Girls Who Travel

by Nicole Trilivas

  “Well, that’s it,” I announced to myself. I tugged my backpack straps taut and marveled at how my whole existence could still be condensed into one bag. I ceremoniously held my final paycheck in both hands.

  You could never save a cent, I heard Lochlon say. But I already told Clive that we would be stopping at the bank on the way to the airport. Another deposit. Take that, I thought. Just watch me rewrite my narrative even in the face of lost momentum.

  All that was left for me to do now was to articulate those overwhelming good-byes: first to Aston, and then to the girls when they got home from school this afternoon.

  I wrote each girl a long letter despite Elsbeth’s wishes and hid it between their bedsheets so that they’d find it before going to bed tonight. No matter what Elsbeth said, I would have my good-bye with them.

  As for Aston, well, there was no letter for him because he already knew how I felt about things: We were put on pause. Walking away from it now felt like a sudden loss of electricity. We were plunged into a blackout, jumbled and unprepared.

  But I was proud of our flailing: I was glad we blundered around blind and let our fluttering fingers feel for walls, grasping at anything we could. Our floundering proved that we were making the effort.

  Though I was going back to New York, I was under orders to call Aston as soon as I landed. All I could do was believe that we would figure out a way for this to work. What else could I do? If I didn’t believe in it, there was no point. Always, even after a hundred heartbreaks, we still want to believe, don’t we? And so I’d be a believer. I’d risk it all, and I’d bet it all. Again, and again, and again.

  “You never know,” Aston told me as we parted ways this morning, facing our front doors. “We still have a few hours left. In football, things change during stoppage time all the time.”

  “I’m not sure I get your sporty metaphors,” I told him with a bent grin. But I couldn’t help but to cross my fingers and hope he was right.

  I thought of Aston’s words when I heard a pounding at my door and perked up.

  “Come in,” I called, begging for something—anything—to push down the chalky lump that had been stuck in my esophagus since returning to the house.

  “Elsbeth!” My breathing caught hopefully when I saw the state she was in: Is this the last-minute miracle I’m hoping for?

  Unfortunately, this didn’t look like it could turn into a happy ending.

  Elsbeth’s hair had broken loose from her ballerina-tight bun, and her face was ghostly pale. As she entered my room, she brought with her a buzz of anxiety so insistent you could hear it.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed. Elsbeth never looked so untidy. (Of course, what she calls unruly, I call Tuesday, but never mind that. For Elsbeth, this was highly undignified.)

  But she was too winded to answer. She hurried at me, fastened her hands on my shoulders, and led me to a set of chairs.

  Once she sat me down, she dumped herself down into the other chair, holding her hand to her head like some swooning Jane Austen heroine. I had the impulse to offer her some smelling salts or a thimbleful of sherry, just to complete the picture.

  “Good God. I just ran here from Harrington Gardens. Sprinted, really. And here I thought I was in amazing shape. I am going to fire that personal trainer—”

  “Are they all right?” I interrupted.

  “What?” Elsbeth fanned herself.

  “The girls—you said you went to the school.”

  “Yes, they’re fine. Oh, let me just start at the beginning.” Elsbeth patted her cheeks and did what my mom would call “a round of Ujjayi breathing.”

  “I received a message this morning instructing me to go to my daughter’s school to meet with her teacher. The message said that it was ‘high time I found out what was going on,’” Elsbeth said, making air quotes with her fingers.

  “Obviously distressed, I jetted over to Harrington Gardens just as fast as I could. I tried to find you to see if perhaps you knew what this was in regards to, but I couldn’t find you anywhere this morning,” she said in one breath.

  I scrunched my brow in anticipation.

  “So because Gwendolyn had been having problems, I assumed the message was about her and went to see her teacher first. Of course, she made me wait for approximately an hour before she was able to sit down with me. I didn’t want to alarm Gwen, so I hid like a refugee in the school hallway—the whole thing was very theatrical really.” Elsbeth looked slightly impressed with herself.

  I whisked my hand in the air for her to get on with the story.

  “Gwen’s teacher told me how amazing she’s doing, and really, Kika, this is all your influence. She has been getting along smashingly with the other kids and behaving herself. As you can imagine, I was just so pleased—with her and you, Kika.”

  “Well, that’s great to hear—” My shoulders collapsed in anticlimax. This is what she got me all wound up about?

  Elsbeth pointed her finger at my chest insistently. “But that’s not all. You’re not off the hook yet.”

  I pepped up, despite the warning.

  “Still concerned about the message, I dashed across the street to the upper-classes building—Mina’s school. And that’s when the real surprises came out.” Her mouth pursed.

  I swore to myself. It must have been Mrs. Benson-Westwood who had called her. She must have gotten the school involved after she heard about how I lectured Peaches and the rest of the junior bitches.

  My back straightened, and I strategized my objection, ready for a fight. But then I remembered: I am already fired. I’m already leaving on a jet plane; don’t know when I’ll be back again, and all that jazz. And so I kept silent, feeling wildly liberated by the “fuck it” mood that was settling in.

  “Mina’s teacher was available to have a sit-down. Kika, only you would have any idea about what I learned. I cannot believe that she had been bullied for so long and no one alerted me. And you knew, Kika. And what you did—”

  “I did do it, and I’d do it again!” I hurled myself out of my chair in a demonstration of guiltlessness. “And you know what, Elsbeth, if you were there, you’d have done the same thing. So I don’t want to hear it.”

  Elsbeth clasped her pearls (or where her pearls would have been had she been wearing some). “Kika!” she wheezed.

  My knees told me that I made my point, and so I plummeted back into my seat, the wind having been knocked from me.

  “Why, Kika, that was just what I was going to say!”

  My mouth opened. “Um, seriously?”

  Elsbeth clapped her hands together in exhilaration. “You fixed it as if you were her mother. And actually, Mina’s teacher thought you were her mother. You see, she saw you at the school that day when you gallantly stuck up for Mina. She said whatever you said to those girls had a great effect on them, and since that day the teasing lessened and then ultimately tapered off completely.

  “Oh, Kika, you saved my girls. I had no clue what was going on. I got so caught up with the social scene here and the parents and parties and . . . and . . .” She stopped talking and looked at me questioningly.

  I sat stunned. “I just did what anyone would have done.”

  “No, Kika. No one can do what you do. And that is the truth. I don’t want you to leave.”

  I nodded sluggishly. “That’s nice, but if the girls are leaving in September—”

  “Kika, they’re not leaving. The boarding school idea is a huge mistake. I was peer pressured,” she claimed with enlarged pupils.

  We both smiled at the statement, the conflict evaporating into the space between us.

  “But I was, Kika. All of Mr. Darling’s colleagues’ children go to boarding school, and the parents all harp on about how they make ‘connections that will last into their futures,’” she said in an intonation that evoked Primrose.


  We both rolled our eyes at the phrase.

  “But now I see that they just say that . . . that . . . poppycock” (of course even now Elsbeth wouldn’t swear) “to make themselves feel better.”

  She reeled in her tone for a moment. “Well, maybe it is right for them, but it’s not for me or my girls.”

  I leaped up and launched a full-contact hug on Elsbeth’s delicate form. “Oh, thank God. I didn’t want to say anything about Mina being bullied because I promised her that I wouldn’t betray her trust. But I was so worried about her going to boarding school and having to deal with being the new girl again.”

  Elsbeth nodded knowingly. “You know, Kika, when you protested boarding school, I couldn’t handle it and fired you because deep down, I felt it was wrong, too.”

  “I know you did. I could tell,” I said enthusiastically.

  “I am truly sorry. Please say you’ll stay?” Elsbeth prompted like she didn’t already know the answer.

  “Yes, I’ll stay—of course I will!”

  “That’s my girl. Now get these bags unpacked before the girls get home—I don’t want to startle them,” she said in her bossy but somehow comforting way. “And don’t forget those letters you snuck in their beds.”

  66

  I KNOW HE’LL be here, I thought as I pushed open the garden gate without shutting it behind me. I didn’t even bother knocking on his door first. He’ll be here.

  Spring had come to the garden overnight. Aston stood with his back toward me. The sunshine glinted off flowers jeweled with condensation, and the pollen in the air gave the whole place a dreamlike haze.

  I hurried toward him. My boots, sprinkled with cherry blossom petals, slapped the wet grass, the suctioning making a sort of kissy noise with every step.

  “I knew you’d be here,” I said lightly, stopping just behind him, my boots yielding to the dewy earth. He didn’t turn around, and I used the concealed moment to tell him exactly how I felt.

  “It means so much to me that you’re where I thought you’d be,” I gushed with hearty emphasis, so needlessly sincere that it was cheesy as all hell, but I didn’t even care. “It makes it feel so right.” When he still didn’t turn around, I took a few more steps forward and reached out to touch his shoulder.

  He wheeled around, and suddenly, I was face-to-face with those hypnotic bright blue eyes and—

  “Fuck me!” I yapped in alarm. I was not face-to-face with those hypnotic bright blue eyes. I vaulted backward as I realized I was actually face-to-face with a teenage boy.

  Oops. Wrong guy. I physically recoiled in embarrassment.

  The teenager gawped at me. “Fuck you?” he repeated. His tongue was suspended mid-lick over the paper of a hand-rolled cigarette, which—it now became apparent—he was rolling facing the tree to avoid the wind.

  “Was it me you were talking to?” he asked again. Strangest of all was that he sounded vaguely hopeful.

  “Um, no, sorry,” I protested with a red face. I took rapid steps backward. “Best be going now,” I said, hiding my face behind a curtain of hair. What is wrong with me?

  I heard cackling behind my back and peeked up apprehensively. I turned to see Aston unsuccessfully trying to hold in his laughter. The teenager used the opportunity to hightail it out of the garden.

  Scrunching up my eyebrows, I stomped over to Aston. (This time I was positive it was him.)

  “Well done. You always talk to underage schoolboys like that?” He broke apart in hard laughter now. “You saucy thing! I think you just sent him into early puberty.”

  I whacked him on the arm. “You sat here watching me pour my heart out to the wrong guy, and you didn’t even stop me?”

  “Couldn’t. It was too funny,” he said, rubbing his arm. “I had to let you crack on, surely.” He chuckled and stretched out his arm where I smacked him and examined his bicep. “Wasn’t expecting to get hurt.”

  I overlapped my arms defiantly, but it was hard to fake a bad mood right now in this sweet stupor.

  “Come on now, I thought I’d at least get a ‘thank you’ or maybe a little snog?”

  I nodded, facing my eyes downward in an effort to conceal my grin. “So, Aston Hyde Bettencourt, who’d you get to leave Elsbeth that message?”

  “My granny, would you believe? She works at the school, so she knew what was going on. She’ll be delighted it worked,” he told me, enthralled.

  I laughed at his enthusiasm. “You brought your poor granny into this?”

  “Brought her into this? She’s been in it. That woman knows everything. It was her idea. She can hardly wait to meet you. So you are staying now, aren’t you?”

  “But how did you know that Elsbeth would change her mind?” I backtracked.

  “As Granny said: ‘Does that Elsbeth Darling understand what Kika did for those girls?’ She saw how they changed since you moved here, as did I. There was never any laughter on this street until you arrived. She said that lately it has been like old times around here, when my parents were still alive. That’s what Granny said.” He sunk his eyes in a moment of introversion.

  “Plus, Miss Chantelle Benson-Westwood has very loose lips and was rather quick to note that Mina used to be a social outcast until her sister—a Benson-Westwood—got ahold of her and ‘changed her life.’ She thought she was making the winning point to convince me to take up with her. The nerve of that woman.”

  I shook my head in disgust, and Aston continued.

  “I must say, I was quite excited to use her own stories against her, and so I was able to find out that you were truly the one who rescued Mina, as it were.”

  “You sneaky bugger!”

  Aston sniggered. “Love, you haven’t been in London long enough to pull off saying ‘bugger.’”

  I made my face blank.

  “So, what’s it to be? Will you stay?” he asked, sounding boyishly hopeful.

  I started casually, my hands hugged at my back. “Well, I was thinking it might be fun to see you play next weekend.”

  “Really? Was that all you were thinking?”

  “And maybe again the weekend after that.”

  He deftly angled his pointer finger into the loop of my jeans like a fishhook and tugged me toward him. Then he ran his knuckles along the curve of my face. “More like it,” he said.

  I threw my arms around his neck, my heart feeling that same undeniable and important pulling. I kissed him with everything I had, holding nothing back. Even while it was happening—the weight of lips on lips, color slapped high onto cheeks, and pink petals pinwheeling through the air—I saw the kiss for what it was: a beginning.

  This was not the end.

  There was too much left to do, too much still to see to call this the end. My career was not yet crafted; there were marshmallows that still needed to be collected. And all my wild, wild loose ends still needed to be tied into Pinterest-perfect bows. But there was that pulling, and so I knew my direction. And all girls who travel know that it’s not about arriving; it’s the getting there that’s the good part.

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