Girls Who Travel Read online

  By the time I got downstairs and outside the office, Bae had texted me her order: “Pick up six Cronuts from Dominique Ansel Bakery. Anything else is unacceptable.”

  I thought to myself: Enough with the damn Cronuts! The croissant-doughnut dessert hybrid was still stupidly popular with tourists, and the bakery would be overrun this time of day with a line around the block. Not to mention that there was no way I’d snag six Cronuts without trading my immortal soul.

  This task was obviously just designed to piss me off; since meeting Bae Yoon, I had never seen her put so much as a martini olive in her mouth.

  Still, what Bae Bae wants, Bae Bae gets. I bundled up my coat and darted rabbitlike into the dank 34th Street Subway heading for Soho.

  • • •

  “YOU HAVE GOT to be shitting me,” I said aloud as another text from Bae came through.

  Some tourist in line for the bakery scowled at me and made her hands into earmuffs for her child’s precious ears.

  I had just waited in line for forty-five minutes to get the Cronuts and now this.

  “One more thing,” texted Bae directly after I let her know that I got her Cronuts—I was only able to snag three without resorting to sexual favors or the black market. Her next request was just plain cruel.

  “Go to Orifice Depot and pick up . . .”—actually I stopped reading right there and prayed that she had made a very unfortunate typo.

  She cannot be asking me to go to a sex shop for her, I silently contested. But when I read the rest of the text, my fears were confirmed. I texted her back: “You must be joking. Please, please be joking?”

  Her response was instantaneous: “No.”

  In a follow-up text, she added: “And when you’re done, make sure you leave the bags with the doorman of my apartment.”

  I said the word “fuck” aloud a few times, because it was clearly in order, and I begrudgingly made my way to the unbearably named store.

  • • •

  I THRUST (BAD choice of word) the phone up to the poor sales associate’s face so I could be spared the embarrassment of reading Bae’s list aloud.

  “Please fetch me these things as quickly as possible, mm’k?” I piped, mashing the words together. But of course, it wasn’t going to be that straightforward. Why did the sales associate have to be so damn thorough?

  “Another question for you,” he chirped (his third). “So this one comes in three sizes and colors. There’s vanilla, then there’s caramel, or the biggest one is called chocolate. Which one were you interested in?”

  I threw up in my mouth when I saw what he was holding, and I inadvertently pictured Bae.

  “Um, whichever. Really. I do not care,” I squealed all too shrilly.

  The sales associate, a peroxide blond who did not look old enough to be working in a sex shop, foppishly pinned his knuckles to his waist as if I was being difficult.

  “Look, they’re not for me. Can we please just get on with it?”

  “Fiiiiine, suuuuuure,” he said, bringing the item to the register. “Looks like someone needs the chocolate one,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Just ring it up.” I checked my phone. I had been out of the office far too long, and Holland had already called me twice.

  I dashed out of the X-rated store, out $65 and my self-respect. It wasn’t like I was a prude, but call me old-fashioned for thinking that sex toy shopping shouldn’t be outsourced. That’s what the Internet and discreet brown boxes were for.

  Now I was stuck toting around a neon-green shopping bag clearly labeled with the store’s disastrous name and filled with things that would make Christian Grey blush. To make matters worse, Bae lived all the way downtown in the Financial District.

  My phone buzzed again, but it was a text from Holland this time: “Where are you?!”

  “In the fetal position,” I almost texted back, but I left the text unanswered. I didn’t have time to go downtown; I had no choice but to wait until after work to drop off Bae’s bags.

  6

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, I crammed a fluffy Cronut glaze-first into my mouth and chewed without taking any pleasure in it. To me, it tasted like tragedy.

  (Okay, fine, it didn’t really taste like tragedy—it still tasted awesome—but it didn’t make me any less depressed.)

  Beside me, a man in a suit discreetly shifted his eyes in my direction. I blatantly stared back without bothering to wipe off the glaze from the sides of my mouth.

  “Vont von?” I asked him, my teeth caked with masticated dough. I held up the box and accidentally spat a few gooey crumbs onto his shoulder. He shook his head with disgust.

  By the time the Long Island Rail Road train pulled into the Plandome station, there’d only be one Cronut left. I glumly licked a fleck of sugar off my fingernail and replayed the scene with Holland from earlier:

  “Kika, where the he-ll” (he pronounced it with two syllables: ha-elle) “have you been?”

  I would never be able to forget the appalled expression on his face when he caught me passing the packed conference room with my hands full of Cronuts, sex toys, and disgrace.

  “Umm, delivery?” I croaked, as Holland stared murderously and I turned fifty shades of red.

  “Let me say this to you so you can see it from my perspective: You messed up my meeting with Richie Rich, which means I won’t have advance notice for any changes to the Dubai schedule. And then, instead of coming clean about it, you make me waste my morning going all the way across town so I have to hear it from that self-satisfied gold digger, Bae Yoon.

  “‘But Mr. Holland,’” he mimicked Bae’s condescending voice, “‘Kika never scheduled a meeting for you and Mr. Richmond. I haven’t heard from her all day.’”

  I nearly bit off my bottom lip at Bae’s backstabbing, but Holland’s rant wasn’t done, so I let him continue.

  “Then when I get back to the office you’re not here and unreachable for the next hour. And when you do finally show up, I find out that you were out getting Cronuts and God knows what else, dressed like a college kid who just came home from ‘finding herself’ at a semester at sea!”

  I didn’t dare tell him that the dessert and dildo outing was Bae’s doing, an obvious fool’s errand in retrospect. It would just make it worse if I admitted to being so gullible.

  His vibrating wrath was one thing, but then his shoulders drooped with disappointment.

  “Your heart is not in this, Kika. I know you’re not stupid, but I also know that you’re not taking this seriously, and that isn’t fair to VoyageCorp. Or to me.”

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged to both him and myself. “I’m sorry. I’m not normally like this—” I began to protest, just to clear my reputation, but once I heard the puny words scrabbling from my mouth, I caught them and swallowed them back down. I had no good explanation. Holland knew that I knew. This wasn’t the first time I had messed up.

  “I’m going to have to let you go, Kika.”

  “Got it,” I said softly. So I left my damn big-girl job, thinking: If this job didn’t mean anything to me, why does it sting so much to lose it?

  The one condolence was before I left I managed to schedule a messenger for a special delivery: The adult toy store bag would be arriving at Bae Yoon’s front desk tomorrow at precisely 8:20 A.M.—the exact time that Richie Rich arrived in his office every day. At least I would get to embarrass Bae and eat Cronuts out of the whole debacle.

  My train reached the station, jolting me back into the present. I looked out of the window as idyllic suburbia, wrapped in a hushed wintertime blanket, came into view. The grit and noise and drama of the city seemed far away now. A quiet snowfall swirled in the floor-length skirts of amber light dropping down from the lampposts.

  I recognized Lynn’s tan (or as she called it, “champagne”) Mercedes. She flickered the headlights whil
e hooting my name. I headed toward her with my face down, away from the blustering snowflakes.

  7

  ANY NORMAL GIRL who just lost her job would get to bond with Bravo TV and butter. But not me; I still had to hang out with a five-year-old. Not that I had any right to complain. I needed the money more than ever now.

  “I don’t fink I’m awowed to watch dis,” said Madison.

  I set down the box of Lucky Charms cereal (I had extracted most of the marshmallows, anyway) and quickly changed the channel as some freakishly young, dead-eyed pop star humped across the stage while her backup dancers shook what their plastic surgeons gave them. Wasn’t this the Disney Channel?

  “Shit,” I mumbled to myself. At this rate, I was gunning to get fired from both jobs today.

  “Can I bwaid your hair?” Madison asked me.

  “Sure you can. I’m sorry I’m being such a crappy babysitter today. I just had a horrible day; I got fired from my job.”

  Madison brought over a comb that smelled like synthetic cherry doll hair. “What job?” she asked.

  “Exactly. You are one smart cookie.”

  Madison’s eyes widened at the mention of a cookie—a girl after my own heart.

  “Sure, I didn’t like it there, but it was at least a way to make money for traveling. It’s not that I want to be a backpacking bum; I want to work while I’m traveling. I need to acquire more merchandise for my website, you know? It was really starting to take off when I was last on the road, and I want to get back there so I can work on it full-time.”

  “Oh,” said Madison looking thoughtful. “I can comb now?”

  She reached up and promptly tangled the comb into my hair. (Side note: When did naming little girls after dead presidents become trendy? This weekend, I was scheduled to babysit a seven-year-old girl named “Kennedy” who, upon questioning, told me her favorite color was “glitter.”)

  “I knew you would get it, Madison. The worst part is that it’s my fault that I got fired,” I confessed. “Holland was right. I didn’t apply myself. And, and, and . . . I just keep thinking about Lochlon, you know?” I sputtered.

  “Yes, I know,” said Madison, her sticky hands holding my head steady with toddler concentration. “Who’s Lockin? Your boyfwiend?”

  “Not really anymore, but he was for a while there,” I said, knowing Madison wouldn’t understand enough to judge me or pry for more info.

  “Diego is my boyfwiend.”

  I turned and squared off with Madison. “Diego? Is that a boy from preschool?”

  “Noooooo! He’s from Dowa de Explower,” she moaned impatiently. “Stop wiggling. Have you got ants in your pants, lady?”

  “Christ. You sound just like Holland during the weekly status meetings, you know that?”

  8

  “MOM, WHAT ARE you still doing up?” I slung my bag slick with frost onto the kitchen floor and flicked on the overhead light. “And why are you sitting in the dark?” I glanced at the clock, which read 12:15 A.M.

  “Kika, I called your work,” my mom said over a steaming cup of calming honey lavender tea. She fingered the tea box, which featured one of those trendy pen drawings of a lady in Warrior II all Zen or stoned or whatever.

  “Mom, I told you not to call that number.”

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said carefully. “I made you a cup of tea.”

  I sighed. “Mom, it’s fine. I’ll get another job.” I sat down next to her at the breakfast bar. She was in her pajamas, which actually looked no different from her yoga clothes, but I had a trained eye.

  My mom nodded mutely, but I saw her recalling the three months that it took me to get the job in the first place. Three more months of résumés, interviews, and desperation stretched ahead of me now as unpromising as a desert. No job. No money. No website. No Lochlon.

  It was doomed to be one of those sad public defeats where I’d keep running into high school peers coming home from their Murray Hill apartments to visit their parents with their dry-clean-only blouses (who even says “blouses” anymore?) and jobs in finance. (Always, finance!)

  “So what happened?” my mom finally asked.

  “I’m a spectacular screwup.”

  “No, Kika. You weren’t meant to be there.” She tried to cup my hand, but I pulled away.

  “Oh, cut the New Age bullshit for a minute. I messed up, Mom. Sure, I wasn’t emotionally fulfilled there, but I should know how to suck it up in order to get to where I’m ‘meant to be.’” I reeled in my tone. “Sorry. I’m not mad at you. I’m just really mad at myself right now. I’m actually shocked I lasted a year there.” I laughed weakly.

  My mom didn’t laugh along. “It’s really been that long?”

  “Yup. And it’s pretty sad that after a whole year of working in that office, I still have a pathetic bank balance hovering dangerously close to the negative. I mean, you’d think they would have paid me better.”

  My mom toyed with her bracelet and sighed. It was made of the mala beads I had bought her in Montreal last weekend. Suddenly, it was a lot harder to remember why I had to take all those weekend trips—using up every last vacation and sick day and spending all that money. Now, they didn’t seem worth it. I did this to myself, didn’t I? some voice of truth gulped.

  I did a gusty yogi exhale for my mom’s benefit. “Thanks for waiting up. I’m sorry I’m so cranky. I should go to bed.”

  “Okay. I’m teaching a power flow vinyasa class tomorrow at 9 A.M., if you want to join.”

  “At Heart ’n Ohm?” (Also known as our living room, which doubled as a yoga studio.)

  She nodded. “You’re going to be okay, Kika. Maybe this was a lesson you needed to learn the hard way, you know?”

  “When I took this job I had this whole plan to save money and get back on the road to continue with the website. I don’t know how I let myself drift so far from that goal . . .” I felt dangerously close to tearing up.

  My mom’s eyes twinkled with sympathy in the dim kitchen light. “Best-laid plans are always the ones that go to shit first. You’ll figure it out.”

  I smiled at my mom’s custom blend of earthy yoga jargon and sailor swearwords, and then I went upstairs trying to believe that she was right.

  9

  I FOUND MYSELF thinking of Lochlon as I bombed face-first onto my bed. I hadn’t been with anyone else since him. I hadn’t even kissed anyone else.

  We spent our final few weeks together in South India, and I could recall the details of our life there as if it were a still life painting, a memory in thick oil paint. But despite the seeming perfection of our days, even South India wasn’t far enough away to keep Lochlon’s past at bay. And one day toward the end of my trip, everything was revealed.

  I remember that day in vivid flashes: We had decided we would take a break from the beach and go into the city of Panaji.

  India was my last stop, and soon my year of travel would be over. The money coming in from my website was still too meager to live on, and my tickets home had been booked and were nonrefundable—a fact I could not let myself forget despite Lochlon’s persuasion to keep traveling with him.

  He had another ten to twelve months on the road before his money ran out, and he was off to follow the “Banana Pancake Trail,” a well-worn backpacker route from Goa to Hanoi.

  After weeks on the seashore, the city felt oppressive and dirty and garish. Quickly wearied from the roaring traffic, exhaust, and yapping stray dogs, Lochlon and I found ourselves sitting at the very top of the epic, zigzagging staircase of the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

  “The name just rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it?” I remember him saying as we both gawked down at the city square below us, the high staircase making our vision blurry.

  As we sat there, three tourists huffed up the infinite steps in our directio
n. Even from way up there, I could hear them making a big show of climbing the steps and moaning about their hangovers in distinct Irish accents.

  “Look, it’s your compatriots.” I motioned at them even though Lochlon avidly avoided the Irish when we traveled. I assumed it was because he didn’t want to feel like he was at home when he was abroad.

  “Mental, isn’t it?” Lochlon lowered his head. “Just look at the likes of them”—he gestured in their direction—“smokes in their hands as they’re about to enter a church. They may as well have a pint of the black stuff in the other and complete the Paddy stereotype. Let’s get out of here.”

  He stood and held his hand down to help me up, but I waved him away and stayed seated.

  “Killing your cultural buzz, are they? Why don’t you ever want to hang out with other Irish backpackers?”

  Lochlon wouldn’t answer my question and instead impatiently shook his arm at me again.

  Still, I ignored him and instead cheered the women on. “Come on, you got this. You’re nearly there!” I applauded their efforts.

  One of the girls, dressed more like a Real Housewife than a sightseer, punched both fists in the air like a champion but looked as if she was about to pass out.

  “C’mere, Kika,” Lochlon murmured in his gravelly way. “Do you always have to talk with everyone?”

  I craned my neck up toward him, shielding the sun from my eyes with my hand. “Oh, relax. I’m still exhausted. Let’s sit for a minute more.”

  The first woman, a plump redhead, finally made it to where we sat. I fanned her with my hands, but Lochlon didn’t even say hello.

  “That climb was right bollocks,” she sang out in a thick, melodious accent. “Holy Mary, Mother of God!” she added, finally focusing her eyes at me.

  “Actually, no, I’m Kika. She may be inside, though,” I said, gesticulating toward to the church. “And that’s Lochlon.”