Girls Who Travel Read online

  But it wasn’t Lochlon.

  Instead, a high-pitched female voice pummeled through the phone and into my ear: “Lamb!”

  There was only one woman it could be: Elsbeth Darling. And to her, everyone—from her husband to her spinning instructor—was dubbed “lamb.” Before I could respond, she plowed on: “Why, oh, why didn’t your mother tell me you were babysitting again?”

  “Um, hi? Elsbeth?”

  “Of course it’s me, Kika. Can you hear me okay? I’m calling from London.”

  I heaved myself onto the kitchen countertop. “My mom told me you guys moved there. How is it?” I kicked my dangling legs. “That’s why she didn’t tell you I was babysitting, I guess. Besides, I’m not really babysitting.” I instantly regretted saying that.

  As if Elsbeth picked up on this, she said, “I know you’re not really babysitting. You have that job at VoyageCorp that Mr. Darling got you. As if I could forget.”

  Elsbeth’s husband, Prescott Darling, was the financial advisor to Richie Rich who passed on my résumé to VoyageCorp. So, in effect, the Darlings got me the job from which I had just been fired.

  “Right,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I got sacked, knowing it would get back to Mr. Darling and he would think I was an incompetent free spirit (but wasn’t I, though?).

  “How are things going over there? Mr. Darling and I were wondering about that . . .”

  “Um, good. Fine,” I fibbed.

  “Oh.” She sounded dissatisfied.

  “I mean, it’s great. I’m getting a big promotion soon.” I squirmed at the lie and willed my mouth to stop moving, but it was no use. “You know, just clocking in my face time, doing due diligence, going big or going home. Total win-win scenario!”

  I blathered out clichéd business jargon in the hopes of confusing her into silence. “I’m just babysitting during my downtime to make some extra money, you know,” I said in conclusion.

  But Elsbeth Darling didn’t know, because her whole world consisted of downtime and she certainly never had a need for money. I visualized her life as a looped Parisian perfume commercial. I imagined she spent lots of time kittening about on chaise longues and whispering.

  “Of course, of course.” Her voice surged emotionally. “Oh, Kika, the girls and I miss you terribly.”

  Elsbeth used to take yoga classes with my mom, and, oddly enough, the two of them became friendly. Because of their friendship, Elsbeth took me on as a babysitter and I got to spend whole summers bonding with the Darling girls, Willamina (Mina) and Gwendolyn (Gwen), and their aquamarine inground swimming pool. But my sunscreen-scented memory suddenly vanished when my eye caught Madison.

  She had uncapped every single one of her Mr. Sketch Scented Markers and was exuberantly huffing them like a practiced druggie.

  I put the phone on speaker so I could wipe the rainbow colors off Madison’s nose. Give them all the bourgeois names you want; all children will act like feral drunks when your back is turned.

  “It’s great to hear from you, Elsbeth. I really miss you guys, too,” I said truthfully. “How is London?”

  “Well, that’s actually why I’m calling, lamb,” she said. “Mr. Darling and I are very happy, and Mina’s wonderful, too—you know Miss Popularity. She’s the reigning queen of Harrington Gardens School for Girls.

  “But Gwen isn’t doing as marvelously. I think she’s homesick. She doesn’t speak to any of the British children in school, and she isn’t clicking with any of the French au pairs we’ve hired.”

  “Oh no,” I said. Gwen was a willful girl who was dazzled by her older sister; scarily skilled at karate; and harbored dreams of being a spy when she grew up. “Well, a spy or a ballerina,” was how she officially put it.

  It was hard to remember a time when she wasn’t so precocious. When I first started working for the Darlings, Gwendy was going on her tenth month of what her world-renowned child psychologists called “selective mutism.” She refused to talk to anyone outside of her immediate family and even stayed completely silent during kindergarten. The doctors blamed it on social anxiety, but now that I knew Gwen, I like to think she was just bored of everyone babying her.

  When Elsbeth hired me, she explained that I wasn’t to take Gwen’s silence personally. I didn’t, but I still found myself chatting to her, even though her mother told me she wasn’t paying any attention.

  One day, while I was ranting about the creepy, babyish Teletubbies show that Elsbeth was always plopping her in front of, Gwen started giggling aloud. Shocked at the sudden sound coming out of her mouth, I asked her what she was laughing at.

  “The bat-shit bonkers Teletubbies!” she said, repeating my words back verbatim. Ten months of not speaking and her first word was “bat-shit”—can you imagine?

  But Elsbeth ignored the distasteful specifics and gave me all the credit for getting her to talk again. And from that day on, Elsbeth never reprimanded me for my foul mouth again.

  Over the phone line, Elsbeth continued: “Mina was studying the French Revolution in school and had made a model guillotine for her European history presentation, and my little Gwendy took it upon herself to torture the au pair with it. The whole thing was getting very Les Misérables, so I’ve just had to let go of another au pair,” said Elsbeth in a blasé way.

  She then added: “Of course, it wasn’t just that they weren’t getting along; I also found out that she was fired from her last job. Fired and she didn’t even tell me! Can you imagine just omitting such an important detail like that from your future employer?”

  The squirm-inducing scene from my own firing swirled in my mind’s eye.

  Then Elsbeth’s voice rose in amusement: “But you should have seen the ‘Vive la Revolution!’ banner Mina and Gwen made when she left. Very creative.”

  I laughed aloud at the image and felt a sudden twinge of sentimentality.

  “Anyway, my point is we really need a nanny Gwen is comfortable with—someone who can make her transition smoother. In the end, she wasn’t even speaking to the nanny; she was just chasing her around. We can’t have Gwen regressing and refusing to speak again. Do you see?”

  “Gotcha,” I said tentatively. Why is she telling me all of this?

  “We want you back, Kika. We want you here in London.”

  Sure that I had just started to hallucinate, I didn’t dare speak. But Elsbeth Darling continued, undeterred by my lack of reaction.

  “Mr. Darling has already secured a visa. And we have plenty of room here at the town house. The house has a whole servants’ quarters. Not that you’d be a servant or anything. Lord no, how very feudal, am I right? But what I’m saying is you’ll have your own space and even your own entrance from the street so that you can come and go as you please.”

  I shook my head. Is this really happening?

  “Kika, did the phone cut out?” Elsbeth heightened her octave and slowed her words. Sounding as if she was talking to an ancient great-aunt, she tried again: “What. I. Said. Was—”

  I interrupted: “No, Elsbeth, I heard. I just . . . can’t believe it.” I swallowed deeply and audibly. “Are you my fairy godmother or something?”

  Elsbeth chuckled. “Oh, lamb, you’d be doing us the favor. You worked miracles on Gwen, and you’re the only one we can trust her with.”

  “Are you sure I don’t have to, like, give you my firstborn? Because if so, you can definitely have it.”

  Elsbeth laughed as if unsure I was joking. (I wasn’t.)

  “You’re the first one we thought of for the job. Plus, I know moving here is a nonissue for you. You’ve always been the type of girl who loves a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants adventure, am I right? And, lamb, I know you have a job and a whole life over there. You can take your time deciding. I know you’d have to give up the VoyageCorp job, and that’s a major career decision.”

 
Right then, I knew my chance had come to tell Elsbeth I’d been fired. But will she still offer me the job if she knows?

  I started rationalizing an omission: If I moved to London, no one would know me, and no one would know I got fired from VoyageCorp. The thought relieved me. Elsbeth would never find out, so what was the point in risking it by telling her now?

  Unaware of my inner struggle, Elsbeth went about convincing me. “Your job can’t be paying you enough if you still have to babysit. And not to make it about money, but we’d offer you a very competitive salary in GBP . . .” Elsbeth Darling trailed off meaningfully. “Oh, Kika, say you’ll come?”

  “Christ on a bicycle. Are you kidding me? Of course I’ll come!” I shot-putted my body off the kitchen counter.

  “Brilliant. Just brilliant,” Elsbeth drilled into the phone.

  Elsbeth had certainly altered her way of speaking since she moved. She sounded like a one-dimensional caricature from an American-produced period drama.

  “Damn, Elsbeth, you’re really getting into this British thing. You sound just like Madonna with that accent.”

  “How dare you! I at least sound like Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  It was good to know that Elsbeth wasn’t above making fun of herself—even with her new overdone inflections.

  “I have to give notice at my job first,” I (white) lied.

  “That’s expected. So you can be here in two weeks? By the middle of February?”

  I agreed and hung up the phone after promising to follow up with Mr. Darling’s assistant to solidify all the details.

  “Madison!” I barked.

  Madison froze and stared up at me with a lemon-scented yellow marker buried halfway up her left nostril.

  “Do you realize what this means?”

  “No . . .” Madison said, slowly removing the marker and looking abashed.

  “It means”—I swiped her up—“that I’m moving to London!”

  “Wike ‘Wondon Bwidge Is Fawwing Down’?” Madison asked eagerly, picking up on my excitement.

  “Exactly like ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down.’” I was moving to London where people said, “Cheers, love,” where the alphabet ended in “zed,” and where there were Cadbury Creme Eggs all year round—not just for Easter. I swirled Madison around the kitchen.

  “Faster, faster!” she yelled, and I obliged until we collapsed on the honeycomb-tiled kitchen floor.

  “Chwist on a bicycle.” Madison sighed, holding her spinning head.

  “Oh shit. Madison, please don’t say that in front of your mother.” I winced. “And you may want to avoid saying ‘shit’ in front of her as well,” I added for good measure.

  12

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, I wrote Lochlon an email about the latest developments in my life:

  “I got a new job in London,” I wrote like it was no big deal. “Hopefully I’ll get to travel all over Europe while I’m there. I feel like my life is moving in the right direction again—I can’t believe I’m getting this opportunity.”

  In my mind, I could see my mother rolling her eyes about the “travel all over Europe” remark, and I deleted it before clicking “send” with determination.

  A band of early-February sunshine slowly made its way across my face, and I leaped from my desk with unnatural morning energy. Now this was how my life was supposed to be.

  My backpack, as well-worn with love as the Velveteen Rabbit, slumped in the corner of my room.

  “Cheer up, buttercup,” I told it. “We’re busting out of this joint in two weeks.”

  Long ago, I learned to pack light, using only my backpack and collecting goods along the way. Rolling luggage is all well and good for packaged group tours on shiny buses pumped with recycled air, but nothing beats a well-packed backpack for the stair-filled metro stations and the cobbled lanes of Europe. I prided myself on my portability.

  Growing up, I used to have a lot more stuff around. I was one of those girls who was the contents of her closet. My friends and I spoke about shopping in a language that was insisting and self-defending—we had to have new, pricey things because we thought we needed them.

  But I couldn’t keep up with these girls, and once I started traveling, I stopped wanting to. Instead, I found my own course to be passionate about. I strove to form a collection of once-in-a-lifetime experiences instead of designer attire.

  Even now, my life didn’t run in alignment with theirs. I wanted none of the things they wanted: not the clothes, the McMansions, the 401(k)s, the husbands, or the silver gadgets named after fruit. I had no interest in the swag of adulthood, of normalcy.

  I looked around my childhood bedroom with my outdated furniture and ratty bedspread. After college and my year abroad, I didn’t bother buying new stuff. Acquiring more things just meant more stuff to leave behind.

  “Hi, Kika. Want some coffee?” my mother asked through my closed door, interrupting my manifesto.

  “Yes, please,” I called.

  She entered my room and set a swilling cup of coffee (free-trade Guatemalan) onto my desk. “I wasn’t sure if you fancied a spot of tea instead,” she said in a laughable English accent.

  “Coffee is brilliant, Mumsy,” I responded with an equally offensive twitter.

  “Kika, I’m so excited for your next soul journey.”

  “Mom, I’m so excited, too.” I didn’t give her a hard time for her yoga-teacher speech and even spewed out some of my own. “I feel like the world is opening up for me in a positive way, like I’m getting a second chance. I couldn’t handle job searching for another three months.”

  “Good. Remember that when you’re with the Darlings.”

  “I’m going to be Mary freakin’ Poppins. I’m going to give it my all. If I fail at a job again, I want it to be because of real reasons, not because I was too lazy.”

  “That’s exactly what I was getting at.” My mom seemed relieved that I got there myself.

  “Besides, it’s the Darlings. Mina and Gwen love me. How hard could it be?”

  “Famous last words, Kika,” she warned before escorting herself to the door. “And maybe you’ll actually make some money this time,” she added. I knew she wasn’t being malicious, only honest. Somehow that made the comment land harder.

  “I’m off to teach downstairs,” she said.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” I called behind her.

  I did yoga on occasion, too, but mainly because it made my mom happy. As far as I was concerned, the greatest benefit of yoga was being bendy enough to tie your shoelaces without crouching all the way down, but I never told her this.

  Even though I didn’t do yoga daily, my mom and I were more alike than not. She passed on her free-spirited penchant for swearwords, Scandinavian features, and impossibly long femurs to me. I secretly hoped that I wouldn’t become the heir of her bad luck with men as well.

  As far as I knew, the only thing I inherited from my dad was my Mediterranean first name, Francisca (which strangely got shortened to Kika), and my dark eyes and eyebrows, which somehow still worked on my otherwise Nordic coloring and frame.

  I’ve never been a “Francisca” with her Italian sensibilities, sky-high stilettos, killing-it red lipsticks, and knowledge of fine wine.

  I was always a “Kika”—foulmouthed and sweet toothed. (No matter how much quinoa my mom fed me, I always wanted what was never around—pure sucrose.) I was raised to rock a bohemian wardrobe and a pair of secondhand Dr. Martens while listening to folk music.

  A normal mother would be a bit nervous about my move to London, but my mom was used to it. She no longer said to me, “I am confused about your life,” like my well-meaning high school friends, or, “But what do you want to do when you grow up?” as my grandparents asked.

  And thankfully she didn’t ask me (like a presumptuous stranger once did): “What are
you running away from?” (Short answer: Nothing. Long answer: Nothing, asshole.) Instead, my mother let me be myself. And even before I had a self to be, she let me figure it out on my own.

  At sixteen, I spent the summer in Panama building houses with Habitat for Humanity. In high school, I suffered through a year of finicky Latin just so I could veni, vidi, vici and vino my way through Florence during the senior trip. In college, I studied abroad every other semester. But I only started to get a sense of who I wanted to be when I traveled alone.

  There are many reasons why girls should not travel alone, and I won’t list them, because none of them are original reasons. Besides, there are more reasons why girls should.

  I have the utmost respect for girls who travel alone, because it’s hard work sometimes. But girls, we just want adventures. We want international best friends and hold-your-breath vistas out of crappy hostel windows. We want to discover moving works of art, sometimes in museums and sometimes in side-street graffiti. We want to hear soul-restoring jam sessions at beach bonfires and to watch celestial dawns spill over villages that haven’t changed since the Middle Ages.

  We want to fall in love with boys with say-that-again accents. We want sore feet from stay-up-all-night dance parties at just-one-more-drink bars.

  We want to be on our own even as we sketch and photograph the Piazza San Marco covered in pigeons and beautiful Italian lovers intertwined so that we’ll never forget what it feels like to be twenty-three and absolutely purposeless and single, but in love with every city we visit next.

  We want to be struck dumb by the baritone echoes of church bells in Vatican City and the rich, heaven-bound calls to prayer in Istanbul and to know that no matter what, there just has to be some greater power or holy magic responsible for all this bursting, delirious, overwhelming beauty in the great, wide, sprawling world.

  I tucked my passport into my bag. Girls, we don’t just want to have fun; we want a whole lot more out of life than that.

  13