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“Near the train station.”
“Which train station?”
I shrug. I’ve sort of blocked it all out.
Dee grabs my laptop. “Now you’re just being ornery.” He taps away. “If you came from London, you arrived at Gare du Nord.” He pronounces it Gary du Nord.
“Aren’t you clever?”
He pulls up Google Maps and then types something in. A cluster of red flags appear. “There.”
“What?”
“Those are the nightclubs near Gare du Nord. You call them. Presumably Céline works in one of them. Find her, find him.”
“Yeah, maybe in the same bed.”
“Allyson, you just said you had to have your eyes wide open.”
“I do. I just don’t ever want to see Céline again.”
“How bad do you want to find him?” Dee asks.
“I don’t know. I guess, more than anything, I want to find out what happened.”
“All the more reason to call this Céline person.”
“So I’m supposed to call all these clubs and ask for her? You forget, I don’t speak French.”
“How hard can it be?” He stops and arranges his face into a puckered expression. “Bon lacroix monsoir oui, tres, chic chic croissant French Ho-bag.” He smirks. “See? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
“Is that French too?”
“No, that’s Latin. And you can ask for the other guy too, the African.”
The Giant. Him I wouldn’t mind talking to, but of course, I don’t even know his name.
“You do it. You’re better at all that than me.”
“What you on about? I studied Spanish.”
“I just mean you’re better at voices, pretending.”
“I’ve seen you do Rosalind. And you spent a day playing Lulu, and you’re currently masquerading as a pre-med student to your parents.”
I look down, pick at my nail. “That just makes me a liar.”
“No it doesn’t. You’re just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they’re already in us. That’s why we pretend them in the first place.”
Kali is taking first-year French, so I ask her, as casually as possible, how one might ask for Céline or a Senegalese bartender whose brother lives in Rochester. At first she looks at me, shocked. It’s probably the first time I’ve asked her something more involved than “Are these socks yours?” since school started.
“Well, that would depend on lots of factors,” she says. “Who are these people? What is your relationship to them? French is a language of nuance.”
“Um, can’t they just be people I’m wanting to get on the phone?”
Kali narrows her eyes at me, turns back to her work. “Try an online translation program.”
