“OKAY, I’M JUST telling you, no one in Europe wears jeans.”
“What?”
Lena holds up the pair of boyfriend jeans I spent a full five seconds folding and throws them across the room. “My sister studied abroad in Barcelona, and that’s what she said.”
I twirl the green streak around my finger and stare for a few seconds at the already overstuffed carry-on sitting on my carpet. “Okay, but then what do they wear?”
“I don’t know,” Lena says. “Leggings? Skirts? Probably skirts. Everyone is way fancier over there. If you’re not, like, in heels and a sweater or something, they’ll know you’re a tourist. Or a scarf! People wear scarves in Europe!”
“Well, I don’t have a scarf. What about these?” I hold up my New Balance sneakers. “Should I just not bring gym shoes?” I pass the shoes to Lena. She smells them for absolutely no conceivable reason.
“Do you have, like, nicer gym shoes?”
My knees creak and pop as I stand up from sitting down for so long, trying to fit half a closet into a suitcase twenty inches long (“European airlines have different carry-on restrictions,” Lena told me knowingly).
“How about these?” I extract a pair of Vans from the floor of my closet. They’re still scribbled with pop-punk lyrics I wrote in Sharpie back when everyone in middle school was struck with the collective delusion that that was cool. I wind up like a softball pitcher and throw one as hard as I can at Lena.
“Ow!”
“Oh, shut up, you know that didn’t actually hurt.”
Lena rubs an invisible lump on her arm. “It hurt a little.” She forgets the pain as soon as she notices the writing on the white rubber sole. “Oh my god, ‘You call me up again just to break me like a promise’? What is this, The Script?”
I grab the shoe back and attempt to fit both sneakers along the side of the bag. I manage to get them in, only slightly displacing my raincoat. “You know full well it’s Taylor Swift.” I sing, a little louder than I need to, with mock-angst, over-exaggerated diction: “You call me up again just to break me like a promise. So something something in the name of being honest.”
“‘Casually cruel,’” Lena supplies.
“Ha! I knew you knew it! Don’t pretend you didn’t try to cut your own bangs when you saw Taylor had them.”
Lena slides onto her stomach. “Oh my god, I think Nick cut his own hair last year, because he had the worst haircut in the world. Hold on, I’ll find a picture.” She’s already extracted her phone from her back pocket before I can say a word. She swipes past a few old photos from Nick’s Facebook. I’ve seen them all a dozen times—poorly focused shots of Nick in striped Hollister polos with the promised terrible haircut uneven on his forehead, not quite covering the craters of early teenage acne on his face.
Just as I reach to grab the phone to get a better view, Lena pulls away. “Oh my god, I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I say, and I almost mean it.
“No, you asked me not to talk about him. I’m sorry.”
“It’s been . . .” I think for a moment. “Months.”
Here’s where, in my imagination, Lena turns to me and says something like, “No, I can tell that it still bothers you, and of course it would. Even though you didn’t date Nick that doesn’t mean you didn’t have feelings for him, and as your best friend I should respect that.” Or, ideally, even better: “Oh my god, I forgot to mention, you were so right about Nick. He is a colossal douchenozzle of a human being, a parasitic emotional vampire who makes girls think he cares about them and then moves on when he gets attention from someone else. How did I not see it before? Every girl at NSHS knows now, and no one is going to date him ever again.”
Instead, she rolls over once, checking Twitter on her phone. “Honestly, I totally see exactly what you said about him. Sometimes I ask myself why I still want to date him at all when he can be such an asshole. Like, flirting with other girls in front of me? Sorry, I mean, obviously you know better than anyone.”
I want to shout at her, “If you can see it, then why do you want to date him at all?” But I don’t. I get off the bed and sift through my makeup, trying to figure out what will fit in a Ziploc baggie. It’s my own stupid fault for not saying anything when she asked whether it would be weird if she and Nick hung out together, just once.
“Oh my god, of course not!” I said, doing my best impression of the super chill girl who never had feelings for Nick at all because the two of you were never actually dating.
It’s too late for that. Now I just need to empty my brain completely of Nick and refill it with anxiety about the trip.
“Okay,” I say. “So . . . one pair of jeans—” Lena raises an eyebrow. “Dark wash jeans. One pair of leggings. Two T-shirts, one going-out top. And all the underwear I can fit.”
“So how are you going to get the, um, projects back to your grandpa? Like, are you going to keep them in your suitcase? Or . . . ?”
Shit. I didn’t think this through. “Do you think I should bring stamps? Wait, it’s different in Europe. Fuck, I didn’t think of that.”
One of the caveats of my free trip to Europe is that, in addition to visiting the best museums in each city, I have to complete assignments of Grandpa’s choice and send the resulting pieces back to him. The sealed manila envelopes are still on my desk, each labeled in Grandpa’s all-caps handwriting: PARIS, GHENT, FLORENCE, LONDON. I’m under strict instruction not to open each one until I get to the corresponding city.
Lena spreads out the envelopes like a card shark and fans herself. “Why don’t you ask your mom how he wants you to send them? Or, like, ask her if they have FedEx in Belgium.” She uses the envelopes to make it rain like she’s in a rap music video.
“Ha.” I pick the folders up and file them neatly in the front compartment of my backpack. “We haven’t even spoken in days. It’s like a stranger rented a room in our house on Airbnb.”
“Practice for college, I guess?” Lena says.
“Did you know dorms at RISD are coed? When do you think I should let that tidbit slide into a conversation with my mom about my future?”
“How’s your application going, by the way?” Lena asks. She, of course, being the perfect paradox of a stoner overachiever that she is, has already finished writing personal essays for her first fifteen choices. We’ve been planning for her to go to Brown and for me to go to RISD since eighth grade.
“It’ll be going much better,” I take on an exaggerated French accent, “wheen I zee all oof zee fine art zhat Yuuurupe haz to offer.” I take a drag on an invisible cigarette and twirl a curlicue mustache.
“What’s the place you’re going to called again?”
“Donegal Colony for Young Artists. DCYA. Do I need to make another Post-It note to stick to the back of your phone so you remember?” Maybe it’s all the pot, but Lena has a terrible memory.
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she slides across my bed like it’s the hood of a cop car in an action movie. “IT’S FUN TO STAY AT THE D-C-Y-A! It’s fun to stay at the D-C-Y-A.” She struggles to figure out arm positions that create a convincing D. I refuse to engage. I’m back to packing.
“Are you going to update your Tumblr while you’re gone?” Lena is the first, and possibly only, fangirl for Ophelia in Paradise, the Tumblr where I upload all the cartoons I draw—some of the commissions and some that I’ve just doodled for myself. My own doodles are mostly modern-day versions of characters from books I read. A drawing of Katniss Everdeen representing Team USA in archery at the Olympics got, like, eight hundred thousand reblogs.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I mean, I could, but I figure I’ll be busy with my grandpa’s assignments and with the DCYA stuff.”
“Hey,” Lena says. “You’re not going to have to take a train to the airport, are you?”
I had told Lena how terrible it was getting to my dad’s wedding, going downtown on the Metro in my tight dress and heels. My mom never once offered to drive me. I hadn’t even realized she had declined on the RSVP until the night before.
I pull my favorite set of pencils from the Tupperware under my desk and put it in my backpack, along with the new spiral of drawing paper I bought this morning.
“I don’t think so. I mean, my mom’s at least going to want to say good-bye to her only daughter, right?” When I came home from the wedding, she was already in her bedroom, maybe asleep, and so I didn’t say good night.
It suddenly dawns on me that it’s very possible my mom isn’t driving me to the airport after all. Maybe in our sullen obstinacy over the past few days, we cemented a tacit pact that even though I’m technically allowed to go Europe on her father’s dime, Alice Parker will do absolutely nothing to encourage my behavior. “I need to Google train schedules. Does the train even run that early?”
“What time do you need to leave?”
Before I can answer, my door swings open, revealing my mother: five foot three inches tall, newly minted paralegal, and parental nightmare.
“Did you get home late last night?” she asks, not even bothering to look at Lena, let alone say hi. I give Lena an apologetic look, hoping she’ll forgive me for my mom being so rude. Usually she loves Lena, offering her an endless array of snacks that she’s never offered me and begging for stories about Lena’s little twin brothers.
“Yeah,” I say. “Around two, I think? I took an Uber from the train station.”
“Fifteen dollars or so?” She pulls an androgynous leather wallet out of her purse and extracts two bills, which I stand to take.
“Thanks.”
I wait a minute to see whether she’s going to ask about the wedding. She clears her throat and smooths out the hem of her skirt.
“Your father looked well?” she finally says.
Lena looks at me. “Yeah,” I say. “He looked good.” How am I supposed to respond? He did look well. Happier than I’ve ever seen him, if I’m being completely honest. “His hair got longer.”
My mother opens her mouth slightly and then closes it again without saying anything.
In my head, I play out a scene where I smile and tell her how terrible the halibut was. We’d laugh about how much we hate Arizona and how sad it is that Dad had to go and marry someone who would drag him off to the land of strip malls to be closer to her family. I could say something about how sad I feel about it too, about the hole he’s leaving, like a dry socket where a tooth was removed.
But then I see the way my mom eyes the paint supplies I already packed, and the words dissolve like a Listerine strip on my tongue.
“Wouldn’t you rather use that room in your suitcase for a more practical pair of shoes.” She says it as a statement, not a question.
“Uh, no. I need the art supplies to complete the assignments Grandpa’s having me do in each stop.”
Her frown tightens.
Lena coughs, and my mom and I both look at her. Alice directs her attention back to me with a single sharp turn of her head. “So your flight is at eleven A.M. We’ll leave the house at eight forty-five,” she says. And then she turns to walk down the hall to her bedroom.
“See you in the car,” I call after her. She’s already gone.
Lena and I are quiet for a few minutes as I fold clothes as tightly as I can so that they’ll fit into the unfathomably tiny carry-on that I’ll be living out of. Suddenly, Lena gets off my bed and begins examining the paintings I’ve hung above my desk. They’re portraits, of us mostly, created using only primary colors, with bold lines like a comic book. Even when I’m not drawing cartoons for Tumblr, that’s the style I always seem to fall back on. “God, I love these,” Lena says.
“Oh, gross, no.” I stand, cracking the knuckles of both of my hands out of habit, and walk over to run my finger along the edge of one of the canvases. At the time I painted them, I thought they were so good, like, call the MoMA now and set up a debut for a brilliant young talent! But now, just six months later, I only see flat, sloppy brushstrokes, like a middle-schooler’s paint-by-numbers.
“What if—” I pause, take a breath, and start again. “What if I’m the worst one at the colony? What if they kick me out after the first workshop?”
“Then fuck ’em,” Lena says.
“Thank you,” I say. “Very comforting.”
Lena realizes she made a mistake; her face falls, and she takes half a step backward. “Hey,” she says, sitting on my bed and patting for me to sit next to her. I do. “You’re great, honestly. You’re going to do amazing stuff. You’ll probably be the best artist there by a long shot. And then you’re going to meet some hot Scottish boy and fall madly in love and go off and be an art couple like Frida Kahlo and Geraldo Rivera.”
For the first time all day, I actually feel my facial muscles unclench, and I smile. “Geraldo Rivera?”
“Yeah,” Lena says, a grin making its way across her face. “What? Geraldo Rivera.”
* * *
For the next twelve hours, I tell myself I don’t need to worry about whether my art will be good enough, or how I’ll find a post office to send my paintings to Grandpa, or whether I’ll have to give my mom a kiss and pretend that I’ll miss her when she drops me off at the airport. All I think about is calculating exactly how good the odds are that I’ll meet a Scottish artist named Geraldo Rivera while I’m in Ireland.