Just One Day(86)

“What? Oh, no. I don’t go here. I go to school in Boston.”
“Who do you search for?”
I almost don’t want to say his name. I could make up a name and then she’d be none the wiser. I wouldn’t have to hear her ask in that adorable accent of hers why I want to know where her boyfriend is. But then I would go home, and I’d have come this far and would never know. So I say it.
“Willem de Ruiter.”
She looks at me for a long moment and then her pretty face puckers, her cosmetic-ad lips part. And then out of those perfect lips comes a spew of what I assume is invective. I can’t be sure. It’s in Spanish. But she’s waving her arms and talking a mile a minute, and her face has gone red. Vate! Déjame, puta! And then she picks me up by my shoulders and throws me off the stoop, like a bouncer ejecting a drunk. She throws my backpack after me, so that everything spills out. Then she slams the door shut, as much as you can slam a sliding-glass door. Locks it. And draws the shades.
I sit there agape for a moment. Then, in a daze, I start putting my things back in my bag. I examine my elbow, which has a scrape from where I landed, and my arm, which bears the half-moons of her nail marks.
“Are you okay?” I look up and see a pretty girl with dreadlocks who has bent down beside me and is handing me my sunglasses.
I nod.
“You don’t need ice or anything? I have some in my room.” She starts to walk back to her stoop.
I touch my head. There’s a bump there too, but nothing serious. “I think I’m okay. Thanks.”
She looks at me and shakes her head. “You were not, by any chance, asking about Willem?”
“You know him?” I ask. “You know Willem?” I come over to her stoop. There’s a laptop and a textbook sitting there. It’s a physics book. She has it open to the section on quantum entanglement.
“I’ve seen him around. This is only my second year, so I didn’t know him when he went here. But only one person makes Ana Lucia crazy like that.”
“Wait. Here? He went to college? Here?” I try to reconcile the Willem I met, the itinerant traveling actor, with an honors college student, and it hits me again how little I know this person.
“For one year. Before I got here. He studied economics, I think.”
“So what happened?” I meant with the college, but she starts telling me about Ana Lucia. About how she and Willem got back together last year but then how she found out that he’d been cheating on her with some French girl the whole time. She’s very casual about it, like none of it is all that surprising.
But my head is reeling. Willem went here. He studied economics. So it takes a minute to finally digest the last part. The cheating-on-Ana-Lucia-with-a-French-girl part.
“A French girl?” I repeat.
“Yes. Apparently, Willem was going to meet her for some secret tryst, in Spain, I think. Ana Lucia saw him shopping for flights on her computer, and thought he was planning to take her as a surprise because she has relatives there. So she canceled her vacation to Switzerland, and then told her family all about it, and they planned a big party, only to discover that the tickets were never for her. They were for the French girl. She freaked out, confronted him right in the middle of the campus—it was quite a scene. He hasn’t been around since, obviously. Are you sure you don’t need some ice for your head?”
I sink onto the stoop next to her. Céline? But she claimed she hadn’t seen him since last year. But then she’d said a lot of things. Including that we were both just ports that Willem visited. Maybe there were a bunch of us out there. A French girl. Or two or three. A Spaniard. An American. A whole United Nations of girls waving from their ports. I think of Céline’s parting words to me, and now they seem ominous.
I always knew that Willem was a player and that I was one of many. But now I also know that he didn’t ditch me that day. He wrote me a note. He tried, however halfheartedly, to find me.
I think of what my mom said. About being grateful for what you have instead of yearning for what you think you want. Standing here, on the campus where he once walked, I think I finally get what she was talking about. I think I finally understand what it truly means to quit while you’re ahead.

Thirty-six
Amsterdam
Forward momentum. That’s my new motto. No regrets. And no going back.
I cancel the Paris-London portion of my flight home so I can fly home straight from London. I don’t want to go back to Paris. I want to go somewhere else. I have five more days in Europe, and there are all these low-cost airlines. I could go to Ireland. Or Romania. I could take a train to Nice and hook up with the Oz crew. I could go anywhere.
But to get to any of those places, I have to go to Amsterdam. So that’s where I’m going first. On the pink bike.
When I went to deliver the bike to Saskia, along with a box of chocolates to say thank you, I told her that I didn’t need her to find me Robert-Jan’s contact information.
“You found what you needed?” she asked.
“Yes and no.”
She seemed to understand. She took the chocolates but told me to keep the bike. It didn’t belong to anyone, and I’d need it in Amsterdam, and I could take it with me on the train or pass it along to someone else.
“The pink White Bicycle,” I said.
She smiled. “You know about the White Bicycle?”
I nodded.
“I wish it still existed.”
I thought about my travels, about all the things that people had passed on to me: friendship, help, ideas, encouragement, macarons. “I think it still does,” I told her.