What Scotland Taught Me

by Molly Ringle

  I wanted Tony to share this city with me, for I knew he would love it. But if he were here, I would either have to lie about Gil or choose between Gil and Tony--the dreaded choice I meant to put off as long as possible.

  I wanted Laurence to be in oblivion about this whole mess; or at least, since he knew, I wanted him to stop tormenting me. But if he didn’t torment me, he wouldn’t be Laurence. And Laurence, as his sanctimonious self, was occasionally useful for something. Like painfully accurate psychoanalysis. Or making soup.

  I entered the dark Room 17 and glanced at Shannon, asleep on her lower bunk. Now there was a girl who, unlike me, deserved true love. At least I would get further acquainted with this Thomas Chester-Brighton on Friday, and feel some satisfaction on her account.

  Sure. I burrowed into my chilly blankets. More likely, I would be jealous that she was free to have a British affair and I wasn’t, and therefore hers had the possibility of eternal happiness, and mine didn’t.

  Life definitely sucked.

  * * *

  On Friday night, the four of us journeyed over the castle hill through misty November rain to catch the university’s production of Much Ado About Nothing. I sent a stealthy glance up the Royal Mile as we crossed, knowing Gil was working tonight and that I might have gone up to visit him if I hadn’t been roped into an evening at the theater. That glimpse of Shelly had cracked open turmoil in me: fight her for Gil’s affections, or let him go since I was ambivalent about the whole thing.

  A night away from him was probably for the best right now.

  We took our seats and opened the glossy programs.

  “Hey, there you are.” I pointed to Shannon’s name under “Costumes.”

  “Yep. And...” She leaned over, flipped my program back a few pages, and stabbed her finger at the larger font that read, “Stage Managed by Thomas Chester-Brighton.”

  “Right on,” Amber said. “So where is he?”

  “Backstage with headphones and lots of important stuff to do.” The pride oozed from Shannon’s voice.

  “I bet this will be better than Wild Rose High’s productions,” Laurence said. “Remember how Jenna Gruber butchered all her Ophelia lines? ‘His Dublin all unbraced’...‘and you call him a downer’...God, I had to leave before I woke up the audience by laughing.”

  “It should be better,” Shannon promised.

  “And this play’s more romantic.” Amber put her hand on Laurence’s thigh.

  I glanced at Shannon. She lifted her eyebrows at me. We both cleared our throats and flipped through our programs.

  The house lights dimmed to darkness, and we plunged into the romantic comedy of Beatrice, Benedick, Hero, and Claudio.

  I forgot where Amber’s hand rested. I forgot Shannon’s giddy new love. I even forgot about Gil, Tony, and what country I was in.

  The actors, costumes, sets, and all possible technical features outshone our high school’s versions so completely that I felt like prostrating myself in the orchestra pit and begging forgiveness for having painted stupid-looking backdrops once upon a time.

  I settled for dashing backstage with my three companions after the play ended and babbling to Thomas, “I’ve never seen any Shakespeare so good, seriously. This show rocked my socks.” (As everyone knows, professional theater critics use such rhetoric in all their reviews.)

  Grinning, he pushed his sweat-dampened curls from his forehead, and hugged me. “Cheers. Thanks so much for coming. I know Shannon really wanted you all to see it.” He let me go and slung his arm around my cousin. “This girl’s the best. Sews up new piping on eighteen doublets at a day’s notice without a single complaint. Smiling the whole time, even.”

  She kissed his nose. “That’s because you’re such an effective manager.”

  As they sank into a kiss, oblivious to the crowd surging around them, Amber smacked herself on the forehead. “Doublet! That’s what Jenna meant by ‘Dublin’.”

  Laurence patted her on the head. “Yes, dear. Glad you finally worked that out.”

  I kept silent, watching Shannon and Thomas. My heart sank as I remembered the five-thousand-mile distance separating their homelands, and the misery that would surely ensue when Shannon’s work permit expired.

  I turned away. That was for them to work out, and they had four months yet. Entire marriages had lasted less time.

  My dilemma wasn’t the same, not at all. I was keeping one lad on either shore; I’d have Tony when I returned. Besides, Gil and I together didn’t look like Shannon and Thomas together. I hadn’t spent much time gazing at our collective reflection in shop windows, but still, I knew. We didn’t sparkle, not like that.

  Mind you, I wasn’t sure I sparkled like that with Tony, either.

  All my Shakespeare-induced happiness dissolved into the stuffy theater air.

  I nudged Amber’s elbow. “Guess we ought to get back.”

  Shannon stayed with Thomas after the performance, so I returned to the hostel with Laurence and Amber. My thoughts wandered to them as I saw her hand slide onto his elbow, where he let it stay. I still doubted Laurence would fall for her, but anyone with eyesight could tell she continued to crush heavily on him.

  So what would she do next year? Follow him to Massachusetts, or wherever he went for college? MIT was the school he kept boasting about; his dad had contacts there, and Laurence had already gotten in via early consideration--same with a handful of other prestigious schools around the country, none of them in Oregon.

  Depression settled in. Bad enough that my best friends might start dating each other, in another year they might live so far away that I’d never even see them. I’d avoided thinking about that fact regarding Laurence (and lately I sort of looked forward to him being far away), but it wasn’t fair for me to lose Amber, too.

  As if the college pixies were working especially strong mischief today, I got an email from my dad that night.

  Dear Eva,

  Time to start collecting the college applications. Let us know which schools you want to apply to, and we’ll get the packets and send them to you. A lot of the schools let you apply online, of course, but we figured you would want to read the brochures.

  Gina misses you. She’s got a new boyfriend and doesn’t have her sister around to tell her about it.

  Love, Dad.

  The college application reminder sent me into a headache, while the mention of my barely twelve-year-old sister having a boyfriend and actually missing me struck me as totally implausible.

  Feeling as if the world was morphing into something I no longer recognized, I turned my phone off without replying to anyone, and went to bed.

  Chapter Fifteen: Graveyard Gossip

  “Okay. Here’s some juicy gossip.” Amber wriggled her shoulders against the tombstone as if she were actually comfortable sitting there.

  My butt was falling asleep on the cold slab. I pulled my gloves loose and blew warm air onto my fingertips. The skeletal shadows of grave markers made me glance around skittishly every minute. Even if Greyfriars Kirkyard held no ghosts, it might well harbor purse-snatchers and rapists. Eyeing a particularly sinister old gate across from us, I said, “Gossip, huh? Let’s have it.”

  “Last night Laurence and I went to this club with some of the Kiwis. The music was really loud, so I had to talk right up against his ear. I’d had some drinks and was flirting with him, and...” She tipped her head back, smiling at the cloudy night sky. “I said something suggestive to him, then kind of licked his ear. He pretended to be all annoyed and embarrassed, but I could tell he wasn’t, ’cause I hugged him, and he caught me around the waist for a second, and um...I could feel he was interested, if you catch my drift.”

  I almost inhaled one of my gloves. “Amber! This is Laurence! I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Well, it’s true.” She smugly tapped her feet on the slab’s edge.

  “You think he...no, it isn’t. He wouldn’t--ew, I really don’t want to think about this.”

&nb
sp; “Didn’t we used to wonder?” she said. “All those girls he dated, who we never really knew. We couldn’t ask them what he liked, or if he even tried anything. Remember?”

  “I guess.”

  She had a point. He usually found dates from outside Wild Rose, girls who attended other schools, or relatives of his father’s coworkers. He never chose a date we could corner in humanities the next day and pry salacious details from. We occasionally asked Laurence himself, but he was like the world’s best spy when it came to not talking.

  “So my guess,” Amber purred, “is that he does, in fact, smolder under the sheets.”

  “I do not want to know that,” I said, though in truth I did want to know. Not only was I dirty-minded, but this gave me a smidgen of blackmail against Laurence, to counter all the muck he held on me.

  “What about Gil?” Amber asked. “Learned anything along those lines yet?”

  My stomach somersaulted, thinking of those gropes on the train station bench. I hadn’t tried it again, but some of his tightly-enfolded embraces the other night, complete with tangling tongues, had come awfully close to the same level of lust. I took a deep breath of the mud-scented autumn air. “Not really. I mean, we kiss and stuff, but since Tony still seems good about us being long-distance, I don’t want to, you know...”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Amber took a sharp breath herself. “Ooh.” She rubbed her temples.

  For once I was glad she brushed me off in favor of ghosts. “Got one?”

  “Yeah. All of a sudden.” She pressed a palm to her stomach. “There we go. Someone’s here.” She fixed her gaze across the path, peering at the barred gates and the darkness beyond. “Oh. There he is. Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh? Why ‘uh-oh’?”

  “He is not happy.” She scrambled upright, heels skidding in the fallen leaves.

  I leaped up too. “‘Not happy,’ like sad? Or ‘not happy,’ like homicidal?”

  She stared ahead with wide eyes. “Uh...”

  I stared too, but saw nothing except tombstones with creepy statues and gargoyles squatting on them.

  She seized my arm.

  “We better go,” she said. “Now.”

  We bolted from the cemetery like cats out of a dog park. Terrified wheezes escaped me with each pump of my legs. I didn’t dare look back. Amber, meanwhile, was laughing by the time we climbed over the stone boundary wall and dropped onto the sidewalk.

  “Dude,” I gasped. “What the hell was that?”

  “You were...so scared,” she said, between breathless laughs.

  I collapsed against the wall. “Oh, you were not faking me out.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I punched her arm. “I hate you. God damn it.”

  “I’m sorry. It was getting cold. I wanted to go home. So I figured, hey...”

  “You figured, ‘Why not give Eva a freaking heart attack?’ Some people would just say, ‘Nothing tonight; let’s go home.’”

  Still laughing, she set off down the sidewalk. “I’m sorry, really. There was supposed to be this guy in there, this ghost. It’s a popular legend. Kids sneak in to see scary old Bloody Mackenzie. I got nothing, though.”

  “Great. Now old Bloody Mackenzie is going to follow us to the hostel and show himself there.”

  “Nah. He won’t. I didn’t sense a thing, honestly.” Her laughter settled into a cheerful sigh. “I was too distracted to see anything. Guess it was all that talk about Laurence’s pants.”

  Here we went again.

  “Do you see ghosts when you’re out with him, or are his pants a problem then, too?” I asked.

  “They’re totally a problem. I haven’t seen a thing in his company lately. I just...” She spread her arms, then swung them inward to hug herself, beaming. “All I can think about is him. Maybe it blocks my seeing abilities. I don’t know.”

  “Then maybe it’s a sign you’re not supposed to go after him. Maybe that’s what the ghosts are trying to tell you.” I knew I sounded mean, but hey, rattled nerves here.

  She rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t work that way. They’re departed spirits, not relationship consultants.”

  “How do you know? Is there a textbook on it?”

  “You’re in a mood.”

  “Well, I just got freaked out for no reason at all, and now my friends are pairing up on me.”

  Her smile dwindled. She kicked a paper coffee cup off the sidewalk. “It’s not exactly official yet.”

  “Would it be worth it? Giving up ghosts for him?”

  “Please. Any day.”

  “All right.” I let every drop of my doubt and disapproval seep into the words.

  She stopped at a street corner and glared at me. “What? You keep acting like I’m bat-loony for liking him. Like you’re the model of healthy relationships.”

  “Hey! You wanted me to go after Gil.”

  “I did say it’d be better to drop Tony first.”

  “Oh, and you’re so incredibly honest? Have you told your mom yet that you’re in touch with your dad? Because that seems a little more important in someone’s overall life than who they’re dating at the time.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “It’s completely different. I’m not cheating on anyone.”

  “Nice. Now I’m ‘cheating.’ Originally you said I could do what I want! Remember, his ‘Go have fun’ thing in the email? How you pointed to that?”

  “Yeah, but I’m also kind of seeing how it’s a shitty thing to do to someone.”

  “I can’t believe this. You’re taking Laurence’s side. Again. That’s what this is.”

  She flung her hand in the air. “What is your issue with Laurence? Tell me already.”

  “He irritates me, okay?”

  “I could name a few incredibly irritating things about the guys you’ve dated, too. But do I?”

  “Yeah, actually, you do,” I said. “In Tony’s case, you say them to his face, so then you two argue about religion all day, killing any plans I made with him.”

  She shook her head, looking out at the traffic. “Fine. Anything else you want to bring up?”

  I stared tight-lipped at a streetlight. “This faking it, with the ghost visions. Is this the first time?”

  “Yes, of course it’s the first time. The only time, even.”

  “How am I supposed to know? I never see them. You could be faking it every time, for all I know.”

  “Wow. My visions, my choice of men, my idea of meeting my dad. Want to tell me my mom’s a whore while you’re ripping on things that are important to me?”

  I spun away, yanking off my gloves and stuffing them into my coat pockets. Cracking my knuckles, I waited while the night air cooled the prickling heat from my hands. Then I took a deep breath and turned around. “I’ve been sleep-deprived lately. And this is a PMS week, can you tell?”

  She acquiesced with a nod. “Same for me. Probably following each other’s cycles.”

  “Ain’t nature grand.”

  She added a bitter laugh. “Plus, my dad’s still putting off coming to see me.”

  “So he’s a jerk. Don’t let him get to you.”

  She folded her arms, watching her foot swivel back and forth on the pavement. “Does that mean you take back what you said?”

  Irritation tugged at my nerves, but I tamped it down. “Yes.”

  “About Laurence and about the ghosts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay.”

  “So.”

  “Can we just get some chocolate,” I said, “and go home?”

  “Chocolate it is.” She turned to face the intersection.

  I stepped up beside her. We waited for the light to change, saying nothing at all.

  Chapter Sixteen: North Bridge

  I called Gil and arranged to go out with him the night after my spat with Amber. Getting away for the evening sounded good, especially when I jogged downstairs and found Amber sitting on Laurence’s knee at the hostel’s front desk.


  She leaned forward, scrolling through the computer screen, chin on hand.

  Laurence, reclining, caught my eye. “She’s only using me for my internet connection.”

  And your manly pants. “We all covet that, Laurence,” I said.

  Amber glanced up, then kept clicking the mouse. “Where you going?” She sounded cool and casual.

  “To hang with Gil. Probably only music shopping or something. He’s kind of a fanboy about his CDs.”

  Laurence scrutinized me. Planning any more groping this evening? Shut your face, my narrowed eyes answered.

  “Stay warm,” he said, and waved goodbye.

  Yeah. I definitely wanted a break from those two.

  As I walked out the door, I heard him say to her, “Babe, you’re pinching a nerve in my hip.” Gosh, how romantic. I allowed a wicked grin to surface. What Amber found to yearn for in Laurence, I had no clue. But I’d done my job; I had warned her. She could fling herself against that fortress all she wanted. I wasn’t going to interfere again. I strolled off down Princes Street to meet my Scottish lover.

  Not that “lover” was the proper term, exactly. We still hadn’t followed through on the idea of going to his house and shutting ourselves into his bedroom. And that was okay--the idea made my stomach twist, and only partly out of lust. We weren’t ready for the big s-e-x. We had a good time with our stolen minutes and naughty whispers.

  Yeah, I thought, my skin warming in eagerness, a very good time indeed. No harm doing that a little more. I stepped up my pace.

  Of course, the naughtiness only happened between sessions of rock-band discussion, or when he ran out of songs stored on his mp3 player to make me listen to. Such was the case tonight. After one friendly kiss hello, I found myself with him at a magazine rack in Waverley Station, serving as audience while he babbled about music.

  He flipped through a magazine as he spoke, flashing me photos every few seconds to illustrate a point. Which groups were splitting up, which were re-forming, who was doing solo projects, whose records sold far more than they deserved to--I got a thorough update.