“I do too.” It was a relief to be speaking English again.
Absentmindedly Sophie reached out and took my arm. “I’m so happy that we’re here together. I feel like the whole experience will be different because you’re here. Better.”
I leaned my head against her shoulder. “So am I.” Together, we were a force, more than the sum of our parts. Les Américaines.
“I need more friends like you. My parents are always telling me that.”
“Telling you what?” I laughed, but suddenly felt a little self-conscious. “What’s a friend like me exactly?”
“A smart friend. I love my teammates, but all they ever talk about is boys and parties and they giggle so goddamn much.” She went on, affecting a stentorian voice, imitating her father, “ ‘Sophie, you need to surround yourself with people who are serious about their goals.’ ” She laughed, but it was rueful, and some of the color had drained from her cheeks.
I groaned. “Ha, my mom is the same way. She’s always on me about getting perfect grades, having perfect extracurricular activities. Good on paper, even if I’m a mess up here.” I tapped my temple with my fingertip.
“Join the club, sister,” Sophie said under her breath.
An expansive silence opened between us, a silence I recognized as one that people allow when they’d prefer to be asked what they’re thinking instead of offering it, when they want to be certain that their listener is invested and not merely present. So I asked her.
“Just thinking about my parents,” she said, looking down the street as though she’d suddenly lost track of where she was going even though we were heading in the same direction we always walked together. “I wish they wouldn’t worry about me so much.”
“Do they? That surprises me. You seem like you have everything so together. I would think that most parents would kill to have a daughter like you.”
“I should amend that to say my mother worries, my dad mostly criticizes. He doesn’t like to encourage feminine emotions.”
“Yikes.”
Crossing her arms, she said nothing. I’d only met her father once, at the volleyball game I’d gone to. He was tall with a full head of gunmetal-gray hair that must once have been blond like Sophie’s. He was slightly terrifying, like a fearsome, gracefully aging Viking. As I remembered him now, it seemed that Sophie’s mother did cower a bit beside him. But I didn’t know much about fathers, after all.
Sophie’s expression had turned stormy and I couldn’t tell what had just happened. This sensation had become familiar; half the time I didn’t quite know how my French phrases were received by native ears, but I wasn’t normally worried about having this tone-deaf feeling when I was with Sophie and speaking in English.
“Do you remember how I left school last year?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking we were moving away from the subject back to talking about travels.
“I wasn’t volunteering abroad with my cousin, I was in a treatment facility.”
“Oh. What kind of—I mean, rehab or something?”
“No.” She smiled wryly, as though the idea of her being a drug addict was funny, and indeed it was far-fetched. “I have these episodes sometimes. Not often. Just spells where I go up and down. It can get a little extreme.”
“I’m sorry.” I wanted to ask her more but it didn’t seem respectful.
“I’ve never told anyone outside my family. It’s not really the way I want people to see me, you know?”
“I understand.”
For a moment we were quiet. Her arm had stiffened in mine and I wondered if she felt she’d said too much. I wanted to say the right thing; to show her the admission didn’t make me think less of her; that, if anything, it made me feel closer to her.
“Lots of people struggle with stuff like that, depression or whatever,” I said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“It’s not that I’m ashamed. I just worry that people will treat me differently even if they don’t mean to. If everyone thinks I’m happy-go-lucky, then it makes it easier to believe that I actually am that way. You know?”
I had a million questions but I didn’t want to grill her. “Honestly, Sophie, it’s sort of a relief to know that you’re not completely perfect.”
Sophie turned and looked at me at close range, disbelieving. “Perfect?”
“Utterly. Perfect face, perfect body. Smart, confident, funny, charming—shall I go on?”
“Why would I stop you?” She smiled now, to my relief.
“Then let’s not forget athletic. Oh, yes, and your superior language skills. Add to that the fact that no one can even hate you because you’re a sweetheart.”
“You’re full of shit. I’m a disaster,” she said, but her voice and the tiny smile that broke through her pout said otherwise. Somewhere beneath any neuroses she might have, she must know what she was, how others admired her, but nonetheless I felt it my duty to convince her.
I halted abruptly in the street. “Sophie, I won’t take one more step until you admit that I’m right.”
“Brooke!” She stood a few yards down the deserted sidewalk, far enough away that I had to raise my voice a little.
I stayed put. The giddiness of the evening had reached a crescendo, and I felt myself happily atop it. Crossing my arms over my chest, I stared her down with pursed lips, waiting for her to take me up on my dare. “I mean it! I will accept that you are not perfect as such, and I believe your claim that you are in fact from this planet despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. However, I will not stand here and listen to you call yourself a disaster. It flies in the face of everything we mere mortals hold dear. Admit you’re a goddess!”
She hung her shoulders as though in defeat. When she looked up at me, her eyes were shining and it was all I had wanted, to replace the look that had been in them a few moments before.
“You’re on quite a roll,” she said quietly. She walked toward me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Tell me how anyone ever resists you.”
She put her arms around my neck and pulled me tightly to her. After standing like this for a moment longer than an ordinary embrace, she took my arm again and we continued on down the street toward our homes as before, only now I could feel her arm relaxed in mine. Somehow I knew that if I hadn’t responded to this confession in the right way, the door to Sophie’s inner self would have been closed to me forever, as I now realized it remained to so many who knew her. So I felt no regrets about my effusive display of admiration. It had never occurred to me that she would need this kind of reassurance, much less from me. Perhaps anyone’s worshipping at her altar would have satisfied her, but I hoped it was somehow better coming from me, that she’d meant what she said about me. I hoped wildly, though I realized it wasn’t likely, that she saw some of herself when she looked at me; saw if not an equal, then at least something of a similar species.
We continued on for a quiet moment and I watched her from the corner of my eye as she gazed contentedly at the town houses along the street. I felt the girl beside me had solidified, become more human. It made her even more beautiful, but as she looked back at me and smiled, I felt a tiny hint of worry creep up my spine.
We reached her door before mine and she hugged me again. She then kissed me three times on the cheek.
“Trois.”
“Trois bisous,” I echoed back, “pour les Américaines!” She threw in a kiss on my lips. I wanted to devour her.
Making my way down the small hill back to my family’s house, I let the decline carry me with its momentum. My feet flew underneath me and it felt glorious until I nearly tripped. I was exhausted, I reminded myself, and still a little drunk from the party.
When at last I was in my bed, my spinning mind and my exhausted body did battle with each other. I worried we’d never see Véronique again, that we’d somehow made a bad impression on her or, worse, bored her. Sophie hadn’t been quite her usual self for the earlier part of the evening—sitting there in ne
ar silence all that time—and I realized it had strained me a bit to hold up the conversation for both of us. But then, maybe I’d fared better with Alex without Sophie’s being turned up to her usual wattage. I felt guilty the moment this thought crossed my mind; it was hard to reconcile the image I had of Sophie with what she’d told me tonight since she had always seemed to simply radiate health and happiness. I tried to wrap my head around the idea that “Peru” had been a treatment facility, a rather different kind of adventure. But she was fine now, wasn’t she? Her family wouldn’t have let her come here if she wasn’t.
Though it seems obvious now that I should have been jealous of Sophie from the beginning, I didn’t even know enough to properly envy her. At least at first. Instead, I assumed that because she was drawn to me, I could become like her: bright and brave and teeth-kickingly gorgeous. Even her troubles seemed sexy, the imperfect in her making her only more complex and alluring.
At last I let sleep cloud my brain. I tried with my last shred of consciousness to spirit myself onward to only good dreams by thinking of the triumphs of the day. Véronique. Sophie.
Alex.
SOPHIE AND I soon discovered that the best bars in town were all located in a neighborhood called Saint-Félix. We stayed out late talking to anyone who would talk to us, about anything they wanted to talk about, drinking and laughing about nothing. We laughed with relief when we could understand the words our companions were saying, with abandon when we could not. I crept back into the house in the wee hours many nights, feeling certain that the ancient wood creaking under my feet would give me away to my host family. We went to school bleary-eyed and drank instant coffee until our nerves stood on end.
Some British and Irish expats, and the French people who wished to make their acquaintance, hung around one particular pub. The inside was a cross between a Bavarian beer hall and a sports bar, with a pastiche of European soccer paraphernalia covering the walls. Soon enough Sophie and I would be known there, but in the beginning it was just an easygoing place to sit and talk without drawing as many stares as we did elsewhere.
One Tuesday, we met there after one of Sophie’s later classes at the university. Because she’d done well on the placement exams, she took most of her classes at the university rather than at the institute, where I took nearly all of mine. I was used to being at the top of the class and it still rankled me to be remedial.
“Doesn’t it already feel like we’ve been here a long time?”
“In a way,” I said, though it had only been weeks.
Sophie pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and extracted one with her delicate fingers. She put the cigarette to her lips, lit it, and inhaled.
“I’m sorry, you smoke ?”
She shrugged. “Only once in a while at home, but I decided I ought to pick up a vice while I’m abroad, you know? Since I don’t have to worry about volleyball. I don’t suppose you’d like one?” She proffered the pack as an afterthought as she went to tuck it back in her bag.
“Only when I’m drunk.”
“That can be arranged.” She took a drag and sighed. “Truthfully, I smoked kind of a lot with Jason this summer.”
“Ah, so this is the fault of the epic summer fling, is it? What do we hear from him these days?”
Sophie shrugged. “A couple of the most boring e-mails I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. That’s about it. God, what is it with guys who just write the most bland laundry lists of things they’ve done? Everything is always ‘cool’ or ‘chill,’ or if not, then ‘lame.’ I mean, learn to write a narrative sentence, Neanderthals.”
“So we’ve moved on from Mr. Summer Fling, then?”
“Since all he really had going for him was a hot body and gorgeous green eyes, yes. Those things don’t translate well to e-mail. Not that I don’t still dream of the hot body.”
“You could always ask him to send you some shirtless photos. I’m just jealous that you spent the summer having hot sex with a beach god. I spent it trying to cook coq au vin recipes with my mother.”
Sophie sighed. “Don’t be too jealous.”
“Ha, tell it to my dry spell, sister.” My last interlude with Regan felt far away indeed.
The waiter came by and I ordered us each another bière blanche. I hadn’t really been exposed to quality Hefeweizens at home and I couldn’t get enough of them here.
Sophie smiled into her lap and shook her head.
“Oh, sorry, did you not want another one?”
“Of course I want another one. It’s not that.”
“Then what are you smirking about over there?”
“It’s just a little ironic.” She leaned her head back and shook her hair over her shoulders. “I mean, I happen to know a thing or two about dry spells. Self-imposed, but still.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Nothing, nothing, ugh, never mind.”
“Oh my God, what? You can’t say something cryptic like that and then take it back. Not fair, completely against the arbitrary full-disclosure clause of our friendship that I’ve just now imposed.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” Sophie said.
“I mean it. Spill!”
“All right, all right. But you can’t laugh at me, it’s kind of embarrassing. Thing is, my summer was sadly not a nonstop humpfest, more of a heavy-petting-fest. Because I am, in fact, a virgin.” She smacked the heel of her palm to her forehead.
“Oh.” My head spun as I tried to absorb this. But why had I just assumed otherwise? It seemed a little incredible that sexy Sophie was not in fact doing the deed itself. A cloud of sex seemed to sort of hover around her at all times; it seemed almost cruel that it was a fake-out.
Stubbing the butt of her cigarette out in the ashtray, she immediately dipped back into her purse for another.
“I’ll have one of those after all.”
She gave me a grateful look.
“That’s good. I mean it’s good that you’re doing that if that’s what you want. Can I ask why you decided to, um, abstain?”
“Abstinent sounds better, doesn’t it? Virgin sounds parochial. So anyway”—she shifted in her seat—“sorry, I know I’m being awkward; it’s just that I don’t talk about it much.”
“You’re not being awkward,” I said with what I hoped was a comforting smile. “Nobody else’s business anyway. Me included, if you want.”
“No, no. I trust you. It’s not religious or anything. It’s just that it’s gonna be a big moment no matter what, you know? Like you’ll always remember it, good, bad, or ugly. It will always be a touchstone. I guess I’ve just never met anyone whose face I want to think of for the rest of my life. ’Cause you’re going to no matter what.”
The cigarette burned my lungs, but the nicotine was already having a soothing effect and I luxuriated in it, taking another long sip of my beer while I contemplated what she’d said.
“And I know this is going to sound lame and rom-comy, but I want my first time to be with someone I love, you know?”
“That doesn’t sound lame at all.” I nodded, a little thrown by how self-conscious she suddenly seemed. “God, I’d forgotten I like cigarettes, drunk me must know best. She knows she likes a smoke but sober me always wants to deny her.”
“Sober you is only looking out for your health, after all.”
“Okay, well, since we’re sharing, and drinking”—with that we clinked glasses—“I’m going to tell you something.”
“Oh, do it!” She settled into her seat and gave me her full attention.
I hesitated for a moment, staring into the amber abyss of my beer. It wasn’t a lack of trust in Sophie that was holding me back. Instead, I had suddenly realized what it meant to have never said aloud or even written down what had happened. It had the effect of making it seem made up, as if it were a fanciful, fictional story that I had been writing and revising for so long that I had forgotten it wasn’t real. Yet I had kept it defiantly to myself, since to talk about it wo
uld make it matter in some way that I couldn’t quite yet own up to. It all felt so far away now, though, it would feel like spinning a campfire story. I had a memory of the emotional impact of the affair, the breakup—if that’s what our ending could reasonably be called—but I didn’t seem to exactly feel any of it any longer. I had a thrilling sense of detachment from my former self, felt I could somehow both take credit for her actions and not take responsibility for them.
So I told Sophie everything, and she listened wide-eyed with an occasional little gasp. I focused on maintaining a cool distance from the story, something I had been trying hard to cultivate since the denouement of the disastrous affair. For the first time, it felt effortless, the story was somehow now under my complete control. My calm felt authentic, as Regan and his pitiful wife and the slick surface of his oak desk seemed far away. So my indifference wasn’t a charade after all.
“Holy shit,” she said after a long silence, then continued delightedly, “I never would have suspected you! I know lots of girls have crushes on him.”
“Regan? Really?”
“Professor Douglas? Oh, yeah. Nerd hot.”
Just like that, I was more seductress than sucker, someone who had captured a desirable older man in a story of sexual conquest rather than submission. Somehow the story flipped from making me look weak and even a little silly to letting me be triumphant and naughty. Suddenly, it all amounted to bragging rights instead of a sob story. Sophie’s admiration made it so.
I slept better that night than I had in a long time.
WHAT DOES it mean, this sneeze?”
My cheeks burned. A sparkle of quiet, terrified laughter came from around me, and I let a cautious smile creep onto my face. Surely the professor must be kidding. His eyebrows knitted together yet more furiously, and I quickly tried to set my face back to neutral. Not a joke, then, it would seem.
“Mademoiselle, quelle est l’histoire de cet éternuement? Vous êtes Française ou Américaine? Presumably you should be one or the other, as you are in this class, but I have now asked you the question in both of the languages which we are here to master—a wild ambition, I readily admit—and yet you sit here mute. Silent. Alors, vous êtes portugaise, néerlandaise, colombienne?”
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