Beautiful Americans (6 page)

“Thanks,” I say, distracted. What is Jay still doing here?

“Well, I heard you’re an amazing French speaker,” he says, changing the subject.

“Oh, thanks, not really.” Didn’t he say he was on his way to the bathroom?

“You want to study together sometime? Maybe get a coffee or something?” Jay offers. “I saw that you like espresso—you were drinking a bunch of them back there.”

“Sure, sure,” I say. “Listen, is orientation over? I’ve got to talk to Mme Cuchon.”

“Yeah, they were wrapping up when I stepped out.”

Dave had probably just gotten home from the bar he tends when I called. After all, it is 4 A.M. in Vermont right now. I can picture what he was likely wearing, an old T-shirt and a pair of Carhartt workpants. I can picture Dave’s bed, the way he rolled over to his cell phone on the nightstand when it rang, probably hoping it was Annabel, back from the abyss. Instead, he got me, Annabel’s gawky kid sister.

Jay looks at me steadily, nodding his head as if he’s just figured something out, something that he’s been thinking about for awhile.

“Listen, great to meet you, PJ,” he says. “Don’t forget about our study date.” As he walks down the hall toward the bathroom, he looks behind him and grins when he catches me watching him walk away. Rolling my eyes, I can’t help but find him the tiniest bit sweet.

“See you back there,” I say, knowing I should hurry back to befriending Alex, Olivia, and the others before it’s too late.

Alex reminds me a little of Annabel, in some ways. Like the way Alex surprised me by stuffing herself with buttery pastries rather than eschewing the rich food the way you’d think a girl like her might. Annabel had a huge apetite, too. Me, I’ve always been different. I’d forget to eat at all if my mom didn’t tempt me with her homemade scones or fresh vegetables from her garden.

Annabel was a heartbreaking conundrum, for me and for Dave. Impossible to live with, impossible to resist. She does everything big. Her steak was always cooked rare. When she helped my mom bake cookies, she drizzled them with rich dark chocolate and ate them for breakfast. She and Dave used to play their guitars together on the back porch, and her voluminous voice would fill up the whole backyard, all the way to my dad’s work shed. She really did have a beautiful singing voice.

On the day of Annabel’s wedding, we spent all morning curling her hair with my mom’s old barrel curling iron, turning her long dark hair into a pile of ringlets woven with fresh wildflowers on top of her head. I dusted her cheeks with sparkly pink powder and dabbed dewy sheer gloss onto her lips. Her face, usually so similar to my own, was transformed from familiar into angelic.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” I told her when she was all ready.

“I know,” Annabel grinned. “But you’re leaving me, too.”

“It isn’t the same. I’m coming back from Paris in a year. Aren’t you scared?” I asked. She was going to be a real adult now, married, with her own house.

“No, Penny Lane,” she laughed. “I never get scared.”

She had a point there; she never did. Annabel was the first one to go splashing in the creek behind our house every spring as soon as the ice thawed. She always drove just as fast as she pleased, and gave anyone who cut her off on the road the finger and a big smile. When she stepped on a nail, she pulled it right back out and kept running barefoot through the backyard.

She must have run because of my parents, but why then? What happened between our sweet last moments together and when I heard the shriek of car wheels spin over our gravel driveway, the only goodbye I ever got from my sister? By the time we were gathered in the gazebo that my dad built for Dave and Annabel to get married under, Annabel was nowhere to be found. Her car never pulled back into the driveway. She never showed up to her own wedding.

All I had was an old paperback copy of Annabel’s favorite book,
Madame Bovary
, left on my bed in the room we shared, a note inscribed on the title page:

Annabel always was so excited about my big Parisian adventure. I should be, too. I head into the classroom, determined get through this alone.

I’m going to come clean to Mme Cuchon and straighten out my homestay
tout de suite
.

It’s time to make Paris my new life. And turn away from the past for good.

Maybe Now, Maybe Never

“Y
ou and I will grab a drink and then meet everyone else at Odéon,” Alex suggests on Friday afternoon, twirling a strand of black hair around her finger. We’re standing on the steps outside the Lycée, each of us having blown off PE class, Alex to go shopping and me, well, because PE is a massive pain in the butt. Besides, the outfit I have on today, cuffed dark denim jeans, boat shoes, and a white blazer over a navy blue v-neck tee, begs to be taken for a long walk in the Trocadero. I’m headed over to the park after school to people-watch while sitting next to the grand fountain, from which you have the best view of the Eiffel Tower in all of Paris.

“We haven’t even
hung out
yet,” Alex says. “I’ve been wanting to get to know you since we met at the airport. I just love your hair.” She reaches over and tousles my messy, longish dark hair. It’s a new thing I’m doing lately—shaggy chic.

“Thanks! I’ll pick you up,” I offer, laughing. “You’ve been in such high demand that I didn’t know you had time for us riffraff.” I consider asking Alex to join me this afternoon, but I sense that Alex wants to make our time together into an occasion. Rightly so. It’s not every day that a girl like Alex asks you out on a date.

“I’d always have time for you, dear,” Alex says sweetly. “See you at eight tonight. Don’t be late.”

I click my heels together as I walk down the Avenue Kléber, following my map carefully so I won’t get lost. The fact that Alex is so set on hanging out with me is proof that my quest for love might not be as much of an upward battle as I thought. Even if Alex herself isn’t exactly . . . my type.

 

The fabulous Alex lives in the same arrondissement as me, the 15
^th
, I discover that evening when I go to pick her up. I find her host family’s building easily, and in the hazy twilight Alex is leaning over the second floor balcony in a bright pink silk Kimono. She’s furiously pounding a text message into her Blackberry with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. A dark, angry expression clouds her pretty face.

“Yoo-hoo!” I call softly up to her. When Alex sees it’s me, her face lights up.

She spreads her palm. “Five minutes,” she mouths down to me, stubbing out her cigarette and tossing it over the ledge. After a moment, Alex bounds out the front door, wearing a black tube dress and red high heels. Her hair is held back by a wide black headband, and she’s carrying her camel-colored tote bag with the thick braided handle.

“
Comment ça va?
” I ask, kissing her gaily on each heavily rouged cheek.

“
Ça va,
” Alex sighs. She lights up another cigarette. “I need a drink
so
badly,” she tells me, pulling me down the street. “I’m getting hassled by my mom about the most
ridiculous
things—her texts have me all
tense
this evening. She’s giving me
such
a hard time about doing well in school this year—and the school year has barely even started.” Alex is wide open tonight—full of energy and spunk.

We grab a table at the first place we see with outdoor seating in the rollicking area near the famous Odéon Theatre on the Left Bank. Alex stares moonily at the cute waiter until he comes over to take our order. I feel the urge to fan Alex’s cigarette smoke out of my eyes, but I’m afraid of offending her. I’m just wearing a simple army-green long-sleeved T-shirt and slouchy tapered Wesc jeans, but I starched and ironed each so carefully that I’d hate for all the smoke in this café to soak into them so early into the night.

Of course, in Paris, trying to keep the putrid stench of cigarette smoke out of your clothes and your hair would have been like trying to tell Johnny Cash to stop singing sad old songs all the time, or telling my preacher back in Memphis that I’d rather he quieted down when he was praising the Lord every Sunday morning. In this case, as in many others, you just have to let go and let God. And be sure to wash your clothes with a whole lot of strong detergent when you get home.

“Anyway, let’s chat about
toi
,” Alex says, flinging her Blackberry on the table. “Not
moi
. Or my
vache
of a mom,
merci beaucoup
, or my deadbeat ex-
whatever
, Jeremy, back in Brooklyn, or my good-for-nothing dad I haven’t seen since I was a baby, nor any of the other reasons why I’m thrilled to be an ocean away from everyone I know. Let’s just skip my sob story and get onto the good stuff about
you
.” She smiles flirtatiously.

Alex is dramatic. I knew that from the moment we met in the baggage carousel and she swooningly had me carry her suitcases out to Mme Cuchon’s van. I am also getting two other feelings from Alex: Number one, that she likes me as more than a friend, and number two, that some of her brazenness is a show to make her look confident. Don’t get me wrong—I
love
Alex’s shenanigans so far. But her crush has to be put out of its misery. Before it gets embarrassing.

“Do you think that waiter is cute?” I say slyly, hoping she’ll catch on.

“Yeah, I guess,” she says thoughtfully. “Though
très petit
. Too short for me.”

“I think he’s cute,” I say evenly. “He has beautiful skin. What if I give him my number?” I ask with way more confidence than I actually have.
As if I ever would! As if he would even want it.

Alex looks at me for a long moment, figuring out what I am saying. “Sure,” she says. “Yeah. Do it.”

Alex has a look on her face like she has been duped. It’s sweet. She starts to laugh. Just then, things fall into place: Alex realizes that she’s got an instant best friend here, a Will to her Grace, a solid rock for her shaky neuroses, and I am happy to note that Alex is smoother than most of the other girls who’ve ever had crushes on me.

She reaches into that behemoth leather bag and pulls out her hot pink lip-gloss for the tenth time since I picked her up. Watch Alex sometime and you’ll see it’s just a constant series of cigarette, lip-gloss, cigarette, lip-gloss. That and her obsession with gum.

“Dude, you don’t even
have
a number here yet,” she says, “but I’d bet my Blackberry he’d screw you if you went up and asked. Who wouldn’t?”

I stick my tongue out at her. She bears her perfectly even teeth at me wolfishly. Our brief, one-sided romance has officially devolved into the snarky friendship I’d been hoping for.

“Well, then, my dear, darling Zack,” Alex goes on, “tell me more about your wild youth. I’m counting on you for a year of debauchery, and I need to know your credentials.”

“Shhh!” I hiss at her. “Deep down, I’m, well,
you know
,” I say. “But let’s keep that to ourselves for the time being. Only a few other people on the entire planet know besides you and me.”

“You’re kidding,” Alex says disbelievingly. “You’re not out of the closet?”

“Sort of,” I tell her. “I came out to my best friend, Pierson, last year.”

Alex snorts. “Haha, ‘coming out’? Is that what the gays are calling it these days? You and your ‘best friend,’ huh?” She raises her eyebrows suggestively.

“It’s not like that!” I protest with a retch. “Pierson and I have known each other since the dawn of time. We both like guys, but we could never be
together
. It would be like going out with my
brother
. It’s too disgusting to think about.”

“You didn’t even come out to your family?”

“That’s how come I applied to the Lycée. I can’t be myself in Memphis,” I explain. “You can’t hardly flick your wrist without hitting some redneck just ready to exorcise all the gay demons right out of your soul in the little suburb where I live. I come into church on Sunday with this hairstyle, and I can just see my preacher itching to bang his Bible right over my head. I’m ready for Paris to just burn itself all over me.”

“And
this
is where I come in,” Alex galvanizes. “Zack, we were destined to meet, I just know we were. You’re obviously never going to get anywhere in Paris without me to help you; I can see that already. Hold on just one second. . . .”

Alex scans the bar inside through the open windows. “Aha! Excellent.”

“What?”

“Zack, darling,” Alex says, stubbing out her cigarette and lacing her velvety, thin manicured fingers into mine. “You and I are going to make a pact. You want a boyfriend; I want a boyfriend. That’s precisely why both of us came to Paris, and that’s precisely what we are going to find here.”

I can’t help but beam giddily at her. In my wildest hopes before coming to Paris, I never dreamed I’d become friends with someone like Alex so quickly. She gets it. She gets me. I reach out and pinch her cheek to make sure she’s real. She is. Every glamorous inch of her.

Alex squeezes my hand and removes it from her face. “So right now,” she commands, “I want you to finish your drink and follow me over to that table full of total poufs inside.”

I look over. She’s right. In the corner are three young guys—none of them older than probably nineteen or twenty—each of them emanating a very, um,
inviting
quality.

“What?” I cry out in alarm, trying to keep my voice down unsuccessfully. “Alex, no!”

“
Yes
,” Alex insists. “It’s now or never.”

“But what about you?” I say nervously. “None of them could become your boyfriend. What’s in it for you?”

“Oh,” Alex waves her hand. “Don’t you worry about that. I’m already lining something up at the Lycée, and besides—I don’t want a French guy anyways. My mom married a French guy, and look what happened to her.”