“Why the hell are you asking me?”
The metro isn’t as crowded as I imagined it, but it’s just as full of Parisians. I mean, obviously. But not the Parisians of artwork and movies, with striped shirts and berets. They’re business people. Students clutching textbooks, earbuds in and staring into space, biting the insides of their cheeks. Flustered-looking, but still immaculately put-together moms with small children.
We step back out into the morning sunshine at Jussieu, in a wide garden-like square opposite a university.
“L’Université de Pierre et Marie Curie,” I read off a sign. “Oh my God, I should go to college here.”
I can picture myself speed-walking across the campus, worrying about classes but also planning my fabulous Parisian social life. I’d be a sophisticated student, going to art museums and wine tastings on the weekend, not some sorority chick who cheers for the Tigers.
“No way,” Levi says.
“Why not?”
“It’s dumb.” He falls in line behind me as I dart to the nearest crosswalk. I head toward the Seine. I know just where it is.
“If I like it here, wouldn’t it be as good a place as any to study?”
Levi doesn’t say anything as we weave our suitcases through a huge crowd of people. When we’re able to walk side-by-side again, he says, “Everyone would just laugh at you because you’re American.”
Anger flares inside me for a moment, before I wonder if he’s just saying that because he would miss me. I remember Dr. Trash Bag—I mean, Dr. Pearson—saying Levi needed to develop more effective communication skills, and now I know what he meant. Anger, insults, and condescension are not ways you should tell people you love them. Neither is shoving your sister into the mantelpiece on prom night.
We wander up the street in the direction I know is right. I’ve memorized all the maps, swallowed them whole. I instinctively know to cross the street here, to take the right fork in the road. We’re on the street that borders the Seine. The city’s islands are right there. The Ile de Saint-Louis, with its pretty, funny, old apartment buildings, and the place of Paris’s genesis, the Ile de la Cité. Visible above the tops of the trees that line our street, the spire and towers of Notre Dame reach for the sky.
And the river itself is right there, the water Joan of Arc’s ashes were spilled into. The river I’ve dreamed of rescuing her from—but I suppose the water was less cruel than the fire.
“Come on,” I say to Levi, tugging my suitcase after me. “I want to see better. I need to see better.”
“Keira …”
I rush to the nearest crosswalk. My wheels get stuck in a crack in the sidewalk and the suitcase nearly yanks my arm off. I don’t care, though. I drag it along behind me, on a mission.
I reach that distant sidewalk and throw myself at the railing. The river sends a cool breeze to kiss my face and play with my hair. There it is. Notre Dame. The bold stone edifice dominates the landscape. The towers face away from us so all I can see is the arcing stone buttresses and the grand roof and the impossibly high, spiked spire. It’s hard to believe something so beautiful and so much larger than life was built by human hands, centuries ago. I think of our house, with its flimsy, crumbling siding, barely twenty years old. The world is different now.
“Isn’t it amazing?” I whisper to Levi. Coppery river air fills my mouth.
He doesn’t say anything. I want to look at him and figure out what he’s thinking, but it might break the spell. His hand is next to mine on the grimy rail, broad and meaty with surprisingly tiny fingernails, his wrist just resting while my hands clutch.
“So when do the gargoyles come to life and start singing?” he finally asks. His lips twist in a tiny smile.
“I think Disney took some artistic license there,” I say, laughing.
“Some?”
“Okay, a lot.”
“Did you know that in the book, Esmeralda is killed and Quasimodo lays beside her corpse in despair until he starves to death?”
“How did you know that? Have you read it?”
I’ve never read the book; always wanted to, but I’m scared to try. Levi, reading French literature? I imagine him curled up in his basement bedroom reading it and it makes me smile. Maybe we should take a Victor Hugo–themed walking tour or something.
“No,” he mutters, frowning again. “I just read the plot summary on Wikipedia.”
Oh.
“Is that the place we’re staying?” Levi asks.
I glance over my shoulder. He points at a sandwich board–style sign across the street, outside a big wooden door propped open with a rock. It’s the same white stone apartment building I spent so long gazing at online.
“Yes,” I breathe, finally turning away from Notre Dame. I crane my neck to see the top floor windows. If we stay up there, I’ll have an even better view of the towers and spires and the entire right bank of Paris.
We make our way back across the street. The weight of my suitcase is painful; I understand backpacking now. Maybe we can pick out the necessities, ship everything else back home, and buy a pair of outdoorsy-looking backpacks like the ones the people making their way into the hostel ahead of us have.
Right away, stepping in the door, I smell pot. It’s faint, but definitely there, especially in the blissed-out smiles of two guys sitting on cushions in the living room–style lobby, reading art books.
Levi smells it, too. His body goes rigid. “Keira. We can’t stay here.”
The backpackers in front of us thank the ponytailed man behind the counter and head for the stairs.
“What are you talking about?” I whisper.
“It’s dirty.” His hands clench in and out of fists. “I can feel it.”
“I’ve looked at pictures of the rooms online, Levi. It’s fine.”
“What can you tell from pictures? I’m not staying here.”
The ponytail guy turns to us and smiles.
“Bonjour!” I say brightly. “Je m’appelle Keira Braidwood, j’ai une reservation pour deux?”
“Ah, oui.” He shuffles some pages on a giant notepad calendar in front of him. “You will be in the Salle de Versailles. All the way up the stairs.”
The Versailles Room. Like it’s meant to be. Like Marie Antoinette herself is watching over us.
“Did you hear that, Levi? The Versailles Room!”
I whip my head around to look at him, but he’s gone. His suitcase stands alone beside mine.
“Levi?” I look back at the ponytail guy. “Did you see where he went?”
The guy shrugs halfheartedly. Like it doesn’t even matter.
“Excusez-moi,” I say, grabbing both of the suitcases and rushing for the door.
He’s standing just outside, facing the Seine, edging farther away from some German-speaking backpackers consulting a map. His fists wedge in tight against his chest, making his arms look like little bird wings.
“Levi, what’s up?”
He frowns. “Don’t want to stay there.”
I look up at the windows of the Versailles Room. I picture a tall-ceilinged room full of dazzling light that spills in through a wall dominated by windows. Gilded ceiling, fantastically ornate crown moldings. An expensive portrait or two. All I can see is the white façade full of ordinary panes, with a plain, flat white ceiling beyond.
I sigh. “Why not?”
“Dirty.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t want to talk to them.” He glares at the backpackers a few feet away. “Why can’t we just stay in a regular hotel? Just us?”
“That’s more expensive, Levi,” I say, thinking of my bank account, imaginary numbers in an Internet browser that somehow rule my whole life.
“Can’t we just find a cheap hotel? Please?”
“A cheap hotel would probably be worse than a good hostel. And if I spend more money, we’ll have less money to do cool things or go to cool places.”
He shrugs. His eyes search the street in f
ront of us. He glances up at the staggering height of Notre Dame’s spire. “Why do we have to do things?” he asks. “Can’t we enjoy just being here?”
I swallow again. He’s right, of course; we are in Paris, and any time spent here doing anything is guaranteed to be amazing. But I didn’t want to blow all our money on accommodations and not have any money for trips out of the city. I randomly think of Fake Jacques and Quasi-Selena again. They’ve probably arrived at their destination by now, maybe a relative’s house or a beautiful hotel. They’ve probably had a nice shower and are now settling in for a nap to combat the jet lag that’s making my body feel like a sack of rocks. They’ll no doubt have the money to hop up to Amsterdam or jaunt down to Italy, no problem. They looked sleek and cosmopolitan, like they’d reek of money and infinite possibilities. Hell, even the real Jacques and Selena are like that. Jacques parents sent him across the world for a whole year, and Selena’s tans from her tropical family “vacays” barely have time to fade before she renews them in Hawaii or Belize. They don’t have to worry about anything, while I’ve got to stretch my pennies that I earned at Safeway. Why is life so goddamn unfair?
I bite my lip and force myself to believe that this is okay. It is okay. It’s Paris. Just being here is enough to make me feel lit up inside, and that would be the same even if I had to sleep under the Pont Alexandre. We’ll do what Levi wants. Avoiding temper tantrums and freak-outs is of the utmost importance.
“Okay,” I say shakily, letting out a long-held breath. “Okay, you’re right.”
We just stand there for a few minutes. I hear snatches of French, English, German, and Japanese all around us. A couple on a Vespa whips by, the girl squealing and clutching at her skirt as it blows up past her knees. A cloud obscures the sun for a few minutes and sinks us into a cool shadow. The cloud breaks apart and twin rays of light fall directly on the towers of Notre Dame and it takes my breath away.
“So? What should we do?” Levi asks.
“Find a hotel, I guess. And then enjoy our first day here.”
Find a hotel—three words describing an action that should be fairly simple, especially in a touristy city like Paris. And it’s true, physically locating hotels is easy. But finding ones with last-minute vacancies in the dying days of summer? Another story.
At first we stick to the immediate area, wandering around, inquiring at all the hotels we see. It soon becomes apparent that nobody within sight of the Seine has any rooms free, or at least not for less than a fortune per night. The weight of our jetlag begins to drag me down. Every flower bed we pass looks like a tempting place to nap. Levi wants to keep wandering, but I force us to do something reasonable: find a visitor’s information center of some sort. I’m so tired, the sidewalk looks as comfortable as a memory foam mattress.
There, we get directions to a little hotel in the 13e arrondissement—far from the city center—called Hoteltastique. It’s a measurement of how tired I am that the silly name on an outdated awning doesn’t even bother me. The décor is very 1970s, but more grungy than retro cool. The elevator is rickety and the warped key barely fits into the warped lock on our warped door. I give Levi a look that says I told you so, but he doesn’t notice.
Without even looking around the room, I collapse on one of the single beds and I’m instantly asleep.
CHAPTER NINE
I wake up feeling not-quite-there. I’m in a room filled with bizarre orange light, surrounded by striped wallpaper, on a crisp, overly starched bedspread. The TV is on, spilling French words.
I remember where I am.
I sit up too fast. Blood rushes to my head.
Levi sits on the other bed, big hairy legs stretched out, staring at the TV. American Idol is on. Wait. I guess French Idol? The gaudy show logo spins across the screen. Le Big Star!
“What time is it?” I croak, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I have that bizarre feeling of not knowing whether I should get up and have breakfast or sit down to eat dinner.
“Seven,” Levi says. “Seven p.m.”
I yawn, stretch my legs. Hunger stabs at my stomach.
“I’m starving,” I say.
“Me too. You slept for forever.”
“You could’ve woken me up.”
He shrugs.
I pad into the bathroom and stare into my puffy face in the mirror. I cup my hands and take a gulp from the tap. The water tastes strange, kind of earthy. The edges of the tiles in the bathroom are worn and chipped, and the threshold between the room and the bathroom is slightly raised. I almost stubbed my toe. The room’s carpet is flattened and worn, and God, could the sun be any freaking brighter?
I walk over to close the blinds when something catches my eye. The window opens onto the tiniest balcony I’ve ever seen, barely six inches of concrete surface between the window sill and a railing with cast-iron curls and ornate designs. I open the window. The sunshine is warm but tempered by a perfect breeze.
My feet and legs just barely fit on the balcony as I perch on the sill. We’re on the second floor, maybe fifteen feet from the narrow street below. A group of middle-aged ladies enter the hotel below me, giggling. They must’ve had a lot of champagne at dinner. Motorcycles and scooters crowd the parking spaces. Across the street, the buildings know no logic. There’s a small garage next to an even smaller shed next to an apartment building, and behind them are a cluster of tiny houses, and behind them are a few rows of apartment buildings. Alleys and tiny paths wind between all the buildings, but mostly I see rooftops. Some shorter, some a bit higher, but all so close together you could jump from roof to roof. Each rooftop has a different building material—terra cotta tiles, tin sheets, wood shingles—creating a mosaic of texture. The sunlight bathes it all.
“Hey, Levi,” I call back into the room, where a cheesy French jingle plays. “We have a pretty neat view.”
He shuffles over and stands behind me. “Huh.”
“Sit down.”
“Not enough room.”
I scoot over.
Levi lowers himself to the ground very, very slowly. He sticks his feet out the window and crawls, crab-like, onto the sill. He takes up so much space he crushes me into the frame painfully. His feet are too big to rest on the tiny balcony, so he pokes them through the railing. When did they grow so huge? I stretch my memory back and remember his soft, little feet paddling in swimming pools with me, kicking at my sides in play fights. Now they’re almost twice as big as mine, calloused and hairy like a hobbit’s.
He glances down the street, both ways, like he’s about to cross it. “I’ve never stayed in a hotel with a balcony before. It’s nice.”
“Yes, you have, when we went down to Portland to visit Josh’s parents for Christmas. That hotel had a balcony overlooking the pool, remember?”
He blinks. “I didn’t go to Portland.”
“Yes, you did, we all did.”
“No, Keira, you idiot,” he snaps. “I stayed behind and Grandma watched me. God, you have the worst memory ever.”
Oh my God, he’s right. It was maybe two years ago, and the first time we’d spent Christmas anywhere but home. Josh pleaded with Levi to come with the rest of us, but Levi refused. He stayed home, with Grandma popping in to check on him when she could. He was supposed to go our grandparents’ house for Christmas Day, but when we returned the next day, we found him playing Xbox in the basement with a giant bowl of cheeseballs. Orange crumbs were everywhere, caked over the front of Levi’s T-shirt. Grandma told Mom that Levi had refused to go to her house, refused to eat Christmas dinner with her and Grandpa, so she’d given in after hours of trying to persuade him.
He had spent that Christmas alone.
“Hey … what did you do that Christmas, while we were gone?” I ask him now.
He shrugs. “Watched home movies.”
I can almost see him in the winter-dark basement, messy hair silhouetted against the TV as it shows him grainy footage of us. It’s the loneliest thing I could imagine.
“Really?”
“Yeah. There were a lot of horrible ones of you, singing the songs from that stupid boyband you loved.”
“To the Starz?” I laugh. “Remember how you used to insert ‘poo’ and ‘bum’ into the lyrics?”
Levi laughs. Actually laughs.
“‘Ooh, girl, I love your blue BUM and long blond POO,’” he sings.
I launch into Levi’s classic rendition of their other hit, “Complicated.” “‘When you’re with me, I never feel CONSTIPATED.’”
We both dissolve into laughter.
“You used to annoy me so much,” I say, wiping away an errant tear. Where’d that come from? “But I guess you were pretty funny.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Levi says. “Now you recognize my poetic genius.”
The sun starts to slip behind the rooftops. Night in Paris is about to begin, and I’m wide awake.
“Well?” I ask. “Should we go get some dinner?”
“Yes,” he says right away. “I’m starving.”
French food, here we come.
I figure the best way to locate a great restaurant is just to wander around until we find one. In minutes, we stumble upon a crêpe place. The name of the place—Crêpes Pour Vous—is so perfect.
“Yes. Crêpes for us. Thank you,” I say to the sign above us as I open the door.
It’s a tiny little place, with only a few tables crowded into a room smaller than my bedroom at home. The walls are covered in posters without a theme. Posters of food alongside posters of Jim Morrison, alongside a framed poster of the cast of Friends circa 1994, bad hair and all, grinning down at us.
Before I can look at the menu, my eyes lock onto the boy behind the counter. He fiddles with a radio, frowning as he turns a stiff, ancient dial. He has deep brown hair that falls into his eyes and cheekbones sharp enough to cast shadows down his face. I can only see him from the chest up over the high counter, but it’s enough to know he’s totally hot.
Hot Crêpe looks up. His gaze spears me, taking in my tangled, curly brown hair and freckled, heart-shaped face. I start to feel tingling along the parts of my body I wish were smaller—my thighs, my stomach, my flabby upper arms. I suck in and draw my shoulders back.
Maybe in Paris Page 6