Home > The Disenchantments(2)

The Disenchantments(2)
Author: Nina LaCour

“I know,” I say. “It’s okay.”

“We’ll celebrate for days when you and Bev get here.”

“Sounds good.”

“Ready?” Bev calls.

“I’ve gotta go,” I tell Mom.

“Good luck,” she says. “Je t’adore. Call from the road if you can.”

Dad hands me my sketchbook as I’m hanging up, and I stick it in my backpack and say, “It’s almost like she’s forgetting how to speak English.”

He laughs, runs a hand through his gray-brown hair, and says, “Guess her language classes are working.”

And then Bev and I are out the door into the San Francisco morning, rushing past the produce markets and well-dressed strangers, catching the F train up Market Street just before it glides away.

The school day is a collection of moments—five good-byes from teachers; a free period spent retrieving my drawings from the airy studio; lunch from the taco stand, our mouths full, asking, Can you believe this is the last time we’ll all eat tacos on this street corner together? All of us answering, No, no.

After school I lean against the building and look at the sea of rainbow-haired teenagers. Everyone is out on the lawn with portfolios and instruments and sculptures, signing yearbooks and playing music, setting down backpacks and kicking off shoes as though now that we’re free we’ve decided to stay here forever.

I’m sketching Bev, who sits a few feet away from me practicing the verse of a new song while Meg plucks the strings of her bass guitar. Nearby, a group of ninth-grade girls watches them rehearse. One of the girls wears a Disenchantments shirt that we made for their first show. Bev and Meg came up with the concept—a close-up of a girl’s eyes with dark makeup and a tear starting to fall—and they had me draw it for them. I used Bev as a model and the first sketch turned out perfectly, and they had it printed in silver on these fitted black T-shirts that sold out the first night.

It’s rare to hear Bev without a microphone, so I listen hard. She’s working out the vocal melody. One second she’s low and throaty, and the next she’s doing this badass breathy thing. Her head is turned away from me, and I’m sketching her neck, realizing that I’ve never seen it this exposed. Her hair has never been so short.

“Hey,” someone says, and then this guy Craig sits down next to me. “So first the tour, and then Europe?”

I nod. “We’ll be around here for a few days in between, though.”

“That’s so cool,” he says. “I respect that. You’re doing something different, you know? You’re getting out there.”

Even though this is San Francisco’s arts high school and people probably expect us all to go off and do unexpected and interesting things, everyone except Bev and me is going to college. When I told the college counselor our plan, she looked pained and asked me if I was sure, but I told her that, yeah, I was completely sure, had been completely sure since the summer after eighth grade when Bev and I found Bande á part in my parents’ DVD collection and watched it three times in a row. The counselor was worried but I didn’t let her get to me. Instead I told her about some Dutch guy who spent a fortune on a single tulip bulb, and how now there are tulip fields just thirty miles outside Amsterdam.

“Picture it,” I told her, “fields of tulips.”

She softened a little, took off her glasses.

“I’ve seen them,” she said.

“You have? Were they great?”

She nodded, and I swear she got a little emotional.

“See?” I said. “This is what I’m talking about. If I had asked about, like, Biology 101 you probably wouldn’t even remember it.”

“I’m not crying about tulips.”

“Yeah, but you’re crying about the experience, right? Maybe not the tulips themselves, but whatever was happening when you saw the tulips, or the person who saw them with you. And the tulips were probably part of it.”

“Yes,” she said. “They were part of it,” and then she cleared her throat and put her glasses back on and said, “Colby, going to college is incredibly important.”

Eventually she gave up, and word quickly spread around campus that Bev and I were actually doing it. Leaving together after graduation. Going to Europe. And everyone wanted to talk about it, about where we were going to go and where we were going to stay, and how amazing it sounded and how they wished that they were going, too.

Now, just a couple weeks before we leave, I glance up from my drawing toward Craig and say, “Remind me what school you chose?”

Craig was in my art history class last semester. We didn’t talk that often, but he’s pretty cool.

“Stanford,” he says.

“Wow,” I say.

“Yeah, well. We’re all off to college like a flock of f**king sheep, man, but not you.”

Most people who hear about the plan think that Bev and I aren’t ever going to go to college, that we’re just going to bum around Europe forever. That isn’t really what we have in mind, though. We want to spend a year there, getting to know Paris, traveling to Amsterdam and Stockholm and maybe even Oslo or Helsinki. Lately I’ve been dreaming about bodies of water: the Seine, the canals in Amsterdam, the Archipelago. Bev and me on trains, moving from one new place to the next.

And then whenever we’re done, whenever we’re ready, we’re going to come home and go to college. I explained this to the college counselor and I explained it to my parents, but I don’t explain it all to Craig. I just nod and say, “To each his own,” and draw the curve of Bev’s neck where it meets her shoulders.

   
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