I finally settle back into my seat. The seats around me are filling; the aisle crowded with travelers making their way to their seats.
Then I spot that guy. Dylan Paris, from Georgia.
We still haven’t spoken. He carefully makes his way down the aisle, guitar case in his left hand, boarding pass in his right. He looks at his boarding pass with a fierce expression I have some difficulty interpreting, then up to the seat numbers above the row. I watch his eyes move from one seat to the next, rows 48, then 49, 50, then 51. Then his gaze drops to the empty seat next to me—then to me. His eyes widen, just a little bit, then he looks back to the seat next to me. From the looks of it, he is headed right to me.
Less than a minute later the people ahead of him clear out of the way and he drops a worn backpack onto the seat next to me, saying “Hey”. The backpack isn’t faux-worn, with stone-washed pre-faded fabric and an expensive label. It looks like a second-hand Army backpack, right down to the stenciled name that I know isn’t his. “I’m Dylan.”
Then he smiles, a warm looking slightly sideways grin that barely shows his teeth but causes the skin around his right eye to crease just slightly. His eyes are piercing, a pale blue that looks oddly out of place against his tan complexion and dark hair.
“Alex,” I say, trying to stay cool. This is the third time in as many days I’ve introduced myself as Alex. It just seems right somehow.
“Where are you from, Alex?”
Oh. I like the way he said my name. His lips curl around the syllables like a particularly delicious fruit, and it makes goosebumps run down the back of my neck.
“I’m from San Francisco,” I reply, trying to keep my breathing under control.
He smiles, a quirky smile. It makes me want to smile back. Truth be told, it makes me want to do a lot more than smile. “Really? I’m from Atlanta. Never been out West.”
I struggle for something to say. “It’s my first trip East by myself,” I said.
He settles in, stuffing his bag under the seat in front of him. He takes a small blister pack out of his pocket and peels it back, then pops a square object in his mouth. It doesn’t look like a pill. More like gum, really. Nicotine gum? Crank tried to quit smoking last year and chewed the stuff constantly.
Dylan says in his soft Southern accent, “Tell me about yourself, Alex.”
By this time, the captain is speaking, and the flight attendant begins walking up and down the aisles checking seats as the plane departs from the gate.
I sit back, unsure what to say. He put me on the spot, and I have no idea what to say. I’m Alex, and all I do is study. I don’t have a life really, except barely reflecting my much more brilliant and colorful sisters. Instead, I say, “That’s a pretty open-ended question.”
His face flushes a little. Then he says, with a twinkle in his eye and a funny looking grin on his face, “I guess. Let me start over. I’m Dylan, and I have lousy social skills. I’d like to get to know you by asking stupid questions. How’s that?”
I burst into laughter, and he laughs too, and everything is okay. “Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll ask you a question, then you ask me a question, then I’ll ask you a question.”
As I speak, his grin grows larger. “They have to be specific questions. And you can’t lie.”
He makes a mock wounded face. “Do I look like someone who would lie?”
I laugh. “Silly, your questions are supposed to be about me, not you.”
For the next two hours, we throw questions back and forth. This is challenging. He opens simply. Do I ever ride on the street cars in San Francisco? But then it turns more serious. I ask him, “What scares you more than anything else in the world?”
His answer stuns me, mostly because it isn’t superficial. He says, “Ending up like my dad. He was a drunk.”
Jesus. I try to change the subject. He’s worried about turning out like his Dad—everybody wants me to be like mine. Even though technically it isn’t my turn to ask a question, I do anyway. “What’s the best thing you’ve ever done?”
He thinks it over, his eyebrows shoved together almost comically, then he replies with something I never anticipated. “I was homeless for a while. Dropped out of school. Anyway, sometimes I didn’t know where I was going to sleep, or get something to eat. One night I was riding on MARTA… that’s our subway… just back and forth, trying to get some sleep on the train before they shut down for the night. They shut down the train at 2 a.m., and I was stuck downtown, and I ran into a family. All of them were homeless, like me. Parents, two kids. The dad had lost his job . And I was working, doing some landscaping and day labor, so I had a little bit of money. So I treated them to dinner at Waffle House. It wasn’t much… maybe twenty dollars. But you could tell the kids hadn’t been eating much at all. They were so… grateful.”
I’m speechless. Homeless? I’m honestly not sure I can even believe him, except that he doesn’t come across as a liar. “You were homeless?”
“No, that’s an extra question. My turn. Why do you smell like strawberries?”
My face turns red hot. “Umm…” I said, because that was as coherent a thought as I could put together. “I … um… it’s my shampoo. I like strawberries… I wear strawberry lip gloss, too.”
Now he blushes. That makes me smile, because where I come from, guys don’t blush. But this one does, and I like it. A lot. We talk about other things. He’s dating a girl—casually, he says, not serious—and I’m dating a guy too. Also not serious. Then we veer from that to other subjects, because really who wants to spend all this time talking about people who aren’t even here?
***
“What’s your favorite book?” he asks me.
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
His face makes a comical expression. “Please, clarify.”
I laugh. Then I find myself trying to explain why this novel of 1968 Prague captured my mind so. “Love is fleeting. Random. Coincidence? I don’t know how to explain, exactly.”
“You don’t believe we’re fated to have someone we love?” His eyes seem to be focused straight into my heart as he asks the question..
I look back at him, refusing to give into the weight of his question. “I don’t,” I reply. “I mean, look at my parents. Random. My Dad walked into a flower shop in Barcelona of all places and met my mother. If he’d never walked into that shop—or if he’d walked into a different one—everything would have been different. If they hadn’t fallen in love, everything would have been different. I wouldn’t even be alive.”
Dylan smiles. “Maybe it was fated to be.”
I shrug. “I don’t know about all that.”
“Sisters,” he says. “How many sisters are we talking?”
“Five.”
As always, stunned silence and raised eyebrows. “There are five of you?”
I laugh. “Not five of me. We’re all different. And it’s a total of six.”
“Wow. Are you the oldest? Youngest?”
“I’m exactly in the middle,” I reply. “Julia and Carrie are in their twenties—Carrie’s in graduate school at Columbia. I turn seventeen next week, and I have three younger sisters. You?”
“No siblings. And I’m eighteen. And happy birthday.” Dylan smiles as he says the words happy birthday.
“You’re a senior, then.”
He nods.
“Where are you planning to go to college?” I ask.
He shrugs. I sit back. “You don’t know? But you’re in your senior year… what about your applications? They should be in by now, you’ll hardly have time in December when we get back.”
He grimaces. “Well… to be honest, I was planning to take a year or two off. I want to travel.”
“Travel? Where?”
He smiles. “South Asia, maybe. India, or possibly Vietnam?”
“But… why?” I’m genuinely puzzled. I’ve lived all over the globe. I can’t see any reason to just travel if it means not going to colleg
e.
“Well… I’m going to be a writer. And while I could learn a lot in college, I’ll learn more on the road. If I really want to be writing, I need to be experiencing life.”
I don’t laugh. But I do say, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He shrugs, then gives me that sideways grin. That maddening sideways grin.
Who consciously decides they aren’t going to college? I don’t understand him.
Alex Thompson’s eyes (Dylan)
Every step of the way through this conversation, I wonder if I’m screwing up. When I told her I’d been homeless, her eyes widened so much I thought they were going to fall out. Same when I told her I had no plans for college. After all, all of the kids on this trip have plans in place for their lives.
Sometimes I feel like I had no map. And that’s just highlighted all the more in the presence of so much drive and direction.
Look, I get it. When you’re a senior in high school, you’re supposed to be thinking about graduation, and college, and grad school, and what your career is going to be. But really, it’s kind of chancy whether or not I’ll even graduate. I mean—I dropped out when I was sixteen. I’ve been busting my ass to catch up with my class. One screw-up, one bad grade, and I could lose it. Being here? It doesn’t seem real.
I think part of me thinks I’ll end up back under that bridge some day. That I’ll end up on drugs again, or drinking again.
That I’ll end up like Dad.
I’ve got people who believe in me. Mom. Mister Philler, my principal. They stood behind me and pushed and helped every step of the way. They’ve encouraged me to apply to college—Mom to Georgia State, and Mister Philler has been pushing me to apply to other, more selective colleges, too. But I’ve made it very clear to everyone who asks what my plans are. Experience first. Then college. This foreign exchange trip—which I never imagined I’d actually be selected for—is just the first step.
It’s really kind of interesting, the groups of students on this trip. Each of a dozen or so cities sent five kids, and they all had their own criteria for selecting the students who attended. In Atlanta, we went through a nomination and application process, essays and an oral presentation. The kids from Atlanta are all over the economic spectrum—Tameka’s family owns a small chain of hotels, Naila’s family is getting food stamps. Some of the other cities aren’t as varied. All of the kids in the Washington, DC delegation come from the same high school, a public school but only marginally so, located in the upper northwest amongst two-million dollar homes.
But one thing they all have in common? They know where they are going.
I need somewhere to steer the conversation. Not my parents, my homelessness, or my aimlessness. So I start to ask her questions. What is her school like? How did she like Moscow? Where else has she lived? What is it like being the child of an ambassador?
She answers all of them, but asks some of her own. And with every pause in the conversation, every time I look her in the eyes, I fall a little deeper.
Let me tell you about Alex Thompson’s eyes.
First, her eyes and her face are framed by long brown hair. Not dark, but a more vibrant brown with slightly red and blonde highlights. Her skin is olive, with full lips and high cheek bones. Lips to linger over. Her mother’s Spanish heritage is obvious. Highly arched eyebrows, and a straight, perfectly-sized nose. Her eyes are green, beautifully spaced, and full. They are eyes to get lost in.
But it’s not just her eyes. It’s what’s behind them. For an almost-seventeen-year-old, she’s remarkably experienced with life. I don’t see that with my friends at school back home. She’s lived in a bunch of different places, all over the world. She speaks a lot of Russian and some Chinese. Crazy. But that’s not all. Behind all that, when she talks about her family? There’s some sadness lurking there. I want to know what is all about.
I realized as we talk and talk during that flight that I want her very badly. But there are two very big problems.
First—she is so far out of my league it isn’t even funny. I’m the kid of a drunk, I’ve been homeless, I have no plans for college. She is the wealthy child of a U.S. Ambassador and headed to Harvard or Columbia. She’s going to turn down colleges, not the other way around.
Second—this little jaunt around the world will be over in five weeks. Thirty-four days, then we’ll return to our own little corners of the world, and that will be it. As I get lost in her eyes, that’s all I can remember. I could so easily fall in love with this girl.
But, on the thirty-fourth day, I will lose her.
Chapter Four
Let me see your eyes (Dylan)
The knock on the door is followed by the appearance of John, one of my new bunkmates, who opens it and sticks his head in, his short, extremely curly hair still wet from the shower.
“Yo, Mike, Dylan,” he barks, loud enough I’m startled. “Let’s head into town.”
I look up. I’m laying on my bunk in the Tel Aviv Youth Hostel, splayed out and resting. My bag, which finally caught up with me this morning, is open on the floor next to me. We spent the day on a tour bus, going from a museum in the morning to a school in the afternoon, followed by a brief bus tour of the Old City of Jaffa. I was disappointed we couldn’t get off the bus then, because it looked fascinating, and far more ancient than modern Tel Aviv.
Unfortunately, we were whisked back to the hostel for dinner. But now, we’ve been released to our own devices. I sit up. “What are your plans?”
John shrugs. “Walk down the street and see what we see.”
“Let’s go,” says Mike, who currently sits across the room from me, his arms and legs stretched out comically on the one chair in the room.
“I’m in,” I reply. “Who else is going along?”
“You know Elle?”
I shake my head.
John waggles his eyebrows and makes a scrunching motion with his hands that leaves little room for mistake about what he thinks of her appearance. “That Elle. She’s from New York. Her roommates are coming too. Not sure who they are.”
John is crude. But I have to admit, it doesn’t hurt my eyes when I look at Elle. A few minutes later I’ve changed, we’ve gathered our things and we’re on our way out the door.
In the lobby, we meet up with the girls. I nod toward Alex and casually say, “Hey.” I don’t trust myself to say much more than that. Seeing her fills me with desire and anxiety and attraction and more than a little bit of lust. I barely know her, and she barely knows me, and even if we did know each other, we’re only here for a few weeks.
So I keep my distance. Instead, I walk along next to John, who I only met as we were getting situated in our rooms last night.
John Modesta is from Long Island, New York. He’s brash, quick with words, a little loud, a little obnoxious. I’ve never spent so much time around people from cities up north. But he’s not rude. In fact just the opposite—he’s been one of the friendlier people I’ve met thus far on this trip. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the most outgoing person on earth—I like people all right, but I’ve never gone out of my way to make friends. And my background is very different from most of them.
I keep pace with him while he launches into a lengthy monologue. He starts by talking about the differences between New York and Tel Aviv (at least the half a dozen square blocks of Tel Aviv which we’ve seen so far). New York is dirtier, more crowded, busier. But it’s also more interesting, livelier and more artsy. He then moves on to the comparative smells (New York smells much worse, he claims, describing the smell as “dead bodies” versus the smell of rotting garbage in Tel Aviv).
The street we walk on—Dizengoff Street—is lined with sidewalk cafes, open restaurants and stores and far more. But it doesn’t have the look and feel of a tourist area like some of the part of New York I saw during our brief stay there. Just the opposite, really. The cafes are lined with people, out in large numbers with friends and family. I hear laughter a
nd see a lot of people of all ages.
Along both sides of the street are signs, primarily in English and Hebrew, but a smattering in other languages—French, some Arabic, other European languages I would guess might be German and Spanish. The signs are colorful and modern looking.
Alex Thompson walks along talking with Elle LaDuke, a girl from the New York delegation. Elle, the object of John’s crude affection, is petite, with shoulder length black hair, all black clothes and very pale face. The only spot of color on her is her eyes (blue) and her lips (painted bright red). I can hear her questioning Alex—where does she go to school? What did she think of New York? Elle’s voice has a world-weary weight to it, like a jaded, experienced traveller coaching along a much younger friend. I keep an ear open to their conversation as Elle begins to talk about the week she spent in Paris her freshman year in high school.
“It was really duller than I thought it would be,” she says. “And the hotel accommodations were disappointing. But really, nothing helps one become more—cultured—than travel. I’m sure you’ll feel much the same after this trip.”
Alex’s eyes cut over to me. I can almost hear her screaming inside. I chime in, “Alex told me she felt the same about Moscow, that it was much less interesting than when she lived in China.”
“Only because of the snow,” Alex says. “Moscow is really cold in the winter time.”
“Oh,” Elle says. “You’ve been to Moscow?”
“Yes, but our stay was cut short, we were only there for a year.”
“And China?”
“Three years in Beijing. I was pretty young, though; I don’t remember as much as I would like.”