by Gayle Forman
“It’s the Glenny way.”
And then we look at each other as if both getting the same idea. After class, we go up to the lectern where the usual coterie of groupies are simpering.
“Well, Rosalind, here to buy your As You Like It tickets?”
I blush. “I already bought mine. I’m actually trying to get ahold of someone I lost touch with, and I don’t have very many leads, but the one I do have is through this Shakespeare troupe that I saw in Stratford-upon-Avon last year, and they have a website, but the email bounced, but I saw them do a play less than a year ago . . . ”
“In Stratford-upon-Avon?”
“Yeah. But not at a theater. It was sort of an underground thing. It was called Guerrilla Will. They performed at the canal basin. They were really good. I actually ditched the RSC’s Hamlet to watch them do Twelfth Night.”
Professor Glenny likes this. “I see. And you’ve lost a Sebastian, have you?” I gasp and I blush but then I realize he’s just referring to the play. “I have an old mate in the tourist bureau there. Guerrilla Will, you say?”
I nod.
“I’ll see what I can dig up.”
The following week, right before spring break, Professor Glenny hands me an address. “This is what my friend found. It’s from police records. Apparently your Guerrilla Will friends have a habit of performing without permits, and this is from an old arrest. Not sure how current it is.” I look at the address. It’s for a city in England called Leeds.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome. Let me know how it ends.”
That night, I print out the copy of the email I sent to Guerrilla Will but then I change my mind and write a handwritten letter to Willem.
Dear Willem:
I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well. I guess more than anything, I want to know, did you just leave? If you did, it’s okay. I mean it’s not, but if I can know the truth, I can get over it. And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did.
I don’t know what your response will be at getting this letter, like a ghost from your past. But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.
I sign Lulu and Allyson and leave all my various contact details. I put it inside an envelope and write Forward to Willem, in care of Guerrilla Will. The night before I leave for spring break, I mail it.
_ _ _
I spend a boring break at home. Melanie’s vacation doesn’t coincide with mine, and I both miss her and feel relieved not to have to see her. I hole up in my room and prop my old science books all around me and spend the time doing Facebook searches and Twitter searches and every imaginable social networking search, but it turns out, only having a first name is kind of a problem. Especially because Willem is a pretty common Dutch name. Still, I go through hundreds of pages, staring at pictures of all different Willems, but none of them are him.
I post a Facebook page as Lulu with pictures of Louise Brooks and of me. I change the status every day, to something only he’d understand. Do you believe in accidents of the universe? Is Nutella chocolate? Is falling in love the same as being in love? I get friend requests from New Age freaks. I get requests from perverts. I get requests from a Nutella fan club in Minnesota (who knew?). But nothing from him.
I try searching for his parents. I do combination searches: Willem, Bram, Yael and then just Bram, Yael. But without a last name, I get nothing. I search every Dutch naturopathic site I can find for a Yael but come up with nothing. I Google the name Yael, and it’s a Hebrew name. Is his Mom Jewish? Israeli? Why didn’t I think to ask him any of these questions when I had the chance? But I know why. Because when I was with him, I felt like I already knew him.
Twenty-four
Spring break ends, and in Shakespeare class we start reading Cymbeline. Dee and I are halfway through, at the really juicy part where Posthumus, Imogen’s husband, sees Iachimo with the secret bracelet that he gave Imogen and decides this is proof that she cheated on him, though of course, the bracelet was stolen by Iachimo, precisely so he could win his bet with Posthumus that he could get Imogen to cheat.
“Another jumped conclusion,” Dee says, looking at me pointedly.
“Well, he did have good reason to suspect,” I say. “Iachimo totally knew things about her, what her bedroom looked like, that she had a mole on her boob.”
“Because he spied on her when she was sleeping,” Dee says. “There was an explanation.”
“I know. I know. Just like you say there might be a good explanation for Willem disappearing. But you know, sometimes you do have accept the evidence at face value. In one day, I saw Willem flirt with, get undressed by, and get a telephone number from a minimum of three girls, not counting me. That says ‘player’ to me. And I got played.”
“For a player, boy talked a lot about falling in love.”
“Falling in love, not being in love,” I say. “And with Céline.” Though when he spoke of his parents, of being stained, I recall the look on his face, one of unmasked yearning. And then I feel the heat on my wrist, as if his saliva were still wet there.
“Céline,” Dee says, snapping his fingers. “The hottie French girl.”
“She wasn’t that hot.”
Dee rolls his eyes. “Why didn’t we think of this? What’s the name of the club she worked at? Where you left your bag?”
“I have no idea.”
“Okay. Where was it?”
“Near the train station.”
“Which train station?”
I shrug. I’ve sort of blocked it all out.
Dee grabs my laptop. “Now you’re just being ornery.” He taps away. “If you came from London, you arrived at Gare du Nord.” He pronounces it Gary du Nord.
“Aren’t you clever?”
He pulls up Google Maps and then types something in. A cluster of red flags appear. “There.”
“What?”
“Those are the nightclubs near Gare du Nord. You call them. Presumably Céline works in one of them. Find her, find him.”
“Yeah, maybe in the same bed.”
“Allyson, you just said you had to have your eyes wide open.”
“I do. I just don’t ever want to see Céline again.”
“How bad do you want to find him?” Dee asks.
“I don’t know. I guess, more than anything, I want to find out what happened.”
“All the more reason to call this Céline person.”
“So I’m supposed to call all these clubs and ask for her? You forget, I don’t speak French.”
“How hard can it be?” He stops and arranges his face into a puckered expression. “Bon lacroix monsoir oui, tres, chic chic croissant French Ho-bag.” He smirks. “See? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
“Is that French too?”
“No, that’s Latin. And you can ask for the other guy too, the African.”
The Giant. Him I wouldn’t mind talking to, but of course, I don’t even know his name.
“You do it. You’re better at all that than me.”
“What you on about? I studied Spanish.”
“I just mean you’re better at voices, pretending.”
“I’ve seen you do Rosalind. And you spent a day playing Lulu, and you’re currently masquerading as a pre-med student to your parents.”
I look down, pick at my nail. “That just makes me a liar.”
“No it doesn’t. You’re just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they’re already in us. That’s why we pretend them in the first place.”
_ _ _
Kali is taking first-year French, so I ask her, as casually as possible, how one might ask for Céline or a Senegalese bartender whose brother lives in Rochester. At first she looks at me, shocked. It’s probably the first time I’ve asked her something more involved than “Are these socks yours?” since school started.
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“Well, that would depend on lots of factors,” she says. “Who are these people? What is your relationship to them? French is a language of nuance.”
“Um, can’t they just be people I’m wanting to get on the phone?”
Kali narrows her eyes at me, turns back to her work. “Try an online translation program.”
I take a deep breath, sigh out a gust. “Fine. They are, respectively, a total bitchy beauty and a really nice guy I met once. They both work at some Parisian night club, and I feel like they might hold the key to my . . . my happiness. Does that help you with your nuance?”
Kali closes her textbook and turns to me. “Yes. And no.” She grabs a piece of paper and taps it against her chin. “Do you happen to know the brother from Rochester’s name?”
I shake my head. “He told it to me once, really fast. Why?”
She shrugs. “Just seems if you had it, you could track him down in Rochester and then find his brother.”
“Oh, my God, I didn’t even think of that. Maybe I can remember it and try that too. Thank you.”
“Amazing things happen when you ask for help.” She gives me a pointed look.
“Do you want to know the whole story?”
Her raised eyebrow says Do pigs like mud?
So I tell her, Kali, the unlikeliest of confidantes, a brief version of the saga.
“Oh. My. God. So that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you have been such a loner, always saying no to us. We thought you hated us.”
“What? No! I don’t hate you. I just felt like a reject and felt so bad you guys got stuck with me.”
Kali rolls her eyes. “I broke up with my boyfriend right before I got here, and Jenn split with her girlfriend. Why do you think I have so many pictures of Buster? Everyone was feeling sad and homesick. That’s why we partied so much.”
I shake my head. I didn’t know. I didn’t think to know. And then I laugh. “I’ve had the same best friend since I was seven. She’s the only girlfriend I’ve ever really hung out with, so it’s like I missed the integral years of learning how to be friends with people.”
“You missed nothing. Unless you missed kindergarten too.”
I stare at her helplessly. Of course I went to kindergarten.
“If you went to kindergarten, you learned how to make friends. It’s like the first thing they teach you.” She stares at me. “To make a friend . . .” she begins.
“You have to be a friend,” I finish, remembering the saying I was taught in Mrs. Finn’s class. Or maybe it was from Barney.
She smiles as she picks up the pen. “I think it’ll be simpler if you just ask for this Céline chick and the bartender from Senegal, leave out the brother, because how many Senegalese bartenders are there? Then if you get the bartender, you can ask if he has a brother in Rochester.”
“Roché Estair,” I correct. “That’s what he called it.”
“I can see why. It sounds much classier that way. Here.” She hands me a piece of paper. Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. She has written both the French and the phonetic translations. “That’s how you ask for them in French. If you want help making the calls, let me know. Friends do that.”
Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. One week later, I’ve uttered this phrase so many times—first to practice, then in a series of increasingly depressing phone calls—that I swear I’m saying it in my sleep. I make twenty-three phone calls. Je voudrais parler à Céline ou au barman qui vient du Senegal, s’il vous plait. . . . That’s what I say. And then one of three things happens: One, I get hung up on. Two, I get some form of non—and then hung up on. Those I cross off the list, a definitive no. But three is when the people launch into turbo-French, to which I am helpless to respond. Céline? Barman? Senegal? I repeat into the receiver, the words sinking like defective life rafts. I have no idea what these people are saying. Maybe they’re saying Céline and the Giant are at lunch but will be back soon. Or maybe they’re saying that Céline is here but she’s downstairs having sex with a tall Dutchman.
I take Kali up on her offer of help, and sometimes she can suss out that there is no Céline, no Senegalese bartender, but more often than not, she’s as baffled as I am. Meanwhile, she and Dee start Googling every potential Senegalese name in Rochester. We make a few embarrassing calls but come up empty.
After the twenty-fourth miserable phone call, I run out of nightclubs anywhere in the vicinity of Gare du Nord. Then I remember the name of the band on the T-shirt Céline had in the club, the one she gave to Willem—and me. I Google Sous ou Sur and look up all their tour dates. But if they played at Céline’s nightclub, it was a long time ago, because now they’re apparently broken up.
By this point, more than three weeks have passed since I mailed my letter, so I’m losing hope on that front too. The chances of finding him, never all that great, dim. But the strangest thing is, that feeling of rightness, it doesn’t. If anything, it grows brighter.
_ _ _
“How’s your search for Sebastian going?” Professor Glenny calls after class one day as we’re lining up to get our Cymbeline papers back. The groupies all look at me with envy. Ever since I told him about Guerrilla Will, he has a newfound respect for me. And, of course, he’s always loved Dee.
“Sort of dried up,” I tell him. “No more leads.”
He grins. “Always more leads. What is it the detectives in film always say? ‘Gotta think outside the box.’” He says the last part in a terrible New York accent. He hands me my paper. “Nice work.”
I look at the paper, at the big red A minus on it, and feel a huge rush of pride. As Dee and I walk to our next classes, I keep peeking at it, to make sure it doesn’t shape-shift into a C, though I know it won’t. I still can’t stop looking. And grinning. Dee catches me and laughs.
“For some of us, these A grades are novel,” I say.
“Oh, cry me a river. See you at four?”
“I’ll be counting the moments.”
When Dee comes in at four, he’s bouncing off the walls. “Never mind thinking outside the box—we got to look inside the box.” He holds up two DVDs from the media center. The title on one reads Pandora’s Box, and there’s a picture of a beautiful woman with sad, dark eyes and a sleek helmet of black hair. I immediately know who she is.
“How are these going to help us?”
“I don’t know. But when you open up Pandora’s Box, you never know what’s gonna fly out. We can watch them tonight. After I get off work.”
I nod. “I’ll make popcorn.”
“I’ll take some leftover cakes from the dining hall.”
“We know how to party on a Friday night.”
Later, as I’m getting ready for Dee, I see Kali in the lounge. She looks at the popcorn. “Having a snack attack?”
“Dee and I are watching some movies.” I’ve never invited Kali anywhere. And she almost always goes out on weekend nights. But I think of the help she’s offered, and what she said about being a friend, and so I invite her to join us. “It’s sort of a movie/fact-finding mission. We could use your help. You were so smart with your idea of trying to find the brother in Rochester.”
Her eyes widen. “I’d love to help. I’m so over keg parties. Jenn, wanna watch a movie with Allyson and Dee?”
“Before you say yes, be warned, they’re silent movies.”
“Cool,” Jenn says. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Neither have I, and turns out to be a little like watching Shakespeare. You have to adjust to it, to get into a rhythm. There are no words, but it’s not like a foreign film, either, where all the dialogue is subtitled. Only major pieces of dialogue are shown with words. The rest you sort of have to figure out from the actors’ expressions, from the context, from the swell of the orchestral music. You have to work a little bit.
We watch all of Pandora’s Bo
x, which is about a beautiful party girl named Lulu, who goes from man to man. First she marries her lover, then shoots him on the eve of her wedding. She’s tried for murder but escapes jail, going into exile with her murdered husband’s son. She winds up sold into prostitution. It ends with her getting killed on Christmas Eve, by Jack the Ripper, no less. We all watch it like you’d watch a slow-motion train wreck.
After we finish, Dee pulls out the next one, Diary of a Lost Girl. “This one’s a comedy,” he jokes.
It’s not quite as bad. Lulu, though she’s not called that in this one, doesn’t die in the end. But she does get seduced, have a baby out of wedlock, get the baby taken away from her, wind up cast out and dumped in a horrible reform school. She too dabbles in prostitution.
It’s almost two in the morning when we flick on the lights. We all look at each other, bleary-eyed.
“So?” Jenn asks.
“I like her outfits,” Kali says.
“The outfits were indeed extraordinary, but not exactly enlightening.” Dee turns to me. “Any clues?”
I look around. “I got nothin’.” And really, I don’t. All this time, I’ve been thinking I was like Lulu. But I’m nothing like the girl in those movies. I wouldn’t want to be.
Jenn yawns and opens a laptop and pulls up a page on Louise Brooks, who apparently had a life as tumultuous as Lulu’s, going from A-list movie star to a shopgirl at Saks, winding up a kept woman, and finally a recluse. “But it says here she was always a rebel. She always did things her own way. And she had a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo!” Jenn smiles at that.
Kali grabs the computer and reads. “Also, she pioneered the short bobbed haircut.”
“My hair was cut into a bob when we met. I probably should’ve mentioned that.”
Kali puts the computer down and takes my hair out of its ponytail and folds it up to my chin. “Hmm. With your hair bobbed, you do sort of look like her.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. That I looked like her.”
“If he saw you that way,” Jenn says, “it means he thought you were very beautiful.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe this is all some game to him. Or calling me Lulu was a way to distance me, so he never had to learn anything about me.” But as I throw out the less romantic scenarios—and let’s be honest, the more likely ones—I don’t feel that usual clutch of shame and humiliation. With these guys at my back, nothing feels quite so fraught.