Just One Day (2 page)

“They did say it was tonight?” Melanie asks.

I think of that one guy, his eyes so impossibly dark, specifically saying that
tonight
was too nice for tragedy. But when I look around, there’s no play here, obviously.
It was probably some kind of joke—fool the stupid tourist.

“Let’s get an ice cream so the night’s not a total write-off,” I say.

We are queuing up for ice cream when we hear it, a hum of acoustic guitars and the
echoey beat of bongo drums. My ears perk up, my sonar rises. I stand on a nearby bench
to look around. It’s not like a stage has magically appeared, but what has just materialized
is a crowd, a pretty big one, under a stand of trees.

“I think it’s starting,” I say, grabbing Melanie’s hand.

“But the ice cream,” she complains.

“After,” I say, yanking her toward the crowd.

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

The guy playing Duke Orsino looks nothing like any Shakespearian actor I’ve ever seen,
except maybe the movie version of
Romeo + Juliet
with Leonardo DiCaprio. He is tall, black, dreadlocked, and dressed like a glam rock-star
in tight vinyl pants, pointy-toed shoes, and a sort of mesh tank top that shows off
his ripped chest.

“Oh, we
so
made the right choice,” Melanie whispers in my ear.

As Orsino gives his opening soliloquy to the sounds of the guitars and bongo drums,
I feel a shiver go up my spine.

We watch the entire first act, chasing the actors around the waterfront. When they
move, we move, which makes it feel like
we
are a part of the play. And maybe that’s what makes it so different. Because I’ve
seen Shakespeare before. School productions and a few plays at the Philadelphia Shakespeare
Theatre. But it’s always felt like listening to something in a foreign language I
didn’t know that well. I had to force myself to pay attention, and half the time,
I wound up rereading the program over and over again, as if it would impart some deeper
understanding.

This time, it clicks. It’s like my ear attunes to the weird language and I’m sucked
fully into the story, the same way I am when I watch a movie, so that I
feel
it. When Orsino pines for the cool Olivia, I feel that pang in my gut from all the
times I’ve crushed on guys I was invisible to. And when Viola mourns her brother,
I feel her loneliness. And when she falls for Orsino, who thinks she’s a man, it’s
actually funny and also moving.

He
doesn’t show up until act two. He’s playing Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, thought
dead. Which makes a certain sense, because by the time he does arrive, I am beginning
to think he never really existed, that I’ve merely conjured him.

As he races through the green, chased after by the ever-loyal Antonio, we chase after
him. After a while, I work up my nerve. “Let’s get closer,” I say to Melanie. She
grabs my hand, and we go to the front of the crowd right at the part where Olivia’s
clown comes for Sebastian and they argue before Sebastian sends him away. Right before
he does, he seems to catch my eye for half a second.

As the hot day softens into twilight and I’m sucked deeper into the illusory world
of Illyria, I feel like I’ve entered some weird otherworldly space, where anything
can happen, where identities can be swapped like shoes. Where those thought dead are
alive again. Where everyone gets their happily-ever-afters. I recognize it’s kind
of corny, but the air is soft and warm, and the trees are lush and full, and the crickets
are singing, and it seems like, for once, maybe it can happen.

All too soon, the play is ending. Sebastian and Viola are reunited. Viola comes clean
to Orsino that she’s actually a girl, and of course he now wants to marry her. And
Olivia realizes that Sebastian isn’t the person she thought she married—but she doesn’t
care; she loves him anyway. The musicians are playing again as the clown gives the
final soliloquy. And then the actors are out and bowing, each one doing something
a little silly with his or her bow. One flips. One plays air guitar. When Sebastian
bows, he scans the audience and stops dead on me. He smiles this funny little half
smile, takes one of the prop coins out of his pocket, and flips it to me. It’s pretty
dark, and the coin is small, but I catch it, and people clap for me too, it now seems.

With the coin in my hand, I clap. I clap until my hands sting. I clap as if doing
so can prolong the evening, can transform
Twelfth Night
into
Twenty-Fourth Night.
I clap so that I can hold on to this feeling. I clap because I know what will happen
when I stop. It’s the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie—one
that I’ve lost myself to—which is that I’ll be thrown back to my own reality and something
hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie all over again just
to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn’t make
any sense.

But there’s no restarting tonight. The crowd is dispersing; the actors drifting off.
The only people left from the show are a couple of musicians passing around the donation
hat. I reach into my wallet for a ten-pound note.

Melanie and I stand together in silence. “Whoa,” she says.

“Yeah. Whoa,” I say back.

“That was pretty cool. And I hate Shakespeare.”

I nod.

“And was it me, or was that hot guy from the line earlier, the one who played Sebastian,
was he totally checking us out?”

Us? But he threw
me
the coin. Or had I just been the one to catch it? Why wouldn’t it have been Melanie
with her blond hair and her camisole top that he’d been checking out? Mel 2.0, as
she calls herself, so much more appealing than Allyson 1.0.

“I couldn’t tell,” I say.

“
And
he threw the coin at us! Nice catch, by the way. Maybe we should go find them. Go
hang out with them or something.”

“They’re gone.”

“Yeah, but those guys are still here.” She gestures to the money collectors. “We could
ask where they hang out.”

I shake my head. “I doubt they want to hang out with stupid American teenagers.”

“We’re not stupid, and most of them didn’t seem that much older than teenagers themselves.”

“No. And besides, Ms. Foley might check in on us. We should get back to the room.”

Melanie rolls her eyes. “Why do you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“Say no to everything. It’s like you’re averse to adventure.”

“I don’t always say no.”

“Nine times out of ten. We’re about to start college. Let’s live a little.”

“I live just plenty,” I snap. “And besides, it never bothered you before.”

Melanie and I have been best friends since her family moved two houses down from ours
the summer before second grade. Since then, we’ve done everything together: we lost
our teeth at the same time, we got our periods at the same time, even our boyfriends
came in tandem. I started going out with Evan a few weeks after she started going
out with Alex (who was Evan’s best friend), though she and Alex broke up in January
and Evan and I made it until April.

We’ve spent so much time together, we almost have a secret language of inside jokes
and looks. We’ve fought plenty, of course. We’re both only children, so sometimes
we’re like sisters. We once even broke a lamp in a tussle. But it’s never been like
this. I’m not even sure what
this
is, only that since we got on the tour, being with Melanie makes me feel like I’m
losing a race I didn’t even know I’d entered.

“I came out here tonight,” I say, my voice brittle and defensive. “I lied to Ms. Foley
so we could come.”

“Right? And we’ve had so much fun! So why don’t we keep it going?”

I shake my head.

She shuffles through her bag and pulls out her phone, scrolls through her texts. “
Hamlet
just let out too. Craig says that Todd’s taken the gang to a pub called the Dirty
Duck. I like the sound of that. Come out with us. It’ll be a blast.”

The thing is, I did go out with Melanie and everyone from the tour once, about a week
into the trip. By this time, they’d already gone out a couple times. And even though
Melanie had known these guys only a week—the same amount of time I’d known them—she
had all these inside jokes with them, jokes
I
didn’t understand. I’d sat there around the crowded table, nursing a drink, feeling
like the unlucky kid who had to start a new school midway into the year.

I look at my watch, which has slid all the way down my wrist. I slide it back up,
so it covers the ugly red birthmark right on my pulse. “It’s almost eleven, and we
have to be up early tomorrow for our train. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to take
my adventure-averse self back to the room.” With the huffiness in my voice, I sound
just like my mom.

“Fine. I’ll walk you back and then go to the pub.”

“And what if Ms. Foley checks in on us?”

Melanie laughs. “Tell her I had heatstroke. And it’s not hot anymore.” She starts
to walk up the slope back toward the bridge. “What? Are you waiting for something?”

I look back down toward the water, the barges, now emptying out from the evening rush.
Trash collectors are out in force. The day is ending; it’s not coming back.

“No, I’m not.”

Two

O
ur train to London is at eight fifteen—Melanie’s idea, so we will have maximum shopping
time. But when the alarm clock starts beeping at six, Melanie pulls the pillow over
her head.

“Let’s get a later train,” she moans.

“No. It’s already all arranged. You can sleep on the train. Anyway, you promised to
be downstairs at six thirty to say good-bye to everyone.” And I promised to say good-bye
to Ms. Foley.

I drag Melanie out of bed and shove her under the hotel’s weak excuse for a shower.
I brew her some instant coffee and quickly talk to my mom, who stayed up until one
in the morning Pennsylvania time to call. At six thirty, we trudge downstairs. Ms.
Foley, in her jeans and Teen Tours! polo shirt as usual, shakes Melanie’s hand. Then
she embraces me in a bony hug, slips me her business card, and says I shouldn’t hesitate
to call if I need anything while in London. Her next tour starts on Sunday, and she’ll
be there too until it begins. Then she tells me she’s arranged a seven-thirty taxi
to take me and Melanie to the train station, asks once again if we’re being met in
London (yes, we are), tells me yet again that I’m a good girl, and warns me against
pickpockets on the Tube.

I let Melanie go back to bed for another half hour, which means she skips her usual
primp time, and at seven thirty I load us into the waiting taxi. When our train arrives,
I drag our bags onto it and find a pair of empty seats. Melanie slumps into the one
next to the window. “Wake me when we get to London.”

I stare at her for a second, but she’s already snuggled up against the window, shutting
her eyes. I sigh and stow her shoulder bag under her feet and put my cardigan down
on the seat next to hers to discourage any thieves or lecherous old men. Then I make
my way to the café car. I missed the hotel’s breakfast, and now my stomach is growling
and my temples are starting to throb with the beginnings of a hunger headache.

Even though Europe is the land of trains, we haven’t taken any on the tour, only airplanes
for the long distances and buses to get us everywhere in between. As I walk through
the cars, the automatic doors open with a satisfying whoosh, and the train rocks gently
under my feet. Outside, the green countryside whizzes by.

In the café car, I examine the sad offerings and wind up ordering a cheese sandwich
and tea and the salt and vinegar crisps I’ve become addicted to. I get a can of Coke
for Melanie. I put the meal in one of those cardboard carriers and am about to go
back to my seat when one of the tables right next to the window opens up. I hesitate
for a second. I should get back to Melanie. Then again, she’s asleep; she doesn’t
care, so I sit at the table and stare out the window. The countryside seems so fundamentally
English, all green and tidy and divvied up with hedges, the fluffy sheep like clouds
mirroring the ever-present ones in the sky.

“That’s a very confused breakfast.”

That voice. After listening to it for four acts last night, I recognize it immediately.

I look up, and he’s right there, grinning a sort of lazy half smile that makes him
seem like he just this second woke up.

“How is it confused?” I ask. I should be surprised, but somehow, I’m not. I do have
to bite my lip to keep from grinning.

But he doesn’t answer. He goes to the counter and orders a coffee. Then he gestures
with his head toward my table. I nod.

“In so many ways,” he says, sitting down opposite me. “It is like a jet-lagged expatriate.”

I look down at my sandwich, my tea, my chips. “This is a jet-lagged expatriate? How
do you get
that
from
this
?”

He blows on his coffee. “Easy. For one, it’s not even nine in the morning. So tea
makes sense. But sandwich and crisps. Those are lunch foods. I won’t even mention
the Coke.” He taps the can. “See, the timing is all mixed up. Your breakfast has jet
lag.”

I have to laugh at that. “The doughnuts looked disgusting.” I gesture toward the counter.

“Definitely. That’s why I bring my own breakfast.” He reaches into his bag and starts
unwrapping something from a wrinkled piece of waxed paper.

“Wait, that looks suspiciously like a sandwich too,” I say.

“It’s not, really. It’s bread and
hagelslag
.”

“Hachuh what?”

“Hach-el-slach.”
He opens the sandwich for me to see. Inside is butter and some kind of chocolate sprinkles.

“You’re calling
my
breakfast confused? You’re eating dessert for breakfast.”

“In Holland, this is breakfast. Very typical. That or
uitsmijter
, which is basically fried egg with ham.”

“That won’t be on the test, will it? Because I can’t even begin to try to say that.”

“
Out. Smy. Ter
. We can practice that later. But that brings me to my second point. Your breakfast
is like an expatriate. And, go ahead, eat. I can talk while you eat.”

“Thank you. I’m glad you can multitask,” I say. Then I laugh. And it’s all just the
weirdest thing, because this is just happening, so naturally. I think I am actually
flirting, over breakfast. About breakfast. “What do you even mean, an expatriate?”

“Someone who lives outside of their native country. You know, you have a sandwich.
Very American. And the tea, very English. But then you have the crisps, or chips,
or whatever you want to call them, and they can go either way, but you’re having salt
and vinegar, which is very English, but you’re eating them for breakfast, and that
seems American. And Coke for breakfast. Coke and chips, is that what you eat for breakfast
in America?”

“How do you even know I’m from America?” I challenge.

“Aside from the fact that you were in a tour group of Americans and you speak with
an American accent?” He takes a bite of his hagu-whatever sandwich and drinks more
of his coffee.

I bite my lip to keep from grinning again. “Right. Aside from that.”

“Those were the only clues, really. You actually don’t look so American.”

“Really?” I pop open my crisps, and a sharp tang of artificial vinegar wafts through
the air. I offer him one. He declines it and takes another bite of his sandwich. “What
looks American?”

He shrugs. “Blond,” he says. “Big . . .” He mimes boobs. “Soft features.” He waves
his hands in front of his face. “Pretty. Like your friend.”

“And I don’t look that way?” I don’t know why I bother to ask this. I know what I
look like. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sharp features. No curves, not much in the boob department.
A little of the fizz goes out of my step. Was all this just buttering me up so he
could hit on Melanie?

“No.” He peers at me with those eyes of his. They’d looked so dark yesterday, but
now that I’m up close, I can see that they have all kinds of colors in them—gray,
brown, even gold dancing in the darkness. “You know who you look like? Louise Brooks.”

I stare at him blankly.

“You don’t know her? The silent film star?”

I shake my head. I never did get into silent films.

“She was a huge star in the nineteen twenties. American. Amazing actress.”

“And not blond.” I mean for it to come out as a joke, but it doesn’t.

He takes another bite of his sandwich. A tiny chocolate sprinkle sticks to the corner
of his mouth. “We have lots of blondes in Holland. I see blond when I look in a mirror.
Louise Brooks was dark. She had these incredible sad eyes and very defined features
and the same hair like you.” He touches his own hair, as tousled as it was last night.
“You look so much like her. I should just call you Louise.”

Louise
. I like that.

“No, not Louise. Lulu. That was her nickname.”

Lulu
. I like that even better.

He reaches out his hand. “Hi, Lulu, I’m Willem.”

His hand is warm, and his grasp is firm. “Nice to meet you, Willem. Though I could
call you Sebastian if we’re taking on new identities.”

When he laughs, little crinkles flower along his eyes. “No. I prefer Willem. Sebastian’s
kind of, what’s the word . . . passive, when you think about it. He gets married to
Olivia, who really wants to be with his sister. That happens a lot with Shakespeare.
The women go after what they want; the men wind up suckered into things.”

“I don’t know. I was glad when everyone got their happy ending last night.”

“Oh, it’s a nice fairy tale, but that’s what it is. A fairy tale. But I figure Shakespeare
owes his comedy characters those happy endings because he is so cruel in his tragedies.
I mean,
Hamlet
. Or
Romeo and Juliet
. It’s almost sadistic.” He shakes his head. “Sebastian’s okay, he’s just not really
in charge of his own destiny so much. Shakespeare gives that privilege to Viola.”

“So you’re in charge of your own destiny?” I ask. And again, I hear myself and can
hardly believe it. When I was little, I used to go to the local ice-skating rink.
In my mind, I always felt like I could twirl and jump, but when I got out onto the
ice, I could barely keep my blades straight. When I got older, that’s how it was with
people: In my mind, I am bold and forthright, but what comes out always seems to be
so meek and polite. Even with Evan, my boyfriend for junior and most of senior year,
I never quite managed to be that skating, twirling, leaping person I suspected I could
be. But today, apparently, I can skate.

“Oh, not at all. I go where the wind blows me.” He pauses to consider that. “Maybe
there’s a good reason I play Sebastian.”

“So where is the wind blowing you?” I ask, hoping he’s staying in London.

“From London, I catch another train back to Holland. Last night was the end of the
season for me.”

I deflate. “Oh.”

“You haven’t eaten your sandwich. Be warned, they put butter on the cheese sandwiches
here. The fake kind, I think.”

“I know.” I pull off the sad wilted tomatoes and smear off some of the excess butter/margarine
with my napkin.

“It would be better with mayonnaise,” Willem tells me.

“Only if there was turkey on it.”

“No, cheese and mayonnaise is very good.”

“That sounds foul.”

“Only if you’ve never had the proper sort of mayonnaise. I’ve heard the kind they
have in America is not the proper sort.”

I laugh so hard that tea comes spurting out my nose.

“What?” Willem asks. “What?”

“The
proper
sort of mayonnaise,” I say in between gasps of laughter. “It makes me think that
there’s, like, a bad-girl mayonnaise who’s slutty and steals, and a good-girl mayonnaise,
who is proper and crosses her legs, and my problem is that I’ve never been introduced
to the right one.”

“That is exactly correct,” he says. And then he starts laughing too.

We are both cracking up when Melanie trudges into the café car, carrying her stuff,
plus my sweater. “I couldn’t find you,” she says sullenly.

“You said to wake you in London.” I look out the window then. The pretty English countryside
has given way to the ugly gray outskirts of the city.

Melanie looks over at Willem, and her eyes widen. “You’re not shipwrecked after all,”
she says to him.

“No,” he says, but he’s looking at me. “Don’t be mad at Lulu. It’s my fault. I kept
her here.”

“Lulu?”

“Yes, short for Louise. It’s my new alter ego,
Mel
.” I look at her, my eyes imploring her not to give me away. I’m liking being Lulu.
I’m not ready to give her up just yet.

Melanie rubs her eyes, like maybe she’s still sleeping. Then she shrugs and slumps
into the seat next to Willem. “Fine. Be whoever you want. I’d like to be someone with
a new head.”

“She’s new to this hangover thing,” I tell Willem.

“Shut up,” Melanie snaps.

“What, you want me say that ‘it’s old hat for you’?”

“Aren’t you Miss Sassy-pants this morning.”

“Here.” Willem reaches into his backpack for a small white container and shakes out
a few white balls into Melanie’s hand. “Put these under your tongue to dissolve. You’ll
feel better soon.”

“What is this?” she asks suspiciously.

“It’s herbal.”

“Are you sure it’s not some date-rape drug?”

“Right. Because he wants you to pass out in the middle of the train,” I say.

Willem shows the label to Melanie. “My mother is a naturopathic doctor. She uses these
for headaches. I don’t think to rape me.”

“Hey, my father is a doctor too,” I say. Though the opposite of naturopathic. He’s
a pulmonologist, Western medicine all the way.

Melanie eyes the pills for a second before finally popping them under her tongue.
By the time the train chugs into the station ten minutes later, her headache is better.

By some unspoken agreement, the three of us disembark together: Melanie and I with
our overstuffed roller bags, Willem with his compact backpack. We push out onto the
platform into the already-hot summer sun and then into the relative cool of Marylebone
Station.

“Veronica texted that she’s running late,” Melanie says. “She says to meet her by
the WHSmith. Whatever that is.”

“It’s a bookstore,” Willem says, pointing across the interior of the station.

The inside of the station is pretty and redbricked, but I’m disappointed that it’s
not one of those grand stations with the clattering destination boards I was hoping
for. Instead, there’s just a TV departure monitor. I go over to look at it. The destinations
are nowhere that exotic: places like High Wycombe and Banbury, which might be very
nice for all I know. It’s silly, really. I’ve just finished up a tour of big European
cities—Rome, Florence, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Edinburgh, and now I’m in
London again—and for most of it, I was counting the days until we went home. I don’t
know why now all of a sudden I should be struck with wanderlust.

“What’s wrong?” Melanie asks me.

“Oh, I was just hoping for one of those big departure boards, like they had at some
of the airports.”