At first, Rae had hated London. She’d missed the warmth of Georgia, and the small clapboard house she and her mom had lived in, and the weekends they’d spent driving down to the beach. Everything about England had seemed so gray to her then—the damp and the fog and the flat, metallic sky.
It seemed like the kind of place where she would never fit in, where she would feel bored and lonely forever. Until two years later, when Aubrey showed up at St. Catherine’s International School. When, halfway through their first homeroom together, Rae caught her rolling her eyes at Sophie French’s insistence that she was going to be cast in the next Harry Potter movie. And Rae had known it then. She’d known that this new girl was her best friend.
Now they walked into St. Pancras together, Rae breathing in the rusty city air and moving her bangs out of her face again to look up at the murky glass ceiling. The station was a cavern of clipping footsteps and humming voices. People moved through it like they were synced to its rhythm, like it was an ocean tide sweeping everyone—including Rae—along with it. She lowered her head and saw Clara leaning against a wall by the Eurostar check-in.
And that’s when Rae’s heart—and her lungs and probably everything else inside her—started to collapse. For a moment, the station quieted. Even the air in her chest went still.
“Your hair!” Aubrey said, and the station roared back to life. Someone stumbled against Rae’s back, forcing her forward.
“When the hell did you do that?” Aubrey asked Clara.
“Does it suck?” Clara walked toward them, pulling her fingers through her hair, now dyed a deep cherry red. “I was thinking about it last night, and I decided I wanted something completely different for art school. But you can tell me if it sucks.”
“It doesn’t suck,” Rae said.
“No,” Aubrey said. “But it is dramatic.”
“Good dramatic,” Rae qualified. “Very Run Lola Run. It makes me want to do something radical with mine.”
“No way!” Aubrey said. “You’ve had the same hair since middle school. You wouldn’t look like Rae anymore.”
Rae snorted under her breath. She didn’t point out that looking the way she did in middle school probably wasn’t a good thing.
Aubrey turned back to Clara. “Did your parents lose it?”
“The doctors were very reasonable,” Clara said. “I think they both get that I’m a free woman now.” She adjusted the waist of her homemade skirt patterned with a map of Europe. She was also wearing a ruffled yellow tank top and a ring on each of her fingers. Everything about her was bright and colorful. Everything about her made Rae’s heart beat faster. “Anyway,” Clara said, “why are we standing around? We’ve got a train to catch.”
They shoved their backpacks through an X-ray machine, and an attendant wearing a blue uniform waved them through a metal detector. Rae took her time removing her bag from the conveyor belt as she told herself over and over that everything was fine. After all, she and Clara were friends; they’d hung out nearly every day since freshman year.
But they’d never spent hours crammed into the same tiny train compartment, or woken up in the same hostel room every morning, or crisscrossed an entire continent side by side. This was all-new territory—this traveling through cities and whisking across borders and falling asleep against each other’s shoulders. Rae had no map for it. She had no idea how to survive this trip while still keeping her biggest secret… a secret.
They reached the departure lounge and spotted Jonah in the far corner, waving them over. “How the hell did I beat you guys here?” he asked. “I never beat Aubrey anywhere.”
“Rae made us late,” Aubrey said.
“That’s true,” Rae said. “I did.”
“You jerk.” Clara dropped her bag onto the ground. “Did you seriously only save us one seat?”
“Nope.” Jonah rubbed one hand over his longish, sandy hair. “I saved Aubrey one seat.” He pulled her down beside him and kissed her quickly on the cheek. Clara groaned and sat on top of her bag while Rae sloughed off hers and did the same. Above them, screens lit up with new departure times and platforms. Clara was playing with the pink plastic ring on her thumb, and Rae noticed a polka-dotted Band-Aid on her index finger. “What happened to your hand?” she asked.
“This?” Clara held it up. “Sewing injury.”
Rae lifted her own ink-stained finger. “I stabbed myself with a pen when I was eight. See? There’s a scar and everything.”
“Being an artist is so badass,” Clara said, grinning. They touched their fingers together, making a jolt run all the way up Rae’s arm. If this had been a normal crush, Rae would have said something flirty then. Or she would have held her hand there for an extra moment. She would have told Clara how impressed she was by her—by her talent and the incredible costumes she was always designing and the prestigious art school she was going to in LA. Rae was planning to major in art as well, but she didn’t breathe it the way Clara did. She wasn’t anywhere near as driven.
And she would have told Clara all of that—if she hadn’t known how gushy and obvious it would sound. Because Clara wasn’t a normal crush. She was one of Rae’s best friends.
Rae pulled her hand back.
“So,” Jonah said, “you guys haven’t heard from Gabe?”
Rae and Aubrey made quick, nervous eye contact. “Nah, dude,” Rae said. “We figured you’d talked to him.”
“Nope.” Jonah yawned. “Didn’t he text you?”
He was addressing this to Aubrey, and Aubrey knew it, because Rae saw her expression freezing with alarm. Rae needed to do something—she needed to think fast. She jumped up, pointing at the screen above them. “THEY ANNOUNCED OUR PLATFORM!”
“Whoa,” Jonah said. “Someone’s excited.”
“It’s the summer before college.” Rae put her hands on her hips. “If I can’t be excited now, I might as well get a full-time job and a mortgage.”
Aubrey shot her a relieved look as they gathered up their stuff and moved through the trundling crowd. Rae scanned the people around them, hoping to notice Gabe’s dark hair or hipster concert T-shirt or the headphones he kept coiled around his neck. But all she could see was Disneyland Paris hats and bleary-eyed adults holding coffee cups and dozens and dozens of rolling suitcases. On the train, she crammed her bag onto an overhead rack and took the seat next to Aubrey. Clara was sitting in front of Jonah, but she turned around and said, “If Gabe doesn’t show, I’m sitting with you.”
“He’ll show,” Jonah said. “And no, you’re not. Your elbows are pointy as fuck.”
“My elbows aren’t pointy.” She bent her arm and stared at one. “Maybe yours are blunt. Let me see.”
Aubrey played with the catch on the tray table in front of her. “What if he’s not coming?” she whispered anxiously.
“Of course he is,” Rae whispered back. “He wouldn’t just bail on us.”
A woman in a paisley summer dress walked down the aisle, her strong perfume filling Rae’s nose. Rae picked at a rip in her jeans and mulled over what to say next. She could go with a traditional maybe he got lost. Or possibly the standard this doesn’t have anything to do with you. But the problem was, she didn’t know if either of those things was true. Gabe could have chickened out. He could have decided that coming here wasn’t worth the probable awkwardness.
And if he did decide that, it was definitely because of Aubrey.
Behind them, the door to their carriage breathed open.
“Holy shit, man!” Jonah stood up. “What took so long?”
Rae turned around. Gabe’s bag hung from one arm, and he looked out of breath, but he also looked like him: St. Vincent T-shirt, headphones, and all. He’d gotten his hair cut recently, so it was shorter on the sides and longer on top. Rae wasn’t attracted to guys, but even she could tell the haircut looked good on him. It looked like it would be nice to touch. Aubrey loosened the catch on the table again, and it bounced open in front of her. She blushed furiously
, pushing it back with both hands.
“My family’s still here from Madrid,” Gabe was saying. “And my sister’s flying back to Barcelona today, so my aunts and uncles wanted pictures. And then my abuela got mad because Zaida’s cheeks started to hurt and she wouldn’t smile anymore.”
Clara absentmindedly braided a few strands of her hair together. “Is your sister going to throw us a party when we’re in Barcelona?”
“No.” Gabe hefted his bag onto the rack. “Why would she do that?”
“Because parties are fun?” Clara said. “Because we’re high school graduates and we deserve a party?”
“You mean you deserve a party?” Jonah said.
“Shut up, Elbows.”
The train exhaled and lurched forward.
Gabe took his seat and stared straight ahead, like he was doing everything in his power not to acknowledge Aubrey. And Aubrey wasn’t looking at him, either—she was scratching at a freckle on her knee; she was picking at her new coat of nail polish. Rae wanted to slither out of her seat. She wanted to tell them both how blatant it was that they were ignoring each other.
Except maybe it wasn’t blatant at all. Maybe it only seemed like that to Rae, because she knew what had happened three weeks ago.
The platform shifted slightly outside the window, making Clara whoop and Jonah clap his hands over his head. Rae felt a small jitter in her stomach. This was it; they were actually on their way.
“Here we go,” she whispered to Aubrey, grasping her hand.
Aubrey squeezed Rae’s hand back, and it reminded Rae of how they used to jump off the high dive together when they were twelve. Of how, when they hit the water, they would try to stay under and hold their breath for the same amount of time. Outside the window, the gray and brown buildings of London started disappearing behind them. Like a sped-up movie reel. Like the world on fast-forward.
3
Aubrey
Friday, July 1
LONDON to PARIS
The train plunged into a tunnel, and their reflections lit up the windows around them. Aubrey’s conversation with Rae had died down, so she put on her headphones and searched for the playlist Rae had made her for graduation, the one Rae had kindly called “Soundtrack to Aubrey Bryce’s Sad, Forever Good-bye.” Yeah. It felt oddly fitting. The fast-paced electronic sounds of Chvrches blasted into Aubrey’s ears, overlapping with the steady chug of the train. The music thrummed with excitement, but also with a strain of angst. A feeling that matched the one in Aubrey’s stomach. The feeling that, at any second, everything could stretch thin and snap apart.
Aubrey turned up the volume.
The train pushed toward the Chunnel, the underwater tunnel that connected England with France. The walls rattled, and Aubrey looked over at her reflection—her slicked-back ponytail and the downturn of her mouth. She saw Rae’s ripped jeans and the pen she was using to drum against her knees. And she saw Gabe, too, sitting across the aisle talking to Jonah. She took in his profile: the slope of his nose and the curve of his chin, his hair falling over his forehead.
Aubrey’s thoughts clouded over with guilt, but she was glad he was here. It meant the idea of being in such close quarters with her didn’t make him want to run away. It meant there was hope that they could be friends again.
She closed her eyes and crossed her arms, slipping deeper into the mesh of music and train. She wondered what her sixth-grade self would have thought if she could have seen this moment. If she could have seen Aubrey at eighteen, starting to do all the things she’d promised herself she would.
Back then, she and Rae used to stay up late, watching their favorite old movies and planning the glamorous adventures they’d have as soon as they grew up. Back then, Aubrey had assumed that she and Rae would go on this trip alone. She’d had no idea that Jonah, Clara, and Gabe would be sitting with them. She hadn’t even met them yet.
That had happened her freshman year, and technically, she’d met Gabe first. They’d both signed up to work backstage crew for the fall play, and by chance, they were assigned to paint the same set together—a smoggy backdrop of a city. Aubrey remembered spending every afternoon in an empty classroom with him, applying layer after layer of gray-blue paint onto a scratchy canvas. They’d talked for hours—about where they’d grown up and how it felt to be living in England. Gabe was from Madrid, but he’d spent most of his life in Rhode Island, where his dad had taught economics at Brown. Now his family was in London so his dad could start another job at University College London.
Aubrey had been sure that her own background story (my dad’s an accountant; I’m from Connecticut) would sound boring compared with his, but he’d seemed to like talking to her. He’d sat with her in Geometry and called her over to his table during lunch to introduce her to his other new friends—Jonah, who was an actor in the play, and Clara, who designed the costumes. When Aubrey mentioned Rae, Clara pointed out that she and Rae took Studio Art together, and everything began to fall into place. Aubrey plus Rae became Aubrey plus Rae plus Gabe plus Jonah plus Clara.
It had stayed that way ever since.
Aubrey must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes again, the train had stopped. A bright bloom of yellow light poured in through the window, and people were walking up and down a platform outside.
“Check it out.” Rae leaned over Aubrey, popping her strawberry gum. “It’s Paris.”
They headed down the platform, pigeons fluttering near the half-circle windows that ran along the station’s main hall. Announcements echoed around them in haughty, musical French.
Jonah walked up beside Aubrey. “It looks like an old movie set or something,” he said, sounding almost reverent.
“If Paris were a person,” Aubrey said, “it would be so elegant.”
“But also kind of a jackass,” he said.
“Paris isn’t a jackass,” Aubrey gasped. “How can you say that?”
“Because,” Jonah said, “it’s aloof and beautiful and arrogant. Total jackass material.”
Aubrey mock-scowled at him. “Fine. Then if you were a city, you would be Paris.”
“And you’d be London,” he said. “Hardworking. Practical. And dull.”
“What the hell? You’re so unromantic!” They walked past a baguette stand at the end of the platform and through a cloud of steam that smelled of hot coffee and warm bread.
“Anyway,” Jonah said, “I wouldn’t be Paris. I’d be New York.”
“Because you’re from there?”
“No.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Because I’m sexy and dangerous.”
She knocked her bag against his as they stepped onto an escalator down to the Metro.
At just after six PM, they got off at their stop and walked through sliding glass doors into a hotel lobby with black-and-white marble floors and crystal chandeliers dripping from the ceilings. Jonah whistled under his breath. This trip was expensive, and for the most part, they were doing the usual interrailing thing and staying in cheap, dingy hostels. But as a graduation present, Aubrey’s parents had reserved them two nights in a hotel—in, apparently, an incredibly fancy hotel.
They checked in and crowded into an elevator that took them to the eighth floor. Their feet padded on lush carpet as they passed sconces glittering on the walls.
“This place is in-fucking-sane,” Rae said. “Aubs. What were your parents thinking?”
“I feel like we shouldn’t be here,” Aubrey said. “Does anyone else feel like we shouldn’t be here?”
“Too late.” Clara grabbed the key from Aubrey’s hand and unlocked their door. She ran inside, pushing back the gauzy curtains to reveal enormous windows that overlooked massive, glitzy buildings. “Everyone come look at this view!”
“And the bathroom!” Rae said. “Guys. Great news. The bathroom is the size of an apartment.”
“What about food?” Jonah crossed the threshold after them. “Did they give you guys any free food?”
Aubrey wa
s about to follow when she heard Gabe say, “Damn, Bryce. You might never get them to leave.”
“Oh.” Her mind went blank. “I guess they have to leave. When we check out.”
There was a weird, empty silence, and Aubrey wished she could think of something else to say. Something that wasn’t about hotel etiquette. Something that would keep this fledgling conversation alive. The dim hallway seemed to grow dimmer. The walls seemed to inch toward them. It all felt so stiff and formal, like they were characters in a Victorian novel. Like they’d never been close at all. Even though, of course, they had been. Only a few weeks ago, they’d been much closer than this—his hands in her hair, their lips touching.
He started to walk away.
“Doesn’t this remind you of Jane Eyre?” she said quickly.
He turned around. “What?”
“Jane Eyre,” she said. Rae and Clara had started playing loud music in the room, but she stepped toward him. She wasn’t giving up yet. “It feels so gothic, doesn’t it? Like we’re all Jane Eyre, and we’re going into this gigantic mansion, and we’re completely unprepared for—”
“Wives in the attic?” Gabe finished for her, the corners of his mouth twitching upward.
“Right!” Hope filled Aubrey’s chest. They were talking now. They were standing across from each other, and they were actually talking. “Wives in the attic. Which—doesn’t make any sense. In terms of my analogy.”
“They kicked me out.” Jonah reappeared next to her. “They told me ‘no boys allowed.’”
“Damn straight!” Clara shouted from inside. “No boys allowed!”
Jonah put his arm around Aubrey’s shoulders, and Gabe’s expression seemed to shut down a little. Aubrey deflated. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, so she shifted away, glancing through the open door. Rae was pulling on a fluffy robe over her clothes, and Clara was clambering onto one of the beds. Jonah let go of Aubrey’s shoulder and said, “We’re going to our room. Meet up with you later?”
The Summer of Us Page 2
