“Yeah, I figured.”
“All jokes aside,” he says, his voice dropping, sobering, “someone will feel more special than the rest.”
I want to ask if Mama felt more special to him than the rest. I want to ask if he ever cries for her, like I still do. Does grief hit him in the most unexpected times and hang over the day until he wants to crawl back in bed and sleep so he won’t remember she’s gone and never coming back? Does she come to him in his dreams?
Or is that just me?
They weren’t together for years before she died, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth still hurting this way for her. If her memory only lives in my heart like a knife lodged between my ribs. Grief is its own kind of intimacy, a bond of sorts between you and the one you lost. No one else feels it the way you do about that person you loved most. And maybe it helps to know someone reaches that same level of despair. That’s what family is for, right?
I wish I could go back to the night of my Sunrise Dance and beg her not to go to that protest. Ask her, just this once, to let someone else fight the world’s problems because I needed her more than everyone else did.
“Lenn, you still there?”
I shake off the helplessness of done deals and irreversible things, and straighten from the wall. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Time difference has me out of it. I just wanted to let you know I got here safely.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I’m sure you have a stack of papers waiting to be graded so I’ll let you go. You need a social life, old man.”
“You’re right,” he says, his voice lightening. “So you’ll be happy to hear I might be getting one. I have a date tonight.”
I frown and blink and lick my lips and tug on my ear. Apparently the thought of my father on a date makes me fidgety. “A-a date? Wow. Good. Good for you.”
“Yeah?” he asks with unexpected tentativeness.
I think of my father as I usually see him. Distracted in that way academicians often are, lost in a pile of papers he’s grading or books he’s reading or something he’s researching. His gray eyes always half-hazed with whatever task I interrupted. He deserves more than that.
“Yeah, I’m happy for you, Dad. Do I know her?”
He goes on to tell me her name is Bethany. She’s an English professor who started a few months ago. They’ve had coffee, but are grabbing dinner tonight. Hearing him excited about something other than his work lifts my heart a little. I find myself smiling as we disconnect.
“I miss you, too.” Vivienne, my best friend number one, is clutching her phone and wiping a tear away when I enter the hostel room we’re sharing. “I keep telling myself it’s only a week, but my heart won’t listen.”
I catch the eyes of my best friend number two, Kimba, who gives me her famous can you believe this shit look.
Vivienne glances at us a little self-consciously, turns her back, and lowers her voice.
“Sorry, I should have told you. I took the pillow case,” she says in a sad whisper. “Because it smelled like you.”
“Jesus, keep me near the cross,” Kimba mutters, rolling her eyes and raising her voice. “Bitch, get off that phone. Stephen, she’ll be fine. We’ll make sure she doesn’t screw anyone before the wedding.”
I snort, but over her shoulder, Vivienne’s eyes are wide and horrified and filled with poison.
“Sorry,” Kimba hisses with unrepentant humor.
“I have to go, Stephen,” Vivienne says. “The girls need help settling in.”
As soon as she hangs up, she grabs a pillow from a nearby couch and puts it over Kimba’s face where she lies on the bottom bunk.
“You’re smothering me,” Kimba’s muffled voice, mixed with laughter, comes from under the pillow.
“That’s the point.” Vivienne chuckles and lifts the pillow. “Were you trying to get me un-engaged?”
“It would take a stick of dynamite to blast you and Stephen apart,” I tell her, climbing the short ladder to my upper bunk on the opposite side. “I’m not sure he’ll make it this one week without you.”
“It’s gonna be tough,” Vivienne says, completely serious, which sets my and Kimba’s eyes to rolling again. “What? It’s our first time apart since the engagement.”
“I get it,” Kimba says, then shakes her head and mouths, “I don’t get it.”
“I mean, it’s a week.” I try to keep the exasperation from my voice. “Surely you can last a week without him.”
“Just wait’ll you meet the one,” Vivienne says. “And you’ll see how it feels. Maybe even here in Amsterdam. Wouldn’t that be romantic?”
“Until I figure out what I want to do with my life,” I say dryly, “the great problem of ‘the one’ will have to wait, and I’m in no hurry.”
“While I’m looking for the one of many,” Kimba says. “Nothing that lasts beyond an orgasm. Maybe I’ll find a big, blond Dutchman to woo me with his foreign tongue.”
“Some tongue.” Vivienne laughs. “And some abs, chest, arms, dick.”
“Oh, for sure some dick.” Kimba high fives Vivienne and peers up at me from the bottom bunk in our tiny, but cozy hostel room. “Come on, Lenn. You planning to get you some while we’re here?”
“Oh, yeah.” I turn over onto my stomach. “Because I’m most likely to rando hook-up. I doubt very seriously I’ll be surrendering the V-card to some stranger in Amsterdam. I’ve held onto it this long; that would be a waste.”
“Already a waste, if you ask me,” Viv says. She climbs the ladder to her top bunk, but stops midway, propping her butt against a rung. “I know you’ve been tempted.”
“Of course I have.” I shrug. “But it passes, and I always see something I don’t like, don’t trust, or can’t tolerate. I’ll know when it’s the right time, the right guy. I literally just had this conversation with my father.”
“You and your dad,” Vivienne says, shaking her head and grinning. “How is the professor?”
“Better now he’s heard my voice and knows I haven’t been sex trafficked yet.”
“Ugh,” Kimba groans from the lower bunk. “Did he watch Taken again?”
“I know. I told him to stop. Anyway, he assures me that I’m probably not asexual.”
“Was that a serious thought?” Vivienne asks. “I mean, it’d be okay if you were, but you’ve had boyfriends and seemed to like all the pre-game activities. I bet you’ll like dick once you get some.”
“I’m just not a dick-for-the-sake-of-dick girl, I don’t think.” I bury my head in the cool pillow and breathe in clean linen. “I trust myself to know when and who.”
I’ve never been ashamed of my virginity; I’ve never avoided discussing it if people asked either. Both my parents taught me to know what I believe, to articulate it first to myself and then to others. If it’s any of their damn business, that is, which in most cases, it’s not. But nothing is off-limits between me and these two girls.