The Paper Girl of Paris

by Jordyn Taylor

  I sit there blinking as the words sink in, and the next thing I know, there’s a lump in my throat. This is what Gram left to me; she wanted me to have it. If we sold the apartment, we might never find out what actually happened to her family. We might lose important clues. We’d be sweeping away history.

  But I also get it. Completely. If everything about the apartment makes Mom sad, then why not just get it out of our lives for good? Start fresh. Mom would feel relieved—and I would feel so much less guilty about the inheritance. And really, do I still want to track down Adalyn, after what I just read in the diary? Do I want to hang on to an apartment that used to house a Nazi sympathizer? I feel like I’m back at square one, not knowing which way to go.

  “You don’t have to make a decision right away,” Dad continues, “but maybe in the next two weeks? I’ve started doing some poking around on potential agents, and I’d like to get in touch with someone before we leave.”

  I reach for the comforter and drag it onto my lap. I have no idea what to say right now, because I honestly see the value in both options.

  “Does Mom know?” I ask.

  “I mentioned it to her,” Dad says. “She said it’s your decision . . . but . . .”

  “. . . She probably doesn’t want to pressure me.”

  “Right.”

  I think Dad might be downplaying Mom’s reaction. Let’s be real—she was probably thrilled at the prospect of selling Gram’s apartment. I sink into the headboard, feeling crushed by the weight of this decision. At least I have two weeks to make it.

  “I’ll let you know, Dad.”

  He flashes me a double thumbs-up and springs to his feet, no doubt delighted for the difficult conversation to be over.

  “What time do you leave for Versailles tomorrow?”

  “Oh . . . um, I’m getting up early so I can pick up food before I meet Paul, so if I don’t see you . . .”

  “Have fun tomorrow, honey.”

  “Thanks, Dad. And hey . . . will you make sure Mom has fun, too? I made her promise me she’d make an effort, but . . .”

  “. . . I’ll make sure,” he says. He smiles, but sadly. “Night, Alice.”

  “Night, Dad.”

  It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning, but the streets are already crowded with people, some of them sporting a French flag tied around their shoulders. I’m supposed to be meeting Paul outside the Musée d’Orsay train station, but the crowds are so dense, I’m having a hard time spotting him. Someone jostles me from behind, and the forty-five pounds of French cheese I’m carrying come dangerously close to flying out of my hands.

  “Alice! Over here!”

  I follow the sound of his voice, and I finally see Paul jumping up and down and waving something in the air to get my attention. Oh my god—it’s a baguette.

  I’m still giggling when I make it over to where he’s standing.

  “I appreciate your resourcefulness,” I tell him.

  “I just didn’t want you to get lost,” Paul says, blushing. Then he takes in the sight of my arms wrapped around the massive shopping bag like I’m hanging on for dear life, and his eyes go wide. “Alice, is that entire bag full of cheese?”

  “Cheese . . . and olives, and nuts, and dried fruit, and these cute mini pickles the guy told me to buy, and some other things I can’t even remember right now. I might have gone a little overboard at the market. We don’t have this kind of selection in New Jersey.”

  “Is it heavy?”

  “Extremely.”

  He takes the bag from my arms and gives me the baguettes to carry instead, and I follow him down the stairs to buy our tickets at the machine. The train is crowded, but Paul and I squeeze through to the upper level and manage to find two seats together. It feels very grown up, to be sitting next to a boy with our groceries at our feet. My heart lurches as the train pulls out of the station.

  After making a few more stops within Paris proper, our train cruises through the suburbs toward the town of Versailles. As we fly past clusters of houses built into the hillsides, I fill in Paul on the disturbing entries I read in Adalyn’s diary. I leave out the part about selling the apartment, because I don’t want to get into everything with Mom—and besides, I don’t even know what I’m going to do yet. Finally, I pull out my phone to show him what I did as soon as I woke up this morning: dig around Facebook for Ulrich Becker III.

  “I could be completely wrong,” I say, “but there’s a chance I found him.”

  Paul leans over to watch, our bare arms pressed together.

  “At first I was like, ‘Shoot, there are a lot of Ulrich Beckers.’” I say, typing the name “Ulrich Becker” into the search bar and scrolling down the page to show him the endless list of matches. “But then I remembered we’re looking for Ulrich Becker the Third. So I tried getting a little more specific. . . .”

  I add the Roman numeral three to the name in the search bar.

  “. . . There didn’t seem to be any Ulrich Becker IIIs who fit the age we’re looking for, but then, out of curiosity, I clicked into this guy’s page—Ulrich Becker IV. . . .”

  I go to the profile of the seventy-something-year-old man.

  “. . . I obviously knew he wasn’t our guy, but then I happened to see the most recent photo he posted, and . . .”

  I show Paul the picture. It takes him a second, but eventually, he gasps. He actually pulls the phone closer to his face, which happens to involve him grabbing me by the hand. It’s a lot to process at once.

  “So you think it could be him?” Paul asks in disbelief.

  The photo is of a group of men and boys holding fishing rods at the edge of a lake. They must be family, because the man tagged “Ulrich Becker IV” has his hand on the shoulder of a younger man tagged “Uli Becker V.” Plus they look alike with their sandy hair and dull, rounded features. But the most intriguing part of the photo is the wizened old man sitting in a chair in the center of the front row. He isn’t tagged—I mean, there’s no way the guy has Facebook—but thankfully, the caption hints at who he might be. I hit the translate button for Paul, and together we read the German text in choppy English:

  “Annual wilderness journey to Three’s ninety-fifth birthday! He is still strong. He caught more fish than anyone else.”

  “They call him Three,” I point out.

  “And he would be the right age,” Paul adds, sounding mystified.

  My heart is racing—one, because Paul is as excited about the discovery as I am, and two, because he still hasn’t let go of my hand. We both seem to realize this second point at the exact same time, because Paul immediately lets go and busies himself with straightening out his glasses. I should probably keep talking so he doesn’t know I’m paying such close attention to our every bit of physical contact.

  “I want to send him a message,” I say quickly, “but I don’t even know where to begin. I mean, he obviously speaks German.”

  “We can use Google Translate,” Paul points out.

  “True. But also, what do I even say? How do you ask someone out of the blue if their dad happened to be a Nazi who fell in love with your long-lost French great-aunt? He’s going to think I’m a freak—or get really angry! You can’t just go asking people if their parents were Nazis.”

  Paul rubs his chin.

  “Yes,” he concedes, “we will have to think about how to phrase that correctly.”

  “I’m not good at that,” I admit. “I’m already stressed out from thinking about it.”

  “Then we will save it for later,” Paul declares. “Tomorrow, we will sit down at the bookstore and figure out exactly what to write to this man, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Today,” he continues, “we worry about nothing except celebrating your first quatorze juillet. Now, let’s have something to eat, yes?”

  He tears off a still-warm hunk of bread and offers me half.

  Pretending to be distraught over the state of the baguette, I ask him, “But now how
will I find you if I get lost?”

  Paul puts on a serious thinking face that makes me giggle again.

  “I suppose we will just have to stick together,” he says.

  We learned about Versailles in history class this past year. Mr. Yip made a slideshow of all the most opulent parts of the palace: the front courtyards; the Hall of Mirrors; the ridiculously symmetrical gardens in back . . . but nothing could have prepared me to exit the train station, turn just one corner, and see the enormous place for myself, looming in the distance.

  “Oh my god, it’s huge!” I exclaim.

  “Just wait,” Paul says. “We’re still a ten-minute walk away.”

  It’s the kind of thing that throws off your entire understanding of size and space, like the Grand Canyon. Up close, the palace is so big, I have to turn my head to see it all. The sprawling front courtyards are teeming with people, so we set down our bags near the statue of Louis XIV on horseback and soak in the sight from there.

  “In the French Revolution,” Paul says, “women marched here all the way from Paris to protest the price of bread.”

  I remember Mr. Yip telling us about that, but the significance of it didn’t really sink in until right now. “I would have given up instantly the second I saw this place!”

  “You? Given up instantly? There is no chance,” Paul says, nudging me with his elbow.

  “Oh yeah? What makes you think that?”

  “I see you trying to solve your grandmother’s mystery. You are determined. I like this about you.”

  I smile to myself the whole way to the apartment.

  Paul mentioned on the train this morning that Vivi is very serious about holidays, and he wasn’t kidding. When we arrive at the top-floor apartment, she opens the door looking like a tiny human firecracker. She’s in a red-white-and-blue sequined dress, and her hair is in pigtails with metallic party favors wedged into either side; she’s wearing dangly earrings in the shape of disco balls, and shiny silver bracelets that jangle every time she moves her arms. When she hugs us each in turn, she leaves behind glitter on our clothes.

  “Vivi, tu es ridicule,” Paul says as he dusts off the front of his shirt. Then, to me, he explains, “The French don’t usually dress up like this. Just Vivi.”

  Practically bouncing with every step, Vivi leads us down the hall into a wide-open space with a kitchen, dining room, and seating area all combined. The smell in here is intoxicating; it might be even better than the bakery, which is saying something. Sure enough, the table is set with a feast that could probably feed twenty people, but as far as I can tell, there are only three other people in the apartment: a guy and two girls who are chatting outside on the balcony.

  “I think I might have gone overboard this year,” Vivi confesses.

  “I think you go overboard every year,” Paul jokes. He plunks the shopping bag down on the counter. “Well, at least Alice and I will have plenty of cheese to eat on the train ride home.”

  Vivi calls the other three inside to introduce us before we sit down to lunch. The guy is her boyfriend, Theo, an art student with multiple piercings in his ears and colorful tattoos from his wrists to his shoulders. The girl with the long brown braid is Vivi’s best friend, Claudette, and the other girl with the blond curls is Claudette’s girlfriend, Lucie.

  I like them instantly. Considering that I’m used to quiet meals with Mom and Dad, Vivi and her friends are so outgoing that it’s almost overwhelming. They do their best to speak in English so I don’t feel left out, and they go out of their way to learn all about me, the random girl who crashed their annual celebration. What’s New Jersey like? How did I meet Vivi’s little brother? And the obvious question: What am I doing in Paris for the summer?

  Paul and I work together to answer that last one. Now and then, he jumps in to relay certain details in French, so that everyone can understand. I surprise myself by opening up about the photos we found of Adalyn, and the recent diary entries, and to my relief, nobody recoils in horror and forces me out of the apartment.

  “The French do not like to admit how deeply many of our people collaborated with the enemy,” says Theo. “There were French policemen who enforced Nazi law . . . French citizens who revealed their Jewish neighbors to the Gestapo . . . French bus drivers who drove Jewish families to the Vel’ d’Hiv to die. . . . And yes, French women who hooked up with Germans.”

  “You know, you can’t judge all the women who did that,” Claudette interjects.

  “What do you mean?” asks Theo.

  Claudette sighs. “After the war, they made a big show of punishing French women for ‘collaboration horizontale.’” She makes air quotes on the last words.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “You know . . . like . . . sleeping with the enemy,” she explains. “They would drag the women into the street and shave off their hair . . . draw swastikas on their foreheads in lipstick . . . and then parade them through the streets naked.”

  “And it’s disgusting,” her girlfriend chimes in, “because they weren’t all just sleeping with the Germans for fun. Maybe their husbands were gone, and they were very poor, and they needed money or food to survive. . . . Or maybe they were forced to have a German come live with them, and the German didn’t give them a choice. . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” says Theo. “That’s horrible.”

  “It’s really messed up,” I agree. “But do you guys think it applies to Adalyn? She had money, and she lived with her family.”

  Everybody sighs.

  The mood lightens again when I tell them about my discovery on Facebook, and how Paul and I are going to sit down tomorrow and figure out what to write to Ulrich Becker IV.

  “What would you guys say?” I ask the group.

  “Howdy there,” says Theo in his best attempt at an American accent, which is already hilarious. “You don’t know me, but we might be secretly related. Any chance your dad wrote this love letter that made me throw up?”

  We take turns tossing out funny ideas and gorging ourselves on Vivi’s amazing cooking until no one can possibly stomach another bite of food, at which point she skips to the kitchen and returns with a tray full of chocolate-chip cookies. When Claudette tries to wave her away, Vivi looks positively affronted.

  “You still have seven hours until dinner,” she says sternly. “Eat!”

  The rest of the day goes by in a haze of sunshine and laughter and the freedom of having nothing to do but enjoy being with Paul. After lunch, the six of us decide to go for a much-needed walk through the palace gardens. Claudette points out that the sections in back have free admission, but Vivi will hear none of it. She wants all or nothing. She convinces us to buy tickets for the fancy gardens right behind the palace, where you can roam through the hedges to the soundtrack of classical music.

  “I promise it’s worth it,” she tells me, her disco-ball earrings swaying side to side.

  As soon as we’re through the ticketing line, I realize Vivi was right. The manicured greens seem to stretch to infinity, like they take up the whole world. At the base of the stairs cascading from the main building, we naturally start to pair off: Vivi and Theo; Claudette and Lucie; me and Paul. Since he’s been here before, I let Paul lead me down the main lawn to a beautiful pond with a fountain in the middle. We take a lap around the perimeter, laughing at the ducks as they skid on the surface of the water with their feet out.

  There’s a young boy sitting on his haunches at the edge of the water, his small, pudgy hand reaching for one of the birds. He starts to teeter dangerously far forward, at which point his father runs over and scoops him into his arms. It brings back a funny memory from when I was little.

  “When I was a kid, I fell into the pond in Central Park,” I tell Paul.

  “Oh no!” he says. “Were you okay?”

  “Yeah, totally fine. My mom yanked me out as soon as I went under—I barely realized what happened.”

  “How did you fall in the first place?”
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  I smile to myself. “It’s a little embarrassing,” I say.

  “Now you have to tell me,” Paul insists.

  “Fine. I . . . I was trying to talk to the turtles.”

  Paul snorts with laughter.

  I nudge him playfully. “I was like four, okay?”

  “Sorry,” he says, smiling at me and shaking his head. “It’s just the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard.”

  After the pond, we explore the shady groves off to the side. I can barely hear what Paul is saying about the design of the gardens, because all my focus is on the fact that my fingers keep grazing his. I know it’s been more than three hangouts, but I’m certain the right chemistry is here—I can feel it. Finally, as we start to meander back to the palace, he takes my hand in his, and even though I’m too shy to look at him, I can sense that we’re both smiling.

  Later in the evening, after another outrageous meal, Vivi leads the party up to the roof deck with a bottle of wine in one hand and yet another tray of homemade desserts balanced in the other. I curl up in the chair next to Paul’s, perfectly full and deliriously happy.

  As if on cue, right as Vivi pops the cork, there’s a dull crackling noise in the air. Paul taps me on the shoulder and points into the distance, and I gasp as red, white, and blue stars explode in the night sky over Versailles. Vivi cheers and throws her arm around Theo’s shoulders; Claudette and Lucie leap up and clap their hands. I keep glancing at Paul as I watch the show, and every time, I catch him looking at me instead of the fireworks.

  The display goes on for a while, and after a few minutes, everybody settles back into their seats. The conversation lapses into French, which I don’t mind—they’ve stuck to English all day, and I’m happy just to listen to the language and nibble at a cookie and watch Paul sip his wine.

  Nobody here drinks alcohol in the show-offy way the kids back home do. Katrina Kim and Bethany Mackler split a beer before the fall semiformal and proceeded to do cartwheels around the gym, just so everyone would know what they’d done. Paul, Vivi, and the others aren’t in it for the spectacle; they sip it during conversation like an afterthought. I’ve tried red wine at Hannah’s place a few times, because her parents are big collectors. I liked it, although I stopped before it gave me any kind of buzz. I didn’t want to have to explain anything to my parents. I don’t see the harm in having some now—Mom and Dad will probably be in bed when I get home. So the next time Vivi offers refills, I hold out my glass. The familiar fruity, leathery taste warms me from the inside out.