She had to stop thinking of him as Bodie Tal and start thinking of him as Bodie, a guy in her class. Otherwise she’d do something embarrassing like ask him to sign her arm.
“That’s a miracle.” He ran a hand over the back of his head, bristling the short hair there, like it was unfamiliar to him. “Those two were walking so slowly I thought we’d never make it. You can’t wear heels on cobblestones,” he said derisively.
“They’re not that slow.” Rosie watched Clara and Elodie progress through the courtyard. “Just a little unsteady. Kind of like baby giraffes.”
He laughed, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and he looked less like Bodie Tal, and more like, well, just some guy. Some exceptionally cute guy, but still. Someone who was human. Like her.
Something shoved Rosie—hard—and she stumbled forward. She was vaguely conscious of Bodie scrabbling the air, reaching for her, but she was in front of him, too far away, and she landed with a thud on her knees and her palms, a horrible jarring sensation traveling up her wrists. Oh no, her wrists. Her wrists had to be okay. She needed them to whisk, and to flip, and to stir, and to do, well, everything. Gingerly, she pushed herself up so she was kneeling, barely mindful of the wet cobblestones soaking her jeans—her good jeans, the nice ones that she’d found at the Salvation Army over in Alliance. She rolled her wrists one way, then the other, but there was no sharp pain, no disturbing crackles or pops—just soreness that would, hopefully, be gone by morning.
“Clara!” Bodie said sharply. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry,” Clara said, and there was a bit of a slur to her sorry. Rosie looked up at her quickly. Was she drunk?
“It was an accident,” Elodie said quickly, and Rosie thought there was a bit of a slur to her voice, too. Maybe. She wasn’t sure. Rosie looked up at them from her place on the pavement, and they seemed impossibly tall, their legs long and thin, as they towered over her.
“Rosie! Are you okay?” Henry asked. He was already at the door of the École, but he’d turned around, concern furrowing on his brow, and was coming back. For her. “Let me help you up.”
“No worries,” Bodie said, and as he spoke, he extended a hand down, and Rosie could see all of his tattoos snaking their way up his arm, disappearing under the sleeve of his T-shirt. How was he not freezing? “I’ve got it.”
And so Rosie took Bodie’s hand, and she let herself be pulled up.
Henry didn’t even know what had happened last night. He’d asked Rosie to hang back with him, like he’d planned, but then he’d chickened out. Repeatedly. And when he’d finally been about to do something, Rosie had literally run away. Not because he’d been about to kiss her, but still—not great. So Henry had chased her back to the École, psyching himself up to kiss her as soon as they made it safely through the gates. He had thought Rosie was right behind him, and then he looked back, and she was on the ground. And then Bodie was helping her up, and Henry wished he’d been there instead. He could have helped her up, then pulled her close to him and kissed her, and that would have been the perfect moment. But he hadn’t been there. Bodie had. And it sucked.
Even though Henry had been back in his room at the perfectly responsible—too responsible, honestly—stroke of ten o’clock, he’d stayed up way too late. Because all he could think about was how spectacularly he’d failed at trying to kiss Rosie. And when he’d tried to distract himself by checking his e-mail, there had been one from Mom, asking if he felt prepared for his classes to start on Monday, double-checking that she had the correct list of subjects, and reminding him that she expected a full report on all of his grades. Had she asked anything about what he’d cooked? Or eaten? Had she even mentioned the omelet, which Henry knew Dad must have told her about?
Of course she hadn’t. Because she didn’t care about any of it. Didn’t care about anything that really mattered.
So when Hampus had asked him if he wanted to watch some Swedish show on his laptop—with subtitles, obviously—of course Henry had said yes. The last thing he wanted to do was think about Mom and school starting on Monday, or even worse, blowing things with Rosie. They’d binge-watched almost an entire season of Bron/Broen, and Henry must have crawled into bed at some point, because he’d slept until eleven a.m. Well, he’d been woken briefly by Hampus’s early-morning-squats routine, but he’d rolled right back over and gone to sleep, and Hampus was gone by the time Henry woke up for real. Foraging, presumably. Or maybe running? The passionate dedication to the squats seemed to imply some sort of fitness regime. Personally, Henry couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less than run. He just wanted to eat.
Downstairs, Henry poked his head into the dining room. All the tables were empty, including, unfortunately, the serving tables at the head of the room. Too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. What he wanted, what he really wanted, he realized suddenly, was a Coke. He hadn’t had one since arriving in France, and right now, nothing sounded better than an ice-cold soda. He needed to shake off his Swedish TV hangover.
Outside the École, the sun struggled to peek through the clouds, swaddling Le Marais in a light that looked much more like early-morning than almost-noon. Henry wandered away from school, no direction in mind, hoping to find somewhere, anywhere, with Coke. The wind picked up, sending an old bit of newspaper scuttling across the road, and Henry got a whiff of something incredible. Bread. Someone was baking bread. Hopefully, it was a bakery. And hopefully, it was open.
As Henry turned onto the next street, the smell got stronger. He literally followed his nose, like he was a cartoon dog salivating as he zoomed toward a bone. That scent was unreal. It had to be coming from a bakery. Only commercial ovens could produce a smell that strong. Right?
Right. Because there it was, a shop sitting proudly on the corner lot, almost like a tiny, two-story version of the Flatiron Building he remembered from his family’s trip to New York City last Christmas. There were blue-and-white-striped round awnings over the windows and the door, and BOULANGERIE painted in flowing gold script on the glass. As Henry got closer, he could see the displays: a veritable mountain of baguettes and some kind of fat, round loaf; tarts with shiny fruits glistening on cake stands; decadent éclairs displayed like cigars in a box. Two women left the shop, talking, baguettes under their arms, pale pink pastry boxes in their hands. Henry nodded at them, waited for the steps to clear, and pushed his way into the boulangerie, the golden bell tinkling behind him as the door shut.
“Bonjour!” The man behind the counter greeted Henry enthusiastically, smiling through a neatly trimmed beard and wiping his hands on his apron, small eddies of flour floating into the air as he did so. Rosie would love it here, Henry thought. He’d have to show her.
He’d only meant to get a croissant, something to tide him over before lunch. But pretty soon he’d pointed at a croissant and what he was pretty sure was a chocolate croissant. And something else that looked kind of like a croissant but was shaped like a half-moon. And a little roll with a crimped sort of bottom and a round shiny top, with another little round piece of bread on top, almost like a hat. And an éclair, because he was in France, so he should probably get an éclair. And a baguette, for the same reason.
And then Henry saw it. The tart. It was small, so small it could fit in the palm of his hand, and filled with some kind of fruit—apple, probably, or maybe pear or some kind of stone fruit—but the fruit was sliced so thin that Henry couldn’t tell what it was. Each slice was arranged like the petal of a flower, so that the tart looked exactly like a rose. A buttery, sugary, edible pastry rose. He’d bring it back to the dorm for Rosie. He’d wait for her in the common room, and then he’d see what she thought about the lamination in the croissants and the crumb structure of the bread and the way everything tasted, and maybe she’d forget about how weird he’d been last night. As always, food would save the day. Henry pointed excitedly at the tart.
The man said something else to Henry and laughed, and Henry just laughed along
with him. Probably a joke about how much food he’d ordered. Maybe in a few months this would all be routine, and he could just walk into a boulangerie and get one thing, but right now, everything was new, and everything was irresistible.
There was clearly some kind of system that Henry didn’t understand, where the croissants and the roll went into a small bag, but the éclair and the tart each went into their own small boxes tied with twine, and the baguette went into its own long, skinny bag, and so Henry left the boulangerie juggling four parcels. For a minute there, he’d thought the guy behind the counter would have to come help him with the door.
The sun had struggled out from behind the clouds, changing the soft lemon-yellow light into a bright force that caused him to blink. Then he blinked again, because there she was—Rosie. She was standing across the street, drinking a small glass bottle of Coke, her braid resting on one shoulder. He blinked again, and she was still there. A smile broke across her face, reminding Henry, in a horrible, cheesy way, of the way the sun had broken through the clouds that morning. And she walked toward him.
“Did you order an insane amount of food again?” she asked.
“This is a very normal amount of food.” Henry attempted to gesture at all of his boxes and bags, but his hands were so full, all he could do was shrug.
“Sure. A nice light snack for one,” Rosie teased.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he blurted out.
She looked at him quizzically.
“When you fell,” he clarified. “Are you okay?”
“Totally okay.” She smiled. “Didn’t even rip my jeans.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I thought you were behind me but . . .”
“No worries,” she said breezily. “Bodie was right there.”
Bodie was right there. And he knew it was just a throwaway comment, not the kind of thing that he should ascribe some kind of deep symbolic meaning to, but it bothered him nonetheless.
“Come on,” she said. “Let me help you carry all this.” Before he knew it, she’d grabbed one of the small twine-tied boxes and the baguette. She bent her head toward the baguette and inhaled deeply, mmming as she did so, before she stopped abruptly, and looked up at him with wide eyes. “Oh gosh. I just smelled your bread. I just smelled your bread!” She seemed almost panicked. “I’m so sorry. That was so weird. Do you want me to get you another one? I can get you another one.”
“You can just eat the half you smelled.” Henry laughed. “I need help eating all of this anyway. I’m glad I ran into you.”
“Me too,” she said, and Henry’s heart leaped at the soft smile she shared with him. Forget Bodie. Now, Henry was right here.
“Any chance you’re willing to trade a sip of that Coke for some delicious pastry?” he asked.
“Here.” She thrust the bottle toward him, and he took it, gladly. “It tastes a little different, somehow? But still good. I felt so embarrassed, heading out to look for pop this morning. So not Parisian. Pretty much the epitome of a tacky American tourist. But I missed it.” She shrugged, helplessly. “Almost everywhere was closed. I wandered around for, like, twenty minutes before I found a place that was open and selling pop.”
“I’d actually headed out this morning looking for Coke,
too,” Henry confessed. He took one more sip—a small one—then handed it back to her as they started walking. “Guess I’m not ready to trade in my American vices for black coffee and cigarettes.”
“It can be our secret,” Rosie said. “Like a Sunday Morning Secret Soda Society. Should we find somewhere to sit so we can eat?”
“Definitely,” Henry said emphatically as they started wandering down the street. “A Sunday Morning Secret Soda Society. I like it. I need someone to enable my tacky American habits.”
“Well, then, I’m definitely your girl.” Your girl. Henry tucked that away for later, something to turn over and over again in his mind. “You can’t get much more American than East Liberty, Ohio. We have an award-winning Memorial Day Parade.”
“They give out awards for parades?”
“They’ll give out awards for anything,” she said, neatly hopping over a puddle that had pooled into a depression in the cobblestones. “My littlest brother, Owen, won an award for being Quietest Worker last year, which just inexplicably depresses me, for some reason. The idea of him working away so quietly. Although I guess it’s supposed to be a good thing.”
“Littlest. Of your four brothers, right?”
“Right,” she said. “Cole’s the oldest, then Ricky, then it’s me, then Reed, then Owen, the baby. Not a baby anymore, but he’s still the baby, you know? What about you? Do you have any siblings? Wait—you do. A sister, right? You mentioned her on the plane.” Henry was surprised she remembered. “The one who doesn’t like ‘weird’ foods.”
Henry explained about Alice and her cello and her terrible taste in food, and the fact that she was somehow, for a ten-year-old girl, pretty terrifying, even though she still had a nightlight. They turned a corner and walked underneath a large stone archway built into a redbrick building, and it deposited them into a square unlike any Henry had seen before.
“What is this place?” Rosie asked, and Henry could only shake his head. “This seems famous. Is it famous, do you think?”
“Everything in Paris seems famous,” Henry said, and it was true, but watching Rosie look around her, there was something about this place that just seemed even more special than usual.
Or maybe it was her.
In some ways, Rosie thought, it looked a little bit like the square in East Liberty in the middle of downtown, with the gazebo where polka bands sometimes played in the summer, and older couples brought beach chairs and coolers and danced as the fireflies came out. But then Rosie almost laughed out loud, because although, yes, this place was in the shape of a square, it was nothing like anything in East Liberty.
This square was wide, with a big statue of a guy on a horse in the middle. There were four triangular grassy areas in each corner, each with its own large fountain, impressive even without water running. There were large trees in the middle, surrounding the statue of the guy on the horse, their leaves still green and fulsome. And then there was everything around the square, too! It looked like another castle, like the École, only made of red bricks, and much, much larger. It enclosed the entire park on all four sides. What was it? Did people live there? Rosie could feel herself gawping up at the windows poking out of the blue slate roofs. Were there people behind them? Eating breakfast? Drinking coffee? Folding laundry? Just living their ordinary lives, in this extraordinary place? She couldn’t imagine.
Henry had started down one of the paths, toward a fountain. She hurried to catch up. He stepped over a low fence—it was only ankle high—and onto one of the grassy areas. Rosie hesitated for a moment but didn’t see any signs telling them to stay off the grass.
“It’s not wet,” Henry said, and Rosie joined him, sitting cross-legged. He opened the small brown bag and held it toward her, and she could smell the butter. Notably, though, there was no grease soaking the bottom of the bag, like when Mom brought home donuts. She peered in.
“I think it’s a croissant. And a chocolate croissant. And some kind of roll. And some other thing I didn’t know what it was.”
“Chausson aux pommes,” Rosie said, pulling it from the bag. She was pretty sure anyway—it had the distinctive half-moon shape, and the slashes on top let her see a peek of what looked like apple filling.
“What’s that?”
Rosie stilled as Henry shifted closer to her. He was just looking at the pastry, and she knew that, but still. He was close, and he smelled warm, and sleepy. And male.
“It’s kind of like an apple croissant,” she said, ignoring the rapid rise of her heartbeat. “Or an apple strudel. An apple turnover, I guess.”
“Try it.”
“You should have the first bite. You got it.”
“I insist,” Henry said,
and he wouldn’t take it from her. So she bit in, and the pastry flaked instantly, then yielded into sweet, soft cinnamon apples. It was so good that she had to imagine this would be the best thing she’d try today. But then Henry was grinning, chocolate smeared on his face, and he passed her the pain au chocolat, and she thought that had to be the best thing. But then the classic croissant was so perfect, each layer of lamination distinct, and then the brioche was dangerously rich, yet so light at the same time, and the éclair’s filling was perfectly smooth, and the baguette made Rosie rethink what, exactly, the stuff she’d been eating for the last sixteen years was, because it couldn’t possibly be bread, not like this . . . and before she knew it, they were surrounded by nothing but crumbs and flakes of croissant, and Rosie groaned, flopping onto her back, as her stomach rose up like a beach ball before her.
“I’m ready to call it,” Henry said. “Paris is the best place on earth.”
Rosie laughed, but she didn’t disagree. She’d eaten so many pastries in her life—a lot of which she’d baked herself, enough of which she hadn’t—but she’d never had anything like this before. All of it so simple, yet so complex, each bite a discovery. She had so much to learn. But she didn’t feel intimidated by that. She just felt profoundly grateful to be here, to be able to learn, in a place where people had clearly perfected the thing she cared most about in the world. Screw eggs. She was here to bake.
“I think I could eat an infinite amount of croissants,” Henry said. “Of all different kinds. Put anything in a croissant, and I’ll eat it.”
“It’s brioche for me,” Rosie murmured. “I don’t know why, because, intellectually, I know it’s rich—it’s so buttery and it’s got egg yolks and all these things bread doesn’t normally have—but it feels so light and fluffy, it just disappears.”
“Do you think we should head back to the École so we don’t miss lunch?”
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