A Nice Fling is Hard to Find Read online

  A Nice Fling is Hard to Find

  Sarah Mlynowski

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “A Nice Fling is Hard to Find” Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Mlynowski

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Tuesday, July 10, 7:22 P.M.

  Dear TJ (aka Travel Journal),

  I’m here! I’m on the plane! I did it!

  I can’t believe I’m actually going to FRANCE. I am so sophisticated.

  Okay, fine, in my ratty sweatpants, T-shirt, and ponytail, I am not looking so sophisticated, but that’s hardly the point. I AM GOING TO FRANCE. As soon as the plane takes off. In eight—wait, make that seven!—minutes.

  I almost missed the plane due to my parents’ fanatical hugging. My mom was full-on whimpering, and even my Dad’s eyes were glistening (although he tried to pretend he got dirt stuck in his contacts). I reminded them that I would only be gone for eleven days (one night on the plane, four nights in Paris, one night on a train, two nights in the Alps, and three nights in Nice—pronounced Niece—which is on the Riviera), but my mom would not calm down.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  I nodded.

  “But what if you break something?”

  “Then I’ll go to the hospital,” I said, attempting to sound calm.

  “But you don’t speak French!”

  “Mom, there’s a translator with the tour.”

  “Well, then stay with the tour at all times,” she ordered.

  “Of course.” Maybe.

  “And don’t talk to strangers, Lindsay,” she warned.

  “Sure.” Please. The entire point of this trip is TO talk to strangers. Because in France, I will be wild. I will be wild and have a mad fling with a gorgeous Frenchman named Jacques or Jean-Claude who will look deep into my eyes and feed me Brie on bite-sized baguettes.

  “Better safe than sorry,” my mom said, and I rolled my eyes.

  See, so far everything about my life has been careful. I’ve never been out of the US before. I’ve barely been out of New York State (one trip to Florida does not a world traveler make). I have a younger brother named Jack, a dog named Ralph, I live in a nice house in Long Island, I have a 3.8 GPA, my parents are happily married . . . and I’ve probably put you, dear TJ, to sleep. Because there is nothing remotely interesting, remotely scandalous, about my existence thus far. I never skip school. I never yell at my parents. I’ve never run for student council. Not that I’m dying to be class president or anything, but my point is that I never take any risks. My mom has always been ridiculously overprotective, especially since I’m a tad bit accident-prone. I wasn’t allowed to do anything growing up—no gymnastics, no skating, no skiing. No fun. This trip is my chance to escape from my mother’s overprotectiveness and live a little.

  My chance to finally have a fling—with a hot foreign boy.

  The snarky French flight attendant in her cleavage-revealing uniform is ordering me to put up my tray-table for take off. We haven’t even left yet and I’m already causing trouble! Go me! J

  No-Clue-What-Time-It-Is-Since-We-Keep-Crossing-Time-Zones p.m.

  Dear TJ,

  We’re in the air! Wahoo! I think we’re somewhere over the Atlantic. Perhaps over the Bahamas? Not that I can see the Bahamas. Looking out the window is like staring into a pool of black ink.

  Becca is sitting next to me in the middle seat, paging through a Seventeen. Tommy, her twin brother, is on her other side, reading Let’s Go France. About fifteen others from our teen tour are on this flight. Mike, one of our tour guides, who is sitting diagonally from us, is already balding, even though he can’t be older than thirty. Joanna, the second tour guide, is sitting next to him. She’s wearing tight jeans and a Teens Tour France! T-shirt. I’d peg her as around twenty-three, at least eight years older than we are. Her teeth are blindingly white and she keeps turning back to us and smiling as though she’s in school and this is her class photo. She has outrageously long fingernails painted bright pink. If she keeps those florescent fingers away from my foreign fling we’ll get along just fine.

  Becca and I have already outlined our rules. We are very good about making rules. In third grade we had club rules, in the fifth we had Barbie rules, and in the sixth we introduced boy rules. Since we both had a crush on a scrawny boy named Chet, we decided we’d each have to choose someone else to like. No hurt feelings allowed. We never liked the same guy again. And I’d know, ’cause we tell each other everything. I’m the person she called when her parents separated. She fed me banana sorbet after I got my wisdom teeth pulled. She’s going to be my BFF until we’re eighty and living on a beach in Florida, complaining about how our grandkids never call us and that we can’t hear the TV.

  “Here’s my rule—I’m calling dibs on the Texan,” she whispered soon after takeoff, motioning with her head to a guy in a Teens Tour France! T-shirt sitting four rows back, near the bathrooms.

  “Oh sure, take the only cute guy on the trip,” I said, poking her in the side.

  “Uh, hello? Remember me? ” Tommy asked, waving. “I’m right here.”

  Whoops. “Sorry Tommy,” I said, laughing. “One of two cute guys on the trip.” I felt kind of bad about that one. Of course Tommy’s cute. Not in a hello-I-need-to-make-out-with-you kind of way, but in a isn’t-he-sweet, brotherly kind of way. What can he expect? He looks too much like my almost-a-sister best friend for me to think of him any other way. They’re not identical, but they both have dark brown hair and the same foreheads. Of course, he’s almost six feet, and she’s barely five foot four. And he has his dad’s dark brown eyes, and she has her mother’s hazel ones. And her lips are pencil-thin and his are full. When his are outlined in lip liner, they’re especially humongous. Why would Tommy use lip liner? Part of one of our many “boomerang dares,” which involved all of us having to do things we didn’t want to do in the name of absurdity. In this case, we got to put makeup on him, but we had to drink Tommy’s Tornado, which was string cheese, raisins, Tabasco sauce, and seltzer, in the blender. Yum. Not.

  There’s no mistaking me and Becca for twins. I have green eyes and light brown hair—stick-straight brown hair. Boring, boring, boring. Maybe I should get highlights to liven up my look? Or not. Becca tried highlights last year, and they were tough to keep up. She also tried lowlights and pink-lights and cropping it and extensions . . . Becca likes to try a lot of things. I, on the other hand, have never tried anything different or exciting.

  Until now.

  I returned my focus to Becca. “You know what? You can have everyone on the tour,” I said with determination. “I’m only considering men with accents.”

  “Go, you!” Becca exclaimed, putting her arm around me. “I raised you well, little one.”

  Becca likes to call me “little one” because at five foot one, I am the only person she knows who is shorter than she is.

  “Long Islanders have an accent,” Tommy piped up with a grin.

  “Foreign accents,” I clarified. “Italians, Russians, Spaniards . . . but most especially, Frenchmen.”

  Tommy kicked off his Adidas sneakers and pushed them under the seat in front of him. “What about Brits? Or Australians? Who gets them?”

  “Good question,” Becca said. “I do
like Brits. And Australian guys are super sexy. They’re all tanned, muscled, and blond.”

  “You can have anyone who speaks English,” I told her. “The only language I’m speaking is the language of love.”

  That’s when Tommy groaned and said, “You’re such a cheeseball, Lindster.” He reclined his seat, pulled out his iPod, and put in his earbuds.

  Becca is poking my side now. She wants to play the travel Battleship she brought. Gotta run. Not that I’m GOING anywhere . . . except France . . . oh, whatever. Can you tell this is the first time I’ve ever kept a diary?

  Wednesday, July 11 6:00 a.m. France Time!

  Bonjour TJ! We are here. Nous sommes ici. And by ici, I mean sitting on the cold floor of the baggage-claim area in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, waiting for our backpacks to be spit out. Not that anything can get me down. Because I am in Paris—the land of romance.

  When the plane finally landed, we followed Joanna through customs. Joanna began singing, “Sur le pont d'Avignon, on y danse, on y danse!” at the top of her lungs. No idea what she was saying, but I’m assuming it was in French. Everything was in French. The signs, the people, the restaurants, the bookstores. Then we went through customs, where the man said, “Bonjour,” to me. Bonjour! How cute is that? I got an adorable stamp on my spanking-new passport, and then I snuck into les toilettes and now we’re here in le baggage claim. Waiting. Oh there’s mine, gotta go! Hmm, it looks insanely heavy. I think twenty T-shirts, fifteen pairs of shorts, and eight pairs of shoes may have been overkill.

  Tommy is waving at me, trying to get my attention, possibly trying to let me know that my bag is coming around the bend.

  Perhaps if I pretend to not see it he will pick it up for me?

  He’s doing it! He’s doing it! Tee hee. What’s French for gullible dork?

  A few hours later

  Even the trip from the airport to the hostel was exciting.

  “Can you smell it?” I asked Becca as we stepped out of the airport doors.

  “Smell what?” she asked, sliding on her oversized sunglasses.

  “The fresh pastries! The hot coffee! The Chanel perfume!”

  “I smell the diesel fuel,” she said with a shrug.

  Mike led us to our air-conditioned bus, and Becca and I moved to the back row and sat with our feet up. We cheered as we spotted the Eiffel Tower through the window. The driver sped along the highway like he had never heard the expression “speed limit,” and I squeezed Becca’s hand.

  Now we are at the hostel, Les Quatre Saisons.

  Which is ironic, considering this place looks nothing like the Four Seasons. Not that I’ve ever stayed at a Four Seasons, but I went to a wedding at one, and it looked nothing like this. And I bet the rooms were not dusty and packed with metal bunk beds.

  Not that I’m complaining. I am not. I am very lucky to be in France. I had to beg, Beg, BEG my parents to let me come on this trip and do filing work at my mom’s office for four months to help pay for it. The trip was Becca’s idea to begin with. She wanted to just backpack across France, but my mother would have never gone for that. I’ll admit it even freaked me out. So this was the best compromise. And since it wouldn’t have been fair if Becca got to go to Europe without Tommy, here we all are. In Les Quatre Saisons. Stop number one.

  There are six bunk beds in our room, which works out because there are eleven of us: ten girls and one leader, Joanna. The guys are in a room down the hall. For the first time ever I am sleeping on the top bunk. (Sure, I can hear my mother’s voice warning me that I might roll off and end up in a body cast, but I am ignoring her, thank you very much. Becca is beneath me. Next to us is Penny and Penni (I am not making that up) best friends from a neighboring Long Island ’burb. This is how Penny introduced herself: “I’m Penny with a Y! This is my B-F-F Penni with an I!”

  I’d mock her for using BFF in a sentence, but I think I just used it a few pages ago.

  But it’s not like I said it out loud.

  Anyway, Penni with an I has blond hair and Penny with a Y is a brunette. They are wearing matching velour sweatsuits, rhinestoned flip-flops, and pigtails.

  “I hate them,” Becca whispered as she unrolled her sleeping bag.

  Becca never shies away from making snap judgments. She never shies away—or is shy—about anything. Compared to her, Tommy is so quiet.

  The other six girls on our trip are Britney, Rori-Ann, and Carrie from Jersey, who seem to be quite cliquey— (they have not spoken a word to anyone but one another and have already taped photos of their boyfriends on the walls behind their pillows); Max and Kristin from Toronto (they have about five cameras between the two of them and have already snapped about seven hundred pictures); and Abby from Miami (who has the most ginormous breasts I have ever seen. She must be a thirty-six triple D). Abby has to share a bunk with Joanna. Our fearless leader seems to have recently ingested at least six cups of café, ’cause she is bouncing off the bunk beds. She has already unpacked her sleeping bag, changed into shorts and a tank top, unpacked all her clothes into neat piles on her shelf, and lined up her shoes.

  Just watching her is exhausting.

  So tired. Eyes heavy. Think I might just close them for a

  Still Wednesday, July 11, 9:15 A.M.

  Joanna let me sleep for about a half a second before deciding that waking me up with a French song was the way to go.

  “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?”

  Max and Kristin snapped pictures.

  I changed into shorts, a fresh T-shirt and running shoes (“Make sure you’re wearing comfy sneakers!” Joanna chirped), located the bathroom down the hall, and washed up.

  Now, the eleven of us are sitting on hard iron benches in a shaded garden behind the hostel, waiting for the boys to join us. What’s taking them so long? I thought girls were the ones who took forever.

  I hear some laughter in the distance. And now the garden door is opening . . .

  OH. MY. GOD.

  Ten Minutes later

  We’re on one of those open-air buses going to the Eiffel Tower so I can’t write for long, but I just want to say that I’ve found him! My fling! His name is Pierre and he is gorgeous! He is our French translator. He is eighteen, and he is tall and blond and has blue eyes the color of the cloudless Parisian sky.

  MUST STOP WRITING CHEESINESS.

  But he is hot.

  He walked into the garden behind the hostel, followed by Mike, Tommy and the other Teens Tour boys. Suddenly it was my turn to drool. Not that I was the only one. Oh, no, the other girls were all staring at the embodiment of French perfection with equal adoration.

  “Allo,” he said in an accent that made us all melt in our comfy sneakers.

  “Hello,” we responded. Max and Kristin snapped pictures.

  “I am the Pierre, ze French translator. I am very pleased to meeting you,” he said and smiled.

  And we are even more pleased to meet you.

  He went on to say that this was his second of four tours this summer, and that he hoped this would be the best of them all.

  “Dibs,” I whispered to Becca when I could find my voice.

  “All right, you can have him,” Becca said, turning back to her Texan.

  Now I’m in the back row of the bus next to Becca, while Tommy and the Texan, whose name is Harold, oddly (what kind of a cowboy is named Harold?), are sitting in the row in front of us.

  The boys want to know what I’m writing about.

  None of your concern, American dweebs.

  Pierre is sitting upfront with Joanna and Mike. When we all introduced ourselves, he said allo and we fully had a moment of eye contact where my heart nearly exploded. Bam! Of course since all the other girls were likely also feeling the bamming, I’ll need to step up my game. Perhaps by not stopping to write in my diary all the time so I look less like an anti-social hermit and more like a friendly, outgoing international lady of fun.

  1:00 P.M.

/>   The sun is kissing my face, the wind is lightly blowing my hair, and I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m on the Eiffel Tower. ON THE EIFFEL TOWER! Cool, huh? And it looks just like it does in Epcot!

  Yes, I’m aware that sounds dumb, and no, I didn’t say it out loud.

  But really. It looks exactly like its replica. Except it’s ten times bigger. And it took us four hours to get up here since the line for the elevator was out of control. Next time I’ll just climb it.

  Anyway. The city is laid out before me like a French Monopoly board. Little cafés and bicycles and small boxy cars line the streets and the air smells like warm bread. I could stay up here forever. From this height I’m not afraid of anything. Except falling.

  Thursday, July 12, way, way too early. Like 5:00 A.M.

  I am lying in my narrow bunk bed, which feels much higher than it did when chose it, and I’m wide awake. Since Long Island is like six hours behind, I don’t know why I’m up. But I’m glad to have a few minutes on my own, since yesterday was beyond busy. After the Eiffel extravaganza we hung out at this huge park called Champ de Mars and had a little picnic of baguettes and cheese (really!). Becca and I lay down on the grass and listened to the sounds of the city as we watched the small white clouds drift across the sky. Then we went over to the Right Bank on the other side of town and were allowed the afternoon to explore. Becca wanted to go into all the fancy couture stores on Avenue Montaigne.

  “Do we have to?” I asked. “The salespeople will know we can’t afford anything.”

  “Then we’ll have to look the part,” Becca said, and pulled matching black scarves from her purse and tied them around our necks. Then she tied my hair into a twist and made me tuck in my shirt so I looked more presentable and instructed me to keep my sunglasses on at all times. She is too much. Anyway, of course the stores were all glossy and polished but the salesladies smiled tightly and Bonjoured us so I guess we had them fooled. Unfortunately, the Pennies had the nerve to follow us and then the greater nerve to buy matching purses in the Louis Vuitton store. The two hundred Euros I have as spending money won’t even cover a purse’s strap.