Wanderlust by Lucy Silag

Author:Lucy Silag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

When I wake up in the morning, the door to the bedroom is closed. I can’t take it anymore. I have to go outside. I leave a note for Annabel and greet the fresh, cold morning. It feels good to be out of that stuffy little apartment. Just a ways down the street is the river walk along the Seine, a parklike path for biking and running. There are benches there, and little docks for houseboats and barges, much like in Paris. In Rouen, however, from the banks of the Seine, you could be anywhere. In Paris, you always know you’re in Paris.

Annabel is three years older than me, a wild child since her first moments on this earth. My parents adored her, spoiled her rotten. She came out screaming, my mom likes to tell us, while I came out with a wondrous look on my face, completely taciturn. When I was born, Annabel took me under her wing as if she would be the mommy. She tried to snatch me from the crib and take me into bed with her, like a doll. When I was a very little girl, she would snip off my blond hair and hide locks of it in her pillowcase. And with the other kids at school, she was always fiercely protective, making sure I never played with anyone she deemed unworthy.

As a teenager, Annabel’s intensity never faded, but her focus did. She didn’t like school as much as she adored reading, and she plowed through every book my parents owned. She liked music but only wanted to strum a guitar, never take lessons. She wanted to teach herself. And when she met Dave, a few years older than her, seventeen when she was fourteen, she fell madly in love with him above all other things. Like Dave, who hadn’t been able to hack school, either, she dropped out halfway through her junior year—exactly the same level in school that I am now.

And I guess now I’m kind of a dropout, too, I surmise as I lower myself onto an empty bench, curling my knees up to my chin. It’s true. Now that I’ve run away from the Lycée, I’m no longer a high school student. And that makes me, at least in the eyes of the colleges, not to mention society, a high school dropout.

I take a long, slow breath. I fix my eyes on the rapidly flowing Seine, trying to imagine the water as all these bad feelings rushing away from me, toward Paris. All the way down to the Mediterranean Sea.

I shiver, stuffing my bare hands into my coat pockets for warmth. There I feel a small piece of paper—a business card. I pull it out and read, Binet Nagou. That curly-haired social worker from the train station. She was so kind.

I gaze sadly at the card. No one can help us now. We have no one to turn to.

I lean over the railing and let go of the tiny rectangular card, watching it catch in the wind and fly through the air above the water, before disappearing.

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