“I don’t know if you remember what it was like being fourteen, but Avery’s mother tells me that’s a difficult age for girls,” he said. He stared down at the ground, and I couldn’t tell who was more embarrassed, him or me. “A time of strong emotions. If she says or does anything unkind . . . well, she knows that is not allowed. You let me know, and I’ll make sure it stops.”
I wanted to say, Oh, you mean like this afternoon, when it felt like we were friends again in that soul place—Puerta del Sol?—and then suddenly she stopped talking to me and acted like I didn’t exist?
Of course, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say, Don’t worry. She started pretending to be nice again when you got home.
I didn’t say, Hello? Don’t you think I’m used to kids being mean to me? Don’t you think I can take it?
But today Avery will be the only other person I know in the Spanish class. In Crawfordsville, I always know everyone. I know who will be out-and-out mean and who just doesn’t bother talking to me. I know who’s as desperate as I am, and doesn’t mind serving as a biology lab partner or language arts critique buddy, if we have to pair off. I’ve known almost every single kid in every single one of my classes since I was in kindergarten.
Before I came to Spain, I don’t think I understood how many strangers there are in the world. I walk around just looking at people, and they are all strangers.
Avery probably feels the same way, I tell myself. Probably, she’ll be glad to have me around in the Spanish class.
Yeah, right.
I slide out of bed and start getting ready. Our luggage came from the airport Saturday afternoon, so I have choices of what to wear. But I still pull on the sundress Avery picked out for me at Target. It’s probably the nicest thing I own.
“Girls? You both up?” Mr. Armisted calls from the hallway.
“Yes,” I call back.
“Avery?” Mr. Armisted asks.
“Dad! Stop treating me like such a baby! I said I’d set an alarm and I did!”
After that, I hear hushed, murmuring voices coming from Avery’s room—probably Mr. Armisted scolding Avery for being grumpy. Or promising her the sun, the moon, and the stars if she’ll cheer up; that’s more the kind of thing he does.
Yeah, it’s going to be a bueno day with Avery, I tell myself.
I step out into the hall and head toward the bathroom just as Mr. Armisted is coming out of Avery’s room. Mr. Armisted says something in Spanish I can’t understand, and when I look at him blankly, he adds, “That’s ‘Learn a lot! Have fun!’ ”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
“And make sure you and Avery leave in plenty of time to catch the Metro,” he adds. “You remember how to get there and how to use it, right?”
He gave us a very detailed Metro-riding lesson over the weekend. Avery rolled her eyes the whole time.
“Sure,” I say.
“Watch out for Avery,” he says. “She’s . . .” He shrugs, as if I’m supposed to understand.
“I will,” I promise.
“I appreciate that,” he says. He doesn’t quite meet my eyes. He walks on down the hall and out of the apartment.
Twenty minutes later, I’m ready, but Avery still hasn’t emerged from her room.
I linger over rinsing my juice glass and plate—my vaso de jugo y . . . I have no idea what the Spanish word for “plate” is, and anyway, what if I’m wasting all this time trying not to bother Avery, and she went back to sleep? Wouldn’t she want me to wake her back up?
I make myself go over and knock at her door. I knock a little too hard—or the latch doesn’t work right—and the door creaks open.
Avery is still lying in bed, hanging over the side, watching something on her iPad.
“Avery! We need to leave in five minutes!”
She cocks her head, as if listening.
“Did Dad already leave?” she whispers.
“Yes, but—”
“Good,” she says. She flops over in the bed and pulls the covers up to her chin. “I’m not going today. I’m sick.”
“Sick! Why didn’t you tell your dad? He wouldn’t make you go if he knew you were sick!” I automatically step toward her and hold out my hand, ready to feel her forehead. “Do you have a fever? Is your stomach upset?”
Avery shoves my hand away.
“Not that kind of sick,” she says. “It’s . . . you know. Cramps. I’m not telling my dad about that.”
“Oh,” I say. For about the millionth time of my life, I try to imagine being a normal girl with a normal dad who’s not in a nursing home. I guess if I were Avery, I wouldn’t want to tell Mr. Armisted about having my period either.
“That’s why I can’t go today,” Avery finishes.
“Oh,” I say again. I slump against the door frame, my own resolve draining out of me. “Then . . . I guess I should stay home too, and make sure you’re okay. Do you want me to fix a hot water bottle for your back?”
I blush, because I sound like Grandma. Even Mom kind of makes fun of Grandma offering a hot water bottle for everything. And it’s not like I’ve seen anything resembling Grandma’s blue-glass hot water bottle anywhere in this apartment.
I swallow a lump in my throat that I refuse to believe is homesickness. I am not going to be homesick for a hot water bottle.
“No,” Avery says. “You have to go to that Spanish class and cover for me. So Dad doesn’t know I stayed home. So I don’t have to explain to him about the cramps.”
She blinks. And in that moment, I can see her as a three- or four-year-old again. She may be a decade older, but she has the same wide, worried greenish-gray eyes, the same sun-streaked hair, the same anguished expression she did back when we were friends. I remember, when she was three or four and I was five or six, she used to cry sometimes when Avery’s nanny and my mom said playtime was over and I had to leave. This is just the same, just like that.
Well, the same except that today she’s upset because I’m offering to stay, not because I’m leaving.
“You have to help me,” Avery says. “You go to that Spanish class and tell me how it goes, and tonight we’ll report to Dad what we learned.”
She blinks again, all innocent-like. She’s playing me. I know that. I mean, even in the nursing home there are manipulators—Mrs. Cooper wheedles for butterscotch pudding even though she’s got diabetes; Mr. Bantoff tells every female who will listen what a good husband he was and how his dying wife’s last wish was that he marry again. (Personally, I think her dying wish was that she wouldn’t die. Unless it was to get away from him.)
Still. I weigh in my head the two ways this day could go: I could be trapped in this apartment with a cranky, moody Avery, who doesn’t even want me here, or I could go to a Spanish class on the other side of Madrid with absolute strangers. Maybe it’s the sunshine calling to me from outside the window. Maybe it’s the thought that, after I go home from Spain, I will probably never leave Ohio again. Maybe I just don’t want to fight with Avery.
But I straighten up.
“All right,” I say. “If you’re sure. . . .”
“Oh, I am,” Avery says, blinking prettily yet again. “Thank you, Kayla. Thank you so much.”
I walk out the door before I can tell Avery how full of it she is.
Or before I chicken out.
Avery, Alone
I hear the front door whisper shut. There. Kayla’s gone.
I let my whole body relax, from my scalp down to my toes.
This is the remnant of something I learned in an exercise class Mom took me to, back when she was into mother-daughter bonding, but it annoys me to remember that.
I don’t have cramps. I’m not even having my period. I just couldn’t get up today. I just couldn’t spend another day with eager-beaver Kayla, always looking so happy and grateful and helpful and hopeful. I just . . . couldn’t.
Not when I keep thinking, Is that what Dad wants me to be like? That weird and awkward and oblivious?
/>
I feel a twinge of guilt. This isn’t like me. If Shannon or Lauren were here, I wouldn’t tell this kind of lie. They wouldn’t let me, even if I tried—they’d see right through me. They know me.
I shove the guilt aside. Kayla didn’t know I was lying. I didn’t hurt her, one way or another. Anyhow, this is Dad’s fault for yanking me out of my normal life this summer, for pulling me out of how my life was supposed to go. Back home, I don’t have any problem getting up for school. At soccer camp, I was usually the first one up.
Back home, I wasn’t the type of person to lose her passport, either.
Why can’t I be the same here as I am at home?
Because I need my friends. . . .
I close my eyes. I’ve been staying up late every night texting and messaging and Snapchatting back and forth with Shannon and Lauren and my other friends. Between the time difference and my iPhone being worthless without Wi-Fi, that’s the only time I can connect. For my friends, it’s six p.m. to midnight—normal times to text. For me it’s midnight to two, four, six a.m. This schedule is killing me. Maybe I’m still jet-lagged, too. It would be great to slip back into sleep for another four or five hours. But the sunshine streaming in my window is so bright. My eyelids can’t seem to block out any of it. I might as well be staring straight at the sun.
Hasn’t Spain ever heard of room-darkening shades? I grumble to myself.
I get up, head into the kitchen, and grab an orange. Spanish oranges are really amazing. I take the orange and an energy bar and a water bottle out onto the teensy-tiny balcony and look down at our alleyway, even though it makes me a little dizzy.
Last night I came out here to text because my prison-cell-size room was starting to feel like a cage. There’s a dance club down on the corner, and even though Dad would kill me before he’d let me go to a place like that, I was thinking maybe I could record a little audio and make my friends think I was going to places like that. Our apartment’s soundproofed or something, but out on the balcony you can hear everything. Maybe I could go back to school as the kid who knows all the hot new European music.
But guess what? The joke’s on me, because that club was playing nothing but eighties music. You hear eighties music all over the place over here—in restaurants, in stores, in taxicabs . . . I asked Dad why Spaniards love eighties music so much, and he actually managed to keep a straight face when he said, “Because Spain has a long tradition of appreciating great culture.”
Right. Boy George, Wham!, Madonna . . . Ugh.
Of course the dance club’s closed this morning, and the street is quiet. Dad says Spain parties late and sleeps late and goes to work late and then expects a long lunch break. And he won’t say it, because he’s Mr. Diplomacy, but that could be the reason his company’s having so much trouble getting the new subsidiary they bought to show a profit.
It is kind of nice sitting on the balcony eating breakfast in the sunshine, with nowhere to go, nowhere I have to be, no one to bother me. It’s like I have the world to myself.
Then I’m done eating, and there’s nothing to do. All my friends are asleep right now, and nothing online would have changed much since last night. Something gurgles behind me—something with the air conditioner, I guess. A lot of Spanish buildings don’t even have air-conditioning, and Dad says we’re lucky we don’t have to make do with fans. But the air conditioner isn’t the best, and the landlord told us someone has to empty this huge tub of water from it every night or it will break down.
Dad thinks Kayla and I are taking turns doing that, but we never officially set up who was doing which night. I guess she just started taking care of it.
Why couldn’t we have rented an apartment where everything worked? Besides the air-conditioning, the washer is still messed up too. And the water heater is annoying—it wasn’t broken that first day, but you have to switch it on five minutes before you need it, and then it shuts itself off afterward.
Someone’s whistling down below. I peek down through the railing, and there’s a man with a toolbox headed toward our building.
I remember that Dad talked about having someone come fix the washer someday this week. What if it’s this guy?
Mom always freaks out about having workers at our house if I’m home alone. This is something else I’ve heard Mom and Dad argue about. Dad’s side of it was, Don’t be so paranoid. What do you think is going to happen? I’m not so high up in the company that anyone’s going to kidnap my daughter and hold her for ransom.
And Mom’s reply was, Why does everything have to be about you and your money? It’s not just kidnapping we have to worry about. What’s wrong with you, that you don’t want to protect your little girl?
Dad: She’s not a “little” girl.
Mom: Exactly!
Thinking about their arguments makes my stomach hurt.
The washer repair guy is going to think he’s coming into an empty apartment. I could just hide in my bedroom and be quiet until he’s gone.
Except that would make my prison-cell-size room seem even more prison-like. What if he’s here for hours?
I could also leave before he gets here. I look down at what I’m wearing: running shorts and a T-shirt. Not exactly street attire, but . . .
It’s not weird if I’m on my way to work out, I tell myself.
It’s not like there’s a gym nearby, but I could go to the park and get a long run in now, before it gets too hot. If I start running twice a day, I will really be in shape for soccer tryouts when I go home. And—it’s something that I like. That I choose.
I slip back into the apartment. I stuff my feet into socks and my running shoes, and I’m out the front door in a flash. When I get down to the street, I see that the man with the toolbox is going into the building next door, where there’s some sort of renovation project going on.
I should have figured that out.
But I’m already outside. A breeze tugs at my hair, and it makes me feel like a little kid again, like when I used to talk my nanny into letting me play on the playground for hours. Nobody knows me here. I can do what I want.
I turn toward the park and take off, my feet already propelling me into a jog.
Kayla, on Her Own
The Spanish classroom is on the third floor. Of course it’s on the third floor. Whoever designed Spanish streets and buildings likes to make people suffer by having to walk as far as possible. It would have been nice to stand in the entryway of the school for a few moments, and bask in the glow of having found the right building. Of having navigated the subway and reached this school on my own. Victory!
But I have only a minute left to climb two flights of stairs. I’m not victorious yet.
I take a deep breath and start hiking up. Rivers of sweat trickle under my dress. I reach the first landing. The second. As senile old Mrs. Grayson at the nursing home likes to shout out at the oddest times, thank the good Lord almighty, for all his mercies. I don’t have to climb up any more stairs.
But as I move down the hall, all I see are dark classrooms labeled with the wrong numbers: twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five . . .
Was I so delirious climbing those steps that I counted wrong?
I go back to the stairway and climb halfway up the next flight. Above me I can see the first classroom of the floor above: thirty-one.
I climb the rest of the way up, trying to figure it all out.
Oh, wait. Is that what Avery and her dad were talking about the other day, how people in Spain don’t count floors the same way Americans do? So when they said our apartment was on the fourth floor . . . have we really been climbing up and down five flights of stairs every single time we go in or out? And . . . I’ve just followed along?
No wonder I feel so exhausted already. Exercise is deadly.
Finally, I see classroom thirty-eight, and I slip inside the door. It’s my bad luck that the door opens into the front of the room, and the teacher has already started talking. I couldn’t even begin to guess her a
ge—it’s somewhere between twenty-five and fifty. She’s one of those severe-looking European ladies with her hair pulled back in a tight twist. And while I’m sweating in a sundress, she’s got on long sleeves with fitted wrists. She looks like she doesn’t even possess sweat glands. She turns my way with one eyebrow raised so high I think maybe it could reach the fifth floor.
“Buenos dias,” she says, and then a whole bunch of other Spanish words I don’t understand.
“Um, I don’t really speak Spanish, so could you say that again in English?” I whisper.
She says something else in Spanish. At least, I think it’s Spanish. It could be Swahili, for all I understand. No, wait, she’s saying the same thing again and again, making the words slower and slower and slower. And then I get it: She’s saying, “En español, por favor.”
“Um, no hablo español?” I say. I don’t speak Spanish. Come on, lady, can’t you tell how completely I can’t speak Spanish?
The other eyebrow shoots up, and she releases another stream of Spanish. But she also points to a desk in the back of the room. I can read hand gestures. I trip my way toward that desk like it’s the Promised Land and I’m one of the Israelites who’s been wandering in the wilderness for forty years.
I melt into the desk and imagine turning myself invisible, just like I’m always invisible back at Crawfordsville High School.
I’m nothing but a puddle of sweat in this wooden seat—why would anyone want to look at me?
The teacher’s voice flows over and around me. Her dark eyes are still directed at me. Oh, good grief, she’s asking me another question. She holds up a piece of paper and points at it.
“Ka-ee-la Boots o Avery Armisted?” she repeats.
Oh, she’s trying to take attendance. I point to myself.
“Kayla,” I say. “Or, I guess, Ka-ee-la. Whichever.”
“En español.” The teacher glowers again.
“Yo soy Ka-eel-a,” I say, and even I know that’s wrong. You’re supposed to introduce yourself with some phrase that sounds like you’re talking about a pet llama. The teacher mutters something—correcting me, I think—but I see her put a check mark next to my name.