Girls Who Travel Read online

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Nicole Trilivas.

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  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19665-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Trilivas, Nicole.

  Girls who travel / Nicole Trilivas. — Berkley trade paperback edition.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-425-28144-4 (paperback)

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Americans—England—Fiction. 4. Travel—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.R55G57 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  2015030415

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / December 2015

  Cover photos: “Woman on Dock” © PlainPicture / Cultura.

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  One of my favorite childhood memories is of my dad taking me to the bookstore after dinner at the long-closed Sun Luck restaurant in Queens and letting me buy any book my heart desired. My father passed away before he could see this book published. This book is dedicated to his memory.

  acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I must acknowledge the two people who listened to me bitch about my writing struggles the most: Thank you, Jonathan Brierley. Words fall short of my gratitude for everything you do for me. You are my champion, my rock, and my hands-down favorite. You’re also really, really funny and wonderful. Second, Georgia Stephens: Thank you for all those walks in Holland Park. Your support has never wavered—not for a second.

  Next up, I must thank my lovely agent, Carrie Pestritto, for believing in me and taking a chance. It’s been so great to do this together.

  Thank you to the venerable Jackie Cantor; you answered my prayers! Thank you for making my dreams come true and for being an absolute dream to work with. My thanks also goes out to the whole Berkley team including Amanda Ng—thank you for being so wonderful to work with, and I hope to continue doing so for many more books.

  Thank you to my mom, Maria, for taking me to the library and letting me take out as many books as I wanted (and then for taking me to Nino’s for pizza after). And thanks to the rest of my family—Charlie, Sherry, and Jeremy—for the love. Oh, right, and a special shout-out to my sister Renee, who—in addition to being the original Mina—is just generally awesome and constantly helpful in terms of my writing and my life.

  Thank you to the readers of my earlier work including: Ann Ehrhart; Amy-Lee Simon; Bayta Gideon; Carly Vasan; and Lauren Raggio;—you are all some of my favorite girls who travel, and we better keep running around the globe together, getting tipsy on local booze, and making to-die-for memories and questionable choices.

  I would like to thank Wattpad, without which I may not even be here today, writing these acknowledgments in my pajamas (especially not without Marian Keyes and the Marian Keyes Short Story Contest). Thanks to Wattpad’s Caitlin O’Hanlon for the backing, and tons of love to the Wattpad community—I’ve been absolutely floored by how loyal and caring Wattpad readers are, including Analise Anderson, an amazing stranger who generously helped me with early edits.

  Thanks to Rick Del Mastro, who was always the best boss and who was the first one to give me space and time to write. Let’s live our dreams, right, Rick?

  Thanks go out to my Manhasset English teachers, Mary Jane Peterson in particular, for the encouragement and sturdy foundation.

  Thank you to my unofficial family, the Island, for all the love. Let’s keep jumping international flights like buses. And I will always looove yooou.

  And lastly, thanks, Daddy. I hope you’re proud.

  contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  1

  TEN THOUSAND MILES away, my mom was probably wondering why I hadn’t called her. But when you’re living inside a tropical screen saver and having knee-weakening sex with a professional Irish rogue, you tend to neglect mundane tasks.

  Today. I will call her today.

  I knew she was going to ask if I found out Lochlon’s secret yet, and I had no update for her. Somehow, not knowing was bothering her more than it was bothering me.

  “I don’t get it, Kika,” she protested during our last phone call. “You’ve been gallivanting around South India with some guy who admitted that he’s hiding his past, and you still haven’t gotten any details?”

  But after a year of travel through countries that had obligatory coffee breaks and nap times, I had been slow-cooked into a state of tender, fall-off-the-bone relaxation.

  “He’ll tell me when he’s ready,” I downplay
ed to my mom and to myself. Still, she wasn’t buying it and was clamoring for more frequent updates from me.

  I will definitely call her tomorrow, I decided as I got out of bed. I pushed the mosquito net aside, writhed into my clammy bikini, and left the beach hut. Feeling the sand against my soles brought up flashes of last night, when Lochlon convinced me that a midnight “swim” was in order.

  “Get in the water, gorgeous.” He didn’t know that no one in real life spoke like the heroes of paperback romances, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to correct him.

  “And leave these”—he hooked his finger into the band of my bikini bottoms, snapping them against my skin—“safe on dry land.”

  I could do little else but nod dumbly. I vaguely worried that my inability to say no to him might present a problem for me one day.

  Oh, but that day was not today.

  I found Lochlon scribbling away in his leather-bound notebook in a patch of shade. He had dreams of becoming a writer, and I thought of him as my Irish Hemingway: all sun-shy skin and minimalist, declarative prose.

  Before he noticed me, I found myself peeking over his shoulder at his notebook, proving that maybe I was slightly more curious than I let on. But he detected my presence and turned. Without speaking, he knitted his fingers into the fringe of my sarong and lowered me to my knees into the sand beside him.

  “Mornin’,” he hummed in his throaty Northern Irish brogue.

  I put my face close to his, and he deftly slipped his hand into the pocket of my sarong and onto my stomach. He slowly moved his hand up, up, up until his sandy palm cupped my—

  “Ma’am!”

  My face scrunched to a scowl. Why is Lochlon calling me “ma’am”? What a horribly unsexy pet name.

  I rattled my head to dissolve the soft-focus soap opera scene from my memory and lifted my eyes to regard the strict eyebrows of a Long Island Rail Road conductor.

  “Eek!” I squeaked like a chew toy. My face flared with heat, burning away my daze.

  “Ma’am, I need to see your ticket,” he repeated with a look that said, Pull your shit together, lady.

  I rifled through my fatally boring winter coat and most-adult-looking handbag.

  “I didn’t realize you were talking to me,” I chatted to buy time, “because I’m not used to being called ‘ma’am.’”

  I shot him a squinty-eyed smile in an effort to wring out some human emotion, but he gave me nothing.

  “Aha! Here, good sir, is my ticket to ride.”

  He punched it without ceremony and moved on to the next train car.

  “Next and final stop is Penn Station,” announced the train’s speaker in a grainy belch.

  I sealed my eyelids and willed time backward to that sugary beach day. What happened next? I interrogated myself. Was that the day Lochlon revealed his mysterious history? But the pressure to remember all the details in the correct order made the specifics shifty. It was like the tighter I squeezed, the more slippery my memories became, like a beach ball in water.

  No matter—there was no more time for reminiscing, anyway. I buttoned my winter coat in preparation to join New York City’s rush hour crush. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, I had become just another pleb carrying my chain-store coffee to a soul-destroying office.

  My life was not supposed to be like this.

  2

  WHEN I FIRST came back from my grand backpacking tour around the world, I used the commute from my mom’s house in suburban Long Island to the office to write out my memories from my year spent abroad.

  The stories were for my website, Gypsies & Boxcars. Throughout my year overseas, I created the site for friends and family to follow me. I’d share stories and post pictures whenever I could, in the frantic but fruitless hope of remembering everything.

  I didn’t travel with much that year, so most of my wardrobe and possessions were acquired on the road, and something unexpected started to happen: People—strangers, even—began asking me questions. They wanted to know where I got the hand-painted glass bead bracelets or my bohemian leather belt. I got compliments on my jaunty hats and the patchwork, tasseled summer scarf, and the fabric journal I always carried with me. My mom always said I had an eye for that sort of thing, but I never truly believed it until the comments started rolling in.

  In hopes of supporting local businesses, I began offering to buy the items and ship them to readers. For example, I blogged about my time in South India with Lochlon, and then sold a small inventory of sandalwood bead necklaces that I bought from the seaside shops near our beach hut.

  My makeshift online shop was very Anthropologie—sans the inauthenticity and astronomical price point. Orders started coming in, and even with a minimal markup, I started making a small profit—which of course I promptly spent.

  Regardless, it was then I realized that I could do this as, like, a job. I could travel around the world, tell my tales, and sell a small collection of local handicrafts that I personally scouted. There was a real market for authentic goods, for things not everyone had, for things not just “Made in China” or H&M.

  Yet as soon as I got back home, business dwindled. I had no new goods to offer, no new tales to tell. And so until I made enough money to get back on the road, here I was, stuck playing the role of Cubicle Dweller in Corporate America. It was the part you had to play when you were in your early twenties and one teensy step away from financial destitution.

  About to exit Penn Station, I crowded my hair into my wool beret and braced myself for the cold, but it still thwacked me with an unexpectedly cruel bitch slap. And good freakin’ morning to you, New York City.

  I hopscotched between honking yellow cabs and irritated businesspeople. New York was fuming with energy, the winter-white sun high and dazzling.

  Despite being the obligatory plucky young girl in the big, sexy city and all that glossy sitcom setup, there was no promenading past the Chrysler Building in cute tutu dresses for me.

  I reached my office building windswept and frazzled, my shoes click-clacking through the marble lobby as I juggled two venti coffees in one upturned palm.

  According to my business card, VoyageCorp was a “corporate travel management company,” which basically meant we planned business trips for CEOs more interested in high thread counts than high art. The only time I saw any desire for indigenous culture was when a client wanted a local high-class escort. Thankfully, those types of requests were usually reserved for my boss, Stephan Holland.

  Placing Holland’s venti in his office, I let the cold sunshine linger on my face and daydreamed of the beach again. My stomach panged at the thought of Lochlon—for the second time today, and it wasn’t even 9 A.M. yet.

  Plopping down at my generic desk outside Holland’s office, I clicked through my email with Monday-morning indifference.

  There was an all-hands-on-deck meeting in Dubai next week for our primary client, the Richmond Group, and every email contained yet another amendment to it. Holland was in a special sort of tizzy over the meeting, but it was hard to take him seriously when he considered missing the elevator a stage-one disaster.

  “Aren’t you looking fierce today,” I catcalled Holland as he marched into the office, rattled and pink cheeked.

  Holland sent his eyes toward the heavens. “Kika, not today.”

  “You’re the one sashaying by me,” I shot back.

  Holland looped his coat onto the hook in his office and looked as if he was about to say something biting, when he noticed his thick-foamed coffee sitting on his desk and thawed.

  “Kika, you’re a peach,” he purred, switching gears. “Now, what is going on north of your forehead?”

  I slinked off my knit hat and smoothed my hair. “There. It’s gone.”

  “No, I actually like it. It’s not at all office appropriate—what do you wear that is?—bu
t it’s très cute. Makes you look a little French.” He ran his eyes over the mess on my desk. “And everyone knows that French women do everything better than us.”

  “Actually, it’s Scottish. It was hand-knit by a brooding Highland granny—”

  Holland outstretched his arm and wagged his finger no, no, no like he was in an R&B music video. The man had a flair for the theatrical and was an unfortunate over-actor. Holland wasn’t interested in hearing the story about my trip to Scotland. He never was.

  “Kika, you cannot get me off task today. I need everything confirmed for the Dubai conference—flights, airport pickups, dinner reservations, happy-ending massages—everything. If anything goes wrong with Ronald Richmond’s trip, it will be my head on his plate.”

  “Richie Rich? Oh, he’ll be fine,” I said with a shrug. “I got it covered.”

  “Stop calling him Richie Rich. I almost called him that to his face the other day because of you. Ronald Richmond is very sensitive about his name—you know that.”

  I conjured the image of the perpetually red-faced man who owned the Richmond Group. Ronald Richmond was a full-name sort of fellow who could never be dwarfed to a friendly “Ron” or even the simple and bro-y “Richmond.”

  “Oh, please. He’s offensively rich. Everyone knows his name,” I reassured Holland.

  “Yes, but the Richmond Group has more problems than Syria right now, so let’s not contribute by screwing up the conference. I mean it, Kika.”

  I gave Holland a fake-serious salute and directed my vision back to my laptop with the intention of ensuring that the conference was scheduled down to the minute, but I got distracted by some uber-luxury travel porn on Barcelona—which was where Lochlon and I first met.

  3

  THE KABUL YOUTH Hostel in Barcelona was an acknowledged party spot located right in the palm tree–studded Plaça Reial, a plaza sporting a bubbling bronze fountain and drippy curlicue lampposts designed by Barcelona’s own artsy kid, Gaudí.

  My first morning there, I sat at a rustic table in the hostel’s common area with a map and a cup of cold complimentary coffee. I had heard about a group of nuns who sold hand-painted flamenco fans, and I was trying to find their convent among the spiderweb of streets in the hopes of buying some for my website.