“Same, same, but different,” Willem says.
“More like same, same, but same.”
“Next time when you go to Cancún, you can sneak out into the real Mexico,” he suggests. “Tempt fate. See what happens.”
“Maybe,” I allow, just imagining my mom’s response if I suggested a little freelance traveling.
“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico one day,” Willem says. “I’ll bump into you, and we’ll escape into the wilds.”
“You think that would happen? We’d just randomly bump into each other?”
Willem lifts his hands up in the air. “There would have to be another accident. A big one.”
“Oh, so you’re saying that I’m an accident?”
His smile stretches like caramel. “Absolutely.”
I rub my toe against the curb. I think of my Ziploc bags. I think of the color-coded schedule of all my activities that we’ve kept tacked to the fridge since I was, like, eight. I think of my neat files with all my college application materials. Everything ordered. Everything planned. I look at Willem, so the opposite of that, of me, today, also the opposite of that.
“I think that might possibly be one of the most flattering things anyone has ever said to me.” I pause. “I’m not sure what that says about me, though.”
“It says that you haven’t been flattered enough.”
I bow and give a sweeping be-my-guest gesture.
He stops and looks at me, and it’s like his eyes are scanners. I have that same sensation I did on the train earlier, that he’s appraising me, only this time not for looks and black-market value, but for something else.
“I won’t say that you’re pretty, because that dog already did. And I won’t say you’re funny, because you have had me laughing since I met you.”
Evan used to tell me that he and I were “so compatible,” as if being like him was the highest form of praise. Pretty and funny—Willem could stop right there, and it would be enough.
But he doesn’t stop there. “I think you’re the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren’t even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don’t let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.”
He stops then. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out and there’s a lump in my throat and for one small second, I’m scared I’m going to cry.
Because I’d hoped for baubles, trinkets, fizzy things: You have a nice smile. You have pretty legs. You’re sexy.
But what he said . . . I did once turn in forty dollars I found at the food court to mall security. I have cried in every single Jason Bourne movie. As for the last thing he said, I don’t know if it’s true. But I hope more than anything that it is.
“We should get going,” I say, clearing my throat. “If we want to get to the Louvre. How far is it from here?”
“Maybe a few kilometers. But it’s fast by bike.”
“You want me to wave one down?” I joke.
“No, we’ll just get a Vélib’.” Willem looks around and walks toward a stand of gray bicycles. “Have you ever heard of the White Bicycle?” he asks.
I shake my head, and Willem starts explaining how for a brief time in Amsterdam in the 1960s, there used to be white bicycles, and they were free and everywhere. When you wanted a bike, you grabbed one, and when you were done, you left it. But it didn’t work because there weren’t enough bikes, and people stole them. “In Paris, you can borrow a bike for free for a half hour, but you have to lock it back up, or you get charged.”
“Oh, I think I just read they started something like this back home. So, it’s free?”
“All you need is a credit card for the deposit.”
I don’t have a credit card—well, not one that doesn’t link back to my parents’ account, but Willem has his bank card, though he says he isn’t sure if there’s enough. When he runs it through the little keypad, one of the bikes unlocks, but when he tries it again for a second bike, the card is declined. I’m not entirely disappointed. Cycling around Paris, sans helmet, seems vaguely suicidal.
But Willem’s not replacing the bike. He’s wheeling it over to where I’m standing and raising the seat. He looks at me. Then pats the saddle.
“Wait, you want me to ride the bike?”
He nods.
“And you’ll what? Run alongside me?”
“No. I’ll ride you.” His eyebrows shoot up, and I feel myself blush. “On the bike,” he clarifies.
I climb onto the wide seat. Willem steps in front of me. “Where exactly are you going to go?” I ask
“Don’t worry about that. You just get comfortable,” he says, as if it’s possible in the current situation, with his back inches from my face, so close I can feel the heat radiating off of him, so close I can smell the new-clothes aroma of his T-shirt mingling with the light musk of his sweat. He puts one foot on one of the pedals. Then he turns around, an impish grin on his face. “Warn me if you see police. This isn’t quite legal.”
“Wait, what’s not legal?”
But he’s already pushed off. I shut my eyes. This is insane. We’re going to die. And then my parents really will kill me.
A block later, we’re still alive. I squint an eye open. Willem is leaning all the way forward over handlebars, effortlessly standing on the pedals, while I lean back, my legs dangling alongside the rear wheel. I open my other eye, release my clammy grip on the hem of his T-shirt. The marina is well behind us, and we are on a regular street, in a bike lane, cruising along with all the other gray bicycles.
We turn onto a choked street full of construction, half the avenue blocked by scaffolding and blockades, and I’m looking at all the graffiti; the SOS, just like on the T-shirt for that band Sous ou Sur is scrawled there. I’m about to point it out to Willem, but then I turn in the other direction and there’s the Seine. And there’s Paris. Postcard Paris! Paris from French Kiss and from Midnight in Paris and from Charade and every other Paris film I’ve ever seen. I gape at the Seine, which is rippling in the breeze and glimmering in the early-evening sun. Down the expanse of it, I can see a series of arched bridges, draped like expensive bracelets over an elegant wrist. Willem points out Notre Dame Cathedral, just towering there, in the middle of an island in the middle of a river, like it’s nothing. Like it’s any other day, and it’s not the freaking Notre Dame! We pass by another building, a wedding-cake confection that looks like it might house royalty. But, no, it’s just City Hall.
It’s funny how on the tour, we often saw sights like this as we whizzed by on a bus. Ms. Foley would stand at the front of the coach, microphone in hand, and tell us facts about this cathedral or that opera house. Sometimes, we’d stop and go in, but with one or two days per city, most of the time, we drove on by.
I’m driving by them now too. But somehow, it feels different. Like, being here, outside, on the back of this bike, with the wind in my hair and the sounds singing in my ears and the centuries-old cobblestones rattling beneath my butt, I’m not missing anything. On the contrary, I’m inhaling it, consuming it, becoming it.
I’m not sure how to account for the change, for all the changes today. Is it Paris? Is it Lulu? Or is it Willem? Is it his nearness that makes the city so intoxicating or the city that makes his nearness so irresistible?
A loud whistle cuts through my reverie, and the bike comes to an abrupt halt.
“Ride’s over,” Willem says. I hop off, and Willem starts wheeling the bicycle down the street.
A policeman with a thin mustache and a constipated expression comes chasing after us. He starts yelling at Willem, gesticulating, wagging a finger at me. His face is turning a bright red, and when he pulls out his little book and starts pointing to me and Willem, I get nervous. I thought Willem had been joking about the illegal thing.
Then Willem says something to the cop that stops the tirade cold.
The cop starts nattering on, and I don’t understand a word, except I’m pretty sure he says “Shakespeare!” while holding a finger up in an aha motion. Willem nods, and the cop’s tone softens. He still wagging his finger at us, but the little book goes back into his satchel. With a tip of his funny little hat, he walks away.
“Did you just quote Shakespeare to a cop?” I ask.
Willem nods.
I’m not sure what’s crazier: That Willem did that. Or that the cops here know Shakespeare.
“What did you say?”
“La beauté est une enchanteresse, et la bonne foi qui s’expose à ses charmes se dissout en sang,” he says. “It’s from Much Ado About Nothing.”
“What does it mean?”
Willem gives me that look of his, licks his lips, smiles. “You’ll have to look it up.”
We walk along the river and onto a main road full of restaurants, art galleries, and high-end boutiques. Willem parks the bike in a stand, and we take off on foot under a long portico and then make a few more turns into what, at first, seems like it should be a presidential residence or a royal palace, Versailles or something, the buildings are so huge and grand. Then I spot the glass pyramid in the middle of the courtyard, so I know we have arrived at the Louvre.
It’s mobbed. Thousands of people are flooding out of the buildings, like they’re evacuating it, clutching poster tubes and large black-and-white shopping bags. Some are energized, chatty, but many more look shell-shocked, weary, glazed after a day spent ingesting epic portions of Culture! I know that look. The Teen Tours! brochure bragged that it offered “young people the full-on European immersion experience! We’ll expose your teen to a maximum number of cultures in a short period of time, broadening their view of history, language, art, heritage, cuisine.” It was supposed to be enlightening, but it mostly felt exhausting.
So when we discover that the Louvre just closed, I’m actually relieved.
“I’m sorry,” Willem says.
“Oh, I’m not.” I’m not sure if this qualifies as an accident or not, but I’m happy either way.
We do an about-face and cross over a bridge and turn up the other bank of the river. Alongside the embankment there are all kinds of vendors selling books and old magazines, pristine issues of Paris Match with Jackie Kennedy on the cover and old pulp paperbacks with lurid covers, titled in both English and French. There’s one vendor with a bunch of bric-a-brac, old vases, costume jewelry, and in a box on the side, a collection of dusty vintage alarm clocks. I paw through and find a vintage SMI in Bakelite. “Twenty euro,” the kerchiefed saleslady says to me. I try to keep a poker face. Twenty euro is about thirty bucks. The clock is easily worth two hundred dollars.
“Do you want it?” Willem asks.
My mom would go nuts if I brought this home, and she’d never have to know where it was from. The woman winds the clock, to show me that it works, but hearing it tick, I’m reminded of what Jacques said, about time being fluid. I look out at the Seine, which is now glowing pink, reflecting the color of the clouds that are rolling in. I put the clock back in the box.
We head up off the embankment, into the twisty, narrow warren of streets that Willem tells me is the Latin Quarter, where students live. It’s different over here. Not so many grand avenues and boulevards but alley-like lanes, barely wide enough for even the tiny, space-age two-person Smart Cars that are zooming around everywhere. Tiny churches, hidden corners, alleys. It’s a whole different Paris. And just as dazzling.
“Shall we take a drink?” Willem asks.
I nod.
