by Karina Halle
He wagged his finger at us and then scampered off to the next person.
I looked to Dave who was rolling his eyes. “So,” I said. “What building are you in?”
“Eight,” he said, dangling his keys in front of me. “Want to go check it out?”
I gave him a wary look. He smiled—cute dimples—and said, “Let’s go.” He jerked his head over to the door and started walking. He had quite the swagger, shaking his little butt that was half the size of mine. I kind of wanted to bite it.
I followed him out, looking for Mateo and Claudia but not seeing them in the chattering crowd, and he picked up his duffel bag. I decided to go back for mine later.
As we walked up the road to his cottage, he brought out a pack of cigarettes and shook it in my face.
“You want?”
I shook my head. I smoked sometimes but usually when I was drinking or feeling down. Right now I was sober and delightfully optimistic, something I just realized I hadn’t been in a really long time.
I watched him light up with a gold zippo and studied his hands. I liked men’s hands, obviously. His fingers were skinny and slender and looked just calloused enough that I could tell he played guitar. Maybe bass. He had tattoos across them, Asian symbols or scripture of some sort.
“What do those mean?” I nodded at them.
He glanced at his hands as if he was surprised to see them. “I don’t know. I got them in Thailand. I was drunk.”
I laughed. “Good story.”
“Better than waking up with a young boy you thought was a woman.”
I grimaced and he shot me a smile. He had crooked teeth but it suited him. “That didn’t happen to me, don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “I can tell you know the difference between a man and a woman.”
He cocked his brow but said nothing until we got to his cottage. He was in a duplex style one, single story and very charming.
“Wow,” I said as we stepped inside. There was a really small kitchenette off to the side but what was impressive was the gleaming wooden floors, the iron chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the cream colored couches complete with plush woven throws. The white stone walls had Spanish tapestry hanging from it. I didn’t follow him into the bedroom where he put down his bag, but I assumed it was just as nice.
The fact was I hit a wall and my body was suddenly exhausted. I guess waking up early in London and all the traveling, plus leftover jet lag, was starting to affect me. I was about to tell Dave I was going to head back to my room to get settled and have a nap when his roommate showed up.
She looked to be in her late twenties, maybe older. She was tall, almost as tall as Dave, and just as thin, though her skin had a nice healthy glow to it, the kind that came from lots of yoga and coconut water. Her name tag said she was Beatriz. She eyed our tattoos and piercings and gave us a shy smile, probably thinking we were a couple and she’d interrupted something.
We quickly made introductions and after Beatriz put her bag away, Dave had brought out a bottle of grappa liquor he’d bought a few days ago. The two new roommates settled on the couch and I perched on the armrest and we all raised our glasses before taking back the foul-tasting poison.
The shot was a bad idea. I’d only learned that Dave was from Ann Arbor, Michigan and was a guitarist in an “ironic punk” band (whatever the fuck that meant) and Beatriz was from San Sebastian and was a local news anchor who wanted to try going international, before the room was spinning and I could barely keep my eyes open.
I excused myself and said I needed to unpack and I’d see them at dinner. I left them behind in the warm glow of their living room, feeling the slightest bit lonely all of a sudden. I shrugged it off and gathered just enough energy to make it back to the reception area and pick up my bag.
Again, I didn’t see Mateo or Claudia, even though there weren’t many people mingling anymore. With great effort, I swung up my backpack on my shoulders. I was so looking forward to putting it down in my room, unpacking and never having to see it for a month. I loved the idea of backpacking but after struggling with mine for one day, I wasn’t too sure how cut out for it I was. It was probably my fault for taking so many pairs of shoes. Narrowing them down to five pairs had taken up an entire day and was a traumatic experience.
My building was right across from the reception/dining hall and at the edge of the property. A bucolic low-stone wall, crumbling and spliced with dried moss, lined it on one side, bordering a barren field as it swept down the hill to the narrow road below. It was early evening now, around five o’ clock or so, and the air was growing colder and the sun was starting to dip toward the mountains.
My first night in Spain was upon me.
And I all I wanted to do was just to crash onto my bed and sleep. I couldn’t even fathom unpacking. Even the idea of food seemed overwhelming.
My apartment was on the upper level of the cottage, so I staggered up the wooden steps to the second floor and stuck my key into the door. The apartment looked more or less the same as Dave and Beatriz’s, except that there was a balcony that ran all along the front with French doors that led out from the common area onto it. Two iron wrought chairs and a tiny round table beckoned you to sit for a spell.
I beelined it to my room and had just enough energy to appreciate the white bedspread complete with Spanish embroidery, the dark wood floors and furnishings and the wonderful dying light that streamed in through the large, gauze curtained windows, before I dropped my bag to the floor and collapsed onto the bed.
Just five minutes, I thought to myself.
Thirty seconds later, I was out.
Chapter Four
Here’s the thing about me—I’ve never been very good at fitting in. I know that goes without saying in some respects but when you think about it, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have found my tribe/gang/group/family over the years. Sure, in high school I hung out with the “skids” but only because I liked to smoke pot and get tattoos and listen to punk and metal. But I was smart too—I liked to learn, I wanted to attend a good university, whereas they did not and wouldn’t even go onto community college. So while I was accepted and had made some friends, none of them were the best of friends, those people that had your back, that made you feel like you could be yourself. I was part of my peers and yet apart from them at the same time.
Same went for university. People were far more tolerant and they were less cliquey but for whatever reason, I still had problems finding the right “team.” My closest friend was Jocelyn, who I met during my first year, but she moved back to Saskatchewan (no idea why you’d willingly go back there) and so we only saw each other once a year if lucky. Our interactions were reduced to emails and Facebook messages, which is how most relationships operate these days anyway, but still. I missed the face-to-face interaction, the laughs over watching stupid skits on YouTube or getting drunk at local dive bars and betting on who would hook up with who.
Yet, the moment that I stepped off the bus in Acantilado yesterday, I felt like if I hadn’t found my place, I was at least halfway there.
Not everyone was immediately likeable or even friendly, but for the most part, people were pretty fucking cool. At least, all of the Spaniards were. Though they took the program very seriously, they also wanted to have fun—my kind of people.
It probably helped that I’d already made a friend or two. It was nice feeling as if Mateo and Claudia and I kind of all knew each other, even if only in the most superficial ways. I could see a few people had bonded with their seatmates during the bus ride, too, something that seemed stupid at first but now I could see the point. Even knowing Dave, Beatriz and Froggy Carlos seemed to go a long way with me.
Unfortunately, I missed out on crucial bonding time because I ended up sleeping all the way through dinner. I was so tired, I passed right out and woke up only briefly when my new roommate—a tiny, cute little thing named Sara—knocked on my door. I think I yelled at her to go away (whi
ch I later apologized for) and that was that.
It was six am when I woke up by my own natural clock. I groaned and sneered at the room that was flooding with natural light before I dragged myself off to the bathroom to shower. I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train but I certainly didn’t want to look it. There was Dave to impress and perhaps some other people I hadn’t met yet. After all there were forty of us there and I think I’d only gotten a good look at a handful.
Of course, if I was being really honest with myself, I wanted to impress Mateo, too. I knew it was really stupid and inappropriate how he kept on crowding my thoughts—I mean, why was my brain and body wasting impulses on someone that I could obviously never have and who wasn’t even my type? I didn’t understand it and yet the fact remained: I wanted to look pretty for him. I wanted him to look at me and think that I was “very beautiful and very sexy” like the way he had described Marilyn Monroe.
And that was oh so fucking wrong. He was married, with a kid. I shouldn’t want him to think I was attractive. I should want him to think I was ugly but just funny enough to want around as a friend.
Sometimes I thought I was a terrible person.
I looked at my phone. It was probably too early—or too late, I was never sure how the time difference worked—to call home and speak to Josh or see if I could get Jocelyn on Facebook messenger. Though I never made it a habit to talk about my love life with my brother, he was adept at making me feel like I was a good person. And Jocelyn, well, she heard about every exploit with every boy, enough that she called me her little slut. I’d call her a whore back and that’s just how things went.
My finger hovered above the screen to turn on the data roaming and cellular coverage—I was being so strict with the phone, I couldn’t even receive texts. I took in a deep breath and waited, then put it away. There was no wireless internet in this place so if I really wanted to contact someone I’d have to either use the payphones or the computers near the reception. They really, really wanted to make you feel isolated here.
I got ready, spending some extra time on my face. I knew I was a good-looking girl—I was blessed with smooth skin, slightly exotic-looking hazel eyes and a great pair of lips. Some people said I looked a bit like Nicole Kidman but I just joked that I was her scarier, fatter twin sister. I had an hourglass figure with a small waist but everything else had a bit of extra padding that was hard to shed, no matter how much I dieted. And the fact was, I liked food way too much to try and really slim down. Luckily, that never hurt my chances with men. They liked having something to hold on to and I liked it when they did.
I wasn’t sure what the weather was going to be like—I recalled someone saying it was dry and hot in the summer and cold and miserable in the winter—so I slipped on a pair of black skinny jeans, cool black buckled boots and a dark blue flowy top with tiny cherry prints on it. I stroked some styling crème into my hair, tousled it, and headed out the door. Sara was already up and ready to go, sitting on the balcony with a cup of instant coffee.
I apologized for being so rude in my half-asleep state and she just waved it off with a big smile. She seemed to be in her late thirties but didn’t speak English all that well. I understood she was married with no kids, from Madrid and worked for a magazine but that’s all I got. She had a bright, educated look about her though—maybe it was her shiny, greying blonde hair or her smart sweater and slacks—and I had a feeling that by the end of her time here, she was going to be absolutely fluent. I mean, how could you not be when you were forced to speak another language all day long for weeks?
We left the cottage together, which was nice, kind like an act of solidarity even though we were right across from the dining hall. I suppose she was as unsure and awkward about the program as I was. The air was nippy but the sun had just begun it’s ascent in the east, casting everything in the color you could never duplicate. It was special here, I could feel that, and just by being a part of it, you felt special too.
There was only one table occupied in the dining room, so I guess we were earlier than I had thought. It was made up of four men, all whispering to each other in hushed Spanish.
“Bad men,” Sara said jokingly as we took a table by the windows. “Big trouble.”
I nodded and smiled. It was funny how sneaky they thought they were being, how trying to speak their own language was going to get them in shit.
We’d only been sitting for a minute when Jerry came into the room, his shoes echoing on the tiles, and cried out, “Alto!” Sara and I watched in amused silence as he marched right over to the table and rested his hands on it. “That means stop, and you know it. No Spanish! What did I tell you?”
It was funny to see Jerry, with his frail frame and wonky face and George Costanza hairline, yelling at a bunch of macho Spanish businessmen, but he did and they responded like disobedient dogs, sulking with their tails between their legs.
They all offered apologies, in English, and Jerry waved his arms in an exaggerated motion, telling them to disperse and go sit elsewhere—only two Spaniards to a table. That was the rule from now until the end of time, or at least until the end of the program. Whichever came first.
One of the men—an opportunist if I ever saw one—came straight over to me and Sara with an eager smile on his face. He was portly, with a handlebar mustache and hair that was as dense and black as a lick of matte paint. His jowls and lined skin put him in his fifties, which made the bad hair dye job stand out even more.
“May I sit down?” he asked politely, smiling like he’d won the lottery.
Sara and I both nodded and told him it was okay, though in the pit of my stomach I felt a peppering of despair. With him sitting here, the chances of Mateo or Claudia joining us were blotted out.
Still, I nodded at the man, who pointed gleefully to his tag and announced himself as Antonio.
“Wow,” he said as he sat down, the tip of his belly hitting the edge of the table and jiggling the plates. “You have a lot of tattoos!”
Sometimes I took offence to this, usually because whoever was saying it was saying it in a really disparaging manner but Antonio looked impressed. I cocked my head and peered down at myself. “Thank you.”
He made the “OK” sign with his fingers, winked, and said, “Very cool.” He then turned to Sara and started asking her basic questions. I watched them for a few moments, both of them thinking hard and trying not to slip into their native tongue. I admired them. I’d only been in Madrid for an hour yesterday with no one understanding a word I’d said and that was hell.
I decided I liked the both of them. I also decided I needed coffee.
I looked around, wondering if it was time to get up and serve ourselves. There was a waiter who was slowly going around and bringing carafes of coffee to each table but it seemed everything else was on a long table, served buffet style. People were coming in now, some already in groups and taking over the tables.
Claudia came in by herself, sporting a chic, cropped leather jacket, her cherubic face looking cute but wary as she scanned the room. The minute she saw me, she smiled and started my way only to stop herself when she noticed I was already with two Spaniards. I gave her a truly apologetic look but she just shrugged and asked to join the table she was closest to.
Dave, with his hair extra stiff and spiky, came in with Beatriz and managed to get the last empty table by the door. Seconds later a sleek-looking Mateo was joining them. Beatriz actually got out of her chair and I had a split-second to admire her tapered legs, yellow strapless dress and cardigan set before she wrapped her arms around Mateo and hugged him like she’d known him her whole life. The embrace was quickly followed by the traditional “beso beso”—quick pecks on each cheek—and he happily joined their table.
Ugh. Now I really felt disappointed. I started cursing at myself, feeling so stupid for sleeping through dinner. Who knew what had happened after Dave and Beatriz’s? Perhaps they went to dinner, made friends with everyone, Mateo included, and d
ragged everyone back to their place to party. I felt like I was in high school all over again, opting to spend many nights at home by myself yet always regretting it on Monday when I heard about all the awesome parties I missed and all the boys I could have kissed.
To make matters worse, the Anglo who sat down at our table was Lauren. There were a ton of other people left, Anglos I hadn’t even had a chance to meet, and yet Lauren was the one who pulled out her chair like she was the Queen of fucking England and sat down.
“I hope they didn’t forget my vegan breakfast,” she said, not even bothering to say hello to Antonio or Sara.
“Your name is Vegan?” Sara asked, peering at her name tag in confusion.
Lauren pulled off her glitter glasses and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “No,” she said, as if speaking was a huge effort. “My name is Lauren. I am a vegan. It’s a life choice.”
Antonio scrunched up his nose. “You are vegetarian?”
Before she could lecture him, I turned to her and said, “I don’t think they bring it to your table. I think it’s a help yourself type of thing.”
“We’ll see about that,” she said and stalked off toward Jerry.
I gave Antonio and Sara an apologetic look. “Most vegans are nice,” I explained feebly. I picked up my plate and headed toward the buffet. As soon as I got there, standing in line behind a really tall Spanish dude with the name Ricardo, I had to giggle to myself.
The entire buffet was just meat and cheese. That’s it. There was a bowl of fruit salad and some whole grain bread that you toasted yourself, but literally everything else was a vegan’s nightmare. Salami, pastrami, prosciutto and ham sliced thinner than paper, followed by a million different hard cheeses, soft cheeses, cottage cheese. Finally there was a large platter of churros and some cups of bread pudding, most definitely un-vegan as well.
If she didn’t get her own private menu, Lauren was going to flip her lid. It was probably really wrong of me to rejoice in that, but what can you do.