The fortress was a series of sprawling ruins hovering over the city. It was overgrown with greenery and cut through with pathways that teemed with dog walkers and joggers. Beyond that, Prague’s red roofs looked hazy, almost indistinct in the golden afternoon light.
“Okay.” Clara stood up from the bench. “I need to pee.”
“But we just sat down,” Rae said.
“Exactly. We had so much coffee this morning, and we haven’t stopped anywhere for hours. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t get lost,” Rae called as Clara disappeared around a bend on the path. She hated seeing her go, even for a little while. But she needed to get over that. Soon she would be the one leaving. She would be the one on a plane landing in Australia. That harsh dose of reality made last night seem unreachable, as far away as an image in an old photograph. She pushed her feet through the gravel. “So,” she said to Aubrey. “Is it true that people in Prague used to throw each other out of windows?”
“The Defenestrations of Prague,” Aubrey said. “Yeah, that’s true.”
“Defenestration,” Rae said. “I love that word. I can’t believe there’s a word for tossing someone out a window.”
“I think, back then,” Aubrey said, “you were either the guy throwing someone from a window or the guy being thrown.”
Rae smirked. So Aubrey wasn’t totally checked out after all.
A bird sang in the branches above them, and Rae let her head roll back. The sky was blotted with purple smog, and the sun made kaleidoscopic patterns behind the trees.
“I’m sorry I missed last night,” Aubrey said. “Will you show me the pictures you took?”
Rae dropped her head. “I didn’t take any.”
“Oh.” Aubrey drew her legs onto the bench and went quiet for a minute. “Rae?” she said eventually.
“Yup?”
“I want to tell you something. About yesterday. I want you to know, you shouldn’t blame Jonah for going. It was seriously all my fault.”
“Aubs, no way. Listen. As someone who has dumped and been dumped, I promise you, his reaction is completely on him. He didn’t have to be so dramatic.”
Aubrey rubbed at a birthmark on her knee that Rae had never noticed before. “That’s what I’m trying to say, though. He couldn’t help being dramatic. What I did… it was pretty unforgivable.”
Rae ground her toes into the gravel again. “What exactly did you do, Aubrey?”
Aubrey took a deep breath. And for a second, Rae was certain she was going to get an answer. Until Aubrey’s expression filled with terror. She looked the way she had when Jonah tried to convince her to try out for the musical. She looked like she was about to have a panic attack. “I—I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t talk about this.”
“Okay,” Rae said, but she felt annoyance flare up inside her again. So, Aubrey wasn’t telling her something. Big news. Rae had figured that out yesterday. She still didn’t know whether Gabe had been involved in the whole Jonah-getting-the-fuck-out-of-here thing. Or why Gabe had gone out by himself early that morning. Maybe Aubrey was waiting for Rae to ask about him directly. Or maybe she really did need to keep this to herself for a while, deal with her own secrets and heartbreak. But, if that was true, Rae wished she would at least pretend to think about someone other than herself. Rae wanted to say, Last night was one of the best nights of my life. I had the most perfect kiss I’ve ever had, and you don’t even care where I went or what I did. You haven’t even asked.
“It was a serious dick move,” she said instead. “Jonah leaving like that. I mean, if he’d stayed, he could have talked things over with you. He would have realized that this doesn’t have to be The. End. You know?”
“Of course it’s The. End,” Aubrey said. “We can’t come back from something like this.”
“But maybe you can,” Rae said. “You’re still moving to the same city, right? Going to college makes relationships complicated, I get it. But that doesn’t mean you have to cut each other off completely.”
Now Aubrey was the one who looked annoyed. She snorted. “That’s pretty rich coming from you.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Never mind.” Aubrey shook her head.
Rae clenched her teeth as a woman walked her dogs past them. A scruffy terrier sniffed the pebbles around Rae’s feet, and she rubbed the top of its nose, letting it wuff into her hand.
After the woman left, Aubrey said, “The thing is, I can’t really explain any of this to you. You’ve never been in a serious relationship.”
Rae blew a curl out of her eye and slouched against the bench. They were both silent now, watching the city below. A transparent sliver of moon appeared in the sky, and Rae latched on to that first hint of evening. She let it carry her back to last night and an alleyway behind a moonlit church. She let it remind her that this day would eventually end, and that, at some point soon, she might be kissing Clara again.
19
Aubrey
Thursday, July 7, to Friday, July 8
PRAGUE to FLORENCE via VIENNA
Aubrey!” A hand was shaking her arm; Rae’s voice was in her ear. “Aubrey, you have to wake up.”
But Aubrey couldn’t. She was stuck inside a dream, walking next to abandoned railroad tracks. The ground was covered in green moss and other plants that twined around the metal. Aubrey could have sworn her friends were right beside her a moment ago, but they weren’t anymore. She tried to listen out for them, but all she heard was a distant train whistle. The ground began to rumble. She felt it even as she drifted toward consciousness.
“Aubrey.” Rae was more insistent now. “Are you listening? We overslept. We’re going to miss our train.”
Aubrey sat up with a jolt. “Is this a joke?”
“No! Get up now!”
“But I set my phone alarm,” Aubrey said.
“I turned it off,” Rae said. “I heard it and I turned it off, okay? I screwed up!”
It was their last evening in Prague, and they were supposed to catch a sleeper train to Vienna just after midnight. In the morning, they would take another train to Florence. Aubrey’s parents had insisted on booking them an extra night in their hostel in Prague to give them somewhere to stay until they left for the station. So Aubrey had crawled into bed at six PM after setting her alarm for ten.
But now it was nearly eleven thirty. Clara was on the floor, cramming knotted phone chargers and sandals into her bag. Aubrey yanked off her pajama bottoms and tried to pull on her denim shorts, but she fell to the side, banging her leg on the wooden bed frame.
“Fuck!” She was this close to bursting into tears. And not only because they would probably miss their train. But because Jonah was still gone, and she and Gabe had been avoiding each other since that stupid night at the bar, and Rae was being so cold with her—she had been ever since they went to the Vyšehrad.
Rae shoved a sweatshirt in her direction. “We have to go now.”
Gabe was waiting for them on the hostel’s front steps, gripping the straps of his heavy backpack. His shirt had song lyrics printed on it, but it was too dark out for Aubrey to read them. They stood as far away from each other as they could.
“Don’t slow down!” Rae jumped off the stoop. “There’s no time to slow down!”
They sprinted up the narrow alley from their hostel to a boulevard teeming with fluorescent-lit clothing stores and fast-food restaurants before turning into a park behind the station. There were fewer streetlights here, and the trees were cast in a strange purple glow.
With five minutes to spare, they raced through the station entrance, stopping briefly in the hall to figure out where their platform was. Aubrey’s veins thudded with adrenaline, so she stared up at the high-domed ceiling, trying to calm herself down. Nearby, a gold clock chimed the hour. The tiled floor echoed with people’s footsteps. This was the last thing she would see in Prague; she tried to make it count.
“Platform six
!” Gabe shouted. Aubrey’s lungs burned as they raced down a final corridor toward their train. Rae and Clara fell onto one of the small beds in their cabin, and Gabe landed on the other. A third bed was fastened to the wall above Gabe’s head.
“How”—Gabe gasped—“how the hell did we pull that off?”
“I don’t know,” Rae said, “but I officially hate running now. Wait. Nope. I’ve always hated running.”
“This place is so vintage!” Clara said. “It makes me wish I was wearing gloves with pearl buttons and carrying a hatbox.”
The train wrenched out of the station, and Aubrey swayed in the doorway.
“Oh!” Rae said. “Do you think someone on this train will get murdered?”
“Um.” Clara pushed Rae’s shoulder. “I hope not.”
“But then we could solve the mystery,” Rae said. “What’s more vintage than an old-fashioned train murder mystery?”
“That’s not really what I was going for,” Clara said, but she relaxed against Rae’s shoulder. Rae pressed her lips together, blushing down at her lap.
Aubrey stayed frozen in the doorway. She wanted to bring up the phone conversation she’d had with Rae the night before the trip started. About Strangers on a Train and Murder on the Orient Express. But Rae and Clara were paying such close attention to each other. It kind of felt like they were excluding her. “We could have missed it, though,” she said. “We could have missed our train and been stuck in Prague all night.”
Rae’s features hardened. “But we didn’t.”
“We shouldn’t have slept through the alarm, though,” Aubrey said. “We convinced our parents we were responsible enough to handle being here. We need to start acting that way.”
“We made the train, dude,” Rae said. “You can officially chill about it.”
The train twitched; Aubrey held on to the sides of the door. “Why do you sound so annoyed at me?” she asked.
Rae crossed her arms. “I’m not annoyed.”
“Well, you’re acting like it. You have been since yesterday.”
“Okay,” Rae spat. “Maybe I am a teeny, tiny bit frustrated by the way you keep making this trip all about you.”
“You know what?” Gabe clapped his hands together. “I’m starving. We should get dinner. Low blood sugar at midnight? Never a good thing.”
“Agreed!” Clara’s eyes flitted nervously between Rae and Aubrey.
“What do you mean I’m making this trip all about me?” Aubrey asked.
“It’s pretty simple.” Rae sat forward. “You want to eat dinner at some fancy-ass restaurant in Paris? We do it. You want to go to museums in Amsterdam? We leave a party and try to find you some. And even though you were incredibly painful about it the whole time, Clara and I still went out of our way to take you everywhere you wanted to go in Prague.”
“Oh yeah.” Aubrey rolled her eyes. “Because you had so many other ideas. The only trip you even care about is your precious one to Australia. You don’t give a fuck about being here.”
The train was moving faster now. They couldn’t see anything in the window except their pale, eerie reflections. “That’s such bullshit!” Rae said. “And also, it’s completely different. I’m moving there.”
“Believe me, we know!” Aubrey said. “And we know you can’t wait to ditch us for your wild new life and the wild new friends you’ll have there. You’ll probably tell them all about how quaint and boring we were. Once, my friend Aubrey lost her shit because we almost missed a train. Ha ha ha, she was so high-maintenance. Anyway, let’s make art and drink an entire bottle of gin!”
“Jesus, Aubrey. Where are you even getting this from?”
“From you! From your new hair and your tattoo and—and everything! From the way you get so aloof whenever I talk to you about college. You’re transforming into this brand-new person, and she’s secretive and she’s mean, and I don’t like her.”
“Now I get it,” Rae snarled. “You can’t stand the fact that I’m changing. That soon, my whole existence won’t revolve around you anymore. Well, big news, Aubs—it already doesn’t. It never has!”
Clara jumped up, her arms extended as if she were trying to physically keep them apart. “That’s it. Both of you. Back away right now.”
Her voice yanked Aubrey from her rage. “We’re not anywhere near each other,” she said.
“This is a small compartment,” Clara said. “We’re all near each other.”
“Nothing we can do about that.” Rae crossed her arms even tighter.
“Actually, there is.” Clara picked up Rae’s bag from the floor. “We’ve got two cabins, and there are four people in this room. We should split up.”
“I can’t stay with Gabe!” Aubrey said, instantly freaking out. She couldn’t even trust herself in the same bar as this guy. Who knew what she would do sleeping in the same room?
The tips of Gabe’s ears went red. He coughed into his hand. “I’ll… you know, I’ll go wherever.”
“Fine,” Clara said. “Aubrey, you stay here with me, and Rae, you go with Gabe.”
Rae’s mouth formed a small o of surprise. “But he’s a boy!”
“And you’re a lesbian,” Clara said. “I think you can both control yourselves for one night.”
Shock and awe flashed over Rae’s face, but she didn’t argue. She slung her bag over her shoulder and left the room. Gabe hovered in the door for a moment longer, looking sheepish. “Well,” he said. “Good night?” And then he slunk into the hall.
The cabin felt much larger now.
“I’ll sleep here.” Clara pointed at the bed she’d been sitting on with Rae.
Aubrey sat on her bed and unfolded the fleecy blanket beside her pillow. Her mattress was thin but firm, and everything shook with the movement of the train. “Thanks for doing that,” she said to Clara.
“You’re welcome.” Clara wrapped her long red hair into a knot on the top of her head.
Aubrey took out her phone and sent a quick text to her parents, telling them she was safely on her way to Vienna. She also said that she was tired and that she would call them tomorrow. She’d avoided talking to them ever since Jonah had left. She knew they’d have to find out about it eventually, but she wanted to prolong that moment as long as she could. Their panic would only make hers much, much worse.
Clara changed into plaid pajama shorts and a tank top. She took her toothbrush into the bathroom and came back again, sitting on the edge of her bed, hands braced on her knees. “Okay, here’s the thing,” she said. “I talked to Jonah.”
Aubrey hugged the blanket against her chest. “Jonah? When? What did he say?” Blood was pounding in her ears. Had he mentioned anything to her about Gabe?
“He texted me the other day,” Clara said. “He thought we’d be worried about him, and he wanted to let us know he’s fine.”
“Did he tell you what he’s doing? I mean, is he still using his Eurail pass? Or did he go back to London?” All of Aubrey’s anxious energy bubbled to the surface. “And has he said anything to his parents yet? Because they haven’t told my parents, and they definitely would have if they knew. Unless he told them not to. Did he mention if he told them not to?”
Clara shook her head. “He didn’t give me any details.”
“Oh.” Aubrey was disappointed but also relieved. Her kiss with Gabe was still a secret—for now at least.
Clara turned off her bedside light and lay down, and Aubrey did the same. She imagined that, right now, they were passing a row of houses and that someone was sitting by their window, watching this train streak by. She closed her eyes and pretended she was that person. She was the one watching the train trail off into the distance, listening to the sound of it as it disappeared.
“Aubrey?” Clara said.
“Yeah?” Aubrey opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry about tonight—and also, I understand why you couldn’t really talk to us about what happened with Jonah. It must be extra hard, because we’r
e all in this together and we’re all Jonah’s friends, too. I wouldn’t know how to handle it, either.”
Through a crack in the curtains, a flash of light glided over Clara’s bed and then Aubrey’s.
“Thanks,” Aubrey said with a sigh. “This has been such a weird week.”
“I know.”
There were a few seconds of silence. Aubrey was grateful that Clara understood. Clara was a little more sensitive than Rae. A little more romantic. Sometimes Aubrey thought they had the same fears about going off to college—they were both nervous to plunge into so much change. Aubrey stretched out her legs; her feet touched the cool plastic beneath the window. Lights kept drifting in, wafting over their beds like ghosts.
“But, Aubrey?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever else you do, don’t treat Rae like that ever again.”
20
Rae
Friday, July 8
PRAGUE to FLORENCE via VIENNA
Gabe went to the dining car to get food, but Rae was too wound up to eat. She walked up and down the strip of carpet between her bed and Gabe’s, listening to the train creak and shudder. She plugged in her phone charger and drafted a few texts to Clara—hey, what a night, huh??; are you sleeping? don’t answer if you’re sleeping. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t, but…; quick! knock twice on the wall when you get this message!—but she didn’t send any of them. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about the kiss yet, so everything she wrote sounded way too casual or way too awkward.
Her phone rang. She dove for it.
“I haven’t heard your voice in ages!” Lucy said.
“Mom.” Rae slumped onto her bed. “It’s been a week. And I text you all the time.”
“Yes, but I like hearing my only daughter’s voice, thank you very much. Plus, I wanted to make sure you’d actually caught your train.”
The Summer of Us Page 13