“What happened?” Noor asked.
“Someone grabbed my arm.” I looked around for my attacker, but he’d disappeared.
Martine’s face was worried. “Did you see who it was?”
I shook my head. “He was wearing a hoodie with the hood up.” I tried to remember any more details, but it had happened so fast. Somebody had grabbed me on the street in broad daylight in front of lots of people and tried to drag me away, and I couldn’t even say what the color of his hoodie was. My knees bounced, and adrenaline careened through my body, a few seconds too late to be helpful. “Can we get out of here?” Noor and Martine put me between them and hustled me along the sidewalk to the Métro entrance, through the turnstiles, and onto the platform. They stared around like Secret Service agents as I huddled into myself, still vibrating with fear. They got me onto the train and steered me to the two facing benches in the center of the car.
Besides Mom, Lily and Mina were the only people I’d told about what Cole did to me. After that, they made sure I was never alone with him at meets. They even walked me to rounds, which he hated. When Cole and I won State and he grabbed me in a hug, they swarmed us, looking like they were celebrating, too, but pushing him away from me. And now Martine and Noor were doing much the same thing. Watching. Keeping me safe.
“Are you okay?” Martine asked.
My knees hurt from where I’d hit them on the ground, and the adrenaline was now souring in my stomach. But I hadn’t been hurt, only frightened.
“Shaken up, but I’ll be okay.” I looked down at my hands. “Oh no.”
“What?” Noor asked.
I turned my empty hands up. “I dropped Nick’s pastries.”
Chapter 8
Eleven Weeks Ago
Nick rang our buzzer Saturday night just as I’d finished helping Madame Dupuy with the dinner dishes. He inspected my hiking shoes, which were the most sensible ones I owned, and pronounced them date-ready. It wasn’t yet dusk when we walked up the street toward the Avenue de Suffren and crossed into the Champ de Mars. The Eiffel Tower, illuminated from top to bottom, glowed like a huge lacyAagainst the fading sunset. Tourists crowded the plaza underneath, taking selfies, gazing up at the enormous steel structure, or staring at their phones. Circusy music floated out from a nearby carousel, which glowed with light. A crêpe stand perfumed the air with chocolate and vanilla.
“Have you been to the observation deck yet?” Nick asked. I shook my head. “You’ll love it,” he said, taking my hand and leading me toward the stairs.
“Nick,” I said as we reached the first landing.
“Yes?”
“The grillwork on the stairs is open. I can see straight down. This does not make me feel safe.”
“It’s not supposed to make you feel safe; it’s supposed to make you feel like you’ve reached your goal despite treacherous odds,” he said. When I whimpered, he added, “Do you want to look out over Paris from inside the Eiffel Tower?”
I nodded. I did. I just wanted the stairway to look way less see-through.
“It’s just a few more flights,” he reassured me. “We’re not going all the way to the top. Keep hold of the handrail”—I was gripping it tightly enough to deform it—“and go as slowly as you need to. Don’t look at your feet; look straight ahead. I’m right behind you.” He moved to the step below and put his hand lightly onto my back. “Now take a step.” I did. Behind me, Nick took a step, too. “Another one,” he said. We made it to the observation deck one slow step at a time, Nick at my back, talking me up. Every step felt like a leap of faith, but I trusted him. He’d done this. He knew it was safe. When we arrived and I dared to breathe again, I saw that the floor and balustrades of the deck wereglass. I whimpered even more, imagining myself plunging through and breaking on the ground far, far below as glass shards rained down on me. I pointed down, shaking.
“See-through,” I quavered, grabbing his arm. “Not reassuring.”
He put his hand over mine. “It’s industrial-grade. It’s been here for years, and it hasn’t broken. It’s safe.” Around us,laughing kids were leaning on the glass wall, taking selfies. Nick put his arm around me and stepped me over to it, so, so slowly. I kept my eyes slitted so I couldn’t see too much.
When we reached the clear wall, he said, “Okay, we’re there.” I opened my eyes to a sparkling carpet of lights out of which reared the Montparnasse Tower, three kilometers away. It stuck into the sky, as ugly as a telephone pole. “Excellent view of the city from there,” he said, pointing at it. “But you just get on an elevator. No adventure. No feeling of having conquered gravity.” He smiled at me. “And it has no poetry; it looks like a smokestack. Who wants to see Paris from a smokestack when they can see it from the one-and-only Eiffel Tower?”
Somehow, I’d climbed into a fairy tale. I could hear the carousel’s cheerful music, people calling to one another, the muted rumble of traffic, the occasional shout of a soccer player from one of the impromptu games on the Champ de Mars. Nick got his phone out and took a photo of us. I took one, too, but my hand was shaking with terror and exhilaration, and the shot was blurry. I texted it to Mina and Lily anyway. “The observation deck on the Eiffel Tower is GLASS,” I wrote. “I am TERRIFIED.”
Mina:Is the blur next to you cute upstairs boy?
Me:Yes
Lily:We need better pics!
“What do you think?” Nick asked with a smile.
I shook my head in awe. “This city just—I don’t even have words. And everybody walks around, looking all serious and I-have-to-go-to-work-and-be-an-adult-so-I’ll-ignore-all-the-amazingness. If I lived here, I’d be doing an endless dance of joy and eating all the pastries all the time while standing on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower.”
“You do live here,” Nick said quietly. “And nothing is stopping you from eating all the pastries all the time.”
