minutes. A new personal best.
And as a result of my meltdown, I never got the shirt he bought me.
“You’re going to be late.” Alice is eating her muffin in such tiny bites that I doubt she’ll make it to a class at all.
“I’m thinking of skipping.”
If eyes could actually roll, Alice’s would be falling out of her head. “It’s only the second week.”
“You skipped yesterday,” I remind her.
“I had a migraine. Go to class.”
“I cried on Zeke’s shirt yesterday.”
“Aha.” She smiles. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You are starting to like your hot French partner.”
I laugh so hard I snort, causing my little wave of coffee to drench my hand. “You think he’s hot? Remember, I go for the soulful poets.”
“Then why did you cry on his shirt?”
Why indeed. Could I blame it on baseball? Or on the memories that the discussion generated? Or maybe I was just overtired? I’d been spending every afternoon stuck in the library.
Is this going to be my life for the next seven weeks?
And is it okay that I hope the answer is yes?
“I don’t know.”
Zeke shows up to class wearing his new Support Our Troops T-shirt with a photo of a crowd of Star Wars storm troopers, and we don’t talk about baseball. Or about my little crying jag. Instead, he suggests we take turns creating French speaking opportunities so that we don’t spend the first half hour of every afternoon session trying to figure out what to do.
“I don’t trust you.” I smirk when he waggles his eyebrows to convince me how fun it will be. Especially as it makes his glasses bounce up and down on his nose.
Trust. Confiance.
Which reminds me of the T-shirt he never gave me yesterday. “Où est mon T-shirt? Je n’étais pas méchante . . .”
I wasn’t mean, was I? I should get the shirt.
Zeke laughs and reaches into his backpack for the plastic bag from the used clothing store. “I was going to keep it for myself.”
Inside is a T-shirt with a picture of the cranky old guys from The Muppet Show (Waldorf and the one I can never remember) with the caption Haters Gonna Hate. It’s perfect.
“Not a chance; this one’s mine now.”
Zeke shrugs and bounces his glasses with his nose again. “Come on, let’s trade off creating assignments? S’il te plaît?”
Oh god. He’s giving me puppy-dog eyes.
Zut.
“D’accords.”
And now Zeke, in his Star Wars T-shirt and long plaid shorts and those bright green Chucks—how many pairs does this boy have?—is dancing a little happy dance in front of Lederer Hall. His index fingers point up and his hips rock back and forth, and he moves to some disjointed tune he tries to sing, and I can’t help it.
I laugh.
And I continue laughing later that evening when Zeke takes me on a tour of Merritt as if it were Paris.
“Voici le fameux Jardin du Luxembourg,” he says, stopping at the very ordinary, nothing-at-all-like-Paris Daley Park. He’s created one of those sticks with a sign on top that reads A to Z Tours and he waves it back and forth when he stops. Like there’s a crowd of people we’re walking through. Like there’s a crowd of people following him.
“Uh, this isn’t . . .”
“Look from this angle,” he says, shoving a photograph of a park in front of my face, the real Jardin du Luxembourg, his face so earnest.
“You may not be able to tell,” Zeke continues, changing the photographs as he rotates me around to see different angles of Daley Park/Jardin du Luxembourg, “but this park is actually fifty acres, and is one of the most popular places to hang out for Parisians and tourists alike.”
His French flawless, his voice like a tour guide, he tells me how the widow of King Henry IV originally lived here, how she created the gardens to remember the Boboli Gardens of Florence.
“How do you know all this?” I ask as we finally leave the famed Jardin du Luxembourg.
“I did a bit of research this afternoon when I was waiting for . . .” He pauses and clears his throat. “But much of it I know from being there with my grandmother. She walks there every day, rain or shine. As long as there’s no ice, because she’s terrified of falling.”
I notice the little pause, the words he drops, and I wonder, but I don’t press. Today’s a good day. And plus, based on the next stack of photographs he’s pulling out, I’m guessing the tiny church on the corner of