“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.
Just One Day - English romantic Novel
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romantic_story
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- Joined: 17 Aug 2015 17:28
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romantic_story
- Expert Member
- Posts: 228
- Joined: 17 Aug 2015 17:28
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
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?”
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?”
-
romantic_story
- Expert Member
- Posts: 228
- Joined: 17 Aug 2015 17:28
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
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?”
“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?”