“You shouldn’t be traveling with that much cash in the first place.”
Yes, thank you for that helpful tip.
The manager taps the end of his cigarette onto a blackened ashtray between us.
“All of it?” he asks, sounding tired and annoyed.
It’s early; there’s a chance I’m the only reason he’s awake right now, but I don’t feel bad.
I train my voice into sounding calm. “No, not all of it. Like I told your employee, I’m five hundred euros short.”
The manager scratches his patchy beard, unbothered by my discovery. “So you have some left?”
I resist snapping at him. What does it matter if they took some of my money or all of it? I was robbed!
“You sure someone even took it?” he continues, cocking his head and eyeing me likeI’mthe one who shouldn’t be trusted here. “Could have counted wrong.”
Surely he can tell I’m about to explode. At any moment,steam will shoot out of my ears. I know the exact amount of cash that was in my locker last night, and the moment I went to check it again this morning, I knew something was off. I counted the bills immediately and found I was five hundred short.
“I’m sure,” I tell the manager, barely masking my indignation.
He nods, tapping out his cigarette again, and crosses his arms over his chest. “Okay.”
“Okay?!”
He shrugs. “Not much I can do. I’ll warn guests about it.”
“We should file a police report at the very least.”
He smiles as he glances at the clerk, then looks back to me, holding up his hand in invitation. “Be my guest. Theft that small… you’ll be waiting awhile.”
I hate that he’s right. Clearly, the police have a lot more pressing matters to deal with. I’m wasting daylight, precious time I could be using to land a job at Aura. Instead, I sit twiddling my thumbs and flipping through old, yellowed magazines in the hostel’s foyer—avoiding the gaze of the clerk—for two and a half hours before anyone shows up. The manager listens in as I describe the situation to the police officer, and he can barely contain his self-righteous smile when the officer makes it clear I should be glad it wasn’t worse.
“A few hundred euro? Count yourself lucky,” the officer says in thickly accented English, ripping off a carbon copy of his police report so he can hand it to me. “My advice? Find a new hostel.”
I look down at the duffel bag at my feet and nod. “Yeah… planning on it.”
I don’t demand to know how he plans to investigate the theft.Chances are, I won’t like what I hear. There are any number of possibilities for what happened: My roommates saw me input my locker combination and decided they’d skim a little of my money while I was sleeping, or the locker is broken and the hostel staff routinely steal from their guests, or… worse. I shudder.
The moment I leave the hostel, I decide to drop it. I fold up the police report and stuff it into my duffel bag. In a way, the manager and the officer are right. Itcould be worse, but it’s still bad. I have even less wiggle room now. I need to focus. I have to find a place to stay and secure a job by the end of today, and I just wasted the better part of my morning waiting for that officer. I’m hungry, cranky, and also late calling my grandmother. I told her I’d check in today; that was part of her demands about allowing me my summer abroad, so once I buy a cheap but delicious café con leche in a quiet café, I dial her number. She picks up after the third ring.
“Loren Isabel De Vere, it’s half past eleven. I thought we agreed on nine thirty?”
I smile at her comforting accent, a unique amalgamation of Spanish and French from spending equal portions of her life in both countries. “I was busy.”
“Doing what? You’d better have a good explanation. You’re already on thin ice with me.”
My grandmother, Caterina De Vere, is one of the most terrifying women I’ve ever met. Never mind that she’s in her late seventies and occasionally needs the help of a cane to get around; she has a fiery spirit and a lot of attitude, and quite frankly, I think she could take me in a fight. Especially if she had that cane.
Right now, this very minute, I’m supposed to be in Francewith her. That’s been the plan for months. I was going to fly out in early May and spend a long summer with her at her estate in Marseille, but I called her two days before my flight from LAX with my change of plans.
“I’m not coming,” I told her, launching into things right away, scared I’d lose the nerve the longer we spoke.
“What do you mean? Is there an issue with the flight?”
“No issue. I—”
“These airlines have no respect for their customers,” she declared, quickly and staunchly coming to her own wrong conclusions. “Changing flights, delays nonstop. Last month, I was scheduled—”
