but it feels different saying it in French. Almost like it doesn’t count.
“All I remember are those crazy orgasms,” Zeke says, and while part of me wants to tackle him to the ground for polluting my perfect movie, I pretend instead that I don’t hear him. I’ve already injured him once in this half hour; I shouldn’t push it.
“The Paris in that movie became my happy place,” I continue, though I can’t help but catch the double meaning. Not to mention Zeke’s obvious smirk. “I mean, the place I started going to when I didn’t fit in anywhere else.” I’m sure that means something else too, but I push past it, my words gaining steam as I go. “It got to the point that I’d watched the movie so many times that I didn’t even need the subtitles. I’d taught myself enough French to understand it.”
There are baby ducks by the side of the pond and I pause for a moment to watch them go by.
“When did you start taking classes?” Zeke uses the French word courses instead of classes, and I make a note of it on the page. Quand as-tu commencé à prendre des cours en français?
I chuckle, both at the question and with the relief that we’ve moved on from his fascination with the orgasms in my favorite movie. “Um. I never did. My school didn’t offer French so I learned it on my own. I used my birthday money to pay for language courses online, and then I just worked on it. I read kids’ books. Watched TV shows on the internet. Anything I could get my hands on.”
“You taught yourself French? Completely?”
“Complètement.”
“Tu es remarquable.”
You are remarkable.
“My family is obsessed with sports. So when they’d start talking at the dinner table, I started conjugating French verbs in my head. I’d rip out pages from an old copy of Le Nouveau Bescherelle, and I’d sit with verb tenses on my lap, practicing. And on the El going to school, or in the back of my parents’ car, I’d have my Larousse dictionary in my lap, and I’d translate ads and signs into French. I know it’s kind of dumb.”
“It’s not dumb.”
I shrug. “It’s not terribly useful in this country. Spanish or even Mandarin would make more sense. But there’s something about how it’s totally not practical that makes it even more attractive in some ways. It feels like poetry, like a special secret.”
I scuff my shoe in the dirt, suddenly embarrassed by all I’ve said, all I’ve said to Zeke of all people. But somehow I can’t yet stop. Because I feel like maybe . . .
I stare at my well-worn Chucks, how they fit me perfectly, broken in just the way I like them. “The fact that there’s a whole country that speaks this beautiful language . . . Sometimes in my head, I picture France like some combination of Hogwarts and Narnia and The Secret Garden. And I know it’s ridiculous, that France is a real place with real people who are sometimes kind and sometimes shitty, but I just . . .” This is too much. “I just want to be able to speak the language.”
We walk for a few minutes in silence as I try desperately to return my face to a color that isn’t bright tomato red.
After that we make small talk about the places we’ve visited, our favorite cities. With a grandmother in Paris, Zeke tells me about a few of the trips to France he’s taken, his parents’ insistence on him speaking only French while he’s there, even with them. How his mother still makes him frequently switch to her native French to keep up his language acquisition.
“So why are you in this class—course—and not Advanced French?”
“Still trying to get rid of me?” he jokes.
But I shake my head. Because when I said the words out loud, I realized how much I didn’t want to say them, didn’t want to give him any ideas.
“My spoken French is much better than my written French, and my reading. And sadly I haven’t been back to Paris in a few years, so even my spoken French has been fading.”
I want to grill him more about the places he’s been to in France, but I feel like I’ve already made myself so vulnerable with my impassioned speech about the French language. Did I really compare France to a blend of Hogwarts, Narnia, and The Secret Garden?
Instead I think about what it would be like