Florence couldn’t help but laugh. Super scary? “I don’t even remember it,” she said.
“I know most of the expats around here—it’s a pretty small town and I’ve been here for a while now—but nobody had ever heard of you. We figured you must have just gotten here. Helen something, right?”
Florence paused. Well, she had to begin somewhere. “That’s right,” she said. “Helen. Helen Wilcox.”
“I’m Meg. Did you just get here?”
Florence nodded.
“Well, welcome! If you have any questions or anything just let me know because I’m like an honorary local, that’s what everyone says.”
Meg, who was still squatting, thumped down heavily at the foot of Florence’s small towel.
“So you’re on vacation?”
“Sort of. A working vacation.”
“How so?”
“I’m doing research. For a novel.”
“Wait, really? You’re a writer? That is so cool. I love reading. I was obsessed with Harry Potter when I was a kid. Like, obsessed. I had the scarf, the glasses, everything.” She watched Florence, waiting for a reaction. “The wand,” she added significantly.
“Cool,” Florence finally offered.
Meg nodded enthusiastically. Then without warning she heaved herself up with great violence and much sand displacement. “Hey, do you smoke?”
“Yes,” Florence said emphatically. She had put a pack of Helen’s cigarettes in her bag that morning. The thought of actually smoking one in this heat made her sick, but it had seemed like a helpful talisman, the way actors use a cane or a pipe to channel their characters.
Meg bounded over to her own towel a few paces down the beach and began rustling in a dirty tote bag. She returned holding out a joint triumphantly.
“Oh,” said Florence. She had never smoked pot before, an embarrassing emblem of her social status in high school and lack of friends in college. Nonetheless, she took the joint from Meg and held it delicately between her thumb and forefinger. Why not? Bonjour l’aventure.
Meg held out a lighter. Florence put one end of the joint into the flame and sucked long and hard on the other, as she’d seen it done in movies. She was immediately wracked with coughs. She handed the joint back to Meg, eyes streaming.
“Yeah, the kif here is kinda evil,” Meg said, laughing.
“Kif?”
“The hash.”
“Yeah, I guess this isn’t exactly what I’m used to.”
“You probably get, like, Harry Potter weed.”
Florence laughed. “That doesn’t even make any sense.” She lay back on her towel and covered her face with her arm. She felt Meg thud down at her feet again.
“So where are you from?” Meg asked.
“New York.” Then she added, “But originally Mississippi.”
“Really? You don’t have much of an accent.”
“I left a long time ago.”
“Oh.”
“Where are you from?”
“Toledo. Ohio.”
There seemed to be no obvious response to this. The sand was swaying beneath Florence’s body like a hammock. She was lulled into a pleasant state of relaxation. She felt looser than she had in months.
A bird called out repeatedly from somewhere in the distance.
“I love those birds that sound like owls,” Meg said dreamily.
“You mean—owls?”
Meg started laughing loudly and recklessly. “Is that what they are? They’re actually owls?”
Florence didn’t answer. She didn’t know what Meg was talking about. Her voice seemed very far away.
Meg kept repeating the word with slight variations. “Owl. Owl. Owl. What a weird word. Is it one syllable or two? I can’t even tell.”
“What?” Florence had lost the thread of the conversation.
“Two, I guess. Ow. Wull. Ow. Wull.”
Florence’s feeling of wellbeing slid away. She opened her eyes and looked at the girl next to her. When Meg laughed, the dolphin on her stomach looked like he was having a seizure. Dark hair sprouted jaggedly from her toes, like the upturned legs of a mosquito. Florence felt exposed and unclean. She wanted to be home. She wanted to be in Helen’s room, among Helen’s things. This is not the type of friend Helen would make. This was not right at all.
She stood up abruptly and began gathering her belongings. “I have to go,” she said. She tugged the towel out from under the younger girl’s body roughly. Meg rolled passively onto the sand like a log.
“Alright,” she said cheerfully. “But hey, you should come to this party tonight.”
“Party?”
“I mean, it’s not like a party party. But there are a bunch of expats who gather at this house with a lot of, like, super interesting, creative people. I think you’d like it a lot.”
It didn’t occur to Florence to wonder how Meg might know what she would or would not like. She simply felt flattered that someone would consider it at all. She envisioned herself surrounded by poets and artists wearing colorful kaftans while candles flickered in brass lanterns.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I would like that.”
Florence explained that she didn’t have a car, and Meg offered to pick her up at Villa des Grenades at eight.
Florence trudged across the hot sand back to the road. She had planned to go into town for lunch, but instead she walked into the first restaurant she saw, a dismal tourist trap advertising “American-style hot dogs,” and drank a Coke while they called a taxi to take her home. She watched the hot dogs roll around in their greasy excretions and thought of pickled heads.
32.
Florence pulled at her lip. She was sitting at the dining room table, still in her damp, sandy clothes, looking at an email from Greta Frost. She read it several times, but the words never changed.
Hi M. Checking in again. Give me a call. I want to discuss TPR in further detail. G.
Florence tried to draw some nuance from the words on the screen. She came up with nothing. She Googled TPR. It was either the stock symbol for a large fashion company or the acronym for a method of teaching foreign languages to children. Neither of those made any sense in this context. She drummed her fingers lightly on the keyboard for a moment. Then she pressed Reply and wrote:
I’ve unfortunately come down with a bad case of food poisoning.
She reread what she’d written and erased it. She sent instead:
Can’t talk today—I’ve been poisoned by a thoroughly rancid piece of octopus. The upshot: I’m getting more insight into Moroccan toilet bowls than I ever thought I would…
M.
An answer immediately pinged back:
What a shame. Get better soon. Stay in touch.
Florence wiped a smudge off the screen and shut the laptop gently. There, she’d begun being Helen Wilcox with someone who actually mattered. The charade was on. She knew that a reckoning with Greta was inevitable, but at this point she just hoped to delay it for as long as possible, at least until she had a clearer idea of how to handle her.
Greta was the major hitch in her plan: She interacted with Helen on a regular basis, she was thoroughly invested in the progress of Helen’s work, and she already wanted to talk to her on the phone.