The Disenchantments

by Nina LaCour

He drops all his stuff on Meg’s floor and collapses onto her roommate’s mattress.

  “God, I hope Julia doesn’t arrive till tomorrow,” Meg laughs.

  “What did your boss say?” I ask him.

  “He got all sentimental, said he was losing a damn good tattoo artist.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah. And then he told me to get the fuck out of his shop. Let’s see that tattoo, Meg.”

  She walks toward him.

  He looks, says, “Goddamn, that’s beautiful.”

  I can’t sleep. Again. I think about getting up and wandering the halls for a while but Jasper and I are not supposed to be here and I don’t want to get Meg in trouble.

  I try to turn over without rustling the blankets too much, and then I hear a whisper: “Colby, you awake?”

  “Yeah,” I whisper back.

  “Me too, bro. Can’t get to sleep. I keep thinking about that girl I used to date. The sort-of vegetarian?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “She let me give her this tattoo when we were sixteen. I told her she could pick whatever she wanted and she found this picture of a unicorn and she wanted it on the side of her hip so her mom wouldn’t ever see it. . . . I ran into her on my way out of town. I told her I was leaving. You should have seen her eyes get all wide when I told her where we were going.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I say, and he says yeah, and continues his story.

  Someone else who feels like talking in the middle of the night—it’s pitch black so I’m not afraid to smile at this news.

  “Hey, Jasper,” I say, “when we get to Amsterdam I want you to do something for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want you to give me a tattoo. Of tulips.”

  “Tulips?” he asks. Then he says, “Okay, bro. I guess tulips are cool.”

  I smile up at the ceiling. “You’re not into it.”

  “No,” he says, “it’s fine. People want all kinds of random shit. Tulips are fine.”

  We’re quiet for a minute. Then he says, “Hey, you should sketch me some tulips, you know? Then I can ink your sketch. That could look good.”

  I picture a sketch of tulips, drawn kind of loose in pencil, like I draw pretty much everything.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I like that. Maybe we could do some kind of really faint color. Like most of it is just the black ink but there’s a little color there. Like inside some of the petals and the leaves.”

  “What colors? I mean obviously green, but maybe red? Like a pinkish red?”

  “Yeah, that sounds good.” I know the exact shade from the colored pencils I used all through school. I’ll show Jasper at an art store; we can mix the color to match it.

  “Maybe yellow, too,” I say.

  “Yellow’s tricky. Doesn’t show up that well. We could throw a little orange in there to kick up the tone, though.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I can picture it. It looks so fucking good.”

  “You’re right. I’m getting into it. These are gonna be some badass tulips.”

  “I want it on the inside of my arm, like growing up from my wrist.”

  “It’ll show up good there.” Jasper yawns. “But it’ll hurt.”

  And I know that Jasper is talking about something specific, about needle puncturing skin, over and over, all the way up the inside of my arm. Yes, it will hurt. But it won’t hurt the way leaving will hurt.

  Everything that’s about to happen, everything that has happened in the last few days—it fills me with an ache so vast it takes me forever to compose myself. After some time, I manage to say, “It’s all right if it hurts.”

  I wait for Jasper to respond, but instead I’m met with the quiet of two sleeping bodies breathing, the familiar feeling of being the only one awake.

  Sunday

  I wake up on the dorm room carpet, roll over. Meg smiles a sleepy smile off the edge of her mattress.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” she says.

  At two o’clock the delivery guy comes and with it, my passport. We stand in the downstairs dorm lobby and I rip open the envelope. I show the passport to Jasper and Meg.

  “I guess this means we’re ready,” I say.

  “Shit,” Jasper says. “This is big. We’re really doing this.”

  We go upstairs and pack up until the left side of the room is bare again and everything Jasper and I are going to carry with us on trains and boats and international flights is on our backs and over our shoulders.

  Meg sits cross-legged on her unmade, yellow bed, the photographs from our trip hanging above her. In her closet is the record player from Abbie’s shop, but she hasn’t discovered it yet.

  “Don’t forget I was the first girl you saw almost-naked,” she says. “I don’t want to be overshadowed by the following evening’s events.”

  “Colby,” Jasper says, “sounds like you have a story to tell me.”

  I laugh, but as I’m laughing sadness rises in me. I look at Meg. It feels almost impossible to leave her.

  But just then a girl in a low-cut shirt and jean shorts, a nose ring, and all these bracelets around both wrists, pushes into the room with her bags.

  “Hey, guys,” she says, breathless, dropping her bags to the floor.

  She looks from me, to Jasper, to Meg, pushes a strand of brown hair off her face and smiles.

  “I’m Julia,” she says.

  Meg and Julia exchange the customary greetings, and I remember leaving Walt’s house, wondering if this trip would be characterized by a series of endings. In a way, it has been. But that’s not exactly it. More than that, it’s been a crash-course in living. You get close to people. You get farther from them. You learn how much you love them, and then you say good-bye, believing that you will be together again, someday, when your lives curve back into one another’s.

  Meg wraps her arms around me.

  “What color will your hair be next year?” I ask.

  “You’ll have to come see me in order to find out.”

  “Fair enough,” I tell her, and then Jasper and I are walking down the dorm stairs, and into the sun, and to the bus stop, waiting for the shuttle that will take us to the airport.

  Even though Jasper hasn’t flown since he was five years old, he knows exactly what to do when going through security. He has everything sealed and separated and ready to go.

  “I’ve done my research,” he says, pulling off his Vans, tossing them along with his cap and his belt into the plastic tray to be X-rayed. “I even printed out a Eurostar map. We can check it out on the plane.”

  Portland International Airport is high ceilinged and bright, every surface reflective. As we find our terminal I see us everywhere—in the shop windows, on the silver sides of escalators. We reach our gate and soon after, we’ve walked the long jetway and down the aisle to our seats in the economy section, where we take our seats next to a dark-haired woman in a fuzzy purple sweater, our neighbor for the next nine hours.

  Jasper looks pale.

  “You okay?” I ask him.

  He nods, but then he’s muttering that he’ll be right back, and I watch him as he moves against the current of boarding passengers, on his way to the bathroom.

  “He isn’t used to flying,” I explain to the woman, who smiles kindly, reminds me a little of my mother.

  I open my backpack and find my calendar. Pull it out, flip to June. I crossed off days as we went, and now the X’s look strange. Everything we’ve done, struck through like it’s been accomplished or conquered, when really all we did was drive and talk and eat and kiss and take off our clothes and sing together. I turn to July, and something is written there in Bev’s handwriting.

  I have no idea when she would have looked through my calendar, or why she would have tried to find it. I feel sick for a moment, embarrassed that I filled every day with a sentence about her.

  But the feeling passes.

  There are grooves in the paper from where she pressed so hard with her black pe
n: Please draw pictures of everything so I can see all I missed.

  I read it over, and then I see something else. Right under where my calendar was, near the top of my backpack, is Bev’s Walkman. It feels bulky in my hand when I lift it, and I have to untangle the headphone cord from the drawstring of my hoodie. This will only be a song—I know that—but it matters to me somehow. I want to know what she chose to listen to over and over after everything that happened between us. So, with only minutes until takeoff, with people crowding the aisles on either side of me, trying to cram their possessions into the overhead compartments, I put Bev’s headphones over my ears. I press play.

  Through the headphones comes a shuffle of fabric or footsteps.

  A giggle.

  A hushed voice that asks, Ready?

  Something catches in my chest.

  It’s us.

  Our nine-year-old voices. Singing loudly, in perfect time with one another, with so much confidence it hurts. I lean forward. Close my eyes. Listen.

  Near the end of our song, Jasper appears above me. His face is white and he is grinning. I take the headphones off.

  “Shit, bro,” he says for the twelfth time since last night, “we’re really doing this.”

  And before he’s even made it past the woman and me to his seat, the announcement comes to turn off our electronics. I click stop on the Walkman, tuck it within easy reach, and a flight attendant’s voice informs us that the doors are secured and we are cleared for takeoff.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, thank you to my family. My mother reads every single draft and catches the smallest changes and my dad subscribes to my Google Alerts. These are two tiny details that make them officially the best parents in history. Jules, thank you for the French phrases and your musical knowledge and for being such a great brother. You are my definition of fun. Kristyn, every paragraph in this book contains a reason to thank you. I mean that literally, but it also works as a metaphor for everyday life. So thank you x forever.

  Thank you to my friends who volunteered to be early readers: Jessica Jacobs, Eric Levy, and Nate Davis, and my supportive, insightful writing group: Carly Anne West, Laura Davis, Lizzie Brock, and Teresa Miller. You all gave me much-needed clarity and guidance when I was fumbling through the early drafts. Mia Nolting, thank you for making the title and the days of the week so pretty

  Amanda Krampf: thank you for loving everything I have ever written. Mandy and Eli Harris: thank you for the unwavering support and the many, many celebratory toasts. Vanessa Micale: thank you for choosing to be a farmer so I could put it in my book. Grandmother and Grandfather: thank you for your wisdom and warmth. The LaCours, Gordons, Proctors, Hoveys, Strobles, Ogulnicks, and Blanton-Hubbards: thank you for giving me such a wonderful family. QPs: thank you for being you. I love you all.

  Sara Crowe is the best advocate a writer could ask for. Thank you for your lightning-quick answers to every single question, for egg creams, and for working so hard for my books. Julie Strauss-Gabel possesses the unparalleled gift of asking the right questions. Thank you for asking them of me, and for pushing me beyond what I thought I could do. I am so grateful and honored to work with both of you.

  Thank you to Scottie Bowdich, Liza Kaplan, Anna Jarzab, Emilie Bandy, Lisa Kelly, Bernadette Cruz, Shanta Newlin, Emily Romero, Ashley Fedor, Eileen Kreit, Rosanne Lauer, Theresa Evangelista, Marie Kent, and everyone else at Penguin Young Readers Group for giving me such a good home. I can’t describe how it feels to have such an amazing team of people working to make sure my books reach readers.

  Thank you to Sarah Ruhl for generously allowing me to use lines from her Melancholy Play. Thanks also to Sleater-Kinney, The Runaways, The Supremes, Heart, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, Bon Iver, The National, and Camera Obscura for providing the sound track to the writing of this book.

  Thank you to Maybeck High School for your energy and quirkiness and warmth. To all the readers who have written to me: your letters and emails are the greatest gifts.

  So many friends contributed pieces of themselves to this novel. Thank you for being the beautiful people you are. I’m lucky to have you to inspire me.