CHAPTER 16
Madrid was as bustling at midnight as New York typically was at that hour, bathed in a curious orange glow from the streetlights that flanked its wide, grand boulevards. I watched the city’s activity through the windows of the yellow bus I rode from the airport into the heart of the city, Atocha train station, where Kristijan had promised he would meet me. Sleepiness was upon me, and I was so physically exhausted that my eyes burned each time I blinked. I felt like someone had parched my lungs with scalding heat and I was eager to wash the stale odor of the plane off my skin. Having spent most of my childhood in New York, it was always surprising to me to see so many people walking around late at night in other cities. It was an annoying thing, actually, to discover that New York was not the only city that never slept.
When the bus pulled into the train station and I stepped off from it along with the other tourists carrying luggage, it felt a little strange to me that all of them had friends or family members waiting for them in idling cars, but I was completely alone. Kristijan was nowhere to be seen, and I wondered if maybe my mother and Danko had already reached out to him. Panic consumed me and I looked around wildly. It was freezing cold outside and there were dirty banks of slush on every corner. Why had I thought coming to Spain alone was a good idea? What if I couldn’t get in touch with him? Where would I sleep? No one was going to let a fourteen-year-old check into a hotel alone. I could text him, but I knew that the second I turned on my mobile phone’s data network, my mother would know exactly where I was, if she was even looking.
Then I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see him standing behind me, smiling impishly, holding a bright yellow gerbera daisy.
“I couldn’t find any roses,” he greeted me.
Seeing him standing there, his silvery blond hair long enough to cover the tops of his ears, smiling shyly at me, the tip of his nose crimson from the cold, my heart felt like it was ballooning. I was so happy that I almost cried. Never before had I seen him during a season other than summer, so it was strange to see him bundled up in a gray winter coat and a thick navy blue scarf. I threw my arms around him in an embrace and kissed his cold cheek. “You did not have to bring me a flower,” I told him.
“I wanted to. Like this,” he insisted, placing the stem of the huge daisy between his teeth and arching his eyebrows at me like a flamenco dancer.
“Very sexy,” I assured him.
Kristijan’s dorm was in the ritzy neighborhood of Salamanca, but before retiring there for the night, we wheeled my suitcase onto the subway and traveled to the area called Sol. We climbed a steep hill and turned down a brightly lit alley to find a tiny restaurant called Chocolateria San Ginés which specialized in long, skinny fried donuts and hot drinking chocolate. It was open all night, and was just as bustling at one in the morning as Veselka would have been at an hour when Bijoux and I would have been typically dropping in for blueberry pie. Every detail in Madrid was a bit more old-fashioned and fancy than at establishments in New York. Madrid was just more delicate in every way. We ordered at a long wood counter indoors, and then Kristijan led me to a booth, where we sat across from each other surrounded by Spanish-speaking club-goers and a handful of tourists. It was Saturday night in Madrid, and no one seemed to be concerned about consuming too many calories at the late hour. The restaurant was surprisingly cozy despite the bitter cold outside, and its frosted glass windows were steamy from the indoor heat.
I took a bite of my donut when our order was brought to our table and it was deliciously greasy.
“How do you like Madrid so far?” Kristijan asked, grinning from ear to ear.
“I can see why you like it so much,” I told him.
An hour later, we arrived at his dorm, a magnificent brick manor on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood populated by an abundance of luxury retail stores, all closed for the night. A security guard reviewed my passport with vague interest before nodding me in behind Kristijan. I envied him for his small but private room. As much as I liked Treadwell, I would have liked it a lot more if every single move I made in between classes wasn’t witnessed by Kate Callahan. Most of Kristijan’s classmates had already gone home to visit their families for the holiday, but he had chosen to stay in Madrid because all of his friends in Croatia wouldn’t have time off from school until January. We put the daisy in a glass of water and I hoped its petals wouldn’t fall off before dawn.
As I crawled into Kristijan’s bed in my pajamas, prepared to sleep head-to-toe alongside him, I reminded myself that my days of being Kate’s roommate were probably effectively over. Surely whenever I worked up the nerve to turn on my phone, there would be no fewer than one hundred furious voicemails from my mother waiting for me. I might have been more nervous about sharing a twin-sized bed with Kristijan, and the likelihood of one of us falling off the narrow mattress, if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the certain doom in store for me at daybreak. After about ten minutes of wondering what he was thinking about, I heard him begin to deeply snore.
I woke up in the morning with every intention of touching base with my mother, but by the time I got out of the shower and towel-dried my hair, Kristijan was already antsy to go down to a café for breakfast. We tugged on our winter coats and took the subway two stops to a glamorous restaurant called Café Comercial, where we drank fresh-squeezed orange juice and slathered croissants thick with white slabs of butter. Kristijan was eager for me to try the potato omelet, which he claimed was a local specialty, but told me that in Spain, eggs weren’t really considered breakfast food. I would have to wait to try the dish until later in the day. I felt very mature and sophisticated in the restaurant seated across from him, catching glimpses of our reflections in the mirrors hanging on walls, speckled with copper-colored age spots. When eating at restaurants in New York with my sister I felt like a kid pretending to be a grownup. With Kristijan, I felt glamorous and worldly, and I didn’t cringe at my own appearance in the mirror. We were royalty, after all.
My phone indicated that I had twelve voicemails when I stealthily checked it before we left the restaurant. Nine of them were from my mother. Two were from a number I didn’t recognize, with a 212 area code which suggested the caller was in Manhattan. I thought perhaps those calls might be from my sister if she was still checked into the hospital, but it also occurred to me that they might very well have been from police. One of the twelve voicemails was from Taylor.
I chose to only listen to Taylor’s, granting myself a few more hours of freedom and happiness in Spain before I would kick open the gates to punishment and shame by calling my mom. I set my phone to vibrate so that if my mom continued to call, Kristijan wouldn’t wonder what was going on.
We made plans to meet Taylor for dinner later that night since she was meeting her boyfriend to check out a giant flea market for the day. “He’d better not show up with Sidley,” Taylor hissed on the phone with me. “Or I swear, Betsey, I’ll totally freak out.”
Kristijan and I took the subway to the world famous art museum, El Museo Del Prado, since that was one of the city’s only tourist attractions open on Sundays. It was hard not to notice how much prettier Madrid was than New York, even on the cusp of winter. The older buildings boasted elaborate and flamboyant surface decorations around every window, and ornamentation around entryways. The modern buildings were like optical illusions with angles veering in every direction. One brick building we passed had a lush green hanging garden growing off one of its exterior walls.
We spent the entire morning strolling through the museum’s long hallways, their walls painted a rich shade of peacock blue, studying oil paintings by Goya and Velázquez. My feeling of guilt was growing as the day continued. I found myself actually kind of missing my mother. She knew an impressive amount about art and it sort of would have been nice to have had her there with us. After eating lunch at a cool hipster café a few blocks away, we took the subway to a much smaller museum, the restored home of painter Joaquín Sorolla. The buildin
g and its outer gardens were so breathtaking that I found myself remembering how I used to sit in my classes at Pershing, mentally interior decorating my classrooms as if the school were my own, personal mansion.
“I have to call my mom,” I reluctantly told Kristijan when we had explored all of the rooms of the Sorolla museum and were about to jump on the subway to visit the San Miguel marketplace that he wanted to show me. “I just need a minute.”
I stepped out into the cold courtyard of the garden alone while he browsed in the gift shop, and without even listening to any of the voicemails from my mom to see how much trouble I was in, I dialed her cell phone number and braced myself for an attack by heavy artillery.
“Elisabeth Jennifer Norfleet!”
My mother’s voice was cold and sharp. Any illusion that I had been permitting myself to believe that she might have been compassionate about the situation vanished the second she answered the phone.
“Where the hell are you!”
I took a deep breath. “I’m in Madrid, with Kristijan.”
There was a long pause while she digested what I had just told her.
“What on earth are you doing in Spain?! And how did you even get there? And why didn’t you call us? We’ve been worried sick about you!”
I cringed and sat down on a freezing cold iron bench in the garden. It was so cold, the chill went straight through my violet Tanzo jeans and made my butt ache. Stretched out in front of me, there were fountains that had been shut off for the winter, collecting brown leaves in the absence of flowing water.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just knew there was a lot going on at home with Bijoux and I don’t want to be there right now.” That was not one of my better lies. My mother would be able to easily figure out that I had booked my flight well in advance of Bijoux’s admittance to the hospital.
“How incredibly childish and selfish of you, Betsey. Really. You’ve really done it this time. Your father wanted to call the FBI this morning to search for you. I have been simply out of my mind between your sister in the hospital, and you vanishing off the face of the planet. Do you know what it was like to get a call from the driver saying you never got off your flight from Boston? You have no idea what you’ve put us through over the last twenty-four hours, and all you can say is sorry?”
She sounded angrier than I had ever heard her before, even angrier than she had ever been at my dad. And when Bijoux and I were younger and our parents were newly divorced, she used to get angry. The FBI. Geez. That would have been pretty bad if my dad had actually called them. But of course, being put on the spot to apologize when I already felt so miserable about what I’d done resulted in only one infuriating word entering my head. “Sorry,” I said again, like a robot. I didn’t think there was anything else I could say to lessen her anger.
“Well, your little party in Spain is over. Danko’s in Paris right now and I’m going to call him and tell him to fetch you as soon as he can catch a flight to Madrid. You had better stay put, little miss, and keep answering your phone, or you’re going to regret running away so much, you’ll wish you’d been kidnapped by a stranger! Let me talk to Kristijan.”
“No,” I said suddenly, surprised by the strength in my own voice.
“I’m going to call you in ten minutes, Betsey, and I swear to God, you had better answer that phone.”
Numbly, I turned my phone off and slid it back into my purse. I knew I couldn’t have put off the inevitable any longer, but I still regretted having called her. There was no way I was going to meet up with Danko anywhere in Madrid. For any reason. Now I had created a situation for myself in which I needed to find a way to get out of staying at Kristijan’s dorm that night, in case Danko came to fetch me. I felt my own anger swelling in my chest, targeted at my mom. My mother was so ignorant about her husband’s misbehavior that she couldn’t even see that sending him to pick me up was the worst thing she could have proposed. The thought of seeing him suddenly appear in Madrid upset me so much, I couldn’t organize my thoughts. Everything felt like a bad dream. This trip had turned into a colossal disaster, possibly even worse than if I had just gone home to New York and minded my manners. The only thing I knew for certain was that I was not going to answer my mother’s call when it came. When I stood up from the bench, I was dizzy, and pressed my hand to my forehead to steady my nerves.
I took a deep breath and smiled at Kristijan when I re-entered the museum.
“Is everything OK?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I lied. “My sister is in the hospital and my mom is freaking out, that’s all. She keeps calling me and it’s getting annoying. If she calls you, let it go to voicemail.”
He nodded, not seeming to question my strange request.
Taylor beat us to the San Miguel market, having briskly walked over from her hotel a few blocks away. As we approached the market on foot down curving cobblestone streets, we could see her from a distance, wearing a bright red shiny winter coat and doing a funny little dance to stay warm.
“Taylor, this is my sort of cousin, Kristijan. Kristijan, this is my friend, Taylor,” I said, feeling especially joyful that I had earned the right to refer to Taylor as my friend. “Her dad is the singer in my dad’s bad.”
I noticed Taylor give me a little wink, suggesting that maybe she thought Kristijan was more than a sort of cousin. It occurred to me that I had probably talked about him a lot over the course of the semester at dinner. It was fair for her to have assumed that he played a more significant role in my life than that of just a distant step-relative.
“Very pleased to meet you, Taylor,” Kristijan said in his formal English.
“Likewise, dude,” Taylor replied. Taylor grew up in Los Angeles. She said words like dude and righteous more frequently than she realized.
The market was a bustling whirlwind of smells and colors. There were barrels of olives, display cases of fresh fish in a thousand different glistening shades of pinks and whites, wheels of cheese with brightly colored rinds of wax behind counters, several wine bars where cosmopolitan-looking Madrileños sipped glasses of rioja while making small talk, and several places offering vast varieties of chocolates and flavors of gelatos in rainbow colors. We ordered cups of gelato, deciding to eat dessert first, and sat at stools near the windows, gazing out into the night illuminated by streetlamps. Christmas carols played, and garland made from potent-smelling pine needles criss-crossed the ceiling. It would have been the perfect night during the holiday season, if it weren’t for the facts that my mother wanted to murder me and my abusive stepfather was presumably on his way to pluck me away from my friends.
“See that?” Taylor said, nodding out the window at a bright yellow poster wheat-pasted to a wall across the street. It was an announcement for a giant holiday party at a nightclub. “I know that guy.”
“Who?” I asked, eating a spoonful of gelato and squinting to see the poster better. “DJ JK?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said, sounding a little sad. “Like, DJ just kidding. That’s the guy from the summer, on the tour. The one who sold t-shirts.”
I tried again to remember a hot guy having been on tour with Pound over the summer but I was coming up blank. “I didn’t realize you kept in touch with him.”
“I didn’t,” she said whimsically. “He told me he had booked a really exclusive gig in Japan and I didn’t believe him. But now he’s spinning here and I looked him up online and after Madrid, he’s spinning at some super hot nightclub in Ibiza all winter. He wasn’t lying after all.”
Something about the way Taylor was talking made me suspicious that trouble was brewing.
“What about Todd? How were things today?” I asked. She hadn’t uttered a single word about him and the day they’d spent together. It was a bit of a coincidence that she’d wanted to come to Madrid to see Todd, and yet once she was there, her summer mystery guy was back on her mind.
“Oh, he brought Sidley with him,” she said, sounding very miffed.
We indulg
ed Kristijan in the brief history of Taylor and Todd’s romance, leaving out the confidential virginity stuff.
“He kissed me right in front of her, but he brought her. I wasn’t sure what to think. But now,” Taylor said, licking the last of her gelato off her spoon and then tossing the paper cup in which it had been served overhand into a nearby trash bin, “I think we should stay up really late and go to Akrobat.”
I looked at the poster across the street again, and blinked at Taylor, dumbfounded. Could it be possible that goody two-shoes, straight-as-an-arrow Taylor was actually suggesting that we break rules? Was she really suggesting that we defy Mr. Ferris and go to a nightclub in Madrid? For the first time in history, the thought of staying out all night to have fun made me really uncomfortable.
But before I could open my mouth to object and ask her if she was nuts, it dawned on me that she was providing me with a perfect solution to my huge immediate problem. If I was at a packed nightclub with Taylor until morning, then it would be basically impossible for Danko to find me.
“Are you serious?” I asked her. “I mean, can we even get in?”
We both looked to Kristijan, as if he was an expert in Madrid nightlife instead of a fourteen-year-old boarding school student.
“Most places let you in if you’re sixteen, but you can’t drink unless you’re eighteen,” he said.
“I don’t care about drinking,” Taylor said, waving her hand in the air as if drinking was a frivolous concern. “I just want to dance.”
I bit my lower lip. I wasn’t even fifteen yet. The only identification I had in Spain with me was my passport and my Treadwell ID. “I’m not sixteen,” I said, a little afraid that my age was going to ruin the night.
“No one will care,” Kristijan assured me. “You can just say you left your ID at home.”
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