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“You are a master pretender, D’Angelo Harrison.”
“Takes one to know one. I am from the Bronx. And I am poor. If people want to translate that as ghetto boy, that’s their choice.” He smiles. “Especially if they want to throw scholarship money my way.”
We arrive at a pretty brick building with cracked gargoyles hanging over the front entrance. Dee rings the buzzer—“so they know we’re coming”—and then we take one of those ancient caged-in elevators to the fifth floor. Outside the front door, he looks at me and tucks some strands of stray hair behind my ear.
“Act surprised,” he whispers and opens the door.
We step into a party, about a dozen people crowded into the small living room where there’s a BON VOYAGE ALLYSON sign tacked up over a table laden with food. I look at Dee, eyes wide in shock.
“Surprise!” he says, twinkling jazz hands.
Dee’s mother, Sandra, comes up to me and wraps me in a gardenia-scented bear hug. “He told you, didn’t he? That was the worst look of surprise I ever saw. My baby couldn’t keep a secret if was stapled to him. Well, come on, then, meet the folk, have some food.”
Sandra, introduces me to various aunts and uncles and cousins and gives me a plate of barbecued chicken and mac and cheese and some greens and sits me down at a table. “Now you hold court.”
Dee has pretty much told everyone about Willem, so they all have advice on how to track him down. Then they start peppering me with questions about the trip. How I’m getting there—a flight from New York to London and then on to Paris—and where I’m staying—a youth hostel in the Villette area Willem and I hung out in, twenty-five bucks a night for a dorm—and how I’ll get around—with the help of a guidebook, and I will brave the Metro. And they ask about Paris, and I tell them about what I saw last year, and they’re very interested to hear how diverse it was, about the sections that were full of Africans and then this starts a big debate about which African countries France colonized until someone goes for a map to figure it out.
While everyone pores over the atlas, Sandra comes up with a plate of peach cobbler. “I got you a little something,” she says, handing me a thin package.
“Oh, you shouldn’t—”
She waves away my objections like stale air. I open the package. Inside is a laminated map of Paris. “The man at the store said this would be ‘indispensable.’ It has all the subway stops and an index of major streets.” She opens the map to show me. “And D’Angelo and I spent so many hours looking at it, it has our good blessings coursing through it.”
“Then I’ll never get lost again.”
She folds the map up and puts it in my hands. She has the same eyes as Dee. “I want to thank you for helping my boy this year.”
“Me helping Dee?” I shake my head. “I think you have it the other way around.”
“I know exactly the way I have it,” she says.
“No, seriously. All Dee has done is help me. It’s almost embarrassing.”
“Stop with such nonsense. D’Angelo is both brilliant and blessed with the road life has taken him on. But it’s not been easy for him. In his four years of high school and one year of college, you are the first friend from school he’s ever talked about, much less brought home.”
“You two are talking about me, aren’t you?” Dee asks. He puts an arm around each of us. “Extolling my brilliance?”
“Extolling your something,” I say.
“Don’t either of you believe a word!” He turns around to introduce a tall, regal girl with a head full of intricate twists. “I was telling you about Tanya.”
We exchange hellos, and Sandra goes off to fetch some more cobbler. Tanya reaches out to free my hair from its clip. She fingers the ends and shakes her head, clucking her tongue the same disapproving way Dee so often does.
“I know. I know. It’s been a year,” I say. And then I realize it has. A year.
“Was it short or long?” Dee asks. He turns to Tanya. “You have to make her look just the same. For when she finds him.”
“If I find him,” I clarify. “It was to here.” I point to the base of my skull, where the stylist in London had cut my hair to last year. But then I drop my hand. “You know, though. I don’t think I want the bob.”
“You don’t want a haircut?” Tanya asks.
“No, I would love a haircut,” I tell her. “But not a bob. I want to try something totally new.”
Thirty
Paris
It takes approximately thirteen hours and six time zones for me to freak out.
