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I remove my hand, which travels straight to my swollen, throbbing, worse-than-yesterday gums. And then I emit a rather frightening moan.
“You said he woke you up, and then you left the café,” Kurt says. “That means he paid your bill.”
“I know. I know.” But I’m scrambling out of bed anyway. I grab my bag, dump it upside down, and shake it frantically.
“You won’t find it,” he says.
A well-loved paperback about hiking disasters on Mount Everest thunks against my rug. Pens and lipsticks and quarters shower out and roll away. My wallet. An empty pack of tissues, a pair of sunglasses, a crumpled flyer for a new bagel store. Nothing. I shake it harder. Still nothing. I check my wallet even though I already know what I won’t find: a receipt from the café.
“Told you,” he says.
“I have to apologize for being such a lunatic. I have to pay him back.”
“Pay who back?” Hattie asks.
My head whips around to find my younger sister appraising me from the doorway. She’s leaning against the frame with crossed arms, but she still looks way too tall. Which she is. Not only did she surpass me in height last year, but she far exceeded me.
“I know what you did last night,” she says. “I know you snuck out.”
“I didn’t sneak out. I just left for a few hours.”
“But Maman and Dad don’t know.”
I don’t reply, and Hattie smiles. She’s as smug as a house cat. She won’t tell. With information this valuable, she’ll hold on to it until it’s useful. Hattie swipes my wallet from the floor and – staring me down, lording over me with her stupid growth spurt – drops it back into my bag. And then she’s gone.
I throw the bag at her vacated space and crawl into bed. I wrap both of my arms around one of Kurt’s. “You have to go with me,” I say. “To the café. Tonight.”
His eyebrows furrow into their familiar V shape. “You think Josh is a regular?”
“Maybe.” I have no reason to think this. I just want him to be a regular. “Please, I have to explain myself.”
His shoulders shrug against me. “Then I’ll find the Right Way.”
Kurt likes routine, and he always likes to know where he’s going ahead of time. He’s obsessed with mapping out the best route to get anywhere…even a café that’s only a few minutes away. He calls these routes the Right Way. The Right Way never involves mass transit, crowded intersections, or streets containing Abercrombie & Fitch-type stores that blast noxious music and/or cologne.
Cartography has fascinated him since he was six, when he discovered The Times Atlas of the World weighing down one of my older sister’s gluey craft projects. The book became an obsession, and Kurt pored over its pages for years, memorizing names and shapes and distances. When we were young, we’d lie on my floor and draw our own maps. Kurt would make these tidy, detailed, to-scale maps of our neighbourhood while I’d create England-shaped islands with Old English-sounding names. They’d have dense woods and spidery rivers and snowcapped peaks, and I’d surround them with shark triangles and sea-monster arches. It drove Kurt crazy that I wouldn’t draw anything real.
I’ve known him for ever. Our mothers are also best friends – and they’re both Frenchwomen living in New York – so he’s just…always been around. We went to the same schools in Manhattan, and now we attend the same high school in Paris. He’s thirteen months younger than me, so there was only one year when we were apart – when he was in eighth grade, and I was a freshman. Neither of us likes to think about that year.
I blow a lock of his scruffy blond hair from my face. “You don’t think…”
“You’re gonna have to finish that sentence.”
“It’s just…Josh and I talked. I remember feeling happy. You don’t think it’s possible that last night was…not some embarrassing mishap, but…my way in?”
He frowns again. “Your way into what?”
Kurt isn’t good at filling in blanks. And even though he’s always known how I feel about Josh, I still hesitate before saying it aloud. This tiny, flickering hope. “A relationship. Kismet, you know?”
“Fate doesn’t exist.” He gives me a dismissive huff. “Catalogue last night as another embarrassing mishap. It’s been a while since you’ve had one,” he adds.
“Almost a year.” I sigh. “Right on schedule.”
Josh and I have had exactly one meaningful interaction per year, none of which have left me looking desirable. When we were freshmen, Josh saw me reading Joann Sfar in the cafeteria. He was excited to find someone else interested in European comics, so he began asking me this rapid string of questions, but I was too overwhelmed to reply. I could only gape at him in silence. He gave me a weird look and then left.
When we were sophomores, our English teacher partnered us up for a fake newspaper article. I was so nervous that I couldn’t stop tapping my pen. And then it slipped from my grasp. And then it flew into his forehead.
When we were juniors, I caught him and his girlfriend making out in an elevator. It wasn’t even at school. It was inside BHV, this massive department store. I bumbled an unintelligible hello, let the doors close, and took the stairs.
“But,” I persist, “I have a reason to talk to him now. You don’t think there’s any chance that it might lead to something?”
“Since when is human behaviour reasonable?”
“Come on.” I widen my eyes like an innocent doe. “Can’t you pretend with me? Even for a second?”
“I don’t see the point in pretending.”
“That was a joke,” I explain, because sometimes Kurt needs explanations.
He scowls at himself in frustration. “Noted.”
“I dunno.” I burrow against the side of his body. “It’s not logical, and I can’t explain it, but…I think Josh will be there tonight. I think we’ll see him.”
“Before you ask” – Kurt barges into my new dorm room in Paris, three months later, narrowly missing a run-in with an empty suitcase – “no. I didn’t see him.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.” Although I was.
My last ember of hope gutters. Over the summer, it faded and faded until it was barely visible at all. The ghost of a hope. Because Kurt was right, human behaviour isn’t reasonable. Or predictable. Or even satisfying. Josh wasn’t there at midnight, nor was he there the next night. Nor the following day. I checked the café at all hours for two weeks, and my memories of happiness disintegrated as I was faced with reality: I didn’t hear any music. I didn’t feel any rain. I didn’t even see any Abe.
It was as if that night had never happened.
I looked for Josh online. I pulled his email address from last year’s school handbook, but when I tried to send a casual/friendly explanation/apology – an email that took four hours to compose – the server informed me that his account was inactive from disuse.
Then I tried the various social networks. I didn’t get far. I don’t actually have any accounts, because social networking has always felt like a popularity contest. A public record of my own inadequacies. The only thing I found was the same black-and-white, again and again, of Josh standing beside the River Seine, staring sombrely at some fixed point in the distance. I confess I’d seen it before. He’d been using the picture online for months. But it was too pathetic to sign up anywhere just to become his so-called friend.
So then I did the thing that I swore to myself I would never do: I Googled his home address. The waves of my shame were felt across state lines. But it was in this final step towards stalkerdom that I was led to the information I’d been seeking all along. His father’s website featured a photo of the family exiting an airport terminal in DC. The picture had been taken two days after Kismet, and the caption explained that they’d remain in the capital until autumn. The senator looked stately and content. Rebecca Wasserstein was waving towards the camera, flashing that toothy, political-spouse smile.
And their only child?
He trailed behind
them, head down, sketchbook in arm. I clicked on the picture to make it bigger, and my eyes snagged on a blue sticker shaped like America.
I’m in there. I’m in that sketchbook.
I never saw his drawing. What would it have revealed about me? About him? I wondered if he ever looked at it. I wondered about it all summer long.
Kurt jiggles the handle of my new door, shaking me back into France. “This is catching. You need to get it fixed.”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I say.
He frowns. “That doesn’t make sense. The door you had last year worked fine.”
“Never mind.” I sigh. Three months is a long time. Any confidence I had in speaking to Josh has crumbled back into shyness and fear. Even if Kurt had just seen him in the hallway, it’s not like I would’ve left my room to speak with him.
Kurt pushes his body weight against the door, listens for its telltale click, and then flops down beside me on the bed. “Our doors are supposed to lock automatically. I shouldn’t be able to walk in like that.”
“And yet—”
“I keep doing it.” He grins.
