He tells you while pushing you to your knees.
As he strips further, you become distracted by another tattoo, a familiar symbol on the left side of his stomach, slightly warped by a developing potbelly.
“What’s that tattoo?”
“Oh,” he says, looking down at it as if seeing it for the first time. It’s a smiley face done in a faux-graffiti style, with Xs for eyes. “It’s for Blink-182.”
“Did you”—you pause and consider your words—“get it when you were a teenager?”
“No,” he says. “Last December. Huge fan of theirs.”
And so you finished a blow job in Edinburgh, eye-to-eye with the world’s only unironic Blink-182 tattoo. You know unequivocally you will never be able to listen to “Adam’s Song” again with a straight face.
“Let’s go to your bed,” he says, and begins leading the way, and even though you’re almost positive bed-sharing isn’t allowed in hostels, he’s so sure of the idea that you follow along, sneaking through the darkened second-floor corridor. You creak into your room, shared by a dozen or so other travelers on half a dozen bunk beds. Maddi is sleeping, still in her clothes, on the bottom bunk—thank God. You and Bill yank yourselves up to the top bunk on the flimsy ladder, trying to be as quiet as possible, and you awkwardly maneuver until you fold yourself into a lowercase C in his arms.
You wake up to see him pulling on his jeans next to your bed. The sky is lit by the earliest morning outside your window. “You’re leaving?” you whisper.
“Yeah, but let’s get together before you leave town,” he says. “I want to see you again.”
“You never gave me your phone number,” you say groggily.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replies, and he kisses you goodbye and slinks away before you have too long to think about what he just said, and you fall back asleep.
The next morning, the entire thing feels like a dream. You never see Bill again, never get his number, never find him on Facebook. In fact, like the end of a lazy ghost story, you never find any evidence of his existence at all. Once you tell Maddi about your evening, she joins you in the saga to find him somewhere online, first out of curiosity and then out of a stubborn fascination.
You know his first and last name. You know his father’s name. You know where he went to college, and where he went to law school. You know what suburb he’s from. And yet you’ve found nothing—not a Facebook profile, not a picture, no mention of him anywhere. You sail through dozens of pages of Google results. You try twenty spellings of his last name. Nothing. He was the ghost in your bunk bed, the haunting of the hostel, the manifestation of your lowest standards while traveling in human form. You imagine if you were to return to the hostel and ask the front desk if any guest had ever stayed there with that name, their face would go ashy and the reply would be, “That person hasn’t stayed in this hostel for a hundred years!”
You could convince yourself the entire thing never happened, that it was a hallucination brought on by a mixture of Irn-Bru and cheap beer, if it wasn’t for the memory of a Blink-182 tattoo, emblazoned in your brain like it had been emblazoned on his belly.
It’s still a fairy-tale city, even Bill-less (perhaps especially Bill-less). “These are the streets that inspired J. K. Rowling to write Harry Potter,” tour guides boast as you scan the cobblestone and crooked storefronts, eyes wide with wonder. Harry Potter lore is treated like a relic of Jesus himself. You make the pilgrimage to your holy sites. You force Maddi to set an alarm and make the trek with you to a small café on a Main Street outside Greyfriars Kirkyard. The Elephant House has a large red sign in its window with bright yellow writing: “BIRTHPLACE” OF HARRY POTTER. Inside, it’s just a normal café, a good place for breakfast or a cup of coffee, but every chair and table hides a secret promise: Maybe she sat here while she was writing. The stalls of the bathrooms at the Elephant House are dense with writing, so much graffiti that you can barely make out the wall beneath. In less than a second, it becomes obvious what unites all of the scribbling: Some drew the deathly hallows triangle or sketched wands shooting off sparks. “I am writing this for Jeanine and Hannah Spencer who love Harry Potter,” reads one note in pen, still visible under the red marker above it: “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” “Mischief managed,” someone squeezed below it in different handwriting, but also in red.
You feel like an archaeologist, deciphering two decades of scrawlings for the series that pulled you into magic and that very restaurant. They’re all notes of love and appreciation, and none have ever been painted over, just added to. You don’t have a pen, but even if you did, you doubt you’d be able to find even a square inch of wall space to claim as yours. Even the wall behind the toilet back was dark with notes in every language. And so you just take a picture and head back to your breakfast. You’re supposed to leave Edinburgh that afternoon—of course, the first day the temperature has crawled above seventy degrees. You still hadn’t made it to the natural history museum or spent much time off the Royal Mile. The previous day you’d gone on a day trip up to the lochs, and, thanks to the 5:00 a.m. departure time, fell asleep almost instantly on the bus. But you had awakened to a world of green valleys and mist. Everything was wet and bright and mossy. Your bus wove across cursed bridges and around ink-black lakes lined with crumbling castle ruins. “I want to go on my honeymoon here,” you announced to Maddi. “Just rent a cabin and live up here for a month.” She didn’t need to point out that you didn’t have a boyfriend.
“How was the bathroom?” Maddi asks when you return to the table.
“Amazing,” you reply. “You have to go see it. Covered with Harry Potter quotes. It’s incredible.”
“I love Edinburgh,” she says, taking a sip of her latte.
“I could live here,” you reply.
“Same.”
“No,” you say. “Really. I feel like I could live here.”
“You should. I want to live abroad when I’m older.”
“No,” you say again. “Like, I feel like I could live here now. Maybe go to grad school.”
Maddi raises her eyebrows. “I mean, University of Edinburgh is a good school,” she suggests offhandedly. “And there’s St. Andrews.” Our friend Allison had shocked us all with her undergraduate decision to attend St. Andrews in Scotland, the mythical land where Will met Kate.
“I could get a job at the hostel and live there for free,” you offer.
“You could,” she says, half smiling, not quite realizing that she’s due to call your bluff.
The rational part of your brain offers its polite rebuttal: You don’t have a job here, and since you’re not a citizen, you’re not sure you’d be able to get a job. On the other hand, everyone working at the hostel was Australian or American. Your tour guide the other day was from Kansas, studying at the university. You could run tours and apply for graduate programs. You could ask your parents to ship some of your clothes, or better yet, you could start fresh, buying just what you need and living the minimalist, nomadic lifestyle you’ve secretly fantasized about while spending $60 at CVS buying makeup you already know you don’t really like. You could start over again, in Scotland. No eating disorder, no depression. You’d run every morning and on the weekends take hikes on Arthur’s Seat. You’d learn how to cook. You’d fall in love with a Scottish laird or a British academic. You would rebuild your life vertically from location up.
“What if I stayed?” you ask.
Maddi doesn’t say anything.
What do you do?
A. Finish your trip and go back to the United States. You are not the “starting a new life” type of person. You would run out of money in Scotland. Why do people never think of things like that when they make the impulsive decision to live in foreign countries? Also, aren’t visas a thing? Don’t you need a visa? How do people get visas?
Turn here.
B. You say goodbye to Maddi the next day when she takes a bus to London. You ask the front desk if you cou
ld apply for a job. They don’t have a full-time job yet, but they let you work cleaning the kitchen and the living room once a day in exchange for half off your room. Turns out you do need a visa to get a job but not if you’re just doing under-the-table work at a hostel and not, you learn, if you’re a student. So you open a thousand tabs on your laptop for graduate school. You buy a six-pack of new underwear at the discount store on the corner. You do not have a European passport, or a closet, or a job, or a single friend, but you’re staying in Edinburgh.
Turn here.
The Scottish boy you meet tells you his name is Fergus. (You will find out later that it is actually Mike.) You met Fergus at a sticky-floored bar off the Royal Mile. He orders you a shot of whiskey without even asking and then gives you a crooked smile that you find irresistible. You ask him what he does. “Oh, this and that,” he answers, which should have been your first red flag. But instead, you leave the bar and make out with him on the street while a tour group led by an American in a Mr. Hyde costume (eye patch, green face paint, top hat) passes by, gawking.
“Your place?” you ask.
“Nah, it’s kind of far. Let’s do yours.”
“Ah,” you say, between kisses on his neck. “So, unfortunately, I’m still in a hostel, and it’s a shared room.”
“That’s kind of fun,” he says, and winks. That should have been your second red flag. (The wink should have been your third.)
So you bring Fergus back to your shared room in the hostel.
The good news here is, even though Fergus is gone by the time you wake up in a newly destroyed hostel room, he didn’t steal anything from you. With a raging hangover and a pit in your stomach, you pull the clothes that have been strewn across the floor back into your suitcase. He hasn’t managed to find your money, or your passport, or your credit cards, which you kept zipped into a hidden compartment inside your purse.
The bad news is, your bunkmate—a girl named Emma from Texas—didn’t keep her money, or passport, or credit cards zipped away anywhere.
You go with her to the American Embassy and pay her back $400. The hostel gives you an hour to pack your things before you have to check out for violating their no-visitor rules and Emma is told to buy a lock.
In the end, you return to Chicago mostly broke and very tired. Your hair is too long and stringy and before she even releases your hug at the airport your mom declares that you need to get it cut. It feels good to be taken care of again.
“I need to see the doctor this week, I think,” you say.
You needed to get adventure out of your system—the fantasy that living in a different place will turn you into a different and better person. If Edinburgh couldn’t do it, New York definitely won’t. You start living at home, with your younger sister who’s home from college for the summer, and the two of you fight and bicker like kids again until your mom insists you get a job and then you’re working part-time at the local library and tutoring kids for the September ACT and you’re saving up money but you don’t know what for. (Emma emails and says the police were able to track down Mike, aka Fergus, and that she canceled her credit cards, and so you feel a little less guilty.)
Maybe you’ll write a book, you think. But you can’t even clean your room. Your mom has to remind you every morning to make your bed. How can you write a book if you can’t clean your room? You are tired, and you are stuck, but you are safe. Maybe soon, once the last remains of your failed adventure are gone from your psyche, you’ll be ready to try something new.
THE END
Or go back here.
* (Okay, that’s not actually true, but you’re only in Europe once, now, at this moment.)
CONGRATS! YOU MADE IT TO NEW YORK CITY! ASIDE FROM LIVING IN AN APARTMENT WITH NO CENTRAL AIR BUT ENDLESS TAKEOUT CONTAINERS OF WHITE RICE IN YOUR FRIDGE, WHAT ARE YOU EXCITED FOR?
A. Having a kick-ass career. Since you are a lady, a successful career will always be “kick-ass,” and the true measure of success will be how good you look in sleek black dresses and blazers and heels and how you can exit a car without ever flashing your underwear. Yours will be a world of glossy hair and expensive highlights and international flights and phone calls to people named “Mark” that you hang up on.
Turn here.
B. Finding love. Isn’t that what every New York City–based romantic comedy and television show promised? You are Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, except you dress like less of a maniac and you don’t wear heels to go to the bodega at two in the morning when you really, really need a pint of ice cream (you wear Birkenstocks).
Turn here.
C. Meeting friends. A group of people that you can feel completely comfortable with, ideally a group with a standing weekly brunch date (see also: Sex and the City). The point of all friendships, you are mostly sure, is to see who can fit the most double entendres into the time between ordering omelets and brunch and the waiter delivering them.
Turn here.
Seeing a celebrity in person is somehow always both more exciting and less exciting than you imagine it’s going to be.
First, there’s the first moment of recognition: “Is that them? No, it couldn’t be. But it looks like them.” That stage might only last a second before it’s replaced by certainty. Yes, you got a good look at their face and there can be no doubt. This is the person you’ve seen on television screens and stared at on your laptop. And once you see their face—taller or shorter, fatter or thinner (usually thinner) than they appeared onscreen—the celebrity always looks shamefully like themselves, as if they just peeled themselves from a page of US Weekly declaring that they are “Just Like Us,” because celebrities, too, sometimes shop for groceries using a grocery cart.
It is during this critical second stage that you must decide whether you’re going to bother them. By the time your brain runs through all of the possible algorithms for interactions (ask for an autograph, ask for a selfie, tell them you loved their last movie even though you never saw it) but by the time you decide on a course of action, they’re too far away, and the only way you’d get in earshot now is to jog and you’re not about to jog up to a stranger even if you did almost get around to seeing their last movie.
Then, finally, once your brain has already become nestled in its certainty that, yes, that was Amanda Seyfried standing a few feet away from you and no, you didn’t talk to her because of course you didn’t, what on earth would Amanda Seyfried possibly want to hear from you? you reach the critical acceptance phase. What is so special about that person anyway? Of course they’re wealthy and attractive, but they’re just living their life the same way you’re living yours. Their job just happens to be one that means you recognize their face and have heard them tell Jimmy Fallon about the hilarious time they went snorkeling in the Maldives. What’s the big deal?
The entire journey—doubt, certainty, excitement, and finally nonchalance—normally takes place over the course of approximately twelve seconds. Any shorter than that, and you risk involuntary shrieking or ill-advised use of a cell phone camera. No, a person needs twelve seconds on average if they’re going to behave like a moderate adult in the presence of a celebrity.
You had exactly a quarter of a second to register that you were inches away from Stephen Colbert on your first day of work as an intern on his television show, and you were walking up a flight of stairs, carrying a dresser.
The trouble you find with being in the first intern class of a brand-new show (at least, an old show with a new host), in a new studio, is that most of it isn’t built yet. There’s no order, not even the normal chaos of a television show. No one knows what cereals are supposed to go in the dispensers in the kitchen, or whether we order coffee in bulk, or if that tricycle someone sent as a joke gift is supposed to actually belong in the office somewhere. And the dressers aren’t built yet.
And so when you see Stephen Colbert for the first time, he is sitting in the writer’s room on the twelfth floor of the Ed Sullivan Theater talking to
someone who looks very important, and you are on the stairs, directly adjacent, separated from His Royal Famousness by only a glass wall and the not-yet-built IKEA dresser still in the cardboard.
“That was Stephen Colbert in there,” you stage-whisper to the intern you just met, whose name you haven’t learned yet. “Right in there, that’s him.”
“Yeah,” the intern says, straightening his glasses. “He’s been in here the last few days, meeting with Brooklyn Guy. I gave his family a tour yesterday. Super nice kids.” And the intern sashays away, presumably to do an important task to which he and only he was entrusted.
When you were in second grade, you had a specific fantasy that, to this day, you’re not certain anyone else has ever shared. It spawned one day in the music room, when you saw the coolest girls united in a cluster on the other side of the room, all recipients of some secret code that hadn’t and wouldn’t be delivered to you. Why were they the coolest girls? Popularity in children is perhaps best described in the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
Your lack of status wasn’t due to the way you dressed—your mother, keen-eyed, with three daughters, kept you more or less well stocked in whatever trend had captured the suburb that particular year—or in how you looked; there must be some aspect of your behavior, you concluded, that prevented you from ascending to the status of popular. But, if that hypothesis stood, it followed that you could alter your behavior, saying the exact right things at the right time, and then you would be popular.
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