Anna and the French Kiss (16 page)

“Yeah, but I don’t think he’s telling St. Clair not to care. He just knows St. Clair can’t deal with things right now.” But I squirm a bit. I do wish Josh would be supportive in a more encouraging way.

She opens her mouth to argue when I interrupt. “How’s soccer?”

“Football,” she says, and her face lights up. Meredith joined a local girls’ league last month, and she practices most afternoons. She updates me on her latest adventures in soccer drills until we reach the front case. It shimmers with neat rows of square-shaped
tarte citrons
, spongy cakes swelling with molten chocolate, caramel éclairs like ballet slippers, and red fruity cakes with wild strawberries dusted in powdery sugar.

And more
macarons
.

Bin after bin of
macarons
in every flavor and color imaginable. Grass greens and pinky reds and sunshine yellows. While Mer debates over cakes, I select six.

Rose. Black currant. Orange. Fig. Pistachio. Violet.

And then I notice cinnamon and hazelnut praline, and I just want to die right there. Crawl over the counter and crunch my fingers through their delicate crusts and lick out the fragrant fillings until I can no longer breathe. I am so distracted it takes a moment to realize the man behind me is speaking to me.

“Huh?” I turn to see a dignified gentleman with a basset hound. He’s smiling at me and pointing at my striped box. The man looks familiar. I swear I’ve seen him before. He talks in friendly, rapid French.

“Uhh.” I gesture around feebly and shrug my shoulders.
“Je ne parle pas ...”

I don’t speak . . .

He slows down, but I’m still clueless. “Mer? Help? Mer?”

She comes to the rescue.They chat for a minute, and his eyes are shining until she says something that makes him gasp.
“Ce n’est pas possible!”
I don’t need to speak the language to recognize an “Oh, no!” when I hear it. He considers me sadly, and then they say goodbye. I add in my own shaky farewell. Mer and I pay for our treats—she’s selected
un millefeuille
, a puff pastry with custard—and she steers me from the shop.

“Who was that? What did he want? What were you talking about?”

“You don’t recognize him?” She’s surprised. “It’s the man who runs that theater on rue des Écoles, the little one with the red-and-white lights. He walks Pouce in front of our dorm all the time.”

We pick our way through a flock of pigeons, who don’t care we’re about to step on them. They rumble with coos and beat their wings and jostle the air. “Pouce?”

“The basset hound.”

A lightbulb goes off. Of course I’ve seen them around. “But what did he want?”

“He was wondering why he hasn’t seen your boyfriend in a while. St. Clair,” she adds, at my confused expression. Her voice is bitter. “I guess you guys have seen a few films there together?”

“We watched a spaghetti-western retrospective there last month.” I’m baffled. He thought St. Clair and I were dating?

She’s quiet. Jealous. But Meredith has no reason for envy. There’s nothing—
nothing
—going on between St. Clair and me. And I’m okay with it, I swear. I’m too worried about St. Clair to think about him in that
other
way. He needs the familiar right now, and Ellie is familiar.

I’ve been thinking about the familiar, too. I miss Toph again. I miss his green eyes, and I miss those late nights at the theater when he’d make me laugh so hard I’d cry. Bridge says he asks about me, but I haven’t talked to him lately, because their band is so busy.Things are good for the Penny Dreadfuls.They’ve finally scheduled their first gig. It’s just before Christmas, and I, Anna Oliphant, will be in attendance.

One month. I can hardly wait.

I should be seeing them next week, but Dad doesn’t think it’s worth the money to fly me home for such a short holiday, and Mom can’t afford it. So I’m spending Thanksgiving here alone. Except . . . I’m not anymore.

I recall the news Mer dropped only minutes ago. St. Clair isn’t going home for Thanksgiving either. And everyone else, his girlfriend included, is traveling back to the States. Which means the two of us will be here for the four-day weekend. Alone.

The thought distracts me all the way back to the dorm.

chapter eighteen

Happy Thanksgiving to you! Happy Thanksgiving to yoouuu! Happy Thanks-giv-ing, St. Cla-airrr—”

His door jerks open, and he glares at me with heavy eyes. He’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and white pajama bottoms with blue stripes. “Stop. Singing.”

“St. Clair! Fancy meeting you here!” I give him my biggest gap-toothed smile. “Did you know today is a holiday?”

He shuffles back into bed but leaves his door open. “I heard,” he says grumpily. I let myself in. His room is . . . messier than the first time I saw it. Dirty clothes and towels in heaps across the floor. Half-empty water bottles. The contents of his schoolbag spill from underneath his bed, crinkled papers and blank worksheets. I take a hesitant sniff. Dank. It smells dank.

“Love what you’ve done with the place. Very college-chic.”

“If you’re here to criticize, you can leave the way you came in,” he mumbles through his pillow.

“Nah.You know how I feel about messes. They’re ripe with such
possibility
.”

He sighs, a long-suffering noise.

I move a stack of textbooks off his desk chair and several sketches fall from between the pages. They’re all charcoal drawings of anatomical hearts. I’ve only seen his doodles before, nothing serious. And while it’s true Josh is the better technical artist, these are beautiful. Violent. Passionate.

I pick them off the floor. “These are amazing. When did you make them?”

Silence.

Delicately, I place the hearts back inside his government book, careful not to smudge them any more than they already are. “So. We’re celebrating today.You’re the only person I know left in Paris.”

A grunt. “Not many restaurants are serving stuffed turkey.”

“I don’t need turkey, just an acknowledgment that today is important. No one out there”—I point out his window, even though he’s not looking—“has a clue.”

He tugs his covers tight. “I’m from London. I don’t celebrate it either.”

“Please. You said on my first day you were an American. Remember? You can’t switch nationalities as suits your needs. And today our country is gorging itself on pie and casseroles, and we need to be a part of that.”

“Hmph.”

This isn’t going as planned. Time to switch tactics. I sit on the edge of his bed and wiggle his foot. “Please? Pretty please?”

Silence.

“Come on. I need to do something fun, and you need to get out of this room.”

Silence.

My frustration rises. “You know, today sucks for both of us. You aren’t the only one stuck here. I’d give anything to be at home right now.”

Silence.

I take a slow, deep breath. “Fine.You wanna know the deal? I’m worried about you. We’re
all
worried about you. Heck, this is the most we’ve talked in weeks, and I’m the only one moving my mouth! It sucks what happened, and it sucks even harder that there’s nothing any of us can say or do to change it. I mean there’s
nothing
I can do, and that pisses me off, because I hate seeing you like this. But you know what?” I stand back up. “I don’t think your mom would want you beating yourself up over something you can’t control. She wouldn’t want you to stop trying. And I think she’ll want to hear as many good things as possible when you go home next month—”

“IF I go home next month—”

“WHEN you go home, she’ll want to see you happy.”

“Happy?” Now he’s mad. “How can I—”

“Okay, not happy,” I say quickly. “But she won’t want to see you like this either. She won’t want to hear you’ve stopped attending class, stopped trying. She wants to see you graduate, remember? You’re so close, St. Clair. Don’t mess this up.”

Silence.

“Fine.” It’s not fair, not rational, for me to be this angry with him, but I can’t help it. “Be a lump. Drop out. Enjoy your miserable day in bed.” I head for the door. “Maybe you aren’t the person I thought you were.”

“And who is that?” comes the acid reply.

“The kind of guy who gets out of bed, even when things are crap. The kind of guy who calls his mother to say ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ instead of avoiding talking to her because he’s afraid of what she might say. The kind of guy who doesn’t let his asshole father win. But I guess I’m wrong. This”—I gesture around his room, even though his back is to me; he’s very still—“must be working for you. Good luck with that. Happy holidays. I’m going out.”

The door is clicking shut when I hear it. “Wait—”

St. Clair cracks it back open. His eyes are blurry, his arms limp. “I don’t know what to say,” he finally says.

“So don’t say anything. Take a shower, put on some warm clothes, and come find me. I’ll be in my room.”

I let him in twenty minutes later, relieved to find his hair is wet. He’s bathed.

“Come here.” I sit him on the floor in front of my bed and grab a towel. I rub it through his dark hair. “You’ll catch a cold.”

“That’s a myth, you know.” But he doesn’t stop me. After a minute or two, he gives a small sigh, some kind of release. I work slowly, methodically. “So where are we going?” he asks when I finish. His hair is still damp, and a few curls are forming.

“You have great hair,” I say, resisting the urge to finger-comb it.

He snorts.

“I’m serious. I’m sure people tell you all the time, but it’s really good hair.”

I can’t see his expression, but his voice grows quiet. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” I say with formality. “And I’m not sure where we’re going. I thought we’d just leave and . . . we’ll know when we get there.”

“What?” he asks. “No plan? No minute-by-minute itinerary?”

I wallop the back of his head with the towel. “Careful. I’ll make one.”

“God, no. Anything but
that
.” I think he’s serious until he turns around with half a grin on his face. I swat him again, but truthfully, I’m so relieved for that half grin that I could cry. It’s more than I’ve seen in weeks.

Focus, Anna. “Shoes. I need shoes.” I throw on my sneakers and grab my winter coat, hat, and gloves. “Where’s your hat?”

He squints at me. “Mer? Is that you? Do I need my scarf? Will it be cold, Mummy?”

“Fine, freeze to death. See if I care.” But he pulls his knitted stocking cap out of his coat pocket and yanks it over his hair.This time his grin is full and dazzling, and it catches me off guard. My heart stops.

I stare until his smile drops, and he looks at me questioningly.

This time, it’s my voice that’s grown quiet. “Let’s go.”

chapter nineteen

There it is! That’s my plan.”

St. Clair follows my gaze to the massive dome.The violet gray sky, the same sky Paris has seen every day since the temperature dropped, has subdued it, stripped away its golden gleam, but I am no less intrigued.

“The Panthéon?” he asks warily.

“You know, I’ve been here three months, and I still have no idea what it is.” I jump into the crosswalk leading toward the gigantic structure.

He shrugs. “It’s a pantheon.”

I stop to glare, and he pushes me forward so I’m not run over by a blue tourist bus. “Oh, right. A pantheon. Why didn’t I think of that?”

St. Clair glances at me from the corner of his eyes and smiles. “A pantheon means it’s a place for tombs—of famous people, people important to the nation.”

“Is that all?” I’m sort of disappointed. It looks like it should’ve at least crowned a few kings or something.

He raises an eyebrow.

“I mean, there are tombs and monuments everywhere here. What’s different about this one?” We climb the steps, and the full height of the approaching columns is overwhelming. I’ve never been this close.

“I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose. It’s a bit second rate, anyway.”

“Second rate? You’ve gotta be kidding.” Now I’m offended. I like the Panthéon. No, I LOVE the Panthéon. “Who’s buried here?” I demand.

“Er. Rousseau, Marie Curie, Louis Braille, Victor Hugo—”

“The
Hunchback of Notre-Dame
guy?”

“The very one. Voltaire. Dumas. Zola.”

“Wow. See? You can’t say that’s not impressive.” I recognize the names, even if I don’t know what they all did.

“I didn’t.” He reaches for his wallet and pays our admission charge. I try to get it—since it was my idea in the first place—but he insists. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he says, handing me my ticket. “Let’s see some dead people.”

We’re greeted by an unimaginable number of domes and columns and arches. Everything is huge and round. Enormous frescoes of saints, warriors, and angels are painted across the walls. We stroll across the marble in awed silence, except for when he points out someone important like Joan of Arc or Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. According to him, Saint Geneviève saved the city from famine. I think she was a real person, but I’m too shy to ask. When I’m with him, I’m always aware of how much I don’t know.

A swinging brass sphere hangs from the highest point in the center dome. Okay, now I can’t help it. “What’s that?”

St. Clair shrugs and looks around for a sign.

“I’m shocked. I thought you knew everything.”

He finds one. “Foucault’s pendulum. Oh. Sure.” He looks up in admiration.

The sign is written in French, so I wait for his explanation. It doesn’t come. “Yes?”

St. Clair points at the ring of measurements on the floor. “It’s a demonstration of the earth’s rotation. See? The plane of the pendulum’s swing rotates every hour. You know, it’s funny,” he says, looking all the way up at the ceiling, “but the experiment didn’t have to be this big to prove his point.”

“How French.”

He smiles. “Come on, let’s see the crypt.”

“Crypt?” I freeze. “Like, a
crypt
crypt?”

“Where’d you think the dead bodies were?”

I cough. “Right. Sure. The crypt. Let’s go.”

“Unless you’re scared.”

“I didn’t have a problem at the cemetery, did I?” He stiffens, and I’m mortified. I can’t
believe
I brought up Père-Lachaise. Distraction. Quick, I need a distraction! I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. “Race you!” And I run toward the closest crypt entrance. My pounding feet echo throughout the building, and the tourists are all staring.