The Bridge

by Jill Cox

  About halfway through the meeting, I realized Pete and I weren’t bumping elbows as we scribbled down our notes. Which meant I also noticed, for the very first time ever, that Pete was left-handed like me. What? How had I possibly missed that detail? Back at Highgate, I generally sat wherever he was not, but spotting lefties was my thing. There were so few of us around that I couldn’t help myself.

  Before she dismissed us, Madame Beauchamp handed out housing assignments for those who hadn’t arranged their own apartments. I would be living in the chambre de bonne of a woman called Marie-France de Clavéry. Those were some pretty aristocratic sounding names she had. I imagined an old biddy with purple hair and a raspy voice from too many years of smoking wearing a cardigan sweater and pencil skirt. And maybe an Hermès scarf, a Birkin bag, and a beret, because when I stereotype, I cover all my bases.

  By the time I returned to the cloakroom, Marshall was nowhere to be found, and Pete was dislodging my gigantic green suitcase from the fold. The one with the tattered Republic of Ireland patch.

  “Let go of that,” I screeched, jumping over two duffel bags, then overshooting the telescoping handle and smacking Pete in the gut with it. Hard.

  “Whoa,” he chuckled, holding me at arm’s length by my shoulder. “I know you hate to get on the teacher’s bad side, Fee, but violence is never the answer.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered. Even though I definitely was not.

  Pete deftly maneuvered the suitcase off to the side, then cocked his head at me. “I didn’t think this was possible, Fee, but it looks like you’ve reached your caffeine saturation point. How about this: let me navigate this bag out of the building for you, and I’ll tell you how I ended up with your pen.”

  I eyed him for a long moment, then nodded. “Fine. You win, Russell. Now ‘fess up.”

  Pete watched me warily, like he thought I might change my mind, then grinned. “Your pen was sitting right next to your notebook. All I did was pick it up off the table and hand it to you.”

  “But…” I blinked, then blinked again. “Ugh. You may be right about my caffeine level.”

  Just then, Dan Thomas appeared before us, flanked by a smiling girl with the most gorgeous dark curls I had ever seen. They both looked so normal. So awake.

  “Hey, guys,” he smiled. “How was your flight?”

  “Long,” I said. “You look disgustingly perfect, Danny.”

  “Um… thanks?” He brushed his floppy bangs away from his glasses. “Guys, this is Anne. We met this morning. She goes to Addison College.”

  Anne nodded first at Pete, then stuck her hand out to shake mine. “Madame Beauchamp asked me to find you,” she said in French, reminding the rest of us that we had a language pledge to uphold on campus. “I got here Friday so I’ve already moved in, but don’t worry, I left you the nicer room. And you will love Marie-France.”

  “Oh. So, we’re living together?” I answered in French.

  “Sort of. Our rooms are next door to each other. Come on. We live about a kilometer north of here on rue Bonaparte.”

  “Great! Pete and I will come with you,” Dan smiled. “That’s on the way to our flat, too.”

  Our flat? Well, that explained the change of clothes and the clean face. Pete must have gone straight to his apartment from the airport instead of going to school. How he knew where to go was another question altogether.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Pete and Dan would live together, but I was. For whatever reason, I’d pegged Dan Thomas as the type to want local student housing, if only for the experience. But I guess it made sense. Those two had always been tight, and not just because they were in the same fraternity. I just didn’t get why someone as gallant as Dan would hang out with a loon like Pete.

  “After you,” Dan grinned down at Anne, who turned on her riding boot heel and headed down the ivy corridor, followed by Dan, Pete and my suitcase.

  FOUR

  Twelve minutes later, we arrived on the fifth floor of our apartment building. The moment Marie-France de Clavéry opened the door, I felt ashamed of myself for the stodgy, conservative matron I’d imagined. Though she was well into her forties, Marie-France seemed at least a decade younger, with black, shoulder-length hair and perfectly styled bangs. She was, in fact, wearing a cardigan-plus-pencil-skirt combo, but she looked smart, not dowdy. When I noticed her funky high heels and the crinkled laugh lines around her dark eyes, I knew we would get along. In fact, the only fault I could find with this woman was her refusal to speak English.

  “Meredith!” Marie-France pronounced my name May-Ray-Deet as she kissed both my cheeks. “Here you are, and with so few bags! You and Anne are so unlike the young ladies who lived here last year. And who are these gentlemen?”

  Poor Dan started off on the wrong foot by calling her “Madame de Clavéry” rather than “Marie-France,” and to his extreme dismay, she spent the next five minutes explaining why he should address her by her first name while still employing the formal “you” to a guy no less than twenty-five years her junior. Hey there, Madame de Messages Mixtes. Way to confuse the kid.

  By the end of Marie-France’s giddy rant, Dan was done speaking for the day, full stop.

  While Anne and Pete did their best to fill the awkward silence, I scanned the enormous living room. When Madame Beauchamp had handed out our housing assignments earlier, she’d warned us that our flat might be small in comparison to the average single family residence back home. But this apartment was bigger than my house in Lincoln City. Spacious, quirky… like something out of a magazine.

  I shifted from side to side, aching to see the chambres de bonne. Back in the day, the uppermost floors in many Parisian buildings belonged to the domestic help. These days, they were prime real estate for students or singletons needing somewhere affordable to live.

  Noticing my impatience, Marie-France asked us to follow her up the back staircase. Since I was the only one with a bag, Pete and Dan hoisted my suitcase up two flights, and when we arrived at the seventh floor landing, Marie-France opened the first door on the left. “Here you go, Meredith,” she smiled. “This room is yours.”

  Had we been alone, I might have shed half a kilo of tears as I followed Marie-France into the narrow room. With an ease I knew I would never replicate, she freed the long casement window panes and volet shutters from their locked position and motioned for me to step closer. The seventh floor was just below the Mansard roof of the building, so the exterior wall pitched upward at the same diagonal as the room. I stared out of the gabled window for so long that I didn’t notice when Marie-France and the rest of them left me to check out Anne’s room down the hall.

  After a few moments, I unzipped my suitcase to find the photos I’d stored on the inside pouch. The wall behind my desk was a bulletin board from floor to ceiling, and the room’s previous occupant had left just enough thumbtacks to make things homey.

  The first thing I placed on the board – right in the center – was a postcard from our restaurant. The graphic designer had gone for a mid-century vintage feel, even though our restaurant was less than two decades old. The word SULLIVAN’S looked like the Hollywood sign, hovering over the coastal highway into Lincoln City.

  To the left, I placed a picture of my mother lying flat on the window seat of my bedroom, her feet propped up against the far wall, with my tiny four-year-old self perched on her lap. She was holding a book facing me, and my hands waved in the air as I recited the story back to her. But the thing I loved most about this photo was that my brother was only ten when he took it. The image was composed and lit like some national ad campaign for cotton. Or literacy.

  I picked up another photo and pegged it to the right of the postcard. The Newport Big Band Society’s gilded logo decorated the bottom left corner just below my dad blowing into his clarinet. Ian took this one, too, which is probably why my dad’s bright green eyes are dancing at the camera instead of focused on the sheet music.

  At the top of my wonky triangl
e, I placed a photo from high school, when I’d won the Oregon state championship in Irish dancing. The bodice of my black dress was embroidered with emerald green Celtic knots, and blinged to the max with matching emerald green rhinestones. I’d curled my normally straight auburn hair in ringlets and pulled it into a ponytail that definitely looked like a hairpiece considering the volume of those curls. The medallion hanging from my neck might as well have been Olympic gold, judging from the look of pride on my brother’s face, his right arm thrown casually over my shoulder. It was his first year working full-time at Greg’s Guidebooks, which probably explains why their logo was embroidered on his fleece.

  A twinge of guilt plucked at my nerves as a Drew-shaped hole glared back at me from the wall. On the day they’d posted the Beckett scholarship winners on the French department website last spring, I hadn’t believed my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to believe them, because Drew Sutton – my oldest friend and the boy I loved most in the world – was suddenly, inexplicably single. The more time we spent together over the summer, the crazier it had felt to leave for Paris. But in all those days and hours we’d spent together working at Sullivan’s or hanging out at the beach, Drew had never once asked me to stay.

  He hadn’t even tried.

  Maybe soon, a million new pictures would fill the blank space where Drew should be. But for now, in the center of the board, I had everything that mattered from home.

  The floor creaked on the far side of the room. I whirled around expecting to find Marie-France again, but found Pete instead. He sauntered across the ancient floorboards and joined me beside my desk, his eyes roaming briefly over the photo collage. Then he smiled and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Sorry, Sully. Didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to say goodbye.”

  I shrugged, then stepped away from my desk, back over to the window.

  Pete joined me, bending forward under the gabled ceiling to peer outside. “Whoa. How cool is this view? By December, you’ll have your very own Rooftops Under Snow out here.”

  I felt my eyebrows knotting together as I watched Pete take in the view. Did he seriously just reference a painting by Caillebotte? I’d bought that exact print on my high school trip to France, and it had been on my dorm room wall the past two years. There was no way Pete could’ve known that. He barely knew me.

  The top of his newly shorn head touched the gable above us, but Pete still craned his neck far into the corner of the sloped ceiling by the window. “Hey, come here,” he said, pushing his head all the way outside. “If you stand just right, you can see the spires of Saint-Sulpice. Look, just above the corner of the roof here. Do you see them?”

  Without thinking, I followed his lead, stretching further out the window than I might have dared on my own. There they were, two mismatched towers that must have been recently cleaned, judging by the lack of soot visible to the naked eye. The sky above us was unreal, with perfect fluffy clouds in all the right places. I pulled the sunglasses out of my front pocket so that the biggest jokester of all time wouldn’t see my eyes fill with tears.

  Pete stood behind me for a long time, then suddenly ducked back under the gable and retreated across my room in three long strides. I turned to find him pausing under the doorway, hand raised. “See you, Sully. I think Dan’s waiting for me downstairs.”

  “Hey, Pete, can I ask you something?”

  He stepped back into my room. “Yeah?”

  I walked to where he stood then crossed my arms, sunglasses still perched on my nose. “When you vanished at the airport, did you go to a barber or something?”

  Pete laughed, but not in his usual, haughty way. For the first time, I could imagine what he had been like as a kid. He lifted an eyebrow and smiled. “You’re getting better at those mind games of yours, Fee. Here I thought you were going to ask me about the farewell message Sutton gave me for you.”

  I took off my sunglasses and propped them on top my head. “I know you think I’m kidding around, but I’m not. Don’t call me Fee, Pete. I mean it.”

  Pete watched me strangely for a moment, then cocked his head to the side. “Why not?”

  “Listen, I’ve let you call me a lot of things over the years without complaining. And I admit, you’ve come up with some good ones: Sully, McMeredith, Ginger Red Riding Hood…”

  “Don’t forget Gingeraffe. That was my personal favorite.”

  “Yes, that one was… unique.” I touched my hair self-consciously, then stood to my full height. “Look, here’s the deal: only two people in the world call me Fee. One is my brother, and one is Drew Sutton. And maybe I’m reading into things, but it feels off when you say it, like you’re mocking both me and Drew. Maybe you think that’s hilarious, but it’s not. He’s off-limits, okay?”

  For half a second, I could have sworn regret flickered in his eyes. But then he ducked under the door again and smiled. “Fair enough, Sully. Fair enough. Hey, you should ask Anne where to get your school supply fix. We both know you’re craving some A4 spirals.”

  For the first time maybe ever, I smiled at him. “Already at the top of my to-do list for today, old chap. Guess I’d better unpack.”

  “Wait, you really are going school supply shopping?” Pete’s eyes widened. “I can’t believe I was right! Dan just bet me ten bucks – er, euros – that the first thing you would do was walk to the Louvre, but I said you’d go to the papeterie first. Oh, man. Wait ‘til I tell him.”

  I had to laugh as I heard his feet clipping at top speed down the stairs.

  A breeze blew the door-like window panes open a little wider. I walked once again to the gable and surveyed my surroundings. To my left, the rue Bonaparte ambled half a mile up to the River Seine. And to my right, even though I couldn’t see them, lay the Luxembourg Gardens and the Centre Lafayette. For better or for worse, this was my little corner of the world for the next year.

  I leaned out of the window and began to breathe.

  FIVE

  Pete had not been wrong about my school supply addiction. Once I’d unpacked, Anne and I walked to the papeterie down the street to stock up on everything from proper A4 European-sized paper to pens and a million other things we didn’t know we needed.

  Good thing we had those supplies ready, too, because on Tuesday and Wednesday we sat scribbling for five classes each day, frantically keeping pace with professors in a language not our own. And both nights at dinner with Marie-France, Neither Anne nor I could contain ourselves. I had never been so excited about any classes in my life.

  On Thursday, after our course enrollment, the entire student body of the Centre Lafayette boarded two enormous motorcoaches bound for Normandy. Because Anne and I were the first ones to board, we scored the prime seats: right in the center of the bus, there was one table with four chairs each. It was the only place a row faced backward, so I took that seat and Anne took the one opposite, saving the two free spots for her friends from Addison College, Harper Anderson and Kelly James.

  As the bus hulked down the streets of Montparnasse, then over the river at Porte de Saint Cloud, the Haussmann-esque uniformity of central Paris gave way to smaller suburban homes, and my classmates settled in for the short trip to Monet’s home at Giverny. In other words, everyone scrolled their smart devices, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi on the bus, searching for news from home. Completely normal, yes. Probably healthy, even. After all, we’d been in France almost a week. A little homesickness was normal at this point.

  Here’s a tip: when your sleep schedule’s wonky and your brain is taxed from overuse, the Internet is your frenemy. “Don’t look back, Fee,” Ian had warned me at the airport last Sunday. “Fill up that bracelet I gave you with new memories. Your future self will thank you someday.”

  I rarely listened to my brother, but for once, he made sense. Step forward, I’d told myself. But then I’d boarded this bus full of strangers, and all of Ian’s logic flew out of my brain. Now, I found myself staring at Lindsay Foster’s daily duck-face selfie, heavily filte
red, including the requisite view of her décolletage and its newest accessory.

  Drew’s Sigma Phi Beta lavaliere.

  Okay, not new – recycled. But still officially official. Again.

  Harper was sitting next to me, and after I didn’t move for a full fifteen seconds she peeked over at my screen. “Friend of yours?”

  I tapped the home key to erase Lindsay’s image from my screen and laid the phone face down on the table before me. “Oh, you know. Just some girl back home.”

  “Just some girl, huh?” Harper scowled at me, her blue eyes bright in the sunlight, despite the shadow from her dark bangs. “You know, Meredith, one of the benefits of going to school with people from all different colleges is that you don’t have to be diplomatic about the people back home. Tell me anything you like about Duckface there. I’m on your side by default.”

  I paused for a minute, then turned my phone back over. “All right,” I glanced from one Addison girl to the next. “So Lindsay dates my friend Drew from home, and…”

  Kelly pulled her long blond hair into a top knot as she rolled her eyes. “Stop right there. We already know the rest of the story. Blondie plus your hometown boy equals total nightmare.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call her a nightmare. It’s just… okay, so you know those people who are together, but then they’re not, but oh wait, yes they are, and you have to hopscotch right alongside them because the on-and-off never ends?”

  “Like I said, a nightmare,” Kelly scowled. “Glad to know those people exist everywhere. I take it you and Duckface aren’t besties?”

  I practically snorted into my sleeve. “Hardly. But I can’t exactly hate her. See, Drew’s family and mine are so close that our lives are forever entangled. He and I have a standing Friday morning breakfast date, he works at my parents’ restaurant every summer, and our families have shared Christmas Day every year for… well, I don’t remember a year when we weren’t together.”