We sit and order two cups of coffee. “I’m going to ask the waitress,” my mom says. The hair around her face has begun to frizz into a halo. It reminds me that I probably look like a shaved yeti. I’ve gone without makeup and hair products this entire trip so far, luckily because I’ve also gone more or less without mirrors. But now that I’m almost at the DCYA, I want to start looking somewhat presentable.
“So you didn’t think to look up how to get to your camp in advance?” my mom asks. “What would you be doing right now if I weren’t here?”
“I did look it up,” I say. “I mean, I thought I did. And I’d be fine. Just like we’re going to be fine.” And then I remember the sign at the front of the restaurant.
“Hold on,” I say. “As long as there’s WiFi, let me get the e-mail for the contact person from the program and see if they can help.” My mom might have shilled out the kidney the cell phone companies charge for overseas data on her own phone, but she definitely didn’t for mine. Bet she regrets that now. I scroll through my e-mails and come to the one I remember. “Aha. Evelyn Wray. She’s the woman we’re staying with.”
“Excuse me,” my mother says to the waitress as she brings our coffee. “Which bus do we get on to get to Donegal?”
“Well, you’re in County Donegal,” she answers.
“No, well, yes. I mean the town Donegal?”
“Donegal Town,” I add.
“Aye, well, you’re not far. It’s just down the N56, hop on the 5 bus right down the road here, and pop off a’ the Diamond.”
“We were on the right bus!” I say.
The waitress offers a sympathetic smile. “Tourists?”
“How can you tell?” I answer.
“Thank you. Very much,” my mom says to the waitress, then puts some euros on the table. We go outside to take the next 5 bus that passes by, carefully sitting in the first row behind the driver. To my humiliation, my mother found it necessary to ask the bus driver every single stop whether we were in Donegal Town yet.
* * *
“You must be Nora.” An older woman with brown shoulder-length hair approaches us right when we step off the bus.
“Hi, yes,” I say. “Are you Evelyn?”
Instead of answering, she laughs and gives me a hug. “My husband and I have been hosting DCYA students for a decade now, and it’s always so exciting to meet our newest guest! Come on, up with your suitcases.”
“I’m Alice Parker.” My mother extends her hand. “Thank you so much for letting me stay with you on such short notice.”
“Not a problem at all, dear. Had the extra bedroom, as long as you don’t mind a twin bed. And besides, it’s quite exciting to have the family of Robert Parker here.”
Evelyn loads both of our suitcases into the back of her car. Though she looks to be about sixty years old, she’s surprisingly strong, and faster on her feet than either my mom or me. It might be the travel, or the flight, or the taking the wrong-but-actually-right bus to get here, but we are both fully zombified.
“DCYA is a great place,” Evelyn says, looking in her rearview mirror at me. “If Seamus—that’s my husband, Seamus—and I had ever had kids, this is the type of program I wish they’d been admitted to. We’ve been friends with Declan and Áine for years now—they’re the couple that runs the place, y’know. Brilliant folk. Áine is a professor at Trinity, over in Dublin, and Declan came from Cambridge.”
My mother gives an approving murmur.
We’re in the car for another twenty minutes, at least, Evelyn giving us a rundown on the local hangout spots and the shops that have gone in and out of business in the many years since she’s lived in the north of Ireland.
“Here we are,” she says finally, pulling off a windy road and down a dirt path. The front steps are littered with mismatched galoshes. “You’re going to want to borrow a pair of those if you head out to the farm—I’m sure Maeve or Callum will show you, Nora—if you want to visit the horses. Hello, horses!” She gives a little wave to a few actual horses in a barn deep in their backyard. I want to ask who Maeve and Callum are, but I’m too distracted by the actual, living, breathing livestock in my vicinity.
“Are those . . . your horses?” my mom asks.
“Yeah, ah, but the little one’s hurt ’is knee, poor thing. So no riding this time around, I’m afraid.”
For a farmhouse on the rural coast of Ireland, the inside of Evelyn’s home feels strangely familiar. We pass a washer and dryer, followed by a big kitchen table and living room. Two pictures hang side by side above the stove: a portrait of Pope John Paul II and one of John F. Kennedy.
We reach the stairs, and Evelyn ushers us up to the guest bedrooms.
“Now I know you’re tired from your trip, but trust me, loves: I’m going to prepare a quick tea, you’ll eat up, and then you’ll go to the pub in town. I promise you’ll have the best time.”
“Tonight might not be the best night,” my mom says. “We really are exhausted, and—”
“Pffft!” Evelyn interrupts with a burst of air and flap of her hand. “Trust me. Drop the bags, have a cuppa, and you’ll be good as gold. A little craic never hurt.”
“Crack?” My mother looks back and forth from me to Evelyn while the two of us exchange a glance.
“Craic,” Evelyn says again, slower, trying to emphasize the difference in spelling.
“A-I-C,” I say. “It’s like Irish for ‘fun.’”
“Oh, is Irish the language? I thought it was Gaelic?”
Evelyn answers quickly, “Yeah, one and the same. It’s all Irish. Now set those bags down and come have some food!”
* * *
There are so many people in the pub that I wonder whether Donegal actually counts as the countryside at all—it seems like there are more people in here than there could possibly be in the entire town, in the whole county. For a pub called the Nook, it definitely feels more like a college bar than a sunny breakfast corner. It’s all made of wood, like a tree house, almost vibrating with noise and swollen with the smell of beer and something a little sweet that I can’t quite place.
“Drinking age in Ireland is eighteen, right?” I whisper to my mom as we weave our way through the bodies. I’m still seventeen. What are the odds that some burly Irish bouncer is going to card me and throw me out? I hold my bag closer to my chest while we slide past a group of middle-aged men in soccer jerseys drinking pints.
“I have no idea,” she answers. “Is it eighteen? You shouldn’t be going crazy tonight, right before your program starts.”
“Okay,” I say out of habit, and even though obviously it would have been all “part of the experience” or whatever to get wildly drunk at a pub in Ireland, it’s not really something I need to do, especially because I’m not even much of a drinker at home, and it seems considerably less fun to do with my mom.
“I’ll get us the drinks,” my mom shouts over the blaring rock music.
“I’ll grab a table!” I shout back, wriggling my way past a girl wearing a cheap veil and surrounded by friends with T-shirts that say: HEN PARTY. I find a wooden table with two chairs up against the far wall.
From my relatively quiet vantage point, I watch my mother. She’s wearing gym shoes, yoga pants, and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, looking like she should be leaving an expensive spin class in New York City and absolutely under no circumstances drinking beer with strangers. It’s like the scene from every Lifetime Original Movie where the hectic businesswoman who doesn’t have time to appreciate the Christmas spirit somehow ends up at a homey family event, still wearing her power suit. You know, except for how for some reason all of Lifetime’s movies hinge on the premise that Santa is real. My mom sticks out like a hangnail that you can’t pull at because it just starts hurting more, and it’s honestly kind of hilarious.
I instinctually pull out my sketchpad and begin drawing
the outline of the scene in cartoon form: my mom, all angles in black, surrounded by a mound of rosy strangers.
“Hey,” a voice next to me says. “You’re drawing.”
“Yeah,” I say back. “I am indeed.”
“In a pub.”
“Yeah again.” Once I finish shading my cartoon mom’s left elbow, I turn to find the voice, and I see that I’m face-to-face with a mess of dark curls.
“You brought a book,” I counter, pointing to the thick paperback sticking out of a satchel at his side.
“I have, yeah.” He smiles and his entire face blushes, from his earlobes down his neck. He’s wearing thick-rimmed glasses that cover most of his face, and even though it’s quite warm in the bar, he’s wearing a puffy red jacket.
“That’s quite good!” he says, peeking over my shoulder. He pulls the opposite page from the one I’m working on toward him and flaps it up so he can see both sides. “These aren’t half-bad.”
I don’t know whether I’m supposed to thank him or get angry at him for looking through my notebook without permission, so I do something halfway in between: “Thanks,” I say, tugging the notebook away. It falls closed. I guess that’s what I get for sketching in a bar like an antisocial lunatic.
“Hey, hey!” the boy says, pointing at the stickers on the front of my notebook. Lena bought them for me last year for my birthday; they’re some of the characters I’ve drawn on Tumblr. She ordered an entire box, and I’ve been selling them from my website. Turns out, people like sticker versions of their favorite characters almost as much as they like personalized gay erotic scenes.
The stickers I have on my notebook are Bilbo and Legolas from Lord of the Rings taking a selfie (a commission), and the logo I drew for my site: Ophelia holding up the skull of Yorick instead of Hamlet, both she and the skull wearing sunglasses.
“Lord of the Rings!” he says
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Ha-ha.”
“Do you like them? The books, I mean?” he asks, eager as a puppy dog.
“Actually, I haven’t read them.”
He takes a full step back and playfully slaps me on the arm. “Come on! My mates and I love those books. I forced them all to read them before eleventh year, and we stayed inside for a full summer term getting through the lot. I gotta say, though, I like those stickers better than the movies. What’s that one?” he asks, pointing at the Ophelia sticker.
He talks in paragraphs. It’s exhausting.
“Oh,” I say, and then it slips out without my permission: “That’s the logo for my blog, Ophelia in Paradise. I actually drew them—all the stickers, I mean—myself.”
“Cool!” the boy says, and he grabs the notebook out of my hand to get a closer look. I should definitely be angry now—no one, not even Lena, is allowed to hold my notebook—but I don’t mind. Is this how famous people feel every day? Do famous people get to feel special and interesting everywhere they go? How do I become a permanently famous person?
“I have more,” I say, gently prying the notebook from his hands and opening it up to reveal the pages behind the front cover. “More commissions with Lord of the Rings characters, some from Harry Potter . . .” And then we hit one of Sherlock pressing John Watson up against the wall, John’s face surprised beneath the kiss. “Oh, well, y’know,” I say and shut the book quickly.
“Those are really decent! Mind if I take a picture for the mates? Send it out on the group chat? Hold on.” He texts wildly for a few seconds, then flashes a picture of the stickers on my notebook. “A’ight. Solid. So you’re here for the Deece, right?”
“What?” I say. “No, I mean, I don’t—sorry, what?”
He laughs, and I love the sound of his laugh. It’s a real one, higher in pitch than you’d expect, but just because it’s actually full of joy, filtered through a mouth tightened into a smile.
“Sorry,” he says. “The Deece. The DCYA. The art program.”
Before I’m able to respond, I see Alice Parker—to my surprise, wielding two beers—standing over the boy’s shoulder with a look like, “Who is this tall and semi-handsome Irish stranger that it looks as if you are suddenly on a date with?”
I give a shrug like, “I don’t know, he just sat down and started texting, but he’s kind of cute, right? And hey! He liked my art!” Or, at least, I convey most of that.
“My name is Callum, by the way,” the boy says to me. He doesn’t notice that my mom is standing right behind him.
“That’s my mom,” I respond.
“Oh,” he says. “Hi, I’m Callum.” He scrambles to his feet and extends a hand to her. She is holding two dripping glasses, so she can’t shake back. He realizes this and withdraws his hand. “Right,” he says. “I’m just going to pop over to the bar.” And he slides off.
“Who was that?” My mom raises her eyebrows.
“I don’t know. He just sat down. But he liked my art! I mean, not my real art, just the online stuff.”
“Your stuff is online?”
Shit. How can I backtrack? “No, the stuff I draw of things online, some of my drawings. He just knew the characters from the front of my notebook. On Tumblr.” My answer is so nonsensical that my only hope is that she’ll assume she doesn’t understand it because she doesn’t know how the Internet works. “You know, Instagram,” I add confidently, trying to confuse her as much as possible.
It works.
“He was cute,” my mom says. Hearing your mom talk about boys she thinks are cute is the stuff they should have warned us about in cheesy videos in health class.
“Sort of,” I say. I don’t add “if you like a sexy librarian who played in an emo band in high school and is embarrassed about it but still has better taste in music and books than anyone he knows. You’ve got to like that sort of thing.”
I take a far bigger sip of the dark beer in front of me than I should. The last time I had a beer was the night Nick took me to his basement, which is not a memory I’m looking to relive. Even though I’m across an entire ocean, in a tiny Irish pub—basically as far physically and thematically from the suburbs of Chicago as it gets, really—I still just think of Nick and it causes my insides to shrivel up. I suddenly get the urge to go on Facebook and see the selfie that Lena posted of the two of them lying side by side on her couch. It’s a masochistic urge. Twist a knife in my own stomach, why don’t I.
This beer doesn’t taste anything like that one. That beer was thin and watery, with a tang left from the can it came from. This one is dark and malty. It tastes a little bit like cinnamon and coffee.
“You should go talk to him!” my mother says.
“Who?”
“The boy who was here.”
And so in this distinctly Twilight Zone episode of my life, where my mom is with me, drinking in a pub in the Irish countryside, where a boy I’ve never met before wants to talk to me and likes my drawings, I put my notebook away and go and find the cute stranger to talk to him again.
13
“SO, WHAT BOOK is that?” I ask, finally managing to elbow my way past a half dozen semi-intoxicated Irishmen and squeeze in next to Callum. “I mean, the one in your bag.”
He smiles at me, revealing incisors that are slightly too long, like a vampire or a teen wolf. For whatever reason, I find it ridiculously sexy.
“It’s dumb,” he says. “Silly, I mean.” He pulls out a paperback copy of The Silmarillion so tattered and weather-worn, it looks like it crossed the ocean on a life raft to make its way to Callum.
“So, are you really a big Lord of the Rings fan?” I ask.
“Oh yeah. You at least seen the films?
“Yeah, I’ve seen them,” I lie. By “seen them,” I mean I saw a few minutes of the first one when it was on TV and then turned it off because the old hobbit made a really, really scary face and it was far too late for me to have to deal with that wh
en I closed my eyes that night. I can barely wrap my mind around real history, let alone the entire medieval history of a magical kingdom. I do like Orlando Bloom with blond hair, though.
“So, are you here for the Deece?”
“Yeah,” I answer. “The Deece.” I like the sound of it in my mouth. “You too?”
Callum laughs and puts one of his hands on my shoulder as if to steady himself. “Jesus, no. I mean, I’m actually there plenty because I’ve known Áine and Declan forever, but you should see me try to draw. Nothing like your stuff. I dropped out around stick figures.”
“You live here?” I ask. I’m finding it difficult to wrap my head around the notion that someone could live his entire life in a small town in a corner of an island so far away from everything.
“Well, sort of, yeah. My mum’s in Dublin—I go to school out there, but I spend the summers with my da’ and uncles here.”
“I can’t believe you thought your friends would like my drawings,” I say. Prevent these words from coming out of your mouth, Nora! You don’t want him to think you’re an insane, self-centered American, which, yes, okay, you might be, but let’s go as long as possible without him figuring that out, shall we?
“Ha, I mean, they’re really good! You totally capture the characters. Like something they should put on BuzzFeed or something.”
“Wait, you have BuzzFeed here?”
“Ha! This is Ireland, not, like, Soviet-era Ukraine. They have BuzzFeed everywhere. I remember a mate of mine from last summer—she was also from America—was shocked that I watched Breaking Bad. Like, she didn’t realize we have Netflix.”
I try to focus on Callum’s words, but suddenly, a voice in my head starts nagging me: He’s been at the Deece every year since he was little. He’s seen American girls come and go. You’re no different.
I push the voice away.
“What about you?” Callum asks. “Where you from? And . . . oh, what’s your name? Lord, did I really go this long without asking your name?”
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