Nick perched on the edge of the couch, moving his hands up and down his thighs like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. He wore the cornered look of an interviewee who’d forgotten his résumé, and he was dictating a phone number to Madame Dupuy as she typed it into her phone.
“I’m ready,” I said brightly, and Nick looked up, relieved. Madame Dupuy raised an eyebrow at me, and nowIfelt like the one who’d forgotten her résumé. I repeated myself in French. She nodded and got up, satisfied with my pronunciation for once, as well as the fact that I’d remembered to use the feminine form of “ready.” She told us to have a good time, glaring at Nick to implyBut nottoogood a time, and we left as quickly as we could without actually running.
“Wow,” Nick said as we waited for the elevator. “Your housekeeper is really old-school.”
I nodded. “She’s a little scary. She’s been nice to me, though.”
“She made me give her my number, tell her both my parents’ names, their cell numbers, where they worked, and their work numbers. I thought she might ask to see my passport next.”
“I think she takes her job seriously.” We got off the elevator and crossed the lobby.
“Ithink she used to work for the French secret police. She’s probably calling an old colleague right now, asking them to run a background check on me.” He held the door open for me, and we started toward the Métro station. I laughed at the thought of Madame Dupuy as a spy. She didn’t look like someone with a secret identity.
“Is there anything special you’d like to see when we get to the Louvre?”
“TheMona Lisa,” I said immediately. He groaned like I’d just tightened the thumbscrews.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s…kind of meh. She looks like she’s listening to a geometry lecture. Take my advice and don’t bother.”
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and put my hands on my hips. “I don’t care. I’ve never lived in a city with a must-see painting before. I promised my friends I’d send them a selfie with it. Plus, I have to spend the rest of the summer conjugating the subjunctive plus-que-parfait, so you have to treat me nice today and do what I say.”
He stroked his chin, pretending to think it over. “Okay, but then you have to let me show you the stuff that’s worth seeing.”
I nodded. “Sure. But first, theMona Lisa.”
He sighed. “Yes, mademoiselle.”
I’d just gotten my Navigo card so I didn’t have to keep buying Métro tickets, and I was super excited when I passed it over the scanner at the station and the gates opened and let me through. I waved it at Nick. “It worked!” He smiled at my enthusiasm and scanned himself through like it was nota thing at all. We climbed the stairs to the platform, whose walls were covered in giant ads for Galeries Lafayette, Club Med vacations, and mobile phone companies. Across the tracks on the opposite wall, somebody’d graffitied a pigeon riding a skateboard onto a Visit the Parthenon travel poster.
“I love that pigeon,” I said, pointing.
“That’s new,” Nick said. “I know the guy who did it.”
“Really?” I was impressed. The pigeon looked so alive that I started to imagine a life for it—where it hung out and what its favorite sandwich was and how it lived with its grandma and dreamed of competing in the X Games.
“Yeah. He’s kind of a friend. Nice that he’s doing new work; I haven’t seen him around for a while.”
“Wow, you have impressive friends.” The train pulled in, and we got on, settling into seats near the doors.
Part of the Métro line in our neighborhood ran on elevated tracks. As we rode above Boulevard de Grenelle toward the river, we got a wonderful view of belle epoque apartment buildings decorated with carved-stone flowers. Every building had a different pattern of wrought iron railing for the windows and tiny balconies, some sinuous and viny, some geometric. Planters filled with trailing geraniums hung from their railings, adding splashes of red, orange, and lavender to the tawny limestone buildings.
We had to change lines to get to the Louvre, which I hadn’t done before. “Just remember the end point of the line you want to be on,” Nick explained, “and follow the signs. It’s easy.”
I stuck close to him, though, because I had no idea wherewe were going in the bewildering maze of hallways crammed with people. I dodged a woman headed straight at me, and we got separated, the stream of people pushing me farther and farther away. I could see him, parting the crowd as he went, but the mass of people flooding between us wouldn’t let me close the gap. I was afraid I’d lose him and be stuck down there forever. He finally noticed I wasn’t beside him and scanned the corridor, but short people in crowds equals invisible. He didn’t see me, so he stopped. People flowed around him like a river flows around a boulder. I thought for the billionth time that it must be nice to be tall. Battling my way to him, I said, “Sorry I lost you, but people kept trying to run me down. Is walking a contact sport here?”
He smiled. “If you don’t yield to them, mademoiselle, they’ll get out of your way.”
“It’s just, I have this super-big personal bubble, and I don’t like people getting in it uninvited.” Cole was always doing that, standing so close he almost touched me. If I moved away, he’d just move closer. I shivered and reminded myself that he was in Portland, and I was here.
I turned my attention back to Nick, who was nodding. “I get that. When we first moved here, I hated how people get right into your space, and they’re like, ‘Excuseyou.’ What you do is, you think of your bubble as impenetrable and use it like a tank. Aim it straight at people, and they’ll go around.”
That seemed unlikely, but then I remembered how our debate coach had told us to stand when we were debating. Straight. With our shoulders back and our feet apart. “Take up space,” he’d told us, practice after practice. “People whotake up space are intimidating. Intimidating debaters win.” He said it so often that Cole turned it into a joke. “You’re taking up too much space,” he’d say when I’d pause outside our round to make sure I was standing straight and had my shoulders pulled back. It worked, though. At one meet, Lily told me about overhearing one of the guys from Eugene talking about this scary Portland debater and realizing they were describing me.
I looked at Nick and put my shoulders back, spaced my feet apart, and stood straighter.
“Nice,” he said. “You look badass. Now, the next person who comes at you, aim your bubble-tank straight at them and imagine flattening them. Ready?” I took a breath, then nodded.
