“Oh,okay,” I tease, surprised and pleased. “You think you can do better?”
“I do, in fact,” Gabe tells me grandly. “We’re Lars and Heidi von Krinklestein, heirs to the world’s largest ball-bearing fortune. We’re in Paris as emissaries of our mother, the ball-bearing magnate, but we lost our luggage in a terrible private-jet mix-up—”
“Art imitating life, I see.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gabe sayssmoothly, but the wink he sends in my direction gives him away. “Anyway, the shock of losing her priceless souvenir shot-glass collection, which she never leaves home without, sent Heidi into an amnesiac episode—”
“Actually, I think it was Lars’s collection of diamond-encrusted belt buckles that went missing,” I cut in. “His favorite is in the shape of a wedge of Swiss cheese.”
“Oh, is that what it was?” Gabe asks, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “He must have forgotten.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh my God,corny!”
Gabe laughs too, his whole face breaking open. “You missed me,” he says with a shrug, and in this moment I can’t deny that it’s true. I’d forgotten over the last few days, in the fog of sour moods and misunderstandings, how happy it used to make me just to goof around with him.
“Come on,” I say now, shaking my head and smiling. “Let’s find this damn arch once and for all.”
We wander the narrow, winding streets for another twenty minutes, dodging bicyclists and peering up at flower-filled window boxes and breathing in the smell of car exhaust mixed with yeast from the open door of a tiny boulangerie. My sandals are giving me blisters again, but somehow today I can’t bring myself to mind. When we finally turn the corner onto the Champs-Élysées and the Arc comes into view, the victory has me crowing out loud. “Put ’er there,” I order, holding my knuckles out for a fist bump; Gabe, I note with some satisfaction, remembers to explode it this time.
“See?” he says, smiling a little. “It’s not so terrible, spending the day with me.”
That gets my attention. I hurt his feelings this morning, I realize with a sharp pang underneath my breastbone. It hadn’t occurred to me that I still could. “I never said it was going to be terrible!” I protest. Then, reaching out and touching his arm before I can talk myself out of it: “Seriously, Gabe, hey. I neverthoughtit was going to be terrible, either.”
Gabe makes a face at that, skeptical, but at least he doesn’t argue. “Come on,” I continue, nodding across the plaza. “I’ll take your picture so you can prove to Jules you actually made it.”
Turns out he’s in the mood to be a ham about it, mugging like a chimp and even turning a cartwheel right there on the concrete like I haven’t seen him do since we were little kids horsing around on the lawn of his parents’ farmhouse, clusters of fireflies lit up all around us. “Very impressive,” I say once he’s upright again, pink-cheeked and smiling.
“Lars gives good picture,” Gabe agrees, taking his phone back; the tips of our fingers brush as I pass it over, my heart tripping a bit in the moment before I remind myself I’m not noticing things like that. “We should probably take a selfie,” he jokes. “You know, to send to our mother, the ball-bearing magnate.”
I start to laugh, only then he actuallydoesit, leaning in close to me and stretching his arm out. “What—delete that!”I protest, swatting at his shoulder. “I’m making the world’s weirdest face.”
“You know, I don’t think I will, actually,” Gabe says calmly, tucking his phone back into his pocket. “Mummy will love that one, don’t you think?”
I snort, I can’t help it. “Jerk,” I huff, though in the back of my mind it occurs to me I’m not actually all that put out about it.
“So how is she, anyway?” I can’t help asking as we move through the crowds in the plaza. “Jules, I mean. Not Mummy the ball-bearing magnate.”
“Right,” Gabe agrees, laughing. “Jules is good. She’s going to Syracuse in the fall. She took Elizabeth to senior prom, which I thought was pretty cool.”
“That is cool,” I echo, feeling a tiny pang like I always do when I think about Jules my former friend and not Jules my sworn blood enemy. We were circling the world’s most fragile armistice last summer before everything came crashing down again, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have regrets.
“We hung out a lot while I was home, actually,” Gabe continues, “at the shop and whatnot. She’s mellowed out, if you can believe it. She wants to do business stuff too—she’s got all these big ideas, just like you do. I actually think you guys might get along now, hugely improbable as I realize that sounds.”
“I will... take your word for it,” I tell him, unable to hold back a quiet laugh. Still, I’m surprised by how it feelsalmost normal to talk about her, that apparently enough time has passed for me to hear her name without my hands going clammy and my blood pressure spiking like I’m about to have a stroke. “But I’m glad.”
Gabe nods; we’re quiet for a moment, strolling under a leafy canopy of trees. “You can ask about my brother, too, you know,” he tells me. “I can, like,feelyou wondering over there.”
I raise my eyebrows, not entirely sure what he’s getting at. “I mean, definitely not in a romantic way,” I say truthfully.
“No, I know,” Gabe says quickly. “I get it. I think he’s good too, though, in his big-grumbles Patrick way. We’re not close or anything, but he seemed happier this summer, he’s got a bunch of new friends. Maybe only one of us can have an existential crisis at once, I don’t know.”
“And you’re up at bat right now?” I ask, looking at him sidelong.
“Kind of feels that way.” Gabe shrugs. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about him a lot on this trip, kind of. He was always complaining that things came easy to me, right? And it’s not like I ever thought he was wrong, exactly. But I also never thought that I wouldn’t be able to handle it if things got hard.”
“You are handling it, though,” I tell him reflexively. “Gabe, really. I promise things aren’t as bad as you think.”
Gabe shakes his head. “Aren’t they?”
