Friday, July 1

LONDON to PARIS

London to Paris to Amsterdam. Prague to Florence to Barcelona.

Rae knew which cities they were going to and when, but she mentally recited them anyway as she and Aubrey rode the tube to King’s Cross station.

London to Paris to Amsterdam.

Prague to Florence to Barcelona.

She knew the exact route they were taking—a line that carved from country to country, that bumped through cities and skirted along bodies of water. This was the trip Aubrey had been planning all year, the one they’d both been talking about since middle school. And it was finally happening.

The tube huffed to a stop at Russell Square, letting a group of people jostle off and another jostle on. Two women wearing business suits squeezed past Rae’s legs, forcing her to hug her backpack to her chest. Aubrey was looking through the map of Paris she’d downloaded onto her phone, whispering directions to herself, while Rae scrounged in her pocket for a stick of strawberry gum.

The tube started moving again. One more stop to go.

Rae wasn’t nervous—not exactly, anyway. And definitely not in the same way Aubrey was. She’d gone backpacking with her mom before, and she’d always loved the whole concept of train travel.

The constant forward momentum.

The going and going and feeling like you’d never slow down.

“We made it!” Aubrey said a few minutes later. They were heading across the busy outdoor plaza that led from King’s Cross to St. Pancras International, where they’d catch the Eurostar to Paris.

“We rode the tube.” Rae shoved her bangs away from her eyes, making the bangles on her wrist clink together. “We do that every day.”

“You’re just showing off,” Aubrey said, “because you’re more British than the rest of us.”

“Only technically,” Rae countered. Because honestly, she’d never really thought of herself as British. That was her mom—Lucy had grown up in London, but Rae was born in Georgia when her mom was a freshman in college. They’d stayed in the States until Rae was nine, after her grandmother died and left them an enormous house and a boatload of money.

At first, Rae had hated London. She’d missed the warmth of Georgia, and the small clapboard house she and her mom had lived in, and the weekends they’d spent driving down to the beach. Everything about England had seemed so gray to her then—the damp and the fog and the flat, metallic sky.

It seemed like the kind of place where she would never fit in, where she would feel bored and lonely forever. Until two years later, when Aubrey showed up at St. Catherine’s International School. When, halfway through their first homeroom together, Rae caught her rolling her eyes at Sophie French’s insistence that she was going to be cast in the next Harry Potter movie. And Rae had known it then. She’d known that this new girl was her best friend.

Now they walked into St. Pancras together, Rae breathing in the rusty city air and moving her bangs out of her face again to look up at the murky glass ceiling. The station was a cavern of clipping footsteps and humming voices. People moved through it like they were synced to its rhythm, like it was an ocean tide sweeping everyone—including Rae—along with it. She lowered her head and saw Clara leaning against a wall by the Eurostar check-in.

And that’s when Rae’s heart—and her lungs and probably everything else inside her—started to collapse. For a moment, the station quieted. Even the air in her chest went still.

“Your hair!” Aubrey said, and the station roared back to life. Someone stumbled against Rae’s back, forcing her forward.

“When the hell did you do that?” Aubrey asked Clara.

“Does it suck?” Clara walked toward them, pulling her fingers through her hair, now dyed a deep cherry red. “I was thinking about it last night, and I decided I wanted something completely different for art school. But you can tell me if it sucks.”

“It doesn’t suck,” Rae said.

“No,” Aubrey said. “But it is dramatic.”

“Good dramatic,” Rae qualified. “Very Run Lola Run. It makes me want to do something radical with mine.”

“No way!” Aubrey said. “You’ve had the same hair since middle school. You wouldn’t look like Rae anymore.”

Rae snorted under her breath. She didn’t point out that looking the way she did in middle school probably wasn’t a good thing.

Aubrey turned back to Clara. “Did your parents lose it?”

“The doctors were very reasonable,” Clara said. “I think they both get that I’m a free woman now.” She adjusted the waist of her homemade skirt patterned with a map of Europe. She was also wearing a ruffled yellow tank top and a ring on each of her fingers. Everything about her was bright and colorful. Everything about her made Rae’s heart beat faster. “Anyway,” Clara said, “why are we standing around? We’ve got a train to catch.”

They shoved their backpacks through an X-ray machine, and an attendant wearing a blue uniform waved them through a metal detector. Rae took her time removing her bag from the conveyor belt as she told herself over and over that everything was fine. After all, she and Clara were friends; they’d hung out nearly every day since freshman year.

But they’d never spent hours crammed into the same tiny train compartment, or woken up in the same hostel room every morning, or crisscrossed an entire continent side by side. This was all-new territory—this traveling through cities and whisking across borders and falling asleep against each other’s shoulders. Rae had no map for it. She had no idea how to survive this trip while still keeping her biggest secret… a secret.

They reached the departure lounge and spotted Jonah in the far corner, waving them over. “How the hell did I beat you guys here?” he asked. “I never beat Aubrey anywhere.”

“Rae made us late,” Aubrey said.

“That’s true,” Rae said. “I did.”

“You jerk.” Clara dropped her bag onto the ground. “Did you seriously only save us one seat?”

“Nope.” Jonah rubbed one hand over his longish, sandy hair. “I saved Aubrey one seat.” He pulled her down beside him and kissed her quickly on the cheek. Clara groaned and sat on top of her bag while Rae sloughed off hers and did the same. Above them, screens lit up with new departure times and platforms. Clara was playing with the pink plastic ring on her thumb, and Rae noticed a polka-dotted Band-Aid on her index finger. “What happened to your hand?” she asked.

“This?” Clara held it up. “Sewing injury.”

Rae lifted her own ink-stained finger. “I stabbed myself with a pen when I was eight. See? There’s a scar and everything.”

“Being an artist is so badass,” Clara said, grinning. They touched their fingers together, making a jolt run all the way up Rae’s arm. If this had been a normal crush, Rae would have said something flirty then. Or she would have held her hand there for an extra moment. She would have told Clara how impressed she was by her—by her talent and the incredible costumes she was always designing and the prestigious art school she was going to in LA. Rae was planning to major in art as well, but she didn’t breathe it the way Clara did. She wasn’t anywhere near as driven.

And she would have told Clara all of that—if she hadn’t known how gushy and obvious it would sound. Because Clara wasn’t a normal crush. She was one of Rae’s best friends.

Rae pulled her hand back.

“So,” Jonah said, “you guys haven’t heard from Gabe?”

Rae and Aubrey made quick, nervous eye contact. “Nah, dude,” Rae said. “We figured you’d talked to him.”

“Nope.” Jonah yawned. “Didn’t he text you?”

He was addressing this to Aubrey, and Aubrey knew it, because Rae saw her expression freezing with alarm. Rae needed to do something—she needed to think fast. She jumped up, pointing at the screen above them. “THEY ANNOUNCED OUR PLATFORM!”

“Whoa,” Jonah said. “Someone’s excited.”

“It’s the summer before college.” Rae put her hands on her hips. “If I can’t be excited now, I might as well get a full-time job and a mortgage.”

Aubrey shot her a relieved look as they gathered up their stuff and moved through the trundling crowd. Rae scanned the people around them, hoping to notice Gabe’s dark hair or hipster concert T-shirt or the headphones he kept coiled around his neck. But all she could see was Disneyland Paris hats and bleary-eyed adults holding coffee cups and dozens and dozens of rolling suitcases. On the train, she crammed her bag onto an overhead rack and took the seat next to Aubrey. Clara was sitting in front of Jonah, but she turned around and said, “If Gabe doesn’t show, I’m sitting with you.”

“He’ll show,” Jonah said. “And no, you’re not. Your elbows are pointy as fuck.”

“My elbows aren’t pointy.” She bent her arm and stared at one. “Maybe yours are blunt. Let me see.”

Aubrey played with the catch on the tray table in front of her. “What if he’s not coming?” she whispered anxiously.

“Of course he is,” Rae whispered back. “He wouldn’t just bail on us.”

A woman in a paisley summer dress walked down the aisle, her strong perfume filling Rae’s nose. Rae picked at a rip in her jeans and mulled over what to say next. She could go with a traditional maybe he got lost. Or possibly the standard this doesn’t have anything to do with you. But the problem was, she didn’t know if either of those things was true. Gabe could have chickened out. He could have decided that coming here wasn’t worth the probable awkwardness.

And if he did decide that, it was definitely because of Aubrey.

Behind them, the door to their carriage breathed open.

“Holy shit, man!” Jonah stood up. “What took so long?”

Rae turned around. Gabe’s bag hung from one arm, and he looked out of breath, but he also looked like him: St. Vincent T-shirt, headphones, and all. He’d gotten his hair cut recently, so it was shorter on the sides and longer on top. Rae wasn’t attracted to guys, but even she could tell the haircut looked good on him. It looked like it would be nice to touch. Aubrey loosened the catch on the table again, and it bounced open in front of her. She blushed furiously, pushing it back with both hands.

“My family’s still here from Madrid,” Gabe was saying. “And my sister’s flying back to Barcelona today, so my aunts and uncles wanted pictures. And then my abuela got mad because Zaida’s cheeks started to hurt and she wouldn’t smile anymore.”

Clara absentmindedly braided a few strands of her hair together. “Is your sister going to throw us a party when we’re in Barcelona?”

“No.” Gabe hefted his bag onto the rack. “Why would she do that?”

“Because parties are fun?” Clara said. “Because we’re high school graduates and we deserve a party?”

“You mean you deserve a party?” Jonah said.

“Shut up, Elbows.”

The train exhaled and lurched forward.

Gabe took his seat and stared straight ahead, like he was doing everything in his power not to acknowledge Aubrey. And Aubrey wasn’t looking at him, either—she was scratching at a freckle on her knee; she was picking at her new coat of nail polish. Rae wanted to slither out of her seat. She wanted to tell them both how blatant it was that they were ignoring each other.

Except maybe it wasn’t blatant at all. Maybe it only seemed like that to Rae, because she knew what had happened three weeks ago.

The platform shifted slightly outside the window, making Clara whoop and Jonah clap his hands over his head. Rae felt a small jitter in her stomach. This was it; they were actually on their way.

“Here we go,” she whispered to Aubrey, grasping her hand.

Aubrey squeezed Rae’s hand back, and it reminded Rae of how they used to jump off the high dive together when they were twelve. Of how, when they hit the water, they would try to stay under and hold their breath for the same amount of time. Outside the window, the gray and brown buildings of London started disappearing behind them. Like a sped-up movie reel. Like the world on fast-forward.