No One Knows Us Here(65)

All this came to me in the space between breaths. When I did inhale, it sounded like a gasp.

“Why would you be with someone like him?” Sam was asking me. “Money?” I shook my head, but he went on as if I hadn’t responded at all. “Whatever it was, you could have just been honest about it—”

I stepped back, and his hand fell from my shoulder, the spell broken. I laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“Just give me one logical reason why you’d be with Leo Glass of all people, and I’ll shut up about this.”

“So you’re saying I’m so desperate for money, right?” I managed to deliver this line in the most disdainful tone possible, despite the fact that he had guessed everything exactly right. “But I should have just told you about it. You. A one-night stand. A guy who lives for free in his aunt’s apartment.”

Sam didn’t flinch. “I could have helped you.”

“Why? Why on earth would you do that?”

“It wasn’t just a one-night stand,” he said. “That’s not what that was.”

“It was for me,” I lied, but I couldn’t look at him while I said it. I told him he had better go, let me finish packing.

For a moment, he didn’t respond. He just stood there, assessing me, like he was planning his next cutting line, some barb that would change my mind, that would change everything. I stood there, too, my hands on my hips. Finally Sam shook his head. “Well, have a great trip,” he said at last, in a monotone. “Bon voyage.”





CHAPTER 20


France didn’t agree with me. It started before we even arrived. As soon as the jet lifted up over the Seattle airport, a pressure built up inside my head, so sudden and alarming that I had to squeeze my eyes shut and breathe my way through it, gripping the armrests. The cabin trembled and the engines roared, and the pain swelled so intensely that I couldn’t believe everyone else wasn’t experiencing it, too. Maybe something was wrong with the plane; maybe they’d gotten the cabin pressure all wrong and we were going to die. They would drop the oxygen masks, and we would struggle to suck air into our lungs, but then it would be too late and the whole thing would burst with us inside and we would splinter off, spin through the air, break into millions of pieces—luggage and flotation devices and plastic cups and airline magazines and us, too, human parts. We’d rain over everything, fall onto earth, unrecognizable. Dust.

That was how bad it felt, like impending death, and I unscrewed my eyes to see how the others were taking it. I expected to see everyone holding their heads, crying out in misery, telling their loved ones this is it, I love you, goodbye.

No one was doing any of those things. The woman across the aisle was taking a sip of the complimentary champagne they’d poured us before takeoff. The couple in front of her were thumbing through a book, reading it in tandem, agreeing with a nod when to turn the page.

And Leo, next to me, was chewing gum. “What’s wrong?” he asked, observing me with both hands to my temples, as if I were holding the pieces of my face together. I could smell the peppermint on his breath.

Once we reached cruising altitude, the pressure subsided, leaving in its place a dull nausea. I placed the sleeping mask over my eyes and buried myself under the airline blanket for the next ten hours of the flight.



We arrived in France in the morning, and Leo told me to stay up, to adjust to the time change, but I couldn’t. In the hotel room I pulled shut all the curtains without bothering to take in the view. The bed was very high up, a princess and the pea bed, piled with heavy embroidered blankets. Underneath were cool white sheets. I climbed inside and slept and slept.

When I woke up it was night, and I was alone. The room was dark, but I could make out the outline of shapes. My body was a limp rag, worn out and frayed at the ends. I’m in Paris, France. These were the words I played over in my mind, a little pep talk. Paris, France! Behind the curtains, Paris, France, twinkled before me, an unmistakable landscape, with the Eiffel Tower lit up, glowing yellow. I opened a window, letting in a gust of cold city air. Still, I craned my head out and glanced up and down the street. I had no idea was time it was. The street was quiet.

Back inside, with the lamp on, I saw what I was wearing: a pair of gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. No bra. I had no memory of changing, of getting changed into this getup.

I stayed in bed for three days, drifting in and out of sleep. I wasn’t feeling well, I couldn’t adjust to the time change. On the third day, Leo said we were going south. The sea air would do me good. I was like a character in a Victorian novel. I wondered if I was dying. That was what it felt like. My symptoms were mysterious. Sensitivity to light, severe fatigue, headache. A doctor had visited me in the Paris hotel. He said I had a cold.

It didn’t feel like a cold. It would be embarrassing, really, to suffer so much from a cold, or to die from a cold.

Leo drove us down himself. I’d never seen him drive before. When we arrived at our destination, he installed us in a hotel, and once again I slipped under the covers and slept.



A rash began to form on my arms. Little red dots. They traveled up my arms to my chest, my cheeks. Wendy texted me from Portland. She was spending spring break with Hannah. How’s FRANCE? she asked me. I sent her a picture of me with my prickly cheeks, my limp hair. She wrote back: That bad, huh?