Die for Me
Page 7
“What are you? Wanted? Wanted for what? Did you steal all the paintings in this room?” I realized I was yelling and lowered my voice. “Or is it something worse?”
Vincent cleared his throat to buy time. “Let’s just say that I’m not the kind of guy your mother would want you hanging around with.”
“My mom’s dead. My dad, too.” The words escaped my lips before I could stop them.
Vincent closed his eyes and pressed his hands to his forehead as if he were in pain. “Recently?”
“Yes.”
He nodded solemnly, as if it all made sense.
“I’m sorry, Kate.”
However bad a person he is, he cares about me. The thought crossed my mind so abruptly that I couldn’t stop it from triggering a reaction. My eyes filled with tears. I picked up the cup of tea and raised it to my lips.
The hot liquid slid from my throat to my stomach, and its calming effect was immediate. My thoughts felt clearer. And weirdly enough, I felt more in control of the situation. He knows who I am now, even if I don’t know the first thing about him.
My revelation seemed to have shaken him. Vincent’s either struggling to hold himself together, I thought, or to hold something back. I decided to take advantage of this apparent moment of weakness to figure something out. “Vincent, if you’re in such a . . . dangerous situation, why in the world would you try to be friends with me?”
“I told you, Kate, I had seen you around the neighborhood”—he weighed his words carefully—“and you seemed like someone I would want to know. It was probably a bad idea. But I obviously wasn’t thinking.”
As he spoke, his voice turned from warm to icicle cold. I couldn’t tell if he was angry with himself for getting me involved in whatever mess he was in—or with me for bringing it up. It didn’t matter. The effect of his sudden frostiness was the same: I shuddered, feeling like someone had walked over my grave. “I’m ready to go,” I said, standing suddenly.
He rose to his feet and nodded. “Yes, I’ll take you home.”
“No, that’s okay. I know the way. I’d . . . rather you not.” The words came from the rational part of me. The part that was urging me to get out of the house as fast as possible. But another part of me regretted it as soon as I spoke them.
“As you wish,” he said, and leading me back through the grand entrance hall, he opened the door to the courtyard.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” he insisted as he blocked the doorway, waiting for an answer before he would let me leave. I ducked under his arm to squeeze by, passing inches from his skin.
My mistake was inhaling as I did. He smelled like oak and grass and wood fires. He smelled like memories. Like years and years of memories.
“You look weak again.” His hard shell cracked open just enough to show a glimpse of concern.
“I’m fine,” I replied, attempting to sound sure of myself, and then seeing him standing there, calm and composed, I rephrased my answer. “I’m fine, but you shouldn’t be. You just lost a friend in a horrible accident and you’re standing there like nothing happened. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done to make you run away like that. But for it not to affect you . . . you’ve got to be seriously messed up.”
A surge of emotion crossed Vincent’s dark face. He looked upset. Well, good.
“I don’t understand you. And I don’t want to.” My eyes narrowed in disgust. “I hope I never see you again,” I said, and began walking toward the gate.
I felt a strong hand grip my arm, and whipped my head around to see that Vincent stood inches behind me. He leaned over until his mouth was next to my ear. “Things aren’t always as they appear, Kate,” he whispered, and carefully released my arm.
I ran toward the front gate, which was already swinging open to let me through. Once I was outside, it began to close. A loud crash that sounded like porcelain being smashed against marble came from somewhere inside the house.
I stood motionless, looking back at the massive metal gates. My intuition told me that I had done something wrong. That I had misjudged Vincent’s character. But all signs pointed to the fact that he was some sort of criminal. And from the smashing sounds still emanating from the house, maybe even a violent one. I shook my head, wondering how I could have lost my capacity for reason just because of a handsome face.
Chapter Nine
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I COULDN’T STOP replaying the events of that day in my mind, over and over again like a broken record. From the outside I must have looked the same. I got up, did my reading at an alternate café, went to the occasional movie, and attempted to join Georgia’s and my grandparents’ dinner-table conversations. Even so, they seemed to know that I was troubled. But they had no reason to attribute my dark mood to anything new.
Every time Vincent pushed his way into my mind I tried to push him back out. How could I have been so mistaken? The fact that he was a part of some sort of criminal network made more sense now that I thought back to that night at the river. There must have been some kind of underworld gang war going on. Even if he’s a bad guy, at least he saved that girl’s life, my conscience nagged.
But whatever his past contained, I couldn’t justify his cold detachment after Jules was hit by the train. How could anyone leave the scene of a friend’s death to insure his own safety from the law? The whole thing chilled me to the bone. Especially knowing that I had already started to feel something for him.
The flirty way he had teased me at the Picasso Museum. His intense expression as he grasped my hand in Jules’s courtyard. The comfort I’d felt when he placed his hand over mine in the taxi. These instants kept flashing up in my memory, reminding me of why I had liked him. I shoved them aside again and again, disgusted with myself for having been so naive.
Finally Georgia cornered me one night in my room. “What is wrong with you?” she asked with her usual tact. She threw herself onto my rug and leaned roughly back against a priceless Empire dresser that I never used because I was afraid I would break the handles.
“What do you mean?” I responded, avoiding her eyes.
“I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? I’m your sister. I know when there’s something wrong.”
I had been yearning to talk to Georgia but couldn’t even imagine where to start. How could I tell her the guy that we saw leap off the bridge was actually a criminal I had been hanging out with—that is, until I saw him walk away from his friend’s death without shedding a tear?
“Okay, if you don’t want to talk I can just start guessing, but I will get it out of you. Are you worried about starting a new school?”
“No.”
“Is it about friends?”
“What friends?”
“Exactly!”
“No.”
“Boys?”
Something on my face must have given me away, because she immediately leaned toward me, crossing her legs in a tell-me-more pose. “Kate, why didn’t you tell me about . . . whoever he is . . . before it got to this?”
“You don’t talk to me about your boyfriends.”
“That’s because there are too many of them.” She laughed and then, remembering my low spirits, added, “Plus, none of them are serious enough to mention. Yet.” She waited.
There was no way I was getting off the hook. “Okay, there’s this guy who lives in the neighborhood, and we kind of hung out a few times until I found out he was bad news.”
“Like how bad is the bad news? Married?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “No!”
“Druggie?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. It’s more like . . .” I watched for Georgia’s reaction. “It’s more like he’s in trouble with the law. Like a criminal or something.”
“Yeah. I’d say that’s bad news,” she admitted pensively. “Sounds more like someone I’d go for, actually.”
“Georgia!” I yelled, throwing a pillow at her.
“Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t joke about it. You’re right. He doesn’t sound like good boyfriend material, Katie-Bean. So why don’t you just pat yourself on the back for not getting in too deep before you found out, and be on your merry way back to Guyland?”
“I just can’t believe that I was so mistaken about him. He seemed so perfect. And so interesting. And—”
“Handsome?” my sister interrupted.
I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, Georgia. Not handsome. Gorgeous. Like heart-stoppingly amazing. Not that it matters now.”
Georgia stood and looked down at me. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. It would have been nice seeing you out and about enjoying yourself with some hot Frenchman. I won’t keep bugging you about it, but as soon as you’re ready to start living again, let me know. There are parties nearly every night.”
“Thanks, Georgia,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand.
“Anything for my little sister.”
And then, without me even noticing, summer was officially over and it was time to start school.
Georgia and I speak French fluently. Dad always spoke it with us, and we spent so much time in Paris during our vacations that French comes as easily for us as English. So we could have gone to a French high school. But the French system is so different from the American that we would have had to make up all sorts of missing credits to graduate.
The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they’re still back at home. I saw it as a place for lost souls. My sister saw it as an opportunity to make more international friends who she could visit in their native countries during school breaks. Georgia treats friends like outfits, happily trading one for another when it’s convenient—not in a mean way, but she just doesn’t get too attached.
As for me, being a junior, I knew I had two short years with these people, some of whom would be leaving to go back to their home country before the school year was even out.
So after walking through the massive front doors on the first day of school, I headed directly to the office to get my schedule and Georgia walked straight up to a group of intimidating-looking girls and began chatting away like she had known them all her life. Our social dice were cast within our first five minutes.
I hadn’t been to a museum since I had seen Vincent at the Musée Picasso, so it was with a sense of trepidation that I approached the Centre Pompidou one afternoon after school. My history teacher had assigned us projects on twentieth-century events happening in Paris, and I had chosen the riots of 1968.
Say “May ’68” and any French person will immediately think of the countrywide general strike that brought France’s economy to a halt. I was focusing on the weeks-long violent fighting between the police and university students at the Sorbonne. We were supposed to write our papers in the first person, as if we had experienced the events ourselves. So instead of looking through history books, I decided to search contemporary newspapers to find personal accounts.
The materials I needed were in the large library located on the Centre Pompidou’s second and third floors. But, since the other floors housed Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art, I planned on following my schoolwork with some well-deserved art gazing.
Once settled in at one of the library’s viewing booths, I flipped through microfilm spools from the riots’ most eventful days. Having read that May 10 was a day of heated fighting between police and students, I scanned that day’s front page, took some notes, and then flipped past the headlines to read the editorials. It was hard to imagine that kind of violence happening just across the river in the Latin Quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from where I was sitting.
I ejected the spool and replaced it with another. The riots had flared back up on July 14, France’s Independence Day. Many students, as well as tourists visiting Paris for the festivities, were taken to nearby hospitals. I took notes from the first few pages, and then flipped back to the two-page spread of obituaries and their accompanying black-and-white photos. And there he was.
Halfway down the first page. It was Vincent. He had longer hair, but he looked exactly like he had a month ago. My body turned to ice as I read the text.
Firefighter Jacques Dupont, nineteen years old, born in La Baule, Pays de la Loire, was killed in duty last night in a building fire believed to have been sparked by a Molotov cocktail thrown by student rioters. The residential building at 18 rue Champollion was in flames when Dupont and his colleague, Thierry Simon (obit., section S), rushed into the building and began pulling out its inhabitants, who had taken cover from the fighting at the adjacent Sorbonne. Trapped under burning timbers, Dupont expired before he could be evacuated to the hospital, and his body was received by the morgue. Twelve citizens, including four children, owe their lives to these local heroes.
It can’t be him, I thought. Unless he is the spitting image of his dad, who happened to sire a son before he died at . . . (I glanced back at the obituary) nineteen. Which isn’t impossible . . .
As my reasoning foundered, I forwarded to the next page and scanned the Ss for “Simon.” There he was: Thierry Simon. The muscle-bound guy who had turned Georgia and me away from the fight at the river. Thierry had a voluminous Afro in the photo but wore the same confident grin that he had flashed me with that day across the café terrace. It was definitely the same guy. But more than forty years ago.
I closed my eyes in disbelief, and then opened them again to read the paragraph under Thierry’s head shot. It read the same as Jacques’s, except it gave his age as twenty-two and place of birth as Paris.
Vincent cleared his throat to buy time. “Let’s just say that I’m not the kind of guy your mother would want you hanging around with.”
“My mom’s dead. My dad, too.” The words escaped my lips before I could stop them.
Vincent closed his eyes and pressed his hands to his forehead as if he were in pain. “Recently?”
“Yes.”
He nodded solemnly, as if it all made sense.
“I’m sorry, Kate.”
However bad a person he is, he cares about me. The thought crossed my mind so abruptly that I couldn’t stop it from triggering a reaction. My eyes filled with tears. I picked up the cup of tea and raised it to my lips.
The hot liquid slid from my throat to my stomach, and its calming effect was immediate. My thoughts felt clearer. And weirdly enough, I felt more in control of the situation. He knows who I am now, even if I don’t know the first thing about him.
My revelation seemed to have shaken him. Vincent’s either struggling to hold himself together, I thought, or to hold something back. I decided to take advantage of this apparent moment of weakness to figure something out. “Vincent, if you’re in such a . . . dangerous situation, why in the world would you try to be friends with me?”
“I told you, Kate, I had seen you around the neighborhood”—he weighed his words carefully—“and you seemed like someone I would want to know. It was probably a bad idea. But I obviously wasn’t thinking.”
As he spoke, his voice turned from warm to icicle cold. I couldn’t tell if he was angry with himself for getting me involved in whatever mess he was in—or with me for bringing it up. It didn’t matter. The effect of his sudden frostiness was the same: I shuddered, feeling like someone had walked over my grave. “I’m ready to go,” I said, standing suddenly.
He rose to his feet and nodded. “Yes, I’ll take you home.”
“No, that’s okay. I know the way. I’d . . . rather you not.” The words came from the rational part of me. The part that was urging me to get out of the house as fast as possible. But another part of me regretted it as soon as I spoke them.
“As you wish,” he said, and leading me back through the grand entrance hall, he opened the door to the courtyard.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” he insisted as he blocked the doorway, waiting for an answer before he would let me leave. I ducked under his arm to squeeze by, passing inches from his skin.
My mistake was inhaling as I did. He smelled like oak and grass and wood fires. He smelled like memories. Like years and years of memories.
“You look weak again.” His hard shell cracked open just enough to show a glimpse of concern.
“I’m fine,” I replied, attempting to sound sure of myself, and then seeing him standing there, calm and composed, I rephrased my answer. “I’m fine, but you shouldn’t be. You just lost a friend in a horrible accident and you’re standing there like nothing happened. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done to make you run away like that. But for it not to affect you . . . you’ve got to be seriously messed up.”
A surge of emotion crossed Vincent’s dark face. He looked upset. Well, good.
“I don’t understand you. And I don’t want to.” My eyes narrowed in disgust. “I hope I never see you again,” I said, and began walking toward the gate.
I felt a strong hand grip my arm, and whipped my head around to see that Vincent stood inches behind me. He leaned over until his mouth was next to my ear. “Things aren’t always as they appear, Kate,” he whispered, and carefully released my arm.
I ran toward the front gate, which was already swinging open to let me through. Once I was outside, it began to close. A loud crash that sounded like porcelain being smashed against marble came from somewhere inside the house.
I stood motionless, looking back at the massive metal gates. My intuition told me that I had done something wrong. That I had misjudged Vincent’s character. But all signs pointed to the fact that he was some sort of criminal. And from the smashing sounds still emanating from the house, maybe even a violent one. I shook my head, wondering how I could have lost my capacity for reason just because of a handsome face.
Chapter Nine
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I COULDN’T STOP replaying the events of that day in my mind, over and over again like a broken record. From the outside I must have looked the same. I got up, did my reading at an alternate café, went to the occasional movie, and attempted to join Georgia’s and my grandparents’ dinner-table conversations. Even so, they seemed to know that I was troubled. But they had no reason to attribute my dark mood to anything new.
Every time Vincent pushed his way into my mind I tried to push him back out. How could I have been so mistaken? The fact that he was a part of some sort of criminal network made more sense now that I thought back to that night at the river. There must have been some kind of underworld gang war going on. Even if he’s a bad guy, at least he saved that girl’s life, my conscience nagged.
But whatever his past contained, I couldn’t justify his cold detachment after Jules was hit by the train. How could anyone leave the scene of a friend’s death to insure his own safety from the law? The whole thing chilled me to the bone. Especially knowing that I had already started to feel something for him.
The flirty way he had teased me at the Picasso Museum. His intense expression as he grasped my hand in Jules’s courtyard. The comfort I’d felt when he placed his hand over mine in the taxi. These instants kept flashing up in my memory, reminding me of why I had liked him. I shoved them aside again and again, disgusted with myself for having been so naive.
Finally Georgia cornered me one night in my room. “What is wrong with you?” she asked with her usual tact. She threw herself onto my rug and leaned roughly back against a priceless Empire dresser that I never used because I was afraid I would break the handles.
“What do you mean?” I responded, avoiding her eyes.
“I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? I’m your sister. I know when there’s something wrong.”
I had been yearning to talk to Georgia but couldn’t even imagine where to start. How could I tell her the guy that we saw leap off the bridge was actually a criminal I had been hanging out with—that is, until I saw him walk away from his friend’s death without shedding a tear?
“Okay, if you don’t want to talk I can just start guessing, but I will get it out of you. Are you worried about starting a new school?”
“No.”
“Is it about friends?”
“What friends?”
“Exactly!”
“No.”
“Boys?”
Something on my face must have given me away, because she immediately leaned toward me, crossing her legs in a tell-me-more pose. “Kate, why didn’t you tell me about . . . whoever he is . . . before it got to this?”
“You don’t talk to me about your boyfriends.”
“That’s because there are too many of them.” She laughed and then, remembering my low spirits, added, “Plus, none of them are serious enough to mention. Yet.” She waited.
There was no way I was getting off the hook. “Okay, there’s this guy who lives in the neighborhood, and we kind of hung out a few times until I found out he was bad news.”
“Like how bad is the bad news? Married?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “No!”
“Druggie?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. It’s more like . . .” I watched for Georgia’s reaction. “It’s more like he’s in trouble with the law. Like a criminal or something.”
“Yeah. I’d say that’s bad news,” she admitted pensively. “Sounds more like someone I’d go for, actually.”
“Georgia!” I yelled, throwing a pillow at her.
“Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t joke about it. You’re right. He doesn’t sound like good boyfriend material, Katie-Bean. So why don’t you just pat yourself on the back for not getting in too deep before you found out, and be on your merry way back to Guyland?”
“I just can’t believe that I was so mistaken about him. He seemed so perfect. And so interesting. And—”
“Handsome?” my sister interrupted.
I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, Georgia. Not handsome. Gorgeous. Like heart-stoppingly amazing. Not that it matters now.”
Georgia stood and looked down at me. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. It would have been nice seeing you out and about enjoying yourself with some hot Frenchman. I won’t keep bugging you about it, but as soon as you’re ready to start living again, let me know. There are parties nearly every night.”
“Thanks, Georgia,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand.
“Anything for my little sister.”
And then, without me even noticing, summer was officially over and it was time to start school.
Georgia and I speak French fluently. Dad always spoke it with us, and we spent so much time in Paris during our vacations that French comes as easily for us as English. So we could have gone to a French high school. But the French system is so different from the American that we would have had to make up all sorts of missing credits to graduate.
The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they’re still back at home. I saw it as a place for lost souls. My sister saw it as an opportunity to make more international friends who she could visit in their native countries during school breaks. Georgia treats friends like outfits, happily trading one for another when it’s convenient—not in a mean way, but she just doesn’t get too attached.
As for me, being a junior, I knew I had two short years with these people, some of whom would be leaving to go back to their home country before the school year was even out.
So after walking through the massive front doors on the first day of school, I headed directly to the office to get my schedule and Georgia walked straight up to a group of intimidating-looking girls and began chatting away like she had known them all her life. Our social dice were cast within our first five minutes.
I hadn’t been to a museum since I had seen Vincent at the Musée Picasso, so it was with a sense of trepidation that I approached the Centre Pompidou one afternoon after school. My history teacher had assigned us projects on twentieth-century events happening in Paris, and I had chosen the riots of 1968.
Say “May ’68” and any French person will immediately think of the countrywide general strike that brought France’s economy to a halt. I was focusing on the weeks-long violent fighting between the police and university students at the Sorbonne. We were supposed to write our papers in the first person, as if we had experienced the events ourselves. So instead of looking through history books, I decided to search contemporary newspapers to find personal accounts.
The materials I needed were in the large library located on the Centre Pompidou’s second and third floors. But, since the other floors housed Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art, I planned on following my schoolwork with some well-deserved art gazing.
Once settled in at one of the library’s viewing booths, I flipped through microfilm spools from the riots’ most eventful days. Having read that May 10 was a day of heated fighting between police and students, I scanned that day’s front page, took some notes, and then flipped past the headlines to read the editorials. It was hard to imagine that kind of violence happening just across the river in the Latin Quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from where I was sitting.
I ejected the spool and replaced it with another. The riots had flared back up on July 14, France’s Independence Day. Many students, as well as tourists visiting Paris for the festivities, were taken to nearby hospitals. I took notes from the first few pages, and then flipped back to the two-page spread of obituaries and their accompanying black-and-white photos. And there he was.
Halfway down the first page. It was Vincent. He had longer hair, but he looked exactly like he had a month ago. My body turned to ice as I read the text.
Firefighter Jacques Dupont, nineteen years old, born in La Baule, Pays de la Loire, was killed in duty last night in a building fire believed to have been sparked by a Molotov cocktail thrown by student rioters. The residential building at 18 rue Champollion was in flames when Dupont and his colleague, Thierry Simon (obit., section S), rushed into the building and began pulling out its inhabitants, who had taken cover from the fighting at the adjacent Sorbonne. Trapped under burning timbers, Dupont expired before he could be evacuated to the hospital, and his body was received by the morgue. Twelve citizens, including four children, owe their lives to these local heroes.
It can’t be him, I thought. Unless he is the spitting image of his dad, who happened to sire a son before he died at . . . (I glanced back at the obituary) nineteen. Which isn’t impossible . . .
As my reasoning foundered, I forwarded to the next page and scanned the Ss for “Simon.” There he was: Thierry Simon. The muscle-bound guy who had turned Georgia and me away from the fight at the river. Thierry had a voluminous Afro in the photo but wore the same confident grin that he had flashed me with that day across the café terrace. It was definitely the same guy. But more than forty years ago.
I closed my eyes in disbelief, and then opened them again to read the paragraph under Thierry’s head shot. It read the same as Jacques’s, except it gave his age as twenty-two and place of birth as Paris.
