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“Oh, you hush up. You see where I’m going with this.”
And I do. And maybe I hadn’t thought about this with Romeo and Juliet, but I had briefly gone to the what-if place with me and Willem. On the train back to England and then on the flight home, I’d had second thoughts. What if something had happened to him? But both times, I’d voiced my doubts—first to Ms. Foley and then to Melanie—and both times I’d been set straight. Willem wasn’t Romeo. He was a romeo. And I’m no Juliet. I tell Dee this. I enumerate all the examples of him being a player, beginning with the fact that he picked up a random girl on a train and, an hour later, invited her to Paris for the day.
“Normal people don’t do that,” I say.
“Who said anything about normal? And maybe you weren’t random. Maybe you were something to him too.”
“But he didn’t even know me. I was someone else that day. I was Lulu. That’s who he liked. And besides, let’s pretend something did happen, he didn’t ditch me. I only know his first name. He doesn’t even know my name. He lives a continent away. He’s irretrievably lost. How do you find someone like that?”
Dee looks at me as if the answer is obvious. “You look.”
Twenty-three
NAME: Willem
NATIONALITY: Dutch
AGE: 20 as of last August
GREW UP IN AMSTERDAM.
PARENTS: Yael and Bram. Mom isn’t Dutch Mom is a naturopathic doctor
1.9 meters, which is about 6’3”; 75 kilos, which is about 165 pounds.
Acted with the theater troupe Guerrilla Will last summer
This is the complete list of hard biographical facts that I have on Willem. It takes up barely a third of a page in one of my abandoned lab notebooks. When I finish, the list is like a taunt, reality’s bitchslap. You think you fell in love with someone, and this is what you know about him? Eight things? And how would I find him with these eight things? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack. That’s easy. At least it would stand out. I’m looking for one specific needle in a needle factory.
Eight things. It’s humiliating. I stare at the page and am about to tear it out and crumple it up.
But instead, I turn the page and start writing a different list. Random things. Like the amused look on his face when I admitted I’d thought he was a kidnapper. And the way he looked at the café when he found out I was an only child and asked if I was alone. The goofy happiness as he bounded around the barge with Captain Jack. How good it felt to know that I was responsible for him looking that way. The way Paris sounded under the canal. The way it looked from the back of the bike. The way his hand felt in the crook of my hip. The fierceness in his eyes when he jumped up to help those girls in the park. The reassurance of his hand, grasping mine as we ran through the streets of Paris. The raw expression on his face at the dinner table when I’d asked him why he’d brought me there. And later, at the squat, how he looked at me and I felt so big and strong and capable and brave.
I let the memories flood me as I fill one page. Then another. And then I’m not even writing about him anymore. I’m writing about me. About all the things I felt that day, including panic and jealousy, but more about feeling like the world was full of nothing but possibility.
I fill three pages. None of what I’m writing will help me find him. But in writing, I feel good—no, not just good, but full. Right, somehow. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long, long time, and it’s this more than anything that convinces me to look for him.
The most concrete thing on the list is Guerrilla Will, so I start there. They have a bare-basics website, which gets me pretty excited—until I see how out of date it is. It’s advertising plays from two summers ago. But still, there’s a contact tab with an email address. I spend hours composing ten different emails and then finally just delete them in favor of a simple one:
Hello:
I am trying to find a Dutch guy named Willem, age 20, who performed in last summer’s run of Twelfth Night. I saw it and met him, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and went to Paris with him last August. If anyone knows where he is, please tell him that Lulu, also known as Allyson Healey, would like him to get in touch with her. This is very important.
I list all my contact info and then I pause there for a moment, imagining the ones and zeros or whatever it is that emails are made of, traveling across oceans and mountains, landing somewhere in someone’s inbox. Who knows? Maybe even his.
And then I press Send.
Thirty seconds later, my inbox chimes. Could it be? Could it be that fast? That easy? Someone knows where he is. Or maybe he’s been looking for me all this time.
My hand shakes as I go to my inbox. Only all that’s there is the message I just sent, bounced. I check the address. I send it again. It bounces again.
“Strike one,” I tell Dee before class the next day. I explain about the bounced email.
“I don’t do sports metaphors, but I’m pretty sure baseball games are generally nine innings.”
“Meaning?”
