Beautiful Americans (21 page)

“I just can’t believe George cheated on me, ruined everything we had together,” Alex hiccups, and starts to weep quietly. “Cheating is just so
wrong
. It ruins
lives
. It’s ruined my life
twice.
. . .” I put my arms around her, stroking her tangled hair.

Alex is belligerent, but she’s right. Thomas is a mistake. Cheating
is
so wrong.

I imagine Vince at an UCLA football game this afternoon, hanging out with his new friends, and then leaving the game plenty early to call me before I go to sleep. I think of Vince’s face, his eyes I’ve stared into so many times.

I want to crawl out of my skin I’m so disgusted with myself.

Enough is Enough

“W
hat are you doing?” Alex growls into the phone far too “ early the morning after PJ’s party. “Want to go to brunch?

I need a drink.”

“You sure about that?” I ask. “I distinctly remember you shutting down a certain Miss Penelope Jane’s party after you had a few too many last night. People are going to be talking about last night until they have varicose veins and grey hair. I’ve got to hand it to you.”

“Oh, be quiet. Hey guess what? I just found out that my mom isn’t coming for fashion week. I just got a text from her.”

“Oh, Alex,” I say, my heart going out to her. I know she’s been looking forward to CAB’s impending descent on Paris the way teenage girls used to wait for the Beatles, frothing at the mouth. “Are you okay about it?”

“Of course I am! She’s coming for Christmas now instead. She’s going to spoil me out of my mind. So, Le Pain Quotidien?”

“You got it,” I say, despite my hangover. I pop some Advil and take a long drink from the Nalgene tossed on the floor next to my pants from the night before. “I’ll see you in a few.”

My room used to be a maid’s room when the apartment my host family lives in was built. I like it. The decoration is spare, with lightly striped wallpaper and a simple white quilt spread over the bed. The room is right off the kitchen, and this means that I can sneak from my room through the kitchen, the front hallway and out the door without ever having to go past the living room or the bedrooms—thus majorly cutting down on run-ins with the fam.

It’s not that I don’t like my host family. They’re very sweet and all. But there isn’t much to tell about them. It’s just Romy and Jacques and their two children, Mireille, age ten, and Paul, age twelve, who seems to have an unhealthy codependent relationship with the family’s elderly cat that’s oddly named Kevin.

(After wondering about this for several weeks, I finally asked them where the hell they came up with the name. I found out that Romy was quite the
Home Alone
fan when she adopted the cat right after graduating University. See, I told you. My host family is so uninteresting I can barely bring myself to engage in routine conversations with them.)

I’ve worked out an arrangement with my host family where they allow me to avoid them as much as possible and in return, I clean their kitchen till it sparkles every night after dinner. Once in awhile I even wax the floor.

I meet Alex at Le Pain Quotidien in Le Marais. When I spot her across the crowded restaurant, I see that in spite of the escapades of the night before, Alex is as put together as ever. Considering how drunk she was the last time I saw her, I half expect her to still be swathed in the Alexander McQueen number she’d filched from Mme Marquet’s boudoir, but she’s dressed up hangover-chic in her
own
clothes, ensconced in her dark sunglasses while big gold hoops dangle glamorously from her ears. Her wavy hair is clipped back loosely into a tortoiseshell clip. The outfit, I see when she stands to kiss me hello, is a bell-sleeved black jersey tunic over black stirrup leggings. On her feet are the red stiletto pumps she loves so much. Basically, Alex looks like she stepped out of a movie about people far too dramatic and dishy to still be in high school.

Alex is impatient, neurotic and can be cruel, but she’s absolute royalty and she knows it. Just look at her, scowling contemplatively across the restaurant. How could anyone resist her?

I giddily prepare for the best part of a really wild night out—the postmortem. A good hangover always makes me feel like my youth is being well-spent. Even if I
am
a virgin with one foot still firmly stuck in the closet.

I lift the café au lait she has ordered for me, as if in a toast to last night’s debauchery.

“Those pieces of Texan white trash,” Alex launches in. “They are
the worst
. So unsophisticated.”

“Those matching berets! I declare!” I crow.

“All of it—their outfits, their hair, their voices . . . it’s all so middle-America,” Alex rants. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I shrug. I might be from Memphis, but I know I don’t look like it. At least I hope not. Guys from M-town don’t wear cashmere scarves or skinny jeans like I do. They don’t wear pointy-toed, distressed-calfskin topsiders they found at the Puces de St. Ouen flea market in Paris. They wear muscle tees, and cowboy hats, and other Godforsaken things.

“Give me a break,” Alex says. “If George wants
that
, then God knows we were never meant to be.”

“You said it, girl,” I agree.

We order quiche Lorraine and a fruit and cheese plate. Alex gulps down her sour Bloody Mary between long, thoughtful drags on her cigarette. I’m famished, but Alex leaves her food untouched.

“Except,” Alex says with a pained sigh, “I know that’s not what he really wants.”

“Don’t worry,” I console her. “We have the Lyon field trip coming up. You’ll have a whole weekend to win George back. You can do it.”

“I can, can’t I?” Alex says, brightening.

If anyone can, it’s Alex Nguyen.

 

Friday afternoon, I look up and down the aisle of the train nervously, then back at my watch. 1:59 and Jay is still not here. Our train to Lyon leaves promptly at 2:00pm. Where is he?

“Wait!” I hear someone shout, the voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling of the Gare de Lyon. The brakes underneath us shudder and lift, and ever so slightly, we’re moving forward out of the station. “Hold the train!” the voice yells.

“Look, it’s Jay!” Olivia squeals, pointing out the window next to her. Delighted, she waves as Jay sprints alongside us, a duffel bag bouncing from his shoulder.

The Lycée kids all jump out of their seats and gather around our window, watching to see if Jay will catch up and be able to jump on board. I unlatch the top of the window and push it down as far as it will go.

“You can do it, dude!” Drew yells out the opened crack, jostling Alex as he leans over her. Her face implanted in his armpit, she makes a retching noise.

“Drew, get off of me!” she says with loathing. “You smell like curry.”

“It’s true,” George says, not to anyone in particular. “We did have Indian for lunch.”

“He smells like he bathed in it,” Alex sniffs. “Or like he just didn’t bathe at all.”

Drew ignores them both. “Hurry up, dude!”

The train is speeding up. The conductor, hardly pleased, stands in the opened doorway to the train. He realizes Jay isn’t going to give up and moves aside so that Jay can jump up. Mme Cuchon looks like she might have a heart attack. The entire Programme Americaine collectively holds its breath as we wait to see if he made it.

All of a sudden, the door to the train compartment swings violently open, and Jay’s standing in front of us, dripping sweat and wearing a huge, triumphant smile.

We Americans erupt into wild applause. The Texan twins, cheerleaders since elementary school, actually do a chant that involves a lot of clapping and indecipherable lyrics.

Jay punches the air several times. “Go big or go home!” he shouts. “What
what
!”

“O. M. G.” Alex sputters. “Did you see that?”

“That’s going on my list of top ten Paris moments, for sure,” Olivia says, reaching into her bag and pulling out the little notebook she’s been carrying around lately, writing down all the things about Paris she loves.

Paris moments? That’s going in my top ten
life
moments. I’ve never seen anyone do anything that cool, ever. Jay just went from class nobody to class hero.

Mme Cuchon recovers, but Jay’s antics seem to have aged her about ten years. Their faces hard, she and Mlle Vailland stand up and scowl at us till we shut up.

When Jay makes his way down the aisle, accepting high-fives and congratulations for his killer entrance, Mme Cuchon tells him the seat next to me is the last one available in the block she reserved for the trip. I sit straight up in my chair, thanking my lucky stars.

Jay tosses his knapsack onto the baggage rack above my head. “Hey, man,” he says, flopping down beside me. The sides of his face, right where his sideburns end, are still sweaty. So is his upper lip. Jay wipes his face with the sleeve of his Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt.

“Wow. Hey, man. That was pretty sweet. How’s it going? Excited for the trip to Lyon? Should be fun, huh?” I ask Jay in a flurry.

Alex looks at me quizzically across the sticky table between us. On most school field trips she and I have adopted a strict no-enthusiasm policy unless, of course, they involve Jean-Luc Godard. Lyon is the second-largest city in France, and according to Mlle Vailland, just full of sublime treasures and apparently tragically underrated. It’s about two hours southeast of Paris by high-speed train. But according to Alex, who’s been there several times to visit some old friend of her mom’s, this weekend field trip is not worth going gaga over.

And yet, the idea of sitting next to Jay all the way to Lyon? That’s something I think is utterly worth getting excited about.

“Definitely,” Jay says with a big smile. “I’m just glad I made it. Looked pretty dicey for a minute there.”

“You’re a really fast runner,” I comment, and then cringe. Who am I, superfan???

“Ha! You should see me at soccer practice in our sprinting drills. You run, man?”

I make a face. “Only when I’m being chased.”

Jay guffaws. “That’s a good one. No, man, I’m amped to be getting out of Paris for the weekend. I’ve been looking forward to Lyon for a while now.”

“You don’t like Paris?”

“No, no,” Jay laughs. “I do. Haven’t I told you about my homestay?”

I shake my head.

“Oh, well, let’s just say I live on the literal and figurative opposite end of the spectrum from most of the kids at the Lycée. Ever heard of Montreuil?”

I shake my head again.

Jay leans forward and pulls a Paris metro map out of his back pocket. He points to a stop called Porte de Montreuil, on the far eastern edge of the spidery web of Paris metro lines. With one finger he traces the lines he takes to get to the Lycée every day: three stops on the lime-green #9 line to Nation station, then switch to the cobalt blue #2 line, which makes a half ring around the northern side of the city, through Belleville and along the bottom edge of Montmartre, and over to Ternes and the Parc Monceau, home to the Lycée, as well as the ritzy homestays of PJ, Olivia, George, Drew, and the Texan twins, among others.

“And Alex and I thought we had it rough!” I remark, tracing the lines of our route to show him. It seems long to take the #6 from Cambronne, then to switch to the #2 for a few stops, but in truth I cherish the commute Alex and I take every morning, sipping takeaway coffee from a little shop under the metro tracks, always exchanging a smile as we pass the Eiffel Tower on our right.

Jay’s fingers brush mine as he folds the subway map back up. I inhale sharply, shifting in my seat. It’s almost unbearable, sitting so close to him for so long. Could he have touched me like that on purpose?

“It’s not as rough as I’m making it sound,” Jay says with good humor. “Sammy lives out there too.” Jay nods towards a kid I’ve never even talked to before, a guy I always assumed was too big of a nerd for me to associate myself with. “We’ve had some good times out there, playing video games in the arcade with some of the local kids.”

“Oh, really?” Jay has French friends? Could he
be
any cooler? Alex and I are stuck in our little trifecta with Olivia, and that’s only when she has time to hang out with us. Most of the time it’s just Alex and me, bumming it and gabbing with each other in English about how much we want a boyfriend. No French kids ever talk to us. Why would they?

“Yeah, we’ve met some cool kids,” Jay tells me. “The hood here ain’t that different from the hood back in the States.”

I have to hide how impressed I am. Jay’s so self-assured. If I’d been given his homestay I’d have cried and called my mom to change it. I don’t want to come off as unworldly and sheltered if I let on that I’ve never really known anyone like him—he probably had it a lot harder growing up than I ever did in Germantown, Tennessee. And if Jay is gay, too . . . imagine how hard it might be for him growing up bouncing from town to town with his parents as they search for work. Jay told us in a French oral report that his parents are from Guatemala, and they’ve lived all over—Texas, Chicago, Arizona, and now Minneapolis. He’s had to start over a bunch of times in his life. Maybe that’s why he’s not out yet—he’s never had anyone he could trust to be the first person he told.

“Sucks about PJ, huh?” Jay remarks.

“What about PJ?” I say blankly. I’m too distracted by Jay’s handsome face to recall what he means.

“Oh! You mean how she got kicked off the trip?”

“Well, yeah,” Jay says. “This is like the last hurrah before the Final Comp.”

Jay’s right. As soon as we get back, we’ll just have two weeks to study for the test, finish the Louvre Project, and then go our separate ways for the holiday break.

“Totally sucks that she is going to miss out,” I agree. I feel a tiny stab of remorse when I think about how Alex and I had pressured her into the party. But it wasn’t like she didn’t
want
to. If anything, she should thank us. After that party, she has way more friends than before.