13 Little Blue Envelopes(45)

“Make sure they give you your deposit back,” she said on her way out. “They’ll try to keep it.”

A quick look explained a lot. Previous tenants had left their comments for all to read. There were scrawls all around the walls, 202

little messages of doom like, MY PASSPORT WAS STOLEN

FROM RIGHT HERE (with a little arrow), Welcome to Motel Hell, Thanks for the lepprosey! and the philosophical, Stay stoned and you may be okay.

Everything was broken—either slightly or completely. The

window didn’t open very far, nor would it close. There was no lightbulb in the one overhead light. The beds were like wobbly restaurant tables, balanced out with bits of cardboard. Some had strange objects in place of an entire leg, and one of the bunks was just completely collapsed. Above this bed someone had written in huge letters: HONEYMOON SUITE.

She ran in and out of the bathroom before her brain could take a good snapshot of the horrors she found within.

The best bed on offer seemed to be the one that the stolen passport arrow was pointing at. It had all four of its own legs, and the mattress seemed relatively clean. At least she couldn’t see any marks through the plastic (which wasn’t the case with some of the others). She quickly threw the sheet over it so she wouldn’t be able to look at it too closely.

The locker at the end of her bed had no lock, and one of the hinges was busted. She opened it up.

There was a thing in it.

The thing might have been a sandwich at some point, or an animal, or a human hand . . . but what it was now was fuzzy and putrid.

A minute later, Ginny was down the stairs, out the door,

and gone.

203





Homeless, Homesick, and

Diseased

There was nothing left to do but eat.

She squelched into a little grocery store and looked over the rows and rows of chips and gummy bears. She grabbed a huge bag of some kind of waffle cookie called a Stroopwaffle that was on sale. They looked like tiny waffles stuck together with syrup. It was kind of like comfort food. She took her cookies outside and sat on a bench and watched the low flat boats and the bicyclists go by. There were disgusting smells that she couldn’t get out of her nose. An uneasy sensation crept all over her skin—a feeling of permanent contamination.

Nothing seemed clean. The world would never be clean

again. She shoved the bag into her pack unopened and went searching for another place to stay.

Amsterdam was full. Ginny walked into every place she

205

could find that seemed at least a little safer than The Apple.

The only places that had any room at all were way out of her price range. By seven o’clock, she was getting desperate. She had walked pretty far from the city center.

There was a small canal house made of sandy-colored stone with white curtains and flowers in the windows. It looked like the kind of house a cute little old lady might live in. She would have passed it by, if not for the blue electric sign that said: HET

KLEINE HUIS HOSTEL AND HOTEL AMSTERDAM.

This was her last try. If this failed, she could go back to the train station knowing she had done all she could. Not that she knew where she would go from there.

Because of her backpack, she had to squeeze sideways into the narrow hall, which led to a lobby that wasn’t much more than a hallway itself. There was a cutaway window, behind which was a desk, and behind that was a neat family kitchen. A man came out to help her and apologized, but he had nothing left. He had just rented the very last room.

“Don’t you have anywhere to stay?” It was an American voice.

She turned to see a man on the stairs, a guidebook in his hand.

“Everything’s pretty full,” she said.

“Are you on your own?”

She nodded.

“Well, we can’t let you back out in the rain with no place to go. Hold on.”

He went back up the stairs. Ginny wasn’t sure what she was holding on for, but she waited anyway. He came back again a moment later, a wide grin on his face.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s settled. Phil can stay in our room with 206

us, and you can share the other room with Olivia. We’re the Knapps, by the way. We’re from Indiana. What’s your name?”

“Ginny Blackstone,” she said.

“Well, hi, Ginny.” He extended his hand, and Ginny shook

it. “Come meet the family! You’re with us now!”

Olivia Knapp, Ginny’s new roommate (“Her initials are OK!” Mr.

Knapp had said. “So just call her OK, okay?”), was a tall girl with short golden blond hair. She had wide, doe-like blue eyes and a creepily even, toast brown tan. The whole family was kind of like that—short hair, whippet thin, dressed exactly as the guidebooks recommended, in easy-to-maintain, modest, all-weather clothes.

The room she was to share with Olivia was a far cry from

the one she had hastily vacated that morning. It was an

extremely narrow room, but it was clean and decorated in a soft, girlish style, with rose-and-cream-striped wallpaper and a pitcher filled with pink and red tulips sitting on the windowsill.

Best of all, it had two beds made up in fluffy white comforters that still held the lingering scent of detergent.

Olivia wasn’t much of a talker. She had tossed her things down on the bed and rapidly unpacked. (It was a textbook