It’s not doing a thing to get my mind off Amber.
At least my friend Travis is here. Guess his parents wanted to get rid of him, too. I don’t even know what country we’re in now. One of those lame ones you don’t learn much about in geography, like Belgium, or maybe one of the “L” ones. I don’t pay much attention to Mindy, but yesterday I heard her say the magic word: coast. We’re near the beach. That’s when I started formulating my plan.
I shake Travis awake.
“What the…what time is it?”
“Five thirty, man.”
“In the morning?”
“No, at night. It’s almost time for dinner.”
That gets him up. But when he sees how dark it is, he slumps back on the bed.
“It’s still dark.”
Can’t put anything over on Travis, at least not where food or sleep are concerned.
“Okay, I lied. But I need to get out of this Tour of the Damned and have some fun. That’s not going to happen unless we can beat the seven o’clock meet-up time.”
“Know what would be fun?”
“What, Trav?” I’m hoping maybe he has some ideas, since I know his parents roped him into this tour, same as mine.
“Sleeping.”
“It’s not like they’re going to let you sleep in, anyway. Soon they’ll be banging on the door, telling us to get ready. This way, you can sleep when we hit the beach.”
“Beach?”
Back home in Miami, Travis is a serious sun god. Now he’s the color of marshmallows.
“Sure, the beach. Think of it, Travis. Topless French chicks.”
“We’re not in France.”
“Okay, topless German chicks. Does it make a difference?”
“Will there be food?”
“Sure. There’s a café across the street. We’ll get breakfast and some sandwiches, but first we have to get out of here.”
Finally, I manage to get him out of bed. I’d actually sort of wanted to go look at this National Botanic Garden of Belgium (Belgium! That’s where we are!) we passed yesterday on the way to Museum Number Three. I could see this huge giant sequoia from the road. Of course, we didn’t have time to look at it. But I knew that Travis was way more likely to go along with me to the beach. At least it’s not another dusty art museum, and maybe we can hit the garden on the way back.
I drag Travis to the concierge desk to ask for directions.
“You couldn’t have done that while I was getting ready?” Travis asks.
“You’d have gone back to sleep.”
“You know, sometimes it’s like you work at being a slacker.”
“I prefer to spend my summer not working at anything.”
We have to stand there for a while, while the concierge guy makes time with the desk clerk. If he doesn’t get over here soon, Mindy might catch us.
“Hey, little help here…” I look at his nameplate. “Jacks?”
He ignores us.
“Hey! Don’t want to take time from your busy schedule.”
When he finally figures out that we’re not leaving, he comes over.
“Which way to the beach, Jacks?” I ask.
“It is Jacques.” He gives me that special glare hotel concierges always give you when they figure out you’re American or that you don’t speak the language, like he ate a bad niçoise salad. Like I’m supposed to speak every language in Europe. I took Spanish in school. Of course, we haven’t been to Spain yet. At least, I don’t think we have.
“The beach?” I repeat. “La playa?”
“Le plage,” Travis tries.
“Ah, oui. La plage.” We’ve pushed a magic button, and suddenly the concierge is our best friend and now speaks perfect English. “The autobus leaves at nine thirty.”
“We can’t wait until nine thirty, Jacks.”
Jacques shrugs. “That is when it goes.”
If we have to wait until nine thirty, we’re going to get caught, and I’m going to get stuck in another museum. My girlfriend dumped me, my summer vacation is ruined, and this guy can’t even help me have one decent day? Isn’t it, like, his job to be helpful? “Is there another bus, maybe? Is this, like, the completely lamest country in Europe?”
Travis nudges me. “Jack, you’re gonna get him mad.”
“Who cares? He doesn’t understand me, anyway. Everyone in this country is—”
“Ah, you are correct, monsieur,” Jacques interrupts, “and I am wrong. I have just remembered there is another autobus, a different route. A different beach.”
I give Trav a look like, see?
“Would you write it down for us?” Travis asks. “Please?”
“But of course.”
The concierge hands us a bus schedule with the routes and times circled. “You want to get off here and then walk to the east.” He sketches a map. It looks pretty complicated, but at least the bus leaves in twenty minutes.
“Thanks,” Travis says. “Listen, is there a place to get sandwiches?”
My cell phone rings. I check the caller ID: Mindy, looking for us. I grab Travis’s arm. “We’ve got to go.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“Later.” I drag him away.
“Thanks,” he yells to Jacques. “See you later.”
Jacques waves, and he’s actually smiling. He says something that sounds like “I doubt it” but is probably just some weird French phrase. I pull Travis out the door just as I spot Mindy stepping out of the elevator.
Luckily, she’s already walking backward and doesn’t see us.
Chapter 2
“Good thing we got food first,” Travis says on the bus.
“Yeah, you mentioned that.”
Actually, Travis has mentioned that seven times, once every ten minutes that we’ve been on this bus ride.
“But it is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be starving. In fact, I’m thinking about breaking out one of the sandwiches now.”
Travis brought enough sandwiches and beer (the legal drinking age here is sixteen!) for a family of four for a week. He also ate a four-egg omelet, a stack of pancakes, and ten strips of bacon (the waitress called it the “American breakfast”). Plus, since he got it to go, he actually just finished eating about twenty minutes ago.
“Forget food for a minute. Doesn’t this bus ride seem a little long to you? I mean, this is a small country. I brought my passport, but I wasn’t planning on using it.”
“It’s long,” Travis agrees, eyeing the bag with the sandwiches.
I pick it up and hold it shut so he has to listen to me.
“And isn’t it going—I don’t know—sort of in the opposite direction of the way you’d think the beach would be?”
“The guy said it was a different beach, but maybe he lied.”
“I think that guy messed us up on purpose.”
“You did say his country was lame.”
“It is lame. So you think we’re going the wrong way, too?”
“Maybe.” Trav’s looking at the bag with the sandwiches. “It’s hard to think straight when you’re hungry.”
I’m about to give him a sandwich just so I can think when the bus driver announces that we’ve reached Jacques’s stop.
“Finally. Time to get off.”
“Does that mean I can’t have a sandwich?”
“Think how good it will taste when we’re sitting on the beach.”
Twenty minutes later, not only have we not found the beach, we haven’t even found the first street Jacques wrote on his map.
“It says go three blocks, then turn on St. Germain,” Travis says. “But it’s been more than three blocks. It’s been, like, six. Maybe we should turn back.”
I’m about to agree when I see a street called St. Germain. “This must be it.”
But the next street isn’t where it’s supposed to be, either, even when we’ve walked three times as far as the map says. “Maybe you’re right,” I say.
When we turn back, nothing lo
oks the way it did the first time. The first time, there were houses and stores and bicycles. Now there’s nothing but trees and, well…nature everywhere I look. “What happened?” I say.
“To what?” Travis is munching on a sandwich.
“To everything—the town, the people?”
Travis wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “I didn’t notice.”
I see a little dirt road I hadn’t seen before. I turn down it, gesturing to Travis to follow me. “Come on.”
But this isn’t where we were before, either. It’s like everything just disappeared into a fog. Travis isn’t noticing, since he’s in a fog of his own, created by the sandwich. But then we run into something he can’t ignore.
It’s a solid wall of brambles.
“Now what?” I say.
“Go back.”
“Back where? We’re lost. This isn’t where we were before. Besides, look.” I gesture around me. “All this natural stuff. Back in Miami, if you had all this nature around, you’d definitely be near the beach.”
In fact, the hedge looks a lot like bramble bushes in Miami. It has fuchsia flowers a little like the bougainvillea that grows there. The weird thing is that it must be three or four stories high.
“So where’s the beach?” Travis asks.
I shrug. “Not back there.”
“But this road’s a dead end.”
“I know. But listen.” I cup my hand to my ear. “What do you hear?”
“Chewing,” Travis says.
“Well, stop chewing.”
Travis finishes the last bite. “Okay.”
“Now, what do you hear?”
Travis listens real carefully. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. Which means there must be nothing on the other side of that hedge—no city, no cars, just nothing. The beach.”
“So you’re saying you want to go through the hedge?”
“What have we got to lose?”
“How about blood? Those bushes look prickly.”
It’s true. But I say, “Don’t be a wuss.”
“Can I have another sandwich at least?”
I grab the bag from him. “After the hedge.”
Fifteen minutes later, there’s nothing on any side of us except brambles.
“I bet I look like the victim in a slasher movie,” Travis says. “What’s the French word for ‘chain saw’?”
“It’s not that bad. The flowers sort of smell nice.” I inhale.
“Right. You stay and smell the flowers. I’m going back.”
I grab his wrist. “Please, Trav. I want to go to the beach. I can’t handle another day of the tour.”
He pulls away. “What’s the big deal? My parents are going to ask me what I did today.”
“That’s the thing. My parents won’t. They won’t ask me what I did the past week. They don’t care what I’m doing. And I hate going to all those stupid museums. Looking at all that boring art makes my mind wander, and when my mind wanders, all I can think of is Amber kissing that frat boy.”
Travis stops pulling. “Wow. That really hit you hard, huh?”
“Yeah.” I thought I was just making stuff up to get Trav to do what I want, but I have this sort of sick feeling in my stomach. I’m telling the truth. My parents haven’t called in two weeks, except once to ask me if I signed up for AP Government next year for school, and this trip is doing nothing to make me forget about Amber. I see her face in every painting in every museum—especially that Degas guy, who painted girls with no faces at all. I can’t get away from her. “Yeah. I just want to go to the beach for one day. I need to be outside.”
“Okay, buddy. Only you go in front.”
So I go up front, taking the full scratchy brunt of the brambles for another twenty minutes—twenty minutes during which I don’t think about my parents or Amber but only about the fact that if I lose too much blood, there’ll be no one here to help. When we finally reach the other side, I stop.
“Wow,” I say.
“What is it?” Travis is still behind me.
“Definitely not the beach.”
Chapter 3
When I was a kid, back when my family was still pretending to like one another, we took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. It’s this place where everything’s like Colonial times—horses and buggies on unpaved streets. There’s stuff like blacksmith shops, too. My sister, Meryl, and I had fun with the employees because if you ask them stuff like which way to Starbucks, they act like they don’t know what you’re talking about. But it got weird after a while. You wondered if they seriously didn’t know it was the twenty-first century. I was ready to go home at the end of the day.
The place on the other side of the hedge is sort of like that. I mean, not just old. Pretty much everything in Europe is old and falling apart and important, but this place takes historic preservation to a whole new level.
“Do you think it’s, like, a theme park?” I say to Travis.
“No one here.”
“Maybe it’s just not open yet. Or closed. Is today Sunday?”
The streets are unpaved, and even if they were, they’re barely wide enough to get one of those little European cars down. But the transportation here is horses, judging from how many are tied to hitching posts, sleeping. There’s not a McDonald’s or a Gap anywhere, only one building with ALEHOUSE painted on it in peeling, old-fashioned lettering. And the plants look bad. Some are overgrown, but a lot of stuff is bare, like the grass died years ago.
“Definitely not the beach.” Travis starts pushing through the brambles.
The brambles have settled into the same shape they were before we went through them. I do not want to go through those bushes again.
Travis must think the same thing because he steps back. “Maybe we should eat lunch first.”
Something about this place is really weirding me out. “Let’s wait for a while. Who knows how long it will take to get back to civilization…and sandwiches.”
Travis thinks about it and gets this worried look on his face. “Okay. Then we should get out of here.” He starts pushing through the brambles again.
“Wait! Maybe we should start looking for a different way out or at least see if anyone around here has a chain saw.”
“You see any people here?”
“There’s horses. And they’re tied up. That means there are people somewhere.” The weird thing is, I sort of want to look around a little bit. This place is cooler than anything else we’ve seen on this trip. At least it’s outside, and Mindy’s not here telling us what to think. “We should look for them.”
Travis glances around. “If there’s people here, they’re really not into mowing and weeding. But if you say so….”
“I do.”
He shrugs but follows me. We walk down the street, which is really more of a pathway with weeds and stuff growing on both sides. I point to the alehouse. “Let’s try in there.”
He nods. “It doesn’t look like the type of place where they’d card.”
The alehouse has steps in front of it. When I put my foot on one, it squeaks and moves under me. I step on a better, less rotted part, but even so, it quivers and shakes.
“This is really weird, Jack. You think maybe the whole town died or something, and there’s nothing but a bunch of dead bodies?”
I remember when we went to Colonial Williamsburg, they told us about all the diseases people got in those days, like yellow fever, black plague, and scarlet fever. Meryl and I joked that all the diseases back then sounded really colorful. But now it’s kind of freaky thinking about some sickness taking out the whole town. Maybe Travis is right, not necessarily that everyone died, but maybe a lot did and the rest decided to get out of Dodge.
But I say, “That’s stupid. There’s no abandoned town in Europe. If there were, someone would turn it into a museum. They’d widen the streets and bring people here by the busload and torture kids on tours.”
“I guess you’re right.”
<
br /> “Of course I am.”
And to prove how right I am, I walk to the door.
But I still can’t bring myself to go in, so I look through the window. It’s easy because there’s no glass in it, and I remember that a lot of places didn’t have glass windows in the old days, only shutters to pull down at night or if it got cold. I can’t see much. There’s no light inside and nothing moving. We stand there so long that I’m almost expecting someone—possibly a ghost—to come up behind us and ask what we’re doing here. So when Travis says, “Come on!” I jump about three feet.
He laughs. “Not afraid of dead bodies, huh?”
“Nope.” I push open the door.
The room is dark. There are lanterns, but none are lit. It takes my eyes a minute to get used to it. Even so, I see there are people there, sitting on barstools, but they’re really quiet. No music, no laughter, no talking, and when my pupils finally dilate, I realize the people aren’t moving at all, like they’re dead.
But they can’t be dead. If they died long ago in some plague or massacre, their horses wouldn’t still be tied outside, and they’d be reduced to skeletons.
Unless they got mummified. I saw this movie once where this guy killed someone. He mummified her body and sat her in an upstairs window. You couldn’t tell the difference unless you saw her face.
I take a deep breath and let it out real slow, prepping myself to walk around and look at their faces. That’s when it happens.
One of them snores.
“What was that?” Travis says. He’s hugging the door.
“It sounded like a snore.”
“A snore? Like they’re sleeping? All of them?”
“I think so.” I walk over to the side of one guy. He snores, and I see his stomach moving in and out. He’s alive. He’s definitely alive. I’m saved! I don’t have to touch a mummified corpse!
I tap his shoulder. “Hey, bud.”
He doesn’t answer. I shake him harder and yell louder. “Hey! Dude! Hey, you!”
Now that it’s that obvious they’re not zombies or anything, Travis steps forward and starts shaking a different guy. “We’re sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for directions.”