Friday, July 8

PRAGUE to FLORENCE via VIENNA

Gabe went to the dining car to get food, but Rae was too wound up to eat. She walked up and down the strip of carpet between her bed and Gabe’s, listening to the train creak and shudder. She plugged in her phone charger and drafted a few texts to Clara—hey, what a night, huh??; are you sleeping? don’t answer if you’re sleeping. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t, but…; quick! knock twice on the wall when you get this message!—but she didn’t send any of them. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about the kiss yet, so everything she wrote sounded way too casual or way too awkward.

Her phone rang. She dove for it.

“I haven’t heard your voice in ages!” Lucy said.

“Mom.” Rae slumped onto her bed. “It’s been a week. And I text you all the time.”

“Yes, but I like hearing my only daughter’s voice, thank you very much. Plus, I wanted to make sure you’d actually caught your train.”

“Am I seriously that untrustworthy?”

“Rae, darling, you’re eighteen. Of course you’re untrustworthy. So, tell me everything. Where are you right now? What can you see?”

“I’m on a train. I can see an electrical socket.”

“Sounds fancy.”

“The fanciest.” Rae detached her water bottle from the side of her bag and took a long swig. The train went around a bend, and her body swung to the side. For a second, she remembered her fight with Aubrey and felt awful. How could she have lost her temper so quickly? How could she have said all that stuff about Aubrey being selfish?

The next second, she remembered what Aubrey had said first—You’re transforming into this brand-new person, and she’s secretive and she’s mean, and I don’t like her—and Rae got pissed all over again.

“You haven’t sent me any pictures,” her mom said. “I want to see it all—the hostels, the dodgy bars. Don’t leave anything out.”

“I’ll send you some now.”

“Great! I’ll get them printed and you can take them with you to Australia.”

“Uh-huh,” Rae said. But she didn’t want to talk about Australia right now. Her brain felt cloudy, and her life felt so complicated. What would happen with Clara when she left? What would happen with Aubrey? It was a lot to wrap her head around. “What are you doing?” she asked, changing the subject. “Where’s Iorek?”

“Sitting next to me. We’re in the studio.”

Rae lay back on her pillow. “It’s kind of late to be working.”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about you. I had this idea for a piece about travel. Maybe a collage? Something about what we imagine a place will be versus what it’s like when we actually get there. Your pictures might inspire me, kid.”

“Mom,” Rae said, “you need to sleep.”

“I sleep! And there’s this wonderful innovation—it’s called caffeine. You should try it sometime.”

Rae’s stomach churned. Was this what her mom would be like next year? Staying up all night, throwing herself into work, clearly drinking a lot of coffee. And what would Rae be like without her? Even now—even during this five-minute phone conversation—she felt hollow with homesickness. She wanted to eat microwaved noodles at her kitchen table and hang out in the studio with Iorek, drawing in her sketchbook. She wished she could forget her fight with Aubrey, and the fact that Clara was one room away but Rae still couldn’t talk to her, and the fact that next year was rushing toward her at an unrelenting speed, never slowing down, never taking a break.

“Rae?” her mom said. “You still here?”

“Yeah.” Rae rubbed her eyelids. “I’m here.”

“Did you get those messages I sent you about Sydney? With the pictures of Bondi Beach? It’s got this art deco architecture, and there’s a pool right there, floating in the middle of the ocean. Check your e-mail and see.”

“I’ll do it later.”

“Okay. Well, pass the phone to Aubrey for a second. I want to say hi.”

“Mom. Everyone here’s asleep.”

Her mom paused for a moment. “Okay, kid. But you know”—her voice went a little quieter—“it’s normal if this trip isn’t going exactly the way you’d hoped. Traveling with friends can be tough. I went with this girl, Annabelle, to Budapest back in ’98, and I thought it would be so much fun. But we drove each other up the wall.”

Rae fidgeted with the corner of her pillow. The train chugged around her like a heartbeat. She wanted to believe that her mom was right—that all this tension was just a side effect of traveling together, of being in all the same places and never getting a moment apart. But the problem was, she’d never needed a moment apart from Aubrey before. Maybe this was about who she and Aubrey were becoming. Maybe they were turning into people who wouldn’t stay best friends.

“I don’t think I can stay awake,” she said. “Can I call you when I get to Florence?”

They said good night and hung up. Rae turned on the tiny reading light above her bed, took the bangles off her wrist, and opened up her sketchbook. There were a few images from Prague she wanted to get down while they felt fresh—the Astronomical Clock and the Charles Bridge and the view from the Vyšehrad. She dragged her pencil across the paper, but her mind kept skipping back to other things—to a square at night, a church, and a girl.

She turned the page and drew the girl instead. A girl standing between buildings so out of focus, they could have been clouds. But she was completely solid. The fabric of her dress fell to her knees, and her collarbone touched the hollow of her neck. The corner of her mouth was pulled into a slight curve—

Gabe opened the door; Rae snapped her sketchbook shut.

“You should seriously go out there.” Gabe hopped onto his own bed. He was holding a bag of M&Ms and a soda. “The people in a train dining car at two in the morning are wild. I think this one girl was a musician. And there was a guy in a wrinkled business suit sitting all by himself, just drinking coffee and reading Ernest Hemingway. What do you think his story was?”

“He’s a misogynist?” Rae offered.

“That’s one possibility.” Gabe put his hands behind his head. His expression was dreamy but awake—like he wanted to sleep, but his mind was busy going over so many other things. “Do you think this is what happens as we get older?” he asked. “We start seeing adults more like people. We start wondering what they did in their life and how they got to where they are.”

“I think we just become adults, too,” Rae said. “And then we realize we’re all equally fucked-up.”

Gabe sat up and put his feet on the ground. “I’ve made a decision. What do you think about literature?”

“Like, in general?”

“Like, as a major. For me. I’ve never really considered it before, but—I don’t know. Books are almost like songs, aren’t they? You can read one a hundred times, but every time you get something different from it.”

“Um,” Rae said, “sure?”

Gabe scratched at his chin. Rae wondered if this whole literature thing had anything to do with Aubrey—she was, after all, their resident English major. But whatever. Rae had no desire to ask him about Aubrey or her major or how the hell any of that related to him.

“I might not sleep yet, if that’s okay?” he said. “I feel like listening to music.”

“Go ahead.” Rae kicked off her flip-flops. “I’m not tired, either.”

He uncoiled his headphones and fished through his stuff for a book with a shiny cover he must have bought in Prague. Rae heard the tinny sounds of a guitar and drums—the opening riff of a Joy Division song—coming from his phone. She heard him push around his pillow and prop himself against the wall behind him.

Rae opened her sketchbook again and turned the page. The picture she’d been working on before didn’t seem right anymore, so she started something new. Two girls on a train, sleeping in separate rooms. A thin wall ran between them, but the perspective was from above so you could see them both. One girl’s hair coiled over her sheets as she slept; the other girl sat up with her stuff all around her, a pen and paper in her hand. Graphite stained Rae’s fingers as she worked. Her wrist ached, but she didn’t stop.

Rae had fallen asleep.

Her head was crunched against the vibrating wall; her sketchbook had fallen to the floor. She woke to the sound of the curtains swishing open. Gabe was perched at the edge of his bed, looking at something outside.

“Whatissit?” Rae mumbled. “Are we there?”

“Oh, sorry.” He looked over at her. “I was trying to be quiet.”

She pushed her bangs out of her eyes and picked up her sketchbook. When she sat back up, she could see what Gabe was looking at: the sunrise. Patchwork fields painted red and orange. A moving landscape bathed in gold.

“Rad,” she said, her voice croaky.

“Here.” He handed her a paper cup with a black plastic lid. “I’ve already had two of these. We’re going to need a lot to get through today.”

She took a few sips of the hot black coffee, her gaze trained on a flock of birds that hovered over the fields. Their forms were distant and smudged, like pencil marks against the sky. Rae stretched out her wrist, which hurt even more than it had the night before. Plus, her neck was stiff, and she knew she had to sit all day on another train from Vienna to Florence. It would be hours until she could have an actual shower and feel normal again.

“She’ll be okay,” Gabe asked suddenly, “won’t she?”

“Who?” Rae yawned. “Aubrey?”

Gabe nodded.

“Of course she will,” Rae said. “This is just her first major heartbreak. She’s having the necessary meltdown.”

“I guess so.” Gabe rubbed his palm over his face and turned back to the window. But now, Rae couldn’t stop staring at him. He looked like he’d slept even less than she had—the sheets were crumpled at the bottom of his bed, and his shoulders were tense, eyes alert. She gripped her coffee as it hit her that she knew what was happening to Gabe—she knew because the exact same thing was happening to her. It had been happening to her all week. All year.

Here they were at six AM, restless and staring at the sunrise over a place they’d never been before. They were both so awake—and they were both so in love.