People We Meet on Vacation

by Emily Henry

  It’s probably the best sleep I get all week, so by the time we take the cemetery tour on the last day of the trip, I’m slaphappy from fatigue. Alex and I expected haunting ghost stories. Instead we get information about how the Catholic Church cares for some graves—the ones for which people bought “perpetual care” generations ago—and lets the others crumble to dust.

  It is decidedly boring, and we’re baking in the sun, and my back hurts from walking in sandals all week, and I’m exhausted from barely sleeping, and halfway through, when Alex realizes how miserable I am, he starts raising his hand every time we stop at another grave for more bland factoids and asking, “So is this grave haunted?”

  At first our tour guide laughs his question off, but he’s less amused every time it happens. Finally, Alex asks about a big white marble pyramid at odds with the rest of the stacked, rectangular French- and Spanish-style graves, and the tour guide huffs, “I certainly hope not! That one belongs to Nicolas Cage!”

  Alex and I deteriorate into cackles.

  It turns out he’s not joking.

  This was supposed to be a big reveal, probably with a built-in joke, and we ruined it. “Sorry,” Alex says, and passes him a tip as we’re leaving. I’m the one who works in a bar, but he’s the one who always has cash.

  “Are you secretly a stripper?” I ask him. “Is that why you always have cash?”

  “Exotic dancer,” he says.

  “You’re an exotic dancer?” I say.

  “No,” he says. “It’s just helpful to carry cash.”

  The sun is going down, and we’re both bone-tired, but it’s our last night, so we decide to get cleaned up and rally. While I’m sitting on the floor in front of the full-length mirror, putting on makeup, I peruse Guillermo’s list and shout out suggestions to Alex.

  “Eh,” he says after each one. After a handful, he comes to stand behind me, making eye contact in the mirror. “Can we just wander?”

  “I’d love to,” I admit.

  We hit a couple dingy pubs before we wind up at the Dungeon, a small, dark goth bar at the end of a skinny alleyway. We’re told that pictures are expressly forbidden, before the bouncer lets us into the red-lit front room. It’s so packed that I have to hold on to Alex’s elbow as we make our way upstairs. There are plastic skeletons hanging on the wall, and a red-satin-lined coffin stands waiting for a photo op that you’re not allowed to take.

  Despite our mantra for this trip, and all the free personal shopping I’ve done for him, Alex has continued to largely loathe themed parties, events, and apparently bars too.

  “This place is horrible,” he says. “You love it, don’t you?”

  I nod, and he grins. We have to stand so close I have to tip my head all the way back to see him at all. He brushes my hair from my eyes and cups the back of my neck, as if to stabilize it. “I’m sorry for being so tall,” he says over the metal music thrumming through the bar.

  “I’m sorry for being so short,” I say.

  “I like you short,” he says. “Never apologize for being short.”

  I lean into him, a hug minus the arms. “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey, what?” he asks.

  “Can we go to that country-western bar we passed?”

  I’m sure he doesn’t want to. I’m sure he finds the whole thing humiliating. But what he says is, “We have to. Theme matters, Poppy.”

  So we go there next, and it’s the polar opposite of the Dungeon, a big open bar with saddles for seats and Kenny Chesney blaring out to no one but us.

  Alex is chagrined at the thought of sitting on the saddles, but I hop up and try to make his Sad Puppy Face at him.

  “What is that?” he says. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m being pathetic,” I say. “So that you will please make me the happiest woman in the state of Louisiana and sit on one of these saddle seats.”

  “I can’t decide if you’re too easy to please or too hard,” he says, and swings one leg over, pulling himself onto the saddle next to mine. “Excuse me,” he says, to a burly bartender in a black leather vest. “Give me something that will make me forget this ever happened.”

  Still polishing a glass, he turns and glares. “I’m no mind reader, kid. What do you want?”

  Alex’s cheeks flush. He clears his throat. “Beer’s fine. Whatever you’ve got.”

  “Make that two,” I say. “Two of those alcohols, please.”

  As the bartender turns to get our drinks, I lean over to Alex and almost fall off my saddle in the process. He catches me and holds me up as I whisper, “He’s so on theme!”

  It’s only eleven thirty when we leave, but I’m wiped out and as unthirsty as I’ve ever been in my life. So we just walk down the middle of the street with all the other revelers: families in matching reunion T-shirts; white-clad brides with silky pink BACHELORETTE sashes and towering heels; drunk middle-aged men hitting on the girls in pink BACHELORETTE sashes, stuffing dollar bills in their dress straps as they walk past.

  Overhead, people line the upstairs balconies of bars and restaurants, waving purple, gold, and green beads around, and when a man wolf-whistles and shakes a handful of necklaces at me, I hold my arms up to catch them. He shakes his head and pantomimes lifting his shirt up.

  “I hate him,” I say to Alex.

  “Me too,” Alex agrees.

  “But I have to admit, he is on theme.”

  Alex laughs, and we walk onward, with no destination in mind. Gradually, the foot traffic slows as we approach a brass band (saxophone-and-other-woodwind free) that’s set up shop in the middle of the street, horns blasting, drums rattling. We stop to watch, and a few couples start dancing. In the twist of the century, Alex offers me his hand, and when I take it, he twirls me in a lazy circle and pulls me in close, one hand around my back, the other folded against mine. He rocks me back and forth, and we both giggle sleepily. We’re not on the beat, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just us.

  Maybe that’s why he can handle the public affection. Maybe, like me, when we’re together he feels like no one else is there, like they’re phantoms we dreamed up as set dressing.

  Even if Jason Stanley and every other bully from my past were here, mocking me through a megaphone, I don’t think I’d stop dancing clumsily with Alex in the street. He spins me out and back in, tries to dip me, almost drops me. I yelp when it happens, laugh so hard I snort when he catches me and swings me upright onto my feet, rocking me some more.

  When the song ends, we break apart and join the crowd in applause. Alex crouches for a second, and when he stands up, he’s holding out a strand of chipped purple Mardi Gras beads.

  “Those were on the ground,” I say.

  “You don’t want them?”

  “No, I want them,” I say. “But they were on the ground.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Where there’s dirt,” I say. “And spilled booze. Possibly vomit.”

  He winces, starts to lower the beads. I catch his wrist, stilling him. “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for touching these filthy beads for me, Alex. I love them.”

  He rolls his eyes, smiles, slips the beads over my neck as I duck my head.

  When I look back up at him, he’s beaming at me, and I think, I love you more now than I ever have. How is it possible that this keeps happening with him?

  “Can we take a picture together?” I ask, but what I’m thinking is, I wish I could bottle this moment and wear it as a perfume. It would always be with me. Everywhere I went, he’d be there too, and so I’d always feel like myself.

  He takes his phone out, and we huddle together as he snaps a picture. When we look at it, he makes a sound of strangled surprise. Probably in an effort not to look so sleepy, he threw his eyes wide in the last possible second.

  “You look like you saw something horrible exactly when the f
lash went off,” I say.

  He tries to pull the phone out of my hands, but I spin away from him, jog out of reach as I text it to myself. He follows, fighting a smile, and when I hand it back, I say, “There, now that I have a copy, you can delete it.”

  “I would never delete it,” Alex says. “I’m just only going to look at it when I’m alone, locked in my apartment, so that no one else ever sees my face in this picture.”

  “I’m going to see it,” I say.

  “You don’t count,” he says.

  “I know,” I agree. I love that, being the one who doesn’t count. The one who’s allowed to see all of Alex. The one who makes him weird.

  When we get back to the apartment, I ask when he’s going to let me read the short stories he’s been working on.

  He says he can’t—if I don’t like them, he’ll be too embarrassed.

  “You got into an amazing MFA program,” I say. “You’re obviously good. If I don’t think they’re good, I’m obviously wrong.”

  He says that if I don’t think they’re good, then U of I is wrong.

  “Please,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says, and gets out his computer. “Just wait until I’m in the shower, okay? I don’t want to have to watch you reading it.”

  “Okay,” I say. “If you have a novel, I could read that instead, since I’ll have the whole length of an Alex Nilsen shower.”

  He tosses a pillow at me and goes into the bathroom.

  The story really is short. Nine pages, about a boy who was born with a pair of wings. All his life, people tell him that this means he should try to fly. He’s afraid to. When he finally does, jumps off a two-story roof, he falls. He breaks his legs and wings. He never gets them reset. As he recovers, the bone heals in its misshapen form. Finally, people stop telling him that he must’ve been born to fly. Finally, he’s happy.

  When Alex comes back out, I’m crying.

  He asks me what’s wrong.

  I say, “I don’t know. It just speaks to me.”

  He thinks I’m making a joke and chuckles along, but for once, I wasn’t referencing the gallery girl who tried to sell us a twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture.

  I was thinking about what Julian used to say about art. How it either makes you feel something or it doesn’t.

  When I read his story, I started crying for a reason I can’t totally explain, not even to Alex.

  When I was a kid, I used to have these panic attacks thinking about how I could never be anyone else. I couldn’t be my mom or my dad, and for my whole life, I’d have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else.

  It made me feel lonely, desolate, almost hopeless. When I told my parents about this, I expected them to know the feeling I was talking about, but they didn’t.

  “That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with feeling that way, though, sweetie!” Mom insisted.

  “Who else do you think about being?” my dad said with his particular blunt fascination.

  The fear lessened, but the feeling never went away. Every once in a while, I’d roll it back out, poke at it. Wonder how I could ever stop feeling lonely when no one could ever know me all the way. When I could never peer into someone else’s brain and see it all.

  And now I’m crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I’m not in my body. Like there’s some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we’re just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely, dancing around each other, unhindered.

  I’m crying because I’m relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.

  18

  This Summer

  ALEX!” I SHRIEK at the sight of his Tinder profile. “No!”

  “What? What?” he says. “There’s no way you’ve read everything by now!”

  “Um, first of all,” I say, brandishing his phone out in front of us, “don’t you think that’s a problem? Your bio looks like the cover letter to a résumé. I didn’t even know Tinder bios could be this long! Isn’t there some kind of character limit? No one is going to read this whole thing.”

  “If they’re really interested, they will,” he says, slipping the phone out of my hand.

  “Maybe if they’re interested in harvesting your organs, they’ll skim to the bottom just to make sure you don’t mention your blood type—do you?”

  “No,” he says, sounding hurt, then adds, “just my weight, height, BMI, and social security number. Is what I wrote good at least?”

  “Oh, we’re not talking about that just yet.” I pluck his phone from his hand again, angle the screen toward him, and zoom in on his profile picture. “First we have to talk about this.”

  He frowns. “I like that picture.”

  “Alex . . .” I say calmly. “There are four people in this picture.”

  “So?”

  “So we have found the first and largest problem.”

  “That I have friends? I thought that would help.”

  “You poor innocent baby creature, freshly arrived to earth,” I coo.

  “Women don’t want to date men who have friends?” he says dryly, disbelieving.

  “Of course they do,” I say. “They just don’t want to play Dating App Roulette. How are they supposed to know which one of these guys is you? That guy on the left is, like, eighty.”

  “Biology teacher,” he says. His frown deepens. “I don’t really take pictures by myself.”

  “You sent me those Sad Puppy selfies,” I point out.

  “That’s different,” he says. “That was for you . . . You think I should use one of those?”

  “God, no,” I say. “But you could take a new picture where you’re not making that face, or you could crop one that’s you and three biology teachers of a certain age so that it’s just you.”

  “I’m making a weird face in that picture,” he says. “I’m always making a weird face in pictures.”

  I laugh, but really, warm affection is growing in my belly. “You have a face for movies, not photographs,” I say.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you’re extremely handsome in real life, when your face is moving how it does, but when one millisecond is captured, yes, sometimes you’re making a weird face.”

  “So basically I should delete Tinder and throw my phone into the sea.”

  “Wait!” I jump out of bed and snatch my phone off the counter where I left it, then climb back up beside Alex, tucking my legs underneath me. “I know what you should use.”

  He dubiously watches me scroll through my photos. I’m looking for a picture from our Tuscany trip, the last trip before Croatia. We’d been sitting outside on the patio, eating a late dinner, and he slipped away without a word. I figured he’d gone to the bathroom, but when I went inside to get dessert, he was in the kitchen, biting his lip and reading an email on his phone.

  He looked worried, didn’t seem to notice I was there until I touched his arm and said his name. When he looked up, his face went slack.

  “What is it?” I asked, and the first thing that jumped into my mind was Grandma Betty! She was getting old. Actually, as long as I’d known her she’d been old, but the last time we’d gone to her house together, she’d barely gotten up from the chair she did her knitting in. Until then, she’d always been a bustler. Bustling to the kitchen to get us lemonade. Bustling over to the sofa to fluff the cushions before we sat down.

  But the thought didn’t have time to gestate because Alex’s tiny, ever-suppressed smile appeared.

  “Tin House,” he said. “They’re publishing one of my stories.”

  He gave a surprised laugh after he said it, and I threw my arms around him, let him draw me up and in against h
im tight. I kissed his cheek without thinking, and if it had felt any less natural to him than it did to me, he didn’t show it. He turned me in half a circle, set me down grinning, went back to staring at his phone. He forgot to hide his emotions. He let them run wild over his face. I tugged my phone out of my pocket, pulled up the camera, and said, “Alex.”

  When he looked up, I captured my favorite picture of Alex Nilsen.

  Unfiltered happiness. Naked Alex.

  “Here,” I say, and show him the picture. Him, standing in a warm golden kitchen in Tuscany, his hair sticking up like it always did, his phone loose in his hand, and his eyes locked onto the camera, his mouth smiling but ajar. “You should use this one.”

  He turns from the phone to me, our faces close though, as ever, his hangs over mine, his mouth soft with a trace of smile. “I forgot about that,” he says.

  “It’s my favorite.” For a while neither of us moves. We linger in this moment of close silence. “I’ll send it to you,” I say weakly, and break eye contact, pulling up our text thread and dropping the picture into it.

  Alex’s phone buzzes in his lap where I must’ve dropped it. He picks it up, does his half-cough tic. “Thanks.”

  “So,” I say. “About that bio.”

  “Should we print it out and find a red pen?” he jokes.

  “No way, man. This planet is dying. No way I’m wasting that much paper.”

  “Ha ha ha,” he says. “I was trying to be thorough.”

  “As thorough as Dostoyevsky.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Shh,” I say. “Reading.”

  Already knowing Alex, I do find the bio kind of charming. Mostly in that it speaks to that lovable grandpa side of him. But if I didn’t know him, and one of my friends read me this bio, I would suggest that perhaps this man was a serial killer.

  Unfair? Probably.

  But that doesn’t change things. He lists where he went to school, when he graduated, talks in depth about what he studied, the last few jobs he had, his strengths at said jobs, the fact that he hopes to get married and have kids, and that he is “close with [his] three brothers and their spouses and children” and “enjoys teaching literature to gifted high school students.”