I’m in there. I’m in that sketchbook.
I never saw his drawing. What would it have revealed about me? About him? I wondered if he ever looked at it. I wondered about it all summer long.
Kurt jiggles the handle of my new door, shaking me back into France. “This is catching. You need to get it fixed.”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I say.
He frowns. “That doesn’t make sense. The door you had last year worked fine.”
“Never mind.” I sigh. Three months is a long time. Any confidence I had in speaking to Josh has crumbled back into shyness and fear. Even if Kurt had just seen him in the hallway, it’s not like I would’ve left my room to speak with him.
Kurt pushes his body weight against the door, listens for its telltale click, and then flops down beside me on the bed. “Our doors are supposed to lock automatically. I shouldn’t be able to walk in like that.”
“And yet—”
“I keep doing it.” He grins.
“It’s strange, though, right?” My voice is tinged with the same awe that it’s had since our arrival two days ago. “Whose door that used to be?”
“Statistically unlikely. But not impossible.”
I have a lifetime’s worth of experience shaking off Kurt’s wonder-killing abilities, so his response doesn’t bother me. Especially because, despite a summer of disappointments and backtracking…
I, Isla Martin, am now living in Joshua Wasserstein’s last place of residence.
These were his walls. This was his ceiling. That black grease mark on the skirting board, the one right above the electrical outlet? He probably made that. For the rest of the year, I will have the same view of the same street outside of the same window. I will sit in his chair, bathe in his shower, and sleep in his bed.
His bed.
I trace a finger along the stitching of my quilt. It’s an embroidered map of Manhattan. When I’m in Manhattan, I sleep underneath a quilt that’s an embroidered map of Paris. But underneath this blanket and underneath these sheets, there’s a sacred space that once belonged to Josh. He dreamed here. I want this to mean something.
My door bursts back open.
“My room is bigger than yours,” Hattie says. “This is like a prison cell.”
Yeah. I’m gonna have to fix that door.
“True,” Kurt says, because the rooms in Résidence Lambert are the size of walk-in closets. “But how many roommates were you assigned? Two? Three?”
This is my sister’s first year attending SOAP – the School of America in Paris. When I was a freshman, our older sister, Gen, was a senior. Now I’m the senior, and Hattie is the freshman. She’ll be living in the underclass dormitory down the street. Students in Grivois have roommates, tons of supervision, and enforced curfews. Here in Lambert, we have our own rooms, one Résidence Director, and significantly more freedom.
Hattie glowers at Kurt. “At least I don’t have to hide from my roommates.”
“Don’t be an assrabbit,” he says.
Last year – when I was in this dorm, and he was still in Grivois – he slept in my bed more often than his own, because he couldn’t get along with his roommates. But I didn’t mind. We’ve been sharing beds since before we could talk. And Kurt and I are strictly friends. There’s none of that he’s-my-best-friend-but-we’re-secretly-in-love bullshit. A relationship with him would feel incestuous.
Hattie narrows her eyes. “Everyone’s waiting in the lobby for dinner.” She’s referring to both his parents and ours. “Hurry up.” She slams my door. It pops back open, but she’s already gone.
I haul myself off the bed. “I wish my parents could’ve sent her to boarding school in Belgium. They speak French there, too.”
Kurt sits up. “That’s a joke, right?”
It is. It’s important to my parents that my sisters and I receive a portion of our education in France. We’re dual citizens. We all received our early schooling in America, and we’ve all been sent here for high school. It’s our choice where to go next. Gen chose Smith College in Massachusetts. I’m not sure where I want to live, but soon I’ll be applying to both la Sorbonne here in Paris and Columbia back in New York.
Kurt pulls up the hood of his favourite charcoal-grey sweatshirt, even though it’s warm outside. I grab my room key, and we leave. It takes both of his hands to yank my door closed. “You really do need to talk to Nate about that.” He nods to our Résidence Director’s apartment, only two doors down.
Okay. So Josh’s old room does have its drawbacks. It’s also located on the ground floor so it’s loud. Extra loud, actually, because it’s also located beside the stairwell.