On the Road Again
Page 8
“Yeah,” I complained, laughing the whole time. “And he hit me, too, with both of them!”
My story was a big success. It was almost as good as the one about my father getting trapped in the phone booth. For all I know, people are still telling the snowball story back in Celeriac!
“So, mon garçon, you liked it here?” Marco asked me.
“You bet!”
“Alors, then you must come back.”
I promised him I would. And I promised myself, too.
EPILOGUE
My checklist
On our last morning in Celeriac, Daniel’s father came to drive us to the train station. Fortunately, our sardine-can car was staying behind. That was one thing I wouldn’t miss.
Rachid and Ahmed were hanging around the square, but they weren’t playing soccer. They were watching us pack. They looked sad.
I felt a little embarrassed. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was moving on to another world, far from here, and they were staying behind.
Rachid came up to me.
“How about a trade?” he asked.
At first I was confused. Then I understood. He was wearing a green and red soccer jersey from the Moroccan national team. I was wearing my old Montreal Expos T-shirt.
I pulled it off and gave it to him, and he did the same. Then we both put on each other’s shirts, just like the pros do after a game.
“I’ll be back,” I told Rachid and Ahmed.
“We’ll be here,” they said.
As I was stowing the last of our bags in the car, my mother asked me, “Do you still have your list?”
“What list?”
“The list of things you wanted to see in Paris.”
“How come?”
“Because that’s where we’re going.”
For once we were going some place I wanted to go. Amazing! You’d better believe I still had that list. It was at the bottom of my suitcase, but I hadn’t forgotten what was on it.
Daniel’s father started up the car.
“Let’s go. Unless you want to miss your train.”
Part of me wanted to stay. Part of me wanted to go. I guess that’s the way it is with traveling. You discover a new place. At first it’s not easy. Then you learn how to live there, and you make new friends. But then it’s time to leave again…
Of course, going to Paris wasn’t bad either. We traveled there on one of the fastest trains in the world. It goes more than 300 kilometers an hour! The cows rushed by like black-and-white blurs, and the trees morphed into speeding broccoli. We went from our little village to Paris in three and a half hours, and I didn’t even get jet lag.
The first thing on my list was the Eiffel Tower. You can see it from nearly anywhere in Paris, and from a distance it looks like a toy. But when you climb to the very top, you can look down and see millions of people scurrying around like ants. And the traffic jams — they’re incredible!
After Celeriac, Paris was so huge. Max said he could see every flowerpot on every balcony in the city, and every Frenchman wearing a beret and carrying a baguette. But, as usual, he was exaggerating.
Of course, my father had to give us another one of his history lessons. He pointed out the Arc de Triomphe, and told us how Napoleon had put it up in the nineteenth century to celebrate one of his victories. He showed us where the Bastille had been, which was a prison that was destroyed in the French Revolution. The people attacked it and tore it apart, brick by brick. All that’s left is a column with a statue on top.
Imagine dark passageways with the walls and ceiling made out of human bones. That’s what the Catacombs are like, where the Romans buried their dead. Things got extra scary when I accidentally dropped my candle, and it went out. There I was, in the dark, surrounded by skeletons. Suddenly I was afraid to move. But then Max came around the corner from another passageway, with his candle. I was pretty happy to see him.
Instead of taking a ride on the Seine river in a tourist boat, we cruised through the Paris sewers. They were smelly, all right, just the way they were supposed to be. In fact, they were worse than the cheese lady’s oldest goat cheese. During the Second World War, people used the sewers to hide out in and have secret meetings. But this time, believe it or not, I saw a crew making a movie down there.
When we got to Notre Dame church, the line to go up in the towers was so long that we gave up. Sometimes there are too many people in Paris. Luckily, my mother had brought along her binoculars, so we took turns looking at the gargoyles hanging by their claws from the edge of the cathedral. Max didn’t want to look at them. He said they would give him nightmares. I reminded him that they were there to chase away the evil spirits by being even scarier than they were. So they were just doing their job.
I finally got back home. But I can still remember everything that happened in our speck-of-dust village, from the duck thief to Rachid’s going-away present that I’m wearing right now.
I think I’d like to stay in one place for a while. But when it’s time to go traveling again, I’ll be ready…
THE END
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GROUNDWOOD BOOKS, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.
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