other things. Because while Alice doesn’t want a panicked response when she asks for help (though really, who does?), she wants to know that I get what’s going on, that I’m taking it seriously.
That she’s working hard.
She drags her top teeth over her bottom lip and her knees bounce nervously in her cross-legged position. “I’m supposed to be reading a poem in public tonight and I thought I could do it but really I can’t.” She speeds through the words so quickly, it takes me a couple of seconds to sound back through them, try to figure out where pauses need to be inserted.
“Can I come with you?”
Alice’s shoulders cave forward, like if she tried hard enough they’d meet in front of her chest. “You don’t need to,” she whispers.
I want to raise my eyebrows, ask why she wanted me to wake up if I didn’t need to go to the reading. But while there are a million places where teasing is appropriate, this isn’t one of them.
I shrug. “Eh. Truth is I have nothing going on tonight. So it’ll give me something to do.”
A giggle escapes from Alice’s lips and I’m quite sure that if she wasn’t so tense, she’d jump the ten feet separating our two beds and give me a tackle hug. “Thank you,” she says instead, and I know it’s the same thing.
“What do you want to do today?” Zeke asks. My brain is buzzing from the discussion we’d just had in class and especially from the part I played in it. We’d been looking at a series of children’s books and I’d mounted a strong argument as to why French children’s books—often darker and more morose than their American counterparts—do a better job building children’s emotional landscape than cute and shiny American books. Which is when Zeke and I discovered that we share the same favorite children’s story—the always-popular Where the Wild Things Are—though we have distinctly different views on the meaning of the story and the importance of Max’s dinner remaining warm at the end.
It became a full-on class debate and for the first time in class, I stopped translating in my head and just felt the words rise up inside. And while I’m sure I made mistakes, it didn’t matter. Especially when Marianne pulled me aside at the end of class to tell me how pleased she was with my progress, how I should forward her the forms for the Paris School.
Which lit up every nerve inside my body and made me want to turn cartwheels down Main Street.
“What do you want to do?” I turn the question around, my smile so wide it feels like it might swallow my head whole.
Zeke picks up his bag and starts walking toward town. “Well, I don’t need to go back to Boston today, so I’m pretty flexible.”
I think back to Alice, to the way Zeke talked her through the hard time she’d had at Chutes and Lattes. She wouldn’t mind if he came too. “You can totally say no, but what about a poetry reading? There’s an open mic night at the Upper Deck and—”
And even before I have a chance to explain, to say that it’s Alice reading, that we’d just be there for moral support, he shrugs. “Sounds good to me.”
He pauses, and it’s only because I know him, know how he works, know when to expect the unexpected that I brace myself. “You’re going to read, right?” he says.
The look on my face clearly says it all, because he widens his eyes and dips his chin.
I shake my head. “It’s for Alice—”
“I’m sure. But if we’re going, you need to read. Unless you’re too scared . . .” The challenge is there in his eyes, and I feel my competitive nature rise to meet it.
“You going to read?”
“Of course.” He smiles. “A French poem, bien sûr.”
Merde.
Standing outside the bright blue door of the Upper Deck, it’s hard to know who’s more nervous, me or Alice. It’s not a date, I remind myself as I check the time again. Zeke and I do these events all the time. And the truth is, if he doesn’t show, it’s even better because then I won’t have to read the poem I spent the afternoon slaving over. It’s just ten lines, but that’s ten lines more than I’m comfortable reading up there in front of the crowd, in front of Zeke.
I’m just about to give up, to tell Alice we should go in and save a