Andrei pretends to conduct an orchestra with one of the thickest of the churros—they’re called fartons, which I think the Bulgarians would really laugh at if they knew what word that sounds like in English. Dragomir actually licks the chocolate out of his cup, which has got to be terrible for his acne.
“This must have a million calories,” I moan to Kayla, who’s sitting beside me.
She spins on me.
“Why do you do that?” she demands. “Can’t you ever eat food that tastes good, and just enjoy it?”
I stare at her.
“No,” I say. “No, because . . . my mother never did. And . . . she never let me.”
“Oh,” Kayla says. She looks down into her little pot of chocolate as if I’ve ruined it for her now too.
Andrei reaches across the table to pat her hand.
“Sonrie,” he says, telling her to smile. “Tenemos churros con chocolate!”
But he accidentally hits one of the pots, and before anyone can catch it, it tips and sends chocolate oozing across the table.
Everyone jumps back except Kayla, who begins attacking the mess with napkins.
“Qué desastre!” Dragomir cries.
Suddenly, his joking around really annoys me.
“How can you say that when we’ve spent this whole week learning about real disasters, real tragedies?” I ask him. “When there’s real pain in the world, and it’s like all of Spanish history was terrible?”
I translate that into Spanish, and I’m mad enough that I do it quickly.
“La historia es siempre triste,” Dragomir says with a shrug. History is always sad. He finishes with something that I think means, “That’s why we should be happy now.”
“La historia de los Estados Unidos no es siempre triste,” I said.
“Pero nosotros somos de Bulgaria,” Andrei argues. “Nuestra historia es muy, muy triste.”
What can I say to that? I don’t know anything about Bulgaria.
“Basta con los tristeza!” Enough with the sadness! “Nosotros tenemos una sopresa,” Dragomir announces.
A surprise?
He and Andrei lean their heads together and half sing, half chant, “Joost seet rot bok und yule hir a tail . . .”
It takes me a moment to realize that’s supposed to be English.
Kayla claps and joins in: “ ‘A tale of a fateful trip . . .’ It’s the Gilligan’s Island theme song!”
“We learn English,” Dragomir says solemnly. In actual, real English. “From TV.” He glances at me, then seems to be trying to peer deeply into Kayla’s eyes. “For you.”
Kayla blushes.
“That’s . . . really sweet,” she says.
“Really sweet,” Andrei echos, though it’s clear he has no idea what the words mean.
Gilligan’s Island is this really, really ancient—and really stupid—TV show that dates back to when my parents were kids. Dad made my friends and me watch it with him once when we were at a soccer tournament in the middle of nowhere, and all our games were rained out, so we were trapped in the hotel. And there wasn’t even a pool.
The show’s about a bunch of different people who just happen to take a short boat trip together—for three hours, I think—but there’s a storm and they get shipwrecked and they’re stranded on an desert island. I felt really sorry for the movie star, stuck with a bunch of weirdos like that, for years.
“Couldn’t you have watched any modern TV shows in English?” I ask. Then I translate it into Spanish. “That would help you more. Nobody says things like, ‘Golly gee, Gilligan,’ anymore.”
Dragomir shrugs and says something that includes the words, “solo negro y blanco,” so I guess the only English-language shows he’s seen so far are in black and white. They’re the only ones he’s found with Spanish subtitles.
He’s learning English from Gilligan’s Island and what little he knows of Spanish? That’s ridiculous.
“Which Gilligan’s Island episodes have you watched?” Kayla asks excitedly in Spanish. “Have you seen the one where the Howells mess up the professor’s plans for getting off the island?”
Dragomir and Andrei answer just as excitedly. They seem to be trying to throw in English phrases, but they know more Spanish, so pretty soon we’re back to just speaking that. And then Susan and Hugh chime in, discussing how they would get off a desert island if they were stranded. Hugh has to ask Susan the Spanish words for “wind turbine” and “solar panels.” But, surprisingly, Kayla answers before Susan does. And then everybody’s discussing whether “solar panels” would be masculine or feminine.
Oh.
Oh, oh, oh.
This summer, it’s like I’m the one trapped on Gilligan’s Island with a bunch of weirdos. It’s like Spain is still a prison.
Except, as I sit there rolling my eyes while everyone else laughs, I start feeling like maybe I’m not the movie star. Maybe I’m more like the rich people—the Howells?—who think they’re so much better than everyone else.
Except they’re not.
Kayla, Enchanted
When my old friend from Crawfordsville, Harley Seitz, was first falling in love with her boyfriend, Gunnar Graves, I was at her house one Friday night when he sent her a text demanding she sneak out and meet him. He didn’t ask if she was busy; he just wrote, Get out here now. And I watched through the window as she tiptoed into the alley. It was raining pretty hard, but Gunnar didn’t even open the car door for her.
I said something to her the next day about that, and she sneered, “You’re just jealous because you don’t have a boyfriend! You hang out with old people too much. It’s not the 1950s anymore, where guys did that kind of stuff. I’m not some helpless girl, going, ‘Ooo, I’m too weak to open my own car door.’ ”
The thing is, unless you count not being able to keep his hands or lips off her (and sometimes I did see her try to push his hands away), I can’t think of anything nice Gunnar ever did for Harley.
The hands-and-lips part always seemed more for his benefit than hers.
Did she really want him squeezing her breast in the middle of math class? In front of everyone?
Or was she just pretending to, because that’s what he wanted?
Andrei and Dragomir binge-watched hours and hours of fifty-year-old TV shows in a language they don’t even understand, just to be able to talk to me better. It turns out that they have been watching Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and Beverly Hillbillies. As a way to try to understand English, America, and Americans, this is crazy.
But as a way to understand me . . .
Somebody besides my family and the Autumn Years residents actually wants to understand me? Somebody cares what I think, figuring out which of the professor’s ideas for getting off Gilligan’s Island was the best?
As we’re getting up to leave the churro place, I catch the English girl, Susan, watching me.
I check to make sure Avery and all the other British kids are out of earshot—they are—and I half whisper to Susan, “What do you know about Bulgarian guys? Do they have roving hands?”
Susan raises an eyebrow. She answers in Spanish, but I totally understand: “Do you want them to? And which of those guys do you want? I think it’s your choice.” Then she grins at me.
I get a choice?
Back in Crawfordsville, I couldn’t have imagined even one guy being interested in me.
Whatever I do, I won’t hurt Andrei or Dragomir. I won’t be like that.
But I have possibilities. Choices. Opportunity.
I love Spain.
We pass the church where I stumbled in to find a place to hide when I couldn’t stop crying. It feels like that was an eternity ago, a different lifetime. I want to send a shout-out to God, maybe: Oh hey, I’m not so mad anymore. Thanks. Sorry I haven’t, um, visited lately.
I feel a twinge of guilt, because God would probably also want me to call my mother, to start Skyping again with my Autumn Years friends.
Maybe I will.
Eventually.
For now, I just want to think about the next time I’ll see Andrei or Dragomir. I’m even looking forward to seeing Susan and Hugh next week. I haven’t opened the bag of Doritos Avery gave me yet—maybe on Monday I’ll take it in to Spanish class, and share with everyone during break. Maybe I’ll buy some Oreos this weekend too—I bet the Bulgarians, at least, have never had Oreos before. I don’t know about the Brits. And maybe I’ll ask them to bring in Bulgarian or British foods, if there’s a store anywhere in Madrid for homesick Bulgarians or Brits. Maybe there’s even a Bulgarian or British restaurant somewhere in Madrid, and the whole class can go together. . . .
Possibilities, I think. Choices. Opportunity.
Avery, Sour
Our apartment stinks.
“Do you know what that smell is?” I ask Kayla, who’s sitting on the couch beside me gazing at Dad’s iPad. I tilt my head—she’s looking up Bulgaria. Once I might have teased her about that, but now I just wait for her to sniff and wrinkle her forehead.
She better appreciate my restraint.
“I think it’s only the wet clothes,” she says. “You should hang them outside. They’ll dry faster that way, anyhow.”
It’s Saturday morning, and the only thing on my schedule for the entire day is washing my clothes. Which I’ve already done. And now Kayla is pretty much telling me I did it wrong.
“Why didn’t Dad rent an apartment with a washer and a dryer?” I gripe.
“I don’t think many Spanish apartments have dryers,” Kayla says absently, turning back to the iPad. “Haven’t you seen how many buildings have clotheslines outside?”
I wait for Kayla to offer to help me move my wet clothes to the little clothes rack out on our patio. But she doesn’t.
“You could just open a window, but it’s about ten billion degrees outside, so I don’t think you want to do that,” Kayla says mildly.
This is annoying—I can’t even annoy her today.
I transfer my clothes outside. Standing on the balcony for five minutes makes me sweat like I’ve been playing soccer for an hour.
I go and knock on my father’s bedroom door.
“Dad!” I call through the door. “We have to get out of this heat pit. I don’t think the air-conditioning’s working right again. Didn’t you say there were great beaches in Spain? Near Valencia, maybe? Let’s go!”
Silence.
“Dad?”
The door creaks open, and Dad stands there, swaying slightly. He’s got a crease on the side of his face, as if his pillow was wrinkled and he lay on it too long in one position. His hair stands up in weird patches that make me see that it’s thinner than it used to be. It’s gone even grayer, too, and it’s about a week past the time when he usually gets it cut.
Even his skin looks a little gray.
“Oh, sorry,” I say. “I thought you were already awake.”
“I was but . . . then I went back to bed,” he says, as if it’s a struggle just to speak those simple words. He blinks. “I . . . I did kind of promise you a great summer in Spain, didn’t I?”
No, I think. You promised me a summer in Spain with Kayla. Without telling me anything about anything. That is not my definition of a great summer.
He glances at his watch.
“It’s too late in the day to head to the coast now,” he says, wincing. “Sorry.”
“Then let’s go to Toledo,” I say. “Or Segovia. One of those day trips that aren’t so far away.”
“Avery, those are places where it’d be really hot today too,” Kayla says behind me. She holds up Dad’s iPad. “I was just looking at possibilities nearby, because Dragomir asked about doing something with him and Andrei and some of the others. . . .” She blushed. “I mean, he was asking if both of us were available. . . .”
But she was the one he contacted.
In our Spanish class, she’s more popular than I am.
How did that happen?
Kayla’s gaze takes in Dad’s rumpled, haggard appearance.
“Dragomir said it’s so hot, maybe we’d want to just go swimming,” she says. “Then, um, you wouldn’t have to worry about us, Mr. Armisted, and you could go back to sleep.”
She wants to get away from my dad. My rumpled, sad, rejected dad.
That makes me so mad I almost say, Do you really want Dragomir and Andrei—or Hugh!—to see you in a swimsuit, Kayla?
But that is so mean, and I can already see in my head how disappointed my father would look if I said that.
He might even cry. He already looks like he’s on the verge of tears.
And—I look Kayla up and down—and she doesn’t actually look so lumpy and ugly anymore. I don’t know if it’s because she’s been eating healthier food and getting more exercise, or just because she’s standing up straighter.
Really, she looks almost . . . pretty. Her cheeks are flushed in an I have an exciting life kind of way, not an I’ve been running through the airport and I can’t catch my breath way. She’s got her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, and the strands that have escaped the elastic are curling around her face and neck as if she styled it that way.
If Mom were here, she would tell Kayla she needs a swimsuit that hides her flaws. And . . . it would come out sounding like she just wanted Kayla to know how many flaws she has.
Was Mom always so mean?
I actually don’t think so.
But she still hasn’t called or texted me. Or Dad.
“We can swim anytime,” I tell Kayla. Too late, I remember that there might not be a swimming pool in her little town back home in the United States. Or she might not have a membership. I forge ahead. “Anyhow, we do things with the kids from Spanish class all week long. We should do something with Dad today, while he has time off.”
It’s weird for me to be arguing for doing something with my dad rather than friends. But, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right to leave him alone when he’s like this.
“Okay,” Kayla says. “I’ll tell Dragomir we’re not available.”
I can hear the disappointment in her voice. I could say, You do something with the other kids, and I’ll have special time with my dad.
But . . . I kind of want her help with Dad. How do you take care of someone who’s this sad?
“Isn’t there someplace in the mountains you were talking about, back when you were telling me everything about Spain, to try to get me excited for this trip?” I ask Dad. “Somewhere that’s really close to Madrid?”
Dad looks at me blankly.
“Valley something?” I add.
“Oh, Valle de los Caidos,” Dad says. “Valley of the Fallen. The memorial for the victims of the Spanish Civil War. And the basilica where Franco’s buried.”
Right, because it’s a great idea to take someone who’s sad and depressed to a war memorial and an awful dictator’s tomb, I think. Maybe Dad had mentioned the Valley of the Fallen having something to do with Franco and war, but it hadn’t meant anything to me then.
But Dad’s face looks a little brighter.
“It is pretty up there,” he says. “Out in nature, away from the city . . .”
“Let’s go,” I say.
Because our apartment still stinks, even without the wet clothes.
Kayla, Making a Choice
It’s Saturday. Don’t I ever get a day off work?
I’m surprised to think that. It’s been a long time since I thought of my time in Spain as a job, exactly. And we never really discussed time off. Back when we were planning everything—or when my mom and Mr. Armisted were planning everything—I guess it never occurred to anyone that I might not want to spend every moment possible with the Armisteds.
Back then, I was in awe that they might want to spend time with me. In Europe. On a trip Mr. Armisted was paying for. With Spanish classes Mr. Armisted would pay for. And with spending money provided, and deposits made to my bank account back home every week.
I thought I was the luckiest girl alive.
But now I really want to go to the pool with Dragomir and Andrei and the others. I just want to be an ordinary teenager having fun. I want to splash water in the boys’ faces and shriek when they splash me back.
I want to see Dragomir and Andrei—and, okay, Hugh—in their swimsuits. I don’t want them to see me in my swimsuit, but . . .
Well, maybe I don’t actually care.
I know that even if they don’t think I look that great, they won’t say anything mean. They aren’t like that.
They like me.
But I hear the way Avery’s voice cracks when she says, We should do something with Dad today, while he has time off. I see the pleading in her eyes, as if she’s really saying, Help me. I don’t know what to do. She and her father stand so awkwardly together—do they have any clue how broken they both look?
How different they are from the rich, glamorous jet-setters I saw them as, that first day at the airport?
Being poor isn’t the only way to be in need.
I lift the iPad I’m still carrying.
“Want me to look up the best way to get to Valle de los Caidos?” I ask. “Does the Metro go out there, or do we have to take a train? Or a bus?”
“I think there’s a tourist shuttle, but it probably already left for the day,” Mr. Armisted says. His voice sounds like he’s a million miles away. “Getting a rental car may be the only option left, but even that . . . I don’t know . . .”
I wave the iPad like it’s a magic wand.
“I’ll find out what’s available,” I say.
I have never rented a car in my life. I don’t even have my driver’s license yet.
But I sound like I know exactly what I’m doing.
Ohhhhh . . .
I sound exactly like my mother.
Avery, in the Mountains, Where You Can See Everything If You Dare to Look
“You’d think a place named ‘Valley of the Fallen’ would actually be in, you know, a valley,” I say as the car climbs higher and higher around hairpin curves.