AllFreeNovel
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The next day, I accept Kelly’s invitation to join the Oz crew. Today they’re going to brave the Louvre. Tomorrow they’re going to Versailles. The day after that, they’re taking the train to Nice. I’m invited to come with them for all of it. I have ten days left on my ticket, and it feels like I’ve found as much as I’m going to find. I found out that he left me a note. Which is almost more than I could’ve hoped for. I am considering going with them to Nice. And, after my wonderful day yesterday, I’m also considering going off on my own somewhere.
After breakfast, we all get onto the Metro toward the Louvre. Nico and Shazzer are showing off some of their new clothes, which they got from a street market, and Kelly is making fun of them for coming to Paris to buy clothes made in China. “At least I got something local.” She thrusts out her wrist to show off her new high-tech digital French- manufactured watch. “There’s this huge store near VendÔme, all they sell is watches.”
“Why do you need a watch when you’re traveling?” Nick asks.
“How many bloody trains have we missed because someone’s phone alarm failed to go off?”
Nick gives her that one.
“You should see this place. It’s bloody enormous. They sell watches from all over; some of them cost a hundred thousand euros. Imagine spending that on a watch,” Kelly goes on, but I’ve stopped listening because I’m suddenly thinking of Céline. About what she said. About how I could get another watch. Another. Like she knew I lost my last one.
The Metro is pulling into a station, “I’m sorry,” I tell Kelly and the gang. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Where’s my watch? And where’s Willem?”
I find Céline in the club’s office, surrounded by stacks of paperwork, wearing a thick pair of eyeglasses that somehow makes her both more and less intimidating.
She looks up from her papers, all sleepy-eyed and, maddeningly, unsurprised.
“You said I could get another watch, which means you knew Willem had my watch,” I continue.
I expect her to deny it, to shoot me down. Instead, she gives me a dismissive little shrug. “Why would you do that? Give him such an expensive watch after one day? It is a little desperate, no?”
“As desperate as lying to me?”
She shrugs again, lazily taps on her computer. “I did not lie. You asked if I knew where to find him. I do not.”
“But you didn’t tell me everything, either. You saw him, after . . . after he, he left me.”
She does this thing, neither a nod nor a shake of the head, somewhere in between. A perfect expression of ambiguity. A diamond-encrusted stonewall.
And at just that moment, another one of Nathaniel’s French lessons comes back to me: “T’es toujours aussi salope?” I ask her.
One eyebrow goes up, but her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “You speak French now?” she asks, in French.
“Un petit peu.” A little bit.
She shuffles the paperwork, stubs out the smoldering cigarette. “Il faut mieux être salope que lâche,” she says.
I have no idea what she said. I do my best to keep a straight face as I try to find keywords to unlock the sentence like Madame taught us, salope, bitch; mieux, better. Lâche. Milk? No, that’s lait. But then I remember Madame’s refrain about venturing into the unknown being an act of bravery and her teaching us, as always, the opposite of courageux: lâche.
Did Céline just call me a coward? I feel the indignation travel from the back of my neck up to my ears to the top of my head. “You can’t call me that,” I sputter in English. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t even know me!”
“I know enough,” she replies in English. “I know that you forfeited.” Forfeit. I see myself waving a white flag.
“Forfeit? How did I forfeit?”
“You ran away.”
“What did the note say?” I am practically screaming now.
But the more excited I become, the more aloof she becomes. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“But you know something.”
She lights another cigarette and blows smoke on me. I wave it away. “Please, Céline, for a whole year, I’ve assumed the worst, and now I’m wondering if I assumed the wrong worst.”
More silence. Then “He had the, how do you say it, sue-tours.”
