Jae took the card gently from my other hand and read it, then showed it to Lou and Dani. “Oh,” said Lou. “Yikes,” said Dani. I didn’t bother throwing Dani another look. I put the water bottle down and stared at the letter laying in my lap.
“I don’t think I can do it,” I said to no one in particular.
“Here. Let me,” said Lou in her “Mama Lou” voice. I looked up and nodded weakly. She held out her hand and I gave her the letter. “I’ll read it and if you like, I’ll just summarise it, okay?” I nodded again and gulped down the lump growing in my throat.
She unfolded the letter and seemed to skim-read to the bottom of the first page, then moved just as quickly through the second page. She turned both pages over, as if she was looking for more writing, then shuffled the pages and read back over the whole thing again. It was killing me, the waiting.
“Lou, please, what?”
“This isn’t the last letter, Cat.”
“What? What do you mean?” I was frozen in place.
“I mean, this is a sweet, newsy letter. There’s nothing about ending your friendship, or just being pen pals, or any of that. It’s just a normal letter.”
What???
“Let me see,” I said. She handed it over and Dani climbed on the bed and sat beside me to read over my shoulder.
Dear Jean-Luc,
I’m at uni at the moment, so this will be an unusually short letter, but you know me—I’ll probably write again tomorrow anyway. I’m supposed to be listening to the world’s most boring lecture. It’s about semiotics. SNORE! Actually, I think someone behind me is snoring. Anyway … If you don’t know—and you probably do, because you’re way smarter than I am—semiotics is about how signs signify stuff and words are signs or something. Ha ha! Maybe I should actually pay attention.
Anyway … I think it’s so cool that you applied to the Sorbonne. If you get in and you move to Paris I will totally come and visit you. For real! At least I will try. Maybe at the end of the year. I could have my first white Christmas! Does it snow in Paris at Chrissie time? Actually, you probably go home for Christmas, right? What about Lyon? Does it snow there? Someone is definitely snoring now. Oh my God, will this lecture ever end???
Mostly I love uni. Not at this particular moment, obviously, but it’s just SO COOL! The lecturers actually listen to our opinions and we have these interesting discussions in the tutes, like we’re actual grown-ups. It’s way better than high school where you got the best marks if you just regurgitated what the teacher said. You’re so lucky you left before the HSC. I know I’ve told you before, but seriously I think my mum nearly asked me to move out. I was such a nightmare stresshead all the time.
Anyway … I have made some cool friends. My bestie is Alison. She’s ridiculously pretty—the opposite of me, tall, thin, long blonde hair. She’s smart and funny so I don’t hate her, even though I probably should. You’d like her. You’d probably LIKE like her. No, scratch that. I wouldn’t want you going out with my bestie. That would be weird.
Nothing on the romance front. The guys here are kind of dumb and a bit too ocker for my taste. I don’t know if you remember but ocker means super blokey and macho, only it’s fake macho, just stupid really—like a bunch of ten-year-olds running around being dicks. It makes me miss you. A lot. If ANY of these guys were like you, I would have had a boyfriend ages ago.
Anyway … I have to go. He’s FINALLY finished. Yayyyyyyy!
Catchya later.
Love, Cat xxxxxxxx
I stared numbly at my name followed by—I counted—eight kisses. I blinked a few times and eventually looked at Lou. “It’s not the letter.”
“No.” Dani and Lou spoke in unison.
“I want to read it.” Jae had been patient and I handed it to her.
“It’s so sweet,” cooed Dani.
“He said he read it a hundred times.”
“Aww.” Dani, the romantic.
We sat in silence while Jae finished reading it. Well, nearly silence. There was the sound of Dani topping up everyone’s wine glasses.
I took a tentative sip from mine and watched Jae over the rim, her face set with concentration. She bit her top lip, then her bottom lip. She frowned, then made a little sound like, “Hunh.” Finally, she looked at me.
“You realise what this means, right?”
“No.” Panic, panic, panic. “What?”
“You were in love with him too.”
“What? What do you mean? No, I wasn’t.” As I protested, Dani said, “Ohhh,” and Lou said, “I did wonder about that.”
Jae came and sat next to me. “Here.” She pointed to the paragraph about the ocker guys. “No one measured up. You only wanted him. And there was the part about you not wanting him to be with Alison.”
I read back over the last part of the letter. Then the very large penny dropped from an incredibly great height.
I had been in love with Jean-Luc.
And I might be again.
“Oh, bollocks.” This time I said it out loud.
Chapter 19
“Can we please talk about something else? Anything else?” I glanced between them and they peered back at me. Lou’s eyes narrowed a little, but I could handle Mama Lou. It was coming up on midnight and we were due on the coach at 8:00am. I needed to sleep, but I knew if I didn’t get the whole “Jean-Luc” situation out of my head, I’d end up staring at the ceiling until the wee hours.
“Amsterdam!” I said a little too loudly for the small room.
Jaelee went back to her position on Lou’s bed. “What about it?” she said, stifling a yawn.
“What are you looking forward to?” I donned an expression of fake enthusiasm, like a nursery teacher trying to get small children excited about something mundane.
Lou answered, “Well, I’m actually going to see my family.”
“Oh, cool,” drawled Dani.
The fake enthusiasm vanished. “I didn’t know you had family in the Netherlands.” Why hadn’t she told me that? Or maybe she had but I’d been too busy obsessing about my trainwreck of a love life.
“Oh, I thought I’d mentioned it. Hang on, maybe I didn’t. Well, anyway, we’re Dutch on my dad’s side and his first cousin lives in Rotterdam. I’m staying with her and her husband. Oh, and her kids are our age, so that’ll be cool.”
“Wait, so you’re staying with them?” asked Jaelee. “Are you leaving the tour early?”
Great questions, Jaelee. How had my bus bestie failed to reveal such important information?
“No, I’ll finish out the trip, but when you go back to London on Friday, Dad’s cousin, Mila, is picking me up from the hotel. I fly straight to Vancouver from Amsterdam on Monday.”
“That’s awesome,” said Dani. Her excitement about Lou’s plans was annoying me senseless.
“So, we have to say goodbye on Friday morning?” I asked, a slight edge in my voice. A whole day less with Lou. I was deflated. I almost wanted to go back to talking about Jean-Luc. Almost.
“Yeah, but we still have two more days together.” She smiled brightly at me, which made me feel even worse. She had something to look forward to over the weekend. And then my thoughts flew to Jackson and the pending divorce and the heinous mess she had waiting for her back home in Vancouver. I was being a cow—again. To Lou, whom I loved.