I laugh so hard that tea comes spurting out my nose.
“What?” Willem asks. “What?”
“The proper sort of mayonnaise,” I say in between gasps of laughter. “It makes me think that there’s, like, a bad-girl mayonnaise who’s slutty and steals, and a good-girl mayonnaise, who is proper and crosses her legs, and my problem is that I’ve never been introduced to the right one.”
“That is exactly correct,” he says. And then he starts laughing too.
We are both cracking up when Melanie trudges into the café car, carrying her stuff, plus my sweater. “I couldn’t find you,” she says sullenly.
“You said to wake you in London.” I look out the window then. The pretty English countryside has given way to the ugly gray outskirts of the city.
Melanie looks over at Willem, and her eyes widen. “You’re not shipwrecked after all,” she says to him.
“No,” he says, but he’s looking at me. “Don’t be mad at Lulu. It’s my fault. I kept her here.”
“Lulu?”
“Yes, short for Louise. It’s my new alter ego, Mel.” I look at her, my eyes imploring her not to give me away. I’m liking being Lulu. I’m not ready to give her up just yet.
Melanie rubs her eyes, like maybe she’s still sleeping. Then she shrugs and slumps into the seat next to Willem. “Fine. Be whoever you want. I’d like to be someone with a new head.”
“She’s new to this hangover thing,” I tell Willem.
“Shut up,” Melanie snaps.
“What, you want me say that ‘it’s old hat for you’?”
“Aren’t you Miss Sassy-pants this morning.”
“Here.” Willem reaches into his backpack for a small white container and shakes out a few white balls into Melanie’s hand. “Put these under your tongue to dissolve. You’ll feel better soon.”
“What is this?” she asks suspiciously.
“It’s herbal.”
“Are you sure it’s not some date-rape drug?”
“Right. Because he wants you to pass out in the middle of the train,” I say.
Willem shows the label to Melanie. “My mother is a naturopathic doctor. She uses these for headaches. I don’t think to rape me.”
“Hey, my father is a doctor too,” I say. Though the opposite of naturopathic. He’s a pulmonologist, Western medicine all the way.
Melanie eyes the pills for a second before finally popping them under her tongue. By the time the train chugs into the station ten minutes later, her headache is better.
By some unspoken agreement, the three of us disembark together: Melanie and I with our overstuffed roller bags, Willem with his compact backpack. We push out onto the platform into the already-hot summer sun and then into the relative cool of Marylebone Station.
“Veronica texted that she’s running late,” Melanie says. “She says to meet her by the WHSmith. Whatever that is.”
“It’s a bookstore,” Willem says, pointing across the interior of the station.
The inside of the station is pretty and redbricked, but I’m disappointed that it’s not one of those grand stations with the clattering destination boards I was hoping for. Instead, there’s just a TV departure monitor. I go over to look at it. The destinations are nowhere that exotic: places like High Wycombe and Banbury, which might be very nice for all I know. It’s silly, really. I’ve just finished up a tour of big European cities—Rome, Florence, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Edinburgh, and now I’m in London again—and for most of it, I was counting the days until we went home. I don’t know why now all of a sudden I should be struck with wanderlust.
“What’s wrong?” Melanie asks me.
“Oh, I was just hoping for one of those big departure boards, like they had at some of the airports.”
“Amsterdam’s Centraal Station has one of those,” Willem says. “I always like to stand in front of it and just imagine I can pick any place and go.”
“Right? Exactly!”
“What’s the matter?” Melanie asks, looking at the TV monitors. “Don’t like the idea of Bicester North?”
“It’s not quite as exciting as Paris,” I say.
“Oh, come on. You’re not still moping about that?” Melanie turns to Willem. “We were supposed to go to Paris after Rome, but the air traffic controllers went on strike and all the flights got canceled, and it was too far to go on the bus. She’s still bummed out about it.”
“They’re always on strike for something in France,” Willem says, nodding his head.
“They subbed Budapest in for Paris,” I say. “And I liked Budapest, but I can’t believe I’m this close to Paris and not going.”
Willem looks at me intently. He twists the tie on his backpack around his finger. “So go,” he says.
“Go where?”
“To Paris.”
“I can’t. It got canceled.”
“So go now.”
“The tour’s over. And anyhow, they’re probably still striking.”
“You can go by train. It takes two hours from London to Paris.” He looks at the big clock on the wall. “You could be in Paris by lunchtime. Much better sandwiches over there, by the way.”
“But, but, I don’t speak French. I don’t have a guidebook. I don’t even have any French money. They use euros there, right?” I’m giving all these reasons as if these are why I can’t go, when in truth, Willem might as well be suggesting I hop a rocket to the moon. I know Europe is small and some people do things like this. But I don’t.
He’s still looking at me, his head tilted slightly to the side.
“It wouldn’t work,” I conclude. “I don’t know Paris at all.”
Willem glances at the clock on the wall. And then, after a beat, he turns to me. “I know Paris.”
My heart starts doing the most ridiculous flippy things, but my ever-rational mind continues to click off all the reasons this won’t work. “I don’t know if I have enough money. How much are the tickets?” I reach into my bag to count my remaining cash. I have some pounds to get me through the weekend, a credit card for emergencies, and a hundred-dollar bill that Mom gave me for absolute emergencies if the credit card wouldn’t work. But this is hardly an emergency. And using the card would alert my parents.
Willem reaches into his pocket, pulls out a fistful of foreign currencies. “Don’t worry about that. It was a good summer.”
I stare at the bills in his hand. Would he really do that? Take me to Paris? Why would he do that?
“We have tickets for Let It Be tomorrow night,” Melanie says, assuming the Voice of Reason. “And we’re leaving on Sunday. And your mom would freak out. Seriously, she’d kill you.”
I look at Willem, but he just shrugs, like he cannot deny the truth to this.
And I’m about to back down, say thanks for the offer, but then it’s like Lulu grabs the wheel, because I turn to Melanie and say, “She can’t kill me if she doesn’t find out.”
Melanie’s scoffs. “Your mom? She’d find out.”
“Not if you covered for me.”
Melanie doesn’t say anything.
“Please. I’ve covered for you plenty on this trip.”
Melanie sighs dramatically. “That was at a pub. Not in an entirely different country.”
“You just criticized me for never doing things like this.”
I have her there. She switches tacks. “How am I supposed to cover when she calls my phone looking for you? Which she’ll do. You know she will.”
Mom had been furious that my cell phone didn’t work over here. We’d been told it would, and when it didn’t, she called the company up in a tizzy, but apparently there was nothing to be done, something about it being the wrong band. It didn’t really matter in the end. She had a copy of our itinerary and knew when to get me in the hotel rooms, and when she couldn’t manage that, she called Melanie’s cell.
“Maybe you could leave your phone off, so it goes to voice mail?” I suggest. I look at Willem, who still has the fistful of cash spilling out of his hand. “Are you sure about this? I thought you were going back to Holland.”
“I thought so too. The winds are maybe blowing me in a different direction.”
I turn to Melanie. It’s on her now. She narrows her green eyes at Willem. “If you rape or murder my friend, I will kill you.”
Willem tsk-tsks. “You Americans are so violent. I’m Dutch. The worst I will do is run her over with a bicycle.”
“While stoned!” Melanie adds.
“Okay, maybe there’s that,” Willem admits. Then he looks at me, and I feel a ripple of something flutter through me. Am I really going to do this?
“So, Lulu? What do you say? You want to go to Paris? For just one day?”
It’s totally crazy. I don’t even know him. And I could get caught. And how much of Paris can you see in just one day? And this could all go disastrously wrong in so many ways. All of that is true. I know it is. But it doesn’t change the fact that I want to go.
So this time, instead of saying no, I try something different.
I say yes.
Three
The Eurostar is a snub-nosed, mud-splattered, yellow train, and by the time we board it, I am sweaty and breathless. Since saying good-bye to Melanie and hastily exchanging plans and info and meeting places for tomorrow, Willem and I have been running. Out of Marylebone. Down the crowded London streets and into the Tube, where I got into some sort of duel with the gates, which refused to open for me three times, then finally did, before snapping shut on my suitcase, sending my Teen Tours! baggage tag flying underneath the automatic ticket machine. “I guess I’m really going rogue now,” I joked to Willem.
At the cavernous St. Pancras station, Willem pointed out the destination boards doing that shuffling thing before hustling us to the Eurostar ticket lines, where he worked his charm on the ticket agent and managed to exchange his ticket home for a ticket to Paris and then used far too many of his pound notes to buy me mine. Then we rushed through the check-in process, showing our passports. For a second, I was worried that Willem would see my passport, which doesn’t belong to Lulu so much as to Allyson—not just Allyson, but fifteen-year-old Allyson in the midst of some acne issues. But he didn’t, and we went downstairs to the futuristic departure lounge just in time to go back upstairs to our train.
It’s only once we sit down in our assigned seats on the train that I catch my breath and realize what I’ve done. I am going to Paris. With a stranger. With this stranger.
I pretend to fuss with my suitcase while I steal looks at him. His face reminds me of one of those outfits that only girls with a certain style can pull off: mismatched pieces that don’t work on their own but somehow all come together. The angles are deep, almost sharp, but his lips are pillowy and red, and there are enough apples in his cheeks to make pie. He looks both old and young; both grizzled and delicate. He’s not good-looking in the way that Brent Harper, who was voted Best Looking in the senior awards, is which is to say predictably so. But I can’t stop looking at him.