away, look at Ms. Foley, nod.

“Then he got what he came for.” Her words are matter-of-fact, but not unkind. “I imagine he never planned on it being more than a one-day fling. That was exactly what he proposed, after all.”

It was. Until it wasn’t. Last night, we declared our feelings for each other. I am about to tell Ms. Foley this. But then I stop cold: Did we declare anything? Or did I just lick some spit on myself?

I think about Willem. Really think about him. What do I actually know about him? Only a handful of facts—how old he is, how tall he is, what he weighs, his nationality, except I don’t even know that because he said his mother wasn’t Dutch. He’s a traveler. A drifter, really. Accidents are the defining force in his life.

I don’t know his birthday. Or his favorite color, or favorite book, or favorite type of music. Or if he had a pet growing up. I don’t know if he ever broke a bone. Or how he got the scar on his foot or why he hasn’t been home in so long. I don’t even know his last name! And that’s still more than he has on me. He doesn’t even know my first name!

In this ugly little café, without the romantic gleam of Paris turning everything rose-colored pretty, I begin to see things as they truly are: Willem invited me to Paris for one day. He never promised me anything more. Last night, he’d even tried to send me home. He knew Lulu wasn’t my real name, and he made absolutely no attempt to ever find out who I really was. When I’d mentioned texting or emailing him the picture of the two of us, he’d cleverly refused to give out his contact details.

And it wasn’t like he’d lied. He said he’d fallen in love many times, but had never been in love. He’d offered it up about himself. I think of the girls on the train, Céline, the models, the girl at the café. And that was just in a single day together. How many of us were out there? And rather than accept my lot and enjoy my one day and move on, I’d dug in my heels. I’d told him I was in love with him. That I wanted to take care of him. I’d begged for another day, assumed he wanted it too. But he never answered me. He never actually said yes.

Oh, my God! It all makes sense now. How could I have been so naïve? Fall in love? In a day? Everything from yesterday, it was all fake. All an illusion. As reality crystallizes into place, the shame and humiliation make me so sick, I feel dizzy. I cradle my head in my hands.

Ms. Foley reaches out to pat my head. “There, there, dear. Let it out. Predictable, yes, but still brutal. He could have at least seen you off at the train station, waved you away and then never called again. A bit more civilized.” She squeezes my hand. “This too shall pass.” She pauses, leans in closer. “What happened to your neck, dear?”

My hand flies up to my neck. The bandage has come off, and the scabby cut is starting to itch. “Nothing,” I say. “It was an . . . ” I’m about to say accident, but I stop myself. “A tree.”

“And where’s your lovely watch?” she asks.

I look down at my wrist. I see my birthmark, ugly, naked, blaring. I yank down my sweater sleeve to cover it. “He has it.”

She clucks her tongue. “They’ll do that, sometimes. Take things as a sort of trophy. Like serial killers.” She takes a final slurp of her tea. “Now, shall we take you to Melanie?”

I hand Ms. Foley the scrap of paper with Veronica’s address, and she pulls out a London A–Z book to chart our way. I fall asleep on the Tube, my tears wrung out, the blankness of exhaustion the only comfort I have now. Ms. Foley shakes me awake at Veronica’s stop and leads me to the redbricked Victorian house where her flat is.

Melanie comes bounding to the door, already dressed up for tonight’s trip to the theater. Her face is lit up with anticipation, waiting to hear a really good story. But then she sees Ms. Foley, and her expression skids. Without knowing anything, she knows everything: She bid Lulu farewell at the train station yesterday, and it’s Allyson being returned to her like damaged goods. She gives the slightest of nods, as if none of this surprises her. Then she kicks off her heels and opens her arms to me, and when I step into them, the humiliation and heartbreak bring me to my knees. Melanie sinks to the ground alongside me, her arms hugging me tight. Behind me, I hear Ms. Foley’s retreating footsteps. I let her leave without saying a word. I don’t thank her. And I already know that I never will, and that is wrong considering the great kindness she’s done me. But if I am to survive, I can never, ever visit this day again.