Girls Who Travel Page 7

  I made the girls bring their homework, but so far Gwendy and I had just been chatting while Mina filtered in and out of the conversation, mainly staying focused on her cell phone.

  “Mina and I both go to the same school. But Mina’s school is in a different building from mine, because she’s older. Mina’s the most popular girl in her school—I know it. And she’s also the prettiest—even though Mom says we can’t say that. And she also is the funniest.” Gwen swirled the Nutella around her deconstructed crêpe.

  Mina’s thumbs scurried over her phone. She hadn’t eaten much of her banana crêpe. I eyed it longingly, though I’d just polished off my own (fresh strawberries, white Belgian chocolate, Chantilly cream, and magic).

  “Jeez, how much are you paying the hobgoblin for these endorsements?” I nudged Mina.

  She skimmed a look away from her phone screen for one solitary second. “What can I say? Gwendolyn has an excellent and observant eye.”

  “I have two excellent eyes,” corrected Gwen, all abuzz in a souped-up sugar high.

  “Do you want the rest of my crêpe, Kika?” Mina asked, noticing that it was the object of my lovestruck gaze. “I don’t want any more.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “Oh, come on, eat it. Carpe diem!”

  “Huh?” Mina frowned.

  Gwendy studied her face and then replicated it. “Huh?”

  I sighed and dragged the dish in front of me. “It means ‘YOLO’ in Latin,” I told them before sawing off a bite.

  Mina went back to her phone.

  “So Mina,” I said, trying hard to keep her attention. “Who are you texting?”

  Mina shielded her phone from me. “Um, no one.”

  “Is it a boy?”

  Gwen made the obligatory oooooh noise.

  Mina glared at us. “I’m texting Peaches Benson-Westwood, my best friend at school. She’s, like, really, really rich. And the most popular girl at school—well, we’re both equally popular.”

  “Peaches Benson-Westwood? Do all English people have three-name monikers?” I thought of that guy from the other day: Aston Hyde Bettencourt. I only remembered his name because it was so snooty and ridiculous.

  The phone absorbed her full attention again. “Pretty much.”

  But then, Mina turned toward the sound of giggles coming from the table next to us. I leaned over her shoulder and stole a glance at her phone screen. She wasn’t texting at all—she was playing Candy Crush Saga.

  She turned back around, and I ruffled Gwen’s hair as a diversion. “And what about you, Gwen? No friends at school yet?”

  “Nope!” said Gwen cheerfully. “Mom says I don’t play well with others!” She beamed with pride.

  “And why is that?” I asked.

  “Because the other kids are crack babies.”

  I spat out my cappuccino, and Mina and I keeled over laughing. Gwen looked very pleased with herself for making us both laugh.

  “Where’d you learn that?” I asked incredulously.

  “From Mina.” She pointed her finger at her sister.

  Mina retorted just as quickly. “Hey! Don’t blame me, you little crack baby.”

  “And TV,” Gwen added. “From Law and Order: SUV. Dad watches it.”

  I didn’t bother correcting her.

  I pictured Mr. Darling. I had only seen him for approximately eight minutes total since I arrived. “You all right, Kika?” he had asked me, or rather demanded of me.

  I just nodded and stared at his tremendously bald head, listening to him smack his nicotine gum in his mouth. That was the extent of our interactions, which was fine with me, because I was secretly kind of scared of him, even though he had always been generous with me.

  Once, he asked me what I wanted to do with my life, but when I told him about Gypsies & Boxcars, he asked me all sorts of intimidating questions about returns on investments and import taxes. I rambled on until he stopped listening, and he just mumbled, “How amusing . . .”

  “Kika, what’s a crack baby?” Gwendy asked me, breaking my thoughts.

  “It’s something little hobgoblins like you should not be calling the other kids. And I think if you stop calling people names, you’ll make some friends,” I added.

  Gwen considered it for a moment. “But they all think I talk funny. And they laugh at me when I say the wrong words.”

  “Is that why you won’t talk to them?” I asked, pulling the crêpe away before she drizzled Nutella all over her math homework. (There would be no criminal waste of Nutella on my watch.)

  I scooped Gwen onto my lap. “We can learn all the new British words together so you’ll know what they’re talking about, okay?”

  Gwen nodded bravely.

  I tried again: “You see, it’s like a secret code,” I cooed in a hushed voice with a mysterious glint in my eye.

  This got her excited; Gwen loved mystery. “A secret code?” she repeated, enthralled.

  “Yup. And we need to crack it. The question is”—I eyed the people around us and flipped up the collar of my shirt in mock suspicion—“will you help?”

  Gwen nodded vigorously. “Does a bear shit in the woods?!”

  I looked at Mina. “We are going to have to watch our mouths around this one.”

  “Word,” said Mina.

  “Word,” I said back.

  “Word,” mimicked Gwen, soberly nodding her head in the same stern way Mina nodded hers.

  As the girls packed away their schoolwork into their backpacks, I stole another look at Mina’s phone to confirm that she definitely wasn’t texting anyone. But why would she lie about something like that?

  17

  A DARK, THROATY voice tumbled over the line: “Hiya, gorgeous.”

  It was Lochlon. (Of course it was Lochlon; who else called me “gorgeous” besides Italian maître d’s?)

  Lochlon had flown into Belfast a few nights ago, and here we were, already chatting on the phone at a decent hour for the both of us. Life was so much easier now that we were in the same time zone.

  “I can’t believe you have a cell phone,” I gushed.

  “And why not? This is modern Ireland now. We even have color telly,” he told me with cheerful sarcasm.

  “It’s not that; it’s just the fact that I can reach you whenever I want that gets me excited.”

  His voice went raspy. “Do you want to know what it is that excites me?”

  I was sitting outside on the stoop in front of the Darlings’ house, and I looked around. “Oh, I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spied movement from the house next door. The red door opened, and the nasty neighbor, Aston Hyde Bettencourt, came out whistling. He’s probably drunk again, I judged.

  Meanwhile, on the phone Lochlon proceeded to tell me in meticulous detail what it was exactly that excited him: “. . . thinking of you lying down on the bed under me, your wrists above your head—”

  “Lochlon, I’m in public,” I muttered into the phone, making accidental eye contact with Aston. He caught my eye for a moment and looked as if he was trying to place me. Maybe he was too drunk to remember me from the last time.

  “You in public, eh? That makes the fantasy a wee bit hotter, doesn’t it now?” Lochlon breathed. “And then tugging off your—”

  “Shh!” I hissed loudly into the phone.

  Thinking I had shushed him, Aston stopped whistling and whipped around to shoot me a disbelieving look. He sneered and rapidly stalked off down the street before I could let him know I hadn’t meant him.

  “Lochlon,” I begged, “I just can’t take it,” I mock-cried into the phone. “Stop right now.”

  But he was unrelenting. “Oh, you can take it, I think.”

  I swallowed hard to compose myself and then changed the subject, because I could feel
myself coloring in hell-hot lust. It had been far too long.

  He snickered on the other end of the line. This was just how he liked me: squirming and impatient for him.

  “So how is everything else?” I asked, clearing my throat. He already told me he didn’t want to talk about his dad, so I ducked around that subject. “Have you seen your old friends?”

  “I have, and you know what’s really at me?” he asked rhetorically. “Everyone and everything”—he stopped to give his words weight—“is exactly the bleedin’ same. Nothing changes, so. Everything is just as it was. Bit depressing, that is. At least they’ve stopped taking the mickey out of me, so I’ve nothing to complain about.”

  “I felt like nothing changed when I first came home, too,” I said. “It was almost disappointing. But also comforting, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose. Places don’t really change, but I suppose if you’re gone long enough, you’re the one who’s doing the changing,” he said.

  I reflected on the unique alienation I felt when I first returned home from my year of backpacking. I was a stranger in my birthplace, feeling as if I had lost all sense of belonging there. And that was weirdly okay. I used the sensation to underscore the belief that I didn’t actually belong there. It was then that I understood the mixed thrill and isolation of belonging nowhere and everywhere.

  “I couldn’t ever live here again. It’s arse-backward,” he complained. But then he upped his mood. “So, gorgeous, when am I to come and see you?”

  I pulled the speaker away from my mouth so that he didn’t hear my girly reaction. I had been waiting the whole phone call for this to come up.

  “You mean visiting me? But what about your dad? You just got there,” I said, keeping my pitch level.

  “Yeah, sure, not straightaway. It would be best to wait until it evens out. But maybe in a few weeks’ time I may come to London and see you, yeah?”

  “How long are you going to be home for?” I asked in a breathy voice.

  He brushed off this question again. “I’m sure I’ll be back on the road in no time. So, what’s the story? Am I to book tickets?”

  “That sounds great.” I tried not to come off as too enthusiastic. “I have weekends off,” I said with nonchalance, like I wasn’t planning the most important weekend of my life or anything.

  “Brilliant.”

  I could sense his smile on the other end of the line. I loved his unshakable smile. It was so authentic and contagious.

  “It’s done, gorgeous. I’ll give you a ring back when I get some dates sorted. And don’t make like you haven’t been thinking about me since I told you I was to be in Ireland. I know you well, I do. You want this. You want this as bad as I do, Kika.”

  Suddenly, I just knew that I’d hear it: He was going to tell me he loved me.

  Not right now or anything, but at that moment, I just knew that one day this man would say those words to me.

  I had already confessed my feelings to him at the end of the last trip. I left him and my life of travel in a train station in South India, on a foggy morning. I remember being so jealous that he got to keep traveling. I was envious but happy for him and angry and depressed and seething and blissful. I felt a thousand things when I left that morning, but mainly I felt heartbroken.

  We spent our last night together in the $4-per-night beach hut that we had called home for the month.

  He lay on top of me, his hips pushing into mine, his skin hot from the perpetual sunburn he’d worn since arriving in sun-scorched India. He brushed my hair from my face like he wanted to say something. But he wouldn’t.

  And so I wiggled out from underneath him and wrestled myself on top of his waist, his hands firm on my hips. The flimsy glass lightbulb swayed in the mosquito net and tossed junglelike shadows on the bamboo walls. The hut smelled of salt and sunscreen and incense and sweat and anticipation.

  “I want to say it,” I told him then, hunching my back so that my sea-sprayed hair dusted his bare chest.

  He shook his head with a thin smile. “Don’t do it, gorgeous,” he cautioned playfully.

  I pressed on. “You don’t have to say it back,” I said, fully meaning it. I knew I couldn’t leave the next day without telling him, without him knowing—without me knowing. And so I said it: “I love you.”

  For a moment, everything was effortlessly still and noiseless in a way you can’t describe. This sort of quiet is a rare thing in India.

  “I’m not saying it to guilt you into saying it back,” I rushed on. We already had the timeworn conversation that hundreds of travelers had before us: We spoke of “letting this be whatever it was supposed to be.” We would see what “happened on its own.” We “wouldn’t force it.”

  The whole dialogue was such a backpacker cliché, and there was a small part of me that was worried that we’d never speak again after this—like so many other travelers before us. And so I said those words to him because I never wanted to regret not saying them.

  18

  WHEN I GOT off the phone with Lochlon, I went back upstairs to my room to find a pile of glossy shopping bags amassed on my bed. The bags were the color of my mom’s wheatgrass shakes and said “Harrods” in gold script.

  Resting in front of the bags was a piece of heavy-stock paper regally embossed with Elsbeth Darling’s initials in a haughty serif font.

  Lamb, the note began in elegant cursive.

  I noticed you only came with a backpack, so I took the liberty of grabbing you a few things while I was shopping today. (You know I couldn’t resist.)

  I forgot to mention that there is a party next weekend with Mr. Darling’s colleagues, and we’d like you and the girls to attend. Since I neglected to tell you about the evening events, I thought it only fair that I undertake the shopping.

  Enjoy!

  E.

  I knew better than to get excited. Elsbeth’s generosity was the stuff of legends, but it didn’t come for free. I dumped out the bags one by one, letting the expensive factory-fresh fabrics wrapped in delicate tissue paper pile on the bed like the spoils of war. There was even a small tub of wrinkle cream—Elsbeth!

  My eyes spotted some hot pink satin, and I snatched at it with the sort of speed that even alarmed me. Had Elsbeth actually gotten me something I’d like?

  But the electric magenta was actually the exquisite lining of a conformist black sheath dress designed for a put-together woman ten years my senior. On the high, tasteful neckline, Elsbeth had clipped another note. I could just picture her doing it, thinking she was being so sneaky.

  For the soirée next Friday, she wrote in her private-school penmanship, all graceful loops and privilege.

  Elsbeth was up to her old tricks again.

  When I first started babysitting for her, I was still in high school, and she’d tried her hardest to “improve” me.

  “Why don’t you let me straighten your hair?” she’d prod, running her hand over my voluminous waves to smooth the constant halo of frizz that accompanied each strand. But I never let her.

  “You make everything look stylish,” she would tell me when I showed up in thrift store getups or one-of-a-kind vintage finds, but then she’d leave me piles of her “old” clothes, cardigans from Ralph Lauren and expensive shoes from Brooks Brothers. She always got me tremendously chic Chanel perfume for Christmas, but I never wore any of it. The Chanel perfume made me smell like an old lady (albeit a French old lady).

  I always had the feeling that if I let her change even one little thing about me, it would be an “If you give a mouse a cookie” predicament. You know: “If you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll eventually expect your ATM number.”

  First, she’d want to straighten my hair, then my clothing would go, and before you know it, I’d be a mini-Elsbeth with a rich banker husband living on Park Place and collecting $200 for passing Go. That was all well and
good, but just not me. She didn’t get that.

  I frowned at the note. I knew that now that I lived with her, telling me to wear the dress was not merely a suggestion.

  19

  “SO, WHAT IF I told you I was a South Kensington bird walking around in Harrods frocks all day long?”

  “Who’s Harrod?” asked my mom on the other end of the phone when I finally called her a week later. “Did you already meet a new boy? Are you sure he’s single?”

  It had taken me a while to call my mom with an update on my life, and my stomach sank with guilt when I heard her animated reaction.

  “I just mean I’m quite posh, Mummy,” I explained.

  “Yeah right. I’ll believe it when you part with those Dr. Martens boots.”

  I chortled, picturing the face that Elsbeth always made when I wore them—like she just found a horsefly in her arugula.

  “How’s life in London?” asked my mom.

  “So you know Bridget Jones?” I asked eagerly.

  “Of course,” my mom said. “Single girl figuring out life and love in London!”

  I copied her enthusiasm: “Walking through Piccadilly Circus! Shagging hot Brits!” I stopped short and deadpanned: “Yeah, it’s nothing like that at all.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m kidding. I love it. Gwen and I are already besties again. Yesterday we went to see the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. We invited a girl from her class to come along, too. I’ve been on a mission to get her to open up to her peers, and she seems really receptive to it.”

  “That’s so sweet,” my mom said.

  “Yes, but Mina has been very closed off lately. Something’s up with her.” I thought of her lying about text messaging.

  “Thirteen is a hard age, and she’s in a new country. But you’ll crack her.”

  I went out onto my tiny balcony, wearing only a navy sweater that drooped off one shoulder from years of wear. My mom once told me that the cable-knit sweater belonged to my dad. I wasn’t sure if it was true, but I liked the idea. This was all I had left of him and all I ever really wanted from him.