Isla and the Happily Ever After Page 2

  I remove my hand, which travels straight to my swollen, throbbing, worse-than-yesterday gums. And then I emit a rather frightening moan.

  “You said he woke you up, and then you left the café,” Kurt says. “That means he paid your bill.”

  “I know. I know.” But I’m scrambling out of bed anyway. I grab my bag, dump it upside down, and shake it frantically.

  “You won’t find it,” he says.

  A well-loved paperback about hiking disasters on Mount Everest thunks against my rug. Pens and lipsticks and quarters shower out and roll away. My wallet. An empty pack of tissues, a pair of sunglasses, a crumpled flyer for a new bagel store. Nothing. I shake it harder. Still nothing. I check my wallet even though I already know what I won’t find: a receipt from the café.

  “Told you,” he says.

  “I have to apologize for being such a lunatic. I have to pay him back.”

  “Pay who back?” Hattie asks.

  My head whips around to find my younger sister appraising me from the doorway. She’s leaning against the frame with crossed arms, but she still looks way too tall. Which she is. Not only did she surpass me in height last year, but she far exceeded me.

  “I know what you did last night,” she says. “I know you snuck out.”

  “I didn’t sneak out. I just left for a few hours.”

  “But Maman and Dad don’t know.”

  I don’t reply, and Hattie smiles. She’s as smug as a house cat. She won’t tell. With information this valuable, she’ll hold on to it until it’s useful. Hattie swipes my wallet from the floor and – staring me down, lording over me with her stupid growth spurt – drops it back into my bag. And then she’s gone.

  I throw the bag at her vacated space and crawl into bed. I wrap both of my arms around one of Kurt’s. “You have to go with me,” I say. “To the café. Tonight.”

  His eyebrows furrow into their familiar V shape. “You think Josh is a regular?”

  “Maybe.” I have no reason to think this. I just want him to be a regular. “Please, I have to explain myself.”

  His shoulders shrug against me. “Then I’ll find the Right Way.”

  Kurt likes routine, and he always likes to know where he’s going ahead of time. He’s obsessed with mapping out the best route to get anywhere…even a café that’s only a few minutes away. He calls these routes the Right Way. The Right Way never involves mass transit, crowded intersections, or streets containing Abercrombie & Fitch-type stores that blast noxious music and/or cologne.

  Cartography has fascinated him since he was six, when he discovered The Times Atlas of the World weighing down one of my older sister’s gluey craft projects. The book became an obsession, and Kurt pored over its pages for years, memorizing names and shapes and distances. When we were young, we’d lie on my floor and draw our own maps. Kurt would make these tidy, detailed, to-scale maps of our neighbourhood while I’d create England-shaped islands with Old English-sounding names. They’d have dense woods and spidery rivers and snowcapped peaks, and I’d surround them with shark triangles and sea-monster arches. It drove Kurt crazy that I wouldn’t draw anything real.

  I’ve known him for ever. Our mothers are also best friends – and they’re both Frenchwomen living in New York – so he’s just…always been around. We went to the same schools in Manhattan, and now we attend the same high school in Paris. He’s thirteen months younger than me, so there was only one year when we were apart – when he was in eighth grade, and I was a freshman. Neither of us likes to think about that year.

  I blow a lock of his scruffy blond hair from my face. “You don’t think…”

  “You’re gonna have to finish that sentence.”

  “It’s just…Josh and I talked. I remember feeling happy. You don’t think it’s possible that last night was…not some embarrassing mishap, but…my way in?”

  He frowns again. “Your way into what?”

  Kurt isn’t good at filling in blanks. And even though he’s always known how I feel about Josh, I still hesitate before saying it aloud. This tiny, flickering hope. “A relationship. Kismet, you know?”

  “Fate doesn’t exist.” He gives me a dismissive huff. “Catalogue last night as another embarrassing mishap. It’s been a while since you’ve had one,” he adds.

  “Almost a year.” I sigh. “Right on schedule.”

  Josh and I have had exactly one meaningful interaction per year, none of which have left me looking desirable. When we were freshmen, Josh saw me reading Joann Sfar in the cafeteria. He was excited to find someone else interested in European comics, so he began asking me this rapid string of questions, but I was too overwhelmed to reply. I could only gape at him in silence. He gave me a weird look and then left.

  When we were sophomores, our English teacher partnered us up for a fake newspaper article. I was so nervous that I couldn’t stop tapping my pen. And then it slipped from my grasp. And then it flew into his forehead.

  When we were juniors, I caught him and his girlfriend making out in an elevator. It wasn’t even at school. It was inside BHV, this massive department store. I bumbled an unintelligible hello, let the doors close, and took the stairs.

  “But,” I persist, “I have a reason to talk to him now. You don’t think there’s any chance that it might lead to something?”

  “Since when is human behaviour reasonable?”

  “Come on.” I widen my eyes like an innocent doe. “Can’t you pretend with me? Even for a second?”

  “I don’t see the point in pretending.”

  “That was a joke,” I explain, because sometimes Kurt needs explanations.

  He scowls at himself in frustration. “Noted.”

  “I dunno.” I burrow against the side of his body. “It’s not logical, and I can’t explain it, but…I think Josh will be there tonight. I think we’ll see him.”

  “Before you ask” – Kurt barges into my new dorm room in Paris, three months later, narrowly missing a run-in with an empty suitcase – “no. I didn’t see him.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask.” Although I was.

  My last ember of hope gutters. Over the summer, it faded and faded until it was barely visible at all. The ghost of a hope. Because Kurt was right, human behaviour isn’t reasonable. Or predictable. Or even satisfying. Josh wasn’t there at midnight, nor was he there the next night. Nor the following day. I checked the café at all hours for two weeks, and my memories of happiness disintegrated as I was faced with reality: I didn’t hear any music. I didn’t feel any rain. I didn’t even see any Abe.

  It was as if that night had never happened.

  I looked for Josh online. I pulled his email address from last year’s school handbook, but when I tried to send a casual/friendly explanation/apology – an email that took four hours to compose – the server informed me that his account was inactive from disuse.

  Then I tried the various social networks. I didn’t get far. I don’t actually have any accounts, because social networking has always felt like a popularity contest. A public record of my own inadequacies. The only thing I found was the same black-and-white, again and again, of Josh standing beside the River Seine, staring sombrely at some fixed point in the distance. I confess I’d seen it before. He’d been using the picture online for months. But it was too pathetic to sign up anywhere just to become his so-called friend.

  So then I did the thing that I swore to myself I would never do: I Googled his home address. The waves of my shame were felt across state lines. But it was in this final step towards stalkerdom that I was led to the information I’d been seeking all along. His father’s website featured a photo of the family exiting an airport terminal in DC. The picture had been taken two days after Kismet, and the caption explained that they’d remain in the capital until autumn. The senator looked stately and content. Rebecca Wasserstein was waving towards the camera, flashing that toothy, political-spouse smile.

  And their only child?

  He trailed behind
them, head down, sketchbook in arm. I clicked on the picture to make it bigger, and my eyes snagged on a blue sticker shaped like America.

  I’m in there. I’m in that sketchbook.

  I never saw his drawing. What would it have revealed about me? About him? I wondered if he ever looked at it. I wondered about it all summer long.

  Kurt jiggles the handle of my new door, shaking me back into France. “This is catching. You need to get it fixed.”

  “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I say.

  He frowns. “That doesn’t make sense. The door you had last year worked fine.”

  “Never mind.” I sigh. Three months is a long time. Any confidence I had in speaking to Josh has crumbled back into shyness and fear. Even if Kurt had just seen him in the hallway, it’s not like I would’ve left my room to speak with him.

  Kurt pushes his body weight against the door, listens for its telltale click, and then flops down beside me on the bed. “Our doors are supposed to lock automatically. I shouldn’t be able to walk in like that.”

  “And yet—”

  “I keep doing it.” He grins.

  “It’s strange, though, right?” My voice is tinged with the same awe that it’s had since our arrival two days ago. “Whose door that used to be?”

  “Statistically unlikely. But not impossible.”

  I have a lifetime’s worth of experience shaking off Kurt’s wonder-killing abilities, so his response doesn’t bother me. Especially because, despite a summer of disappointments and backtracking…

  I, Isla Martin, am now living in Joshua Wasserstein’s last place of residence.

  These were his walls. This was his ceiling. That black grease mark on the skirting board, the one right above the electrical outlet? He probably made that. For the rest of the year, I will have the same view of the same street outside of the same window. I will sit in his chair, bathe in his shower, and sleep in his bed.

  His bed.

  I trace a finger along the stitching of my quilt. It’s an embroidered map of Manhattan. When I’m in Manhattan, I sleep underneath a quilt that’s an embroidered map of Paris. But underneath this blanket and underneath these sheets, there’s a sacred space that once belonged to Josh. He dreamed here. I want this to mean something.

  My door bursts back open.

  “My room is bigger than yours,” Hattie says. “This is like a prison cell.”

  Yeah. I’m gonna have to fix that door.

  “True,” Kurt says, because the rooms in Résidence Lambert are the size of walk-in closets. “But how many roommates were you assigned? Two? Three?”

  This is my sister’s first year attending SOAP – the School of America in Paris. When I was a freshman, our older sister, Gen, was a senior. Now I’m the senior, and Hattie is the freshman. She’ll be living in the underclass dormitory down the street. Students in Grivois have roommates, tons of supervision, and enforced curfews. Here in Lambert, we have our own rooms, one Résidence Director, and significantly more freedom.

  Hattie glowers at Kurt. “At least I don’t have to hide from my roommates.”

  “Don’t be an assrabbit,” he says.

  Last year – when I was in this dorm, and he was still in Grivois – he slept in my bed more often than his own, because he couldn’t get along with his roommates. But I didn’t mind. We’ve been sharing beds since before we could talk. And Kurt and I are strictly friends. There’s none of that he’s-my-best-friend-but-we’re-secretly-in-love bullshit. A relationship with him would feel incestuous.

  Hattie narrows her eyes. “Everyone’s waiting in the lobby for dinner.” She’s referring to both his parents and ours. “Hurry up.” She slams my door. It pops back open, but she’s already gone.

  I haul myself off the bed. “I wish my parents could’ve sent her to boarding school in Belgium. They speak French there, too.”

  Kurt sits up. “That’s a joke, right?”

  It is. It’s important to my parents that my sisters and I receive a portion of our education in France. We’re dual citizens. We all received our early schooling in America, and we’ve all been sent here for high school. It’s our choice where to go next. Gen chose Smith College in Massachusetts. I’m not sure where I want to live, but soon I’ll be applying to both la Sorbonne here in Paris and Columbia back in New York.

  Kurt pulls up the hood of his favourite charcoal-grey sweatshirt, even though it’s warm outside. I grab my room key, and we leave. It takes both of his hands to yank my door closed. “You really do need to talk to Nate about that.” He nods to our Résidence Director’s apartment, only two doors down.

  Okay. So Josh’s old room does have its drawbacks. It’s also located on the ground floor so it’s loud. Extra loud, actually, because it’s also located beside the stairwell.

  “There he is,” Kurt says.

  I assume he means Nate, but I follow his gaze and grind to a halt.

  Him.

  Josh is waiting for the elevator in the lobby. In less than a second, an entire summer of daydreaming and planning and rehearsing explodes into nothingness. I close my eyes to steady myself. I’m dizzy. It physically hurts to look at him. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Of course you can breathe,” Kurt says. “You’re breathing right now.”

  Josh looks alone.

  I mean, he is alone, but…he looks alone. He’s carrying a cloth grocery bag and staring at the elevator, completely detached from the crowd behind him. Kurt drags me towards the lobby. The elevator dings, the door opens, and Josh pushes back its old-fashioned gate. Students and parents bustle in behind him – way too many people for such a small space – and as we pass by, he flinches at being shoved into a corner. But the flinch is just that, one quick moment, before his expression slides back into indifference.

  The crowd jostles and smashes buttons and someone’s dad forces the gate shut, but that’s when an odd thing happens. Josh looks out over the sea of passengers and through the metal cage. And his eyes go from blank to seeing. They see me.

  The elevator door closes.

  Chapter four

  The head of school is finishing up her usual first-day, post-breakfast, welcome-back speech. Kurt and I are in the back of the courtyard, nestled between two trees pruned like giant lollipops. The air smells faintly of iron. The school looms over us, all grey stone and cascading vines and heavy doors. Our classmates loom before us.

  There are twenty-five students per grade here – always one hundred students in total – and it’s difficult to get accepted. You have to have excellent grades, high test scores, and several letters of recommendation. It helps to have connections. Gen got in because Maman knew someone in the administration, I got in because of Gen, and Hattie got in because of me. It’s cliquey like that.

  It’s also expensive. You have to come from money to attend.

  When my father was only nineteen, he built an overdrive pedal called the Cherry Bomb for guitarists. It was red and revolutionary and turned him from the son of a Nebraskan farmer into a very wealthy man. It’s one of the most copied pedals ever, but musicians still pay top dollar for the original. His company’s name is Martintone, and even though he still tinkers with pedals, as an adult he works mainly as a studio engineer.

  “I have one final announcement.” The head’s voice is as poised as her snow-white chignon. She’s American, but she could easily pass for French.

  Kurt studies a map on his phone. “I’ve found a better route to the Treehouse.”

  “Oh, yeah? After all this time?” I’m scanning the courtyard for Josh. Either he slept in or he’s already skipping. I planned my outfit carefully, because it’s the first day in months when I know I’ll see him. My style tends to be rather feminine, and today I’m wearing a dress patterned with tiny Swiss dots. It has a scoop neck and a short hem, both of which help me look taller, but I’ve added a pair of edgy Parisian heels to keep me from looking too innocent or vanilla. I can’t imagine Josh falling for someone v
anilla.

  Not that Josh would ever fall for me.

  But I wouldn’t want to ruin any chance.

  Even though I don’t have a chance.

  But just in case I do.

  Even though I don’t.

  “But I’ll let him tell you in his own words,” the head says, continuing a sentence whose beginning I did not hear. She moves aside, and a short figure with a shaved head steps forward. It’s Nate, our Résidence Director. This is his third year here. He’s also American, but he’s young, working on his doctorate, and known for being lax with the rules yet firm enough to keep us under control. The kind of person that everybody likes.

  “Hey, guys.” Nate shifts as if his own skin were the wrong fit. “It’s come to the faculty’s attention—” He glances at the head and changes his story. “It’s come to my attention that the situation in Lambert got a little out of hand last year. I am, of course, referring to the habit of opposite-sex students hanging out in each other’s rooms. As you know, we have a strict policy—”

  The student body snickers.

  “We have a strict policy that ladies and gentlemen are only allowed to visit each other with their doors propped open.”

  “Isla.” Kurt is annoyed. “You’re not looking at my phone.”

  I shake my head and nudge him to pay attention. This can’t be good.

  “Things will be different this year, upperclassmen. To remind you of the rules—” Nate rubs his head and waits for the gossip to stop. “One. If a member of the opposite sex is in your room, your door must be open. Two. Members of the opposite sex must be gone from your room by nightfall according to the weekday and weekend hours listed in your official school handbook. This means that, three, there will be no spending the night. Are we clear? The consequences to breaking these rules are big, you guys. Detention. Suspension. Expulsion.”

  “So, what, you’ll be doing random room checks?” a senior named Mike shouts.

  “Yes,” Nate says.

  “That’s unconstitutional!” Mike’s sidekick Dave shouts.

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re in France.” Nate steps back into the gathered faculty and shoves his hands into his pockets. He’s clearly aggravated by this new hassle in his life. The crowd breaks as abruptly as his announcement, and everyone is griping as we make our way towards first period.