Beautiful Americans (2 page)

It’s not like me to stare, but I recognize the stately logo of the Lycée de Monceau on the front of what she is trying to show the French Airways clerk. My eyes widen. Could it be that another student from my program is on the same flight as me?

How thrilling!

I whoop with excitement, eliciting a cranky look from an elderly Frenchman standing next to me in line. Is there another New Yorker attending the Lycée with me? The Programme Americaine at the Lycée de Monceau is one of the most respected and exclusive high school study-abroad programs in the world. Students from all over the United States sign up to go to Paris for a year—an entire
year
—and live in homestays while they study French at a very competitive private school. I barely got in myself, despite having spoken French since I was just a baby. Your whole transcript is considered when you apply, as is your disciplinary record. In my case, let’s just say I was lucky my mom’s a contributing editor at
Luxe
and my being there brings a certain cachet to the student body this year.

I can’t help it—I push past the old guy and rush forward to the counter.
“Excusez-moi!”
the Frenchman protests, but I just giggle in his general direction in response.

“I’m Alex!” I place my hand on the girl’s bony arm, delicate blue veins streaking her translucent skin. “You’re going to the Lycée with me!”

“What?” Her plump lips form a startled “O” as she turns to face me. “Who are you?”

“Alex Nguyen,” I reiterate. “We’re studying abroad together this year! I saw your registration packet from where I was standing in line!”

She looks at the papers in her hand, and then back at me, confused. I notice as I wait for her to react that she needs some concealer in a bad way—the bags under her eyes make her look like she’s been popping amphetamines all night.

She
wouldn’t
. Would she? And I thought
I’d
be the token wild child at the Lycée de Monceau.

“You haven’t been abroad before, have you?” I ask her. She has the that nervous twitch of a newly minted traveler.

“No, I haven’t,” she says. “But that’s not my problem right now. My problem is that I don’t have a reservation and French Airways only has first-class tickets left. And I don’t have enough cash for first class, just coach.”

“There’s one first-class seat left,” the clerk tells me in French. “Coach has been booked for weeks.”

“You haven’t bought a plane ticket to Paris yet?” I ask in disbelief. My mom’s assistant at
Luxe
booked my trip last June.

“Can you fly tomorrow?” the clerk offers. “There’s a middle seat open if you can go on the six pm flight tomorrow night.”

“No, no, no,” the girl says, kicking her backpack in frustration. “I have to go to Paris
tonight
!”

“
Oui, oui, oui
,” says the clerk. “Do you have a credit card? The only way French Airways can accommodate your request to go to Paris tonight is if you buy the last available first class seat.”

“No!” the girl moans.

“Well, then, please step aside so I can help the next
ticketed
passenger.”

“Hold on,” I stop them, glancing down at the wad of cash in the girl’s hand. “I’ll buy her ticket. I have my American Express card. Will that be okay?”

“What are you doing?” the girl asks me.

“You give me the cash you have, and take my seat. I can’t bear coach, anyway. You’re doing me a favor,” I tell her.

“Really?”

“Sure!” I hand the black Amex to the clerk. “So, what’s your name, anyway?”

“Penelope Jane Fletcher,” she says, putting her passport on the counter so that the clerk can type in her name and information. “But you can call me PJ. Why are you doing this for me?”

“Well,” I say with my brightest, most charming smile, looking down at the euros in her hands. “I can always use cash. I forgot to get some before my driver dropped me here. You can pay me for the ticket I just bought for you.”

PJ pushes the money toward me as if she can’t wait to get rid of it. “Here, take it,” she says. “I can’t believe you are doing this for me.”

I’m stoked, but I’m already picking up on the fact that something is not quite right about this girl.

PJ is
precisely
the kind of girl that the program is supposed to weed out, I think as we walk toward Security. The Lycée is for the best of the best young American students, the kind that have summered on the Riviera, the ones that know the Musée d’Orsay like the back of their hand. PJ looks like she’s never been off the ranch.

For one thing, PJ is dressed like an absolute fugitive—dirty, ripped jeans from JC Penney’s and a thin, shrunken black T-shirt with the silk screened words “Live Free or Die” starting to crumble and fade on her chest. As I give her a once-over, I notice that it is more than just her ragamuffin clothes that are making me uncomfortable. Her hands are trembling as she sets a cloth purse onto the conveyor. She keeps looking at her boarding pass like it might not be real.

Unpacking my laptop and all my cosmetics, not to mention taking off my gold filigree hoops and unloading my Blackberry and everything for the metal detector, means PJ is waiting for several minutes by the time the TSA is done with me.

“Listen,” PJ says. “You really helped me out just now. I’m totally grateful. My dad gave me all that cash. . . . I was sure it would be enough.”

“Please,” I guffaw. “Tell me about it. My dad is the same way. He assumes that a stack of hundreds can solve any problem.”

PJ looks at me peculiarly. “Really? Your dad always pays for everything in cash, too?”

“Totally!” I nod. That’s not exactly true, but she seems so embarrassed about not having a credit card that I want to put her at ease. I’m sure my dad has a dozen credit cards, each with an enormous spending limit that I am sure he takes full advantage of. My dad works for the Commonwealth Trust Bank in London, where he oversees all ventures in Southeast Asia. He also comes from old money, since his family was one of the first noble Vietnamese families to get rich off of French trade during the colonial era. Educated at the best schools in France, my dad ended up on Wall Street, then rose the ranks of the City in London, and is now an inspiration for b-school graduates everywhere, with homes, cars, and girlfriends all over the world.

I know my dad’s story like I know Jeremy’s acoustic ditties, but the truth is I barely know him. If it weren’t for the photos of him in the
Wall Street Journal
whenever he makes some massive overseas shipping deal, I wouldn’t even know what he looks like. My mom caught him cheating with our
Quebecoise
nanny when I was about five, and he’s been the invisible man, so to speak, ever since.

“It’s really no problem,” I tell PJ breezily. “You want to take a spin through Duty Free with me before we take off?”

PJ hesitates. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I think I’d rather just go to Starbucks. I need a cup of coffee really badly.” There go her hands again, trembling as she pushes her long blond hair off her face.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll come with you. I could use a picker-upper, too.”

PJ’s blue eyes meet mine. “Alex, I could never repay you for how you swooped in today. In Paris, I am going to try. But right now, can I just be by myself?”

I nearly choke. Is my company that terrible? It’s just a cup of coffee. I know her type: ungrateful, awkward loners. Her beauty clearly does not match her personality.

“Well, okay,” I say, shocked. “I’ll go to Duty Free alone then.”

Three lip-glosses, four packs of gum, and a new Burberry rain hat later, I emerge from Duty Free.

I spot PJ, shivering from the overly air-conditioned terminal in a seat by the gate. I don’t make eye contact, but I’m carefully aware of her, of what she’s doing. Even in her brown, unseasonable wool sweater, she looks elegant and somehow poised despite how she fidgets. Her chilly dismissal of me, how she rejected my friendship before we even got to Paris, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Good thing I bought all that gum.

I’ll outshine the blonde spazz sitting in coach with no credit card. I’ll bet PJ is not even from New York. No New Yorker
I
know would ever wear
Birkenstocks
to Paris.

French Airways is boarding first class passengers to Paris. I line up to swipe my boarding pass and flash my passport at the gate agent. This is it!

This is the end of Jeremy, of New York, of failure. Paris is my chance to start over. And I can hardly wait.

The Dance of Discovery

I
try to get comfortable in my seat at the back of the shuttle as I stare at Madame Cuchon, the director of Progamme Americaine at the Lycée de Monceau. She is
totally
not what I expected from the first actual French person I met. Mme Cuchon is eccentrically dressed in a getup consisting of several layers of Indian-print flowing rayon and pointy, elfish clogs on her large, long feet. She looks more like she belongs in the desert at the Burning Man festival than as the person in charge of one of the most well-respected high school study-abroad programs in the world.

“Do you have kids of your own, Madame Cuchon?” PJ, an ethereal blonde from Vermont, asks her in perfectly accented French. I envy how cool and ungreasy PJ’s skin looks, despite the mugginess of the van. I’m roasting and near passing out from exhaustion. Not to mention, I have motion sickness like I’m on a ride at Disneyland. That and my heart is pounding wildly at the realization that I’m in a foreign country, halfway around the world from California.

Don’t puke, don’t puke.
I take a long drink of water from the liter bottle I bought as soon as my plane landed. I can barely focus on the new world outside the van’s windows—the beautiful, long-dreamed of streets of Paris! Is this nervousness or is Mme Cuchon just a really,
really
bad driver?

Mme Cuchon talks nearly as fast as she drives.

“Do I have kids, you mean, besides the hundreds of Americans who’ve passed through my program at the Lycée?” she chuckles. “No, the antics of
les étudiants
turned me off that notion long ago.”

How Mme Cuchon manages to expertly field our many questions while also weaving a fifteen-passenger van in and out of Paris traffic I will never know. As far as I can see, that’s just Madame Cuchon. She has a voice like a foghorn and must have eyes on the back of her head, hidden by the taut chignon of her bright red hair.

The Lycée van, jerking along the highway from Charles de Gaulle airport, is packed with kids fresh off flights from the U.S. Every time we turn a corner, my stomach lurches.

Sticky with sweat and stale airplane grease, I’m squished between a leggy South Carolinian named Sara-Louise and Mary, who’s from L.A. Mary is almost as short and small as I am, so we’re sharing a seatbelt.

When Mary leans forward to hear Mme Cuchon better, Sara-Louise widens her eyes at the tattoo in the shape of an anchor on the back of Mary’s bare neck, just above the collar of her formfitting black t-shirt. I try not to give away my disgust—the idea of a needle polluting my body with permanent ink is just
too
gross for me to take seriously, even if the design
is
pretty awesome. Sara-Louise, in her pink sundress and blonde Shirley Temple curls, looks absolutely scandalized and
totally
impressed.

“Well, I’ll be darned!” a guy named Zack hollers as he spots the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Zack has the tousled, shaggy haircut and hipster outfit of a shoe-gazing emo rocker, but his Southern drawl gives away his Memphis roots before he can tell us where he is from. Zack is already chummy with Alex, who is from New York. Everyone besides Alex (who can’t be bothered by it) leans forward to try to catch
La Tour Eiffel
before it disappears again behind the skyline. PJ, in the front seat, has her mouth hanging open at the sight of it.

“Wow,” she breathes. It
is
pretty spectacular. Alex looks up at me from the message she is texting on her Blackberry and gives me a generous smile. When she looks at PJ, though, her smile turns into a look of disdain.

Alex and Zack keep rolling their eyes at PJ. I can see why Alex might feel threatened by her—PJ is a dead ringer for Heidi Klum. But it would be stupid for Alex to feel that way—she herself is a total knockout. Alex, with her creamy skin and almond-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes, her bouncy layered black hair and huge boobs, is easily the envy of every girl in this van and surely will be the envy of everyone in our program that we haven’t met yet, too. She also has a killer outfit on. The body-hugging top shows off her great cleavage and small waist to full effect. On her lap is an enormous leather tote bag, which she cradles as lovingly as one might a newborn kitten. On her face are Gucci sunglasses that probably cost more than my entire outfit from American Eagle. I’d been excited about making a good impression when my mom bought me the denim carpenter shorts and the white ruffled sleeveless top, but now I just melt into the crowd. I’m not wearing any makeup, and my hair is pulled back into a simple ponytail to keep it out of my eyes, like always.

Back at the baggage claim at Charles de Gaulle airport, Alex told us as we waited for our bags that she’s been to Paris many, many times. Her dad is French-Vietnamese, and her mom lived here for several years after college. Because of her mom’s magazine job, Alex gets to tag along on trips to Paris all the time.

“Oh, look you guys,” she points out, casually motioning toward some patisserie where she once had a fabulous
coq au vin
with some of the actors from
Amelie
several years ago. “One of the guys told me,” Alex says, “that my French was the best he’d ever heard an American speak.”

“Really?” I gasp, immediately self-conscious of my own French. Besides my ballet teacher back in San Diego, I’ve never even tried speaking French with a real French person. Even our French teacher back home isn’t really French—she’s from Fresno. Alex’s self-confident grasp of Paris is enviable. And I can’t help liking her more and more.