The students ebbed around me, pressing cigarettes feverishly to their mouths, laughing nasaly laughs, kissing (in greeting or otherwise), clapping one another and even their teachers on the backs. For a moment they seemed a crowd purely of strangers. I saw Dan first; his hieght, the blonde streaks in his hair, and the brightness of his shirt all gave him away. Then I spotted Sarah, Molly, Theresa, Céline. Dan and Sarah waved, Céline winked, Molly pretended not to have seen me, and Theresa smiled uncertainly. I went to them, kissed where kissing was appropriate (where one of us was french). We said simple things back and forth in one language or another. Céline lit a cigarette off of Sarah's; they smoked with their spare hands on their hips, blowing truncated gray plumes towards the sky, speaking hurridly in between drags. Dan asked where Bruna was. I said class, a test, then asked why Theresa was with us instead of with her host brother Ludavic. Dan said Ludavic had a test too, same as Bruna. I nodded. Sarah ground the useless part of cigarette into the concrete. Around us even the stragglers were straggling off one by one. Finally, Céline shoved his hands into the depths of his unnecessary coat, something apolagetic in his posture. "I go," he said simply. Sarah nodded, told him not to be late. Then she was alone with the four of us, the Americans. For a moment she was silent, surveying us with a look of cryptic amusement. Behind her, in the ramshackle apartment across the way, the old drunkard we had been told to ignore on the very first day leaned out of his window to shout a slurred profanity at an irritated passerby. Sarah rolled her eyes in his direction, then said, "So."
"So," I said back.
Dan laughed (good natured, compulsivley; Dan was always laughing.) "What are we doing?" he asked.
"What do you want to do?" Sarah retorted, her dark eyes gleaming with mischeif and promise and a million other less definable things. (She was like that. Like this: sturdy, agreeable, impulsive, what one might call a force.)
At first nothing creative came to mind. There were the stores, and there was the café -bar where, it seemed, Bruna and her friends passed more time during school hours than they did at school.
And then, there was the sea.
"Johan is sick today," Sarah said, as if somehow this decided things. "We will go visit him." Then, off our looks of mild confusion, she added, "He lives by the beach. It will be fun. And he's not really sick, he's...what do you say?"
"Playing hooky," I offered.
"Hickey?"
"Haha. No. Hooky."
"Hooky. O.k. On y va."
And we did just that. On the bus Sarah told us that Johan hadn't come to school all week. The way she said it it sounded like pride, like boasting. Molly asked if his parents knew. Sarah, in lieu of answering, laughed. "Johan is my best friend," she said affectionately. For a moment no one spoke. Then, with a startling, appealing lack of elegance, Sarah scrambled onto her knees, and pointed out the bus's faintly tinted, not-so-faintly dirty windows. "Look at the lavender," she said, and we did, at the shimmering, stretching ripple of silver-purple blurring past. When the beautiful fields faded from view, Sarah settled back into her seat with an air of absolute satisfaction. "We're close," she said.
Johan lived in a town filled with kitschy stores selling lanyards and pornographic postcards, keychains and umbrellas and novelty martini glasses, bikinis and shark tooth necklaces. Presumably it was sometimes filled also with tourists, but it wasn't the right season for that. On the contrary, the only people we saw seemed more than content to pretend that they were alone, an illusion we likewise maintained. From where the bus let us off, it was a five minute walk through the naked streets to the beach. Everything felt wide and silent and empty--until we reached the sea, which, though wide (infinite, in fact), was loud and alive. And blue. So blue. Not the same blue as the sky, but a different blue, a blue worthy of the sky's efforts and affections.
We took off our shoes, our socks, our tights, our jackets. We piled them on a log close to the sidewalk. We dug our toes down deep into the sand. We wiggled them. The wind took our voices and ran off with them. It brought us the taste of the sea. We walked along the beach, slanting towards the water. Beneath us, the sand grew darker and cooler. Eventually the waves reached for our ankles. We cringed from the cold but refused to shy away. We cuffed our jeans. We bunched up our skirts in our hands. We waded.
There were shells everywhere. It was easy not to notice them at first, but if you wanted to find them, they were there. Pink shells and purple shells and strange, cylindrical shells that looked more like magical flutes than like any other shells I had ever seen. Sarah and Molly and Theresa went to lie in the sun, but Dan and I wandered, following one shell to the next, lifting them gingerly, fighting over some of them, hardly talking,hardly even breathing, maybe letting the sea breathe for us... until finally we heard Sarah shouting for us and realized that we were almost too far to hear her at all. We turned back.
When we reached them Sarah called Johan and told him that we were on our way. It seemed criminal to put the rest of our clothing back on, so we carried everything in awkward bundles. It was O.K; it wasn't far. It seemed we had barely lost sight of the waves when we came to a white, two story house with a balcony and a blue roof. Its stucco-esque walls reminded me of an adobe, and a fenced-in patio was fiiled with small palm trees, potted cactuses, and exuberant flowers that stuck out their long, pink tongues at us as Sarah keyed in a number she knew by heart and the gates clicked open.
Stepping through, Sarah tilted her head back,and thundered, "Johan? JOOOHAAN?"
A moment later Johan appeared on the balcony. He was tall and bony with a long forehead, deep-set gray eyes, and gelled light brown hair. He was also more sloppily dressed than I'd come to expect of the french students; although it was hard to say whether this was habitual or simply because he hadn't been planning on leaving the house. As I watched, he tapped ash carelessly over the rail into the garden below, bit back a smile and regarded us silently.
"We came to visit you," Sarah said. "Because you are sick."
Johan laughed.
"Playing hooky," she added.
"Comment? Hocky, comme sur la glace?"
"Hooky. Comme quand on ne va pas a l'école."
"Ah. Hooky. I am playing hooky."
"Yes. But you said you are sick so we came to visit you, to make you better."
"Actually," said Theresa, "We would really just say skipping school."
Everyone looked at her. Everyone blinked. Up until that point, Theresa had hardly spoken at all.
"O.k," said Johan. He tossed his cigarette butt over the fence to the neighbors yard, and promptly vanished from the balcony. A moment later, he reappeared at the front door.
"Drinks?" he asked. "Alchohol? Jus?"
"Je vais mourir de soif," Sarah whined. "I'm thirsty. Lemonade."
Dan and I exchanged glances, raised brows. There was something fundamentally unnerving about Sarah picking fruit juice over alchohol. It seemed strange, too, (though not unpleasent), when we were, some minutes later, seated on wire chairs around a wire table, drinking limonade from stout, colorful plastic cups. In the last few days we'd grown used to the artistry and rituals of eating and drinking, and to the omniprescence of wine. I sipped slowly, at once enchanted and apalled by how much sweeter the soda tasted by contrast. How quickly we adapt.
And yes, right then it felt so easy to be there, so natural. The sun, the sea, the smoke, the bread, the wine, kiss hello, kiss good bye. Playing hicky, hocky, hooky, whatever. Everyone speaking one language, then everyone speaking another, botching both, sometimes the feeling of understanding neither, but even then...
Laughter. Lavender. Love.
The bus came and went without us, humming down the street just close enough that we turned our heads.
"Fuck," said Sarah, grinning. Theresa squirmed. "I said I'd meet Ludavic..." she trailed off. Sarah shrugged. The next bus came in an hour and there was nothing we could do. Theresa looked annoyed, but it seemed impossible not to smile. In that moment, the feeling of freedom was absolute. The wind was soft and balmy and sweet, like a breeze borrowed from a shampoo commercial in which topless girls lounged luxuriously in the tropics. The limonade was going to our heads like wine. Time was different here; time was on our side. Twenty-four hour time was slow and meaningless and kind. We doddled on our way to the bus stop, stopped at one of the homogenous stores to fill a white paper bag with licorice, happy cola, and creme brulee gummies. We tossed the bag back and forth, licked sour sugar from our thumbs. When we reached the bus stop, we lay on the benches on our backs and stared up at the sky. We taught each other to be vulgar or charming in english or french. Sarah made it a rule that for the rest of the day no one could speak in their own language; for the most part the rule was followed. Dan and I sang the repetitive pop songs we'd learned from the radio on the drive to Mont Pellier the day before; Sarah filled in the blanks we couldn't remember. Eventually the bus came, not quite on schedule, but close enough. It was our last night in Bézier, and even paying for the bus ticket felt sacred and sad.
Dinner that night was strange, wineless and crowded. Since it was the last night, it had been decided that all of the exchange and host students from the Lycée Henry VI would eat together at a traditional restaurant. As our trip the sea had somewhat delayed us, we arrived last, and Dan and I got seperated from our host sisters and their friends. We were seated at the end of the table by the door. It felt cold and sequestered. Around us were other American students, mostly from West High. Sometimes they tried to speak to us, but for the most part, we refused. I was struck by the realization that Dan had somehow become my friend, and then immediately after by the realization that he would not remain so for long. I sulked, folded my napkin into a crane, then a flower. Dan fidgeted, skated a knife down his arm, laughed when I told him to stop. Aaron Heise asked if we liked France. We said yes. Aaron said something else and I'm sure at that point my irritation was plain across my face; I wasn't in the mood to humor anyone. I felt like time was running out, like it had turned against us.
It was and it had.
On the train the next day I would stare out the window, speak to no one, and dream. I would wander behind my wavering eyelids to the place where sea met land, absently turning a little pink shell over and over and over again in my hands. In three days time I would be home, and we-- these people whom I felt so deceptively close to--would be no one to each other. The inevitability of this was thick in my throat. I thought about trying say something about not wanting to leave, but knew that whatever I said would come across somehow as both understatement and exaggeration. Dan turned to me and muttered that roquefort is better with wine and that it was a shame that we couldn't order any as tu sais qui was sitting with us. Aaron glanced up angrily and asked what we were talking about. Dan rolled his eyes at me and said, "Nothing."
Then Sarah came by, as if to save us. Dan said something that neither of us heard. "Comment?" Sarah asked, kneeling between our chairs.
And I thought: but for now, we lean in close when we speak. ~
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