As we get off, Captain Jack shakes our hands. “I feel a little bad to take your money,” he says.
“No. Don’t feel bad.” I think of the look on Willem’s face, of being in the tunnel. That alone was worth a hundred bucks.
“And we’ll take it off you soon enough,” Gustav calls.
Jacques shrugs. He kisses my hand before he helps me off the boat, and he practically hugs Willem.
As we walk away, Willem taps my shoulder. “Did you see what the boat is named?”
I didn’t. It’s right on the back, etched in blue lettering, next to the vertical red, white, and blue stripes of the French flag. Viola. Deauville.
“Viola? After Shakespeare’s Viola?”
“No. Jacques meant for it be called Voilà, but his cousin painted it wrong, and he liked the name, so he registered her as Viola.”
“Okaaay—that’s still a little weird,” I say.
As always, Willem smiles.
“Accidents?” Immediately, a strange little tremor goes up my spine.
Willem nods, almost solemnly. “Accidents,” he confirms.
“But what does it mean? Does it mean we were meant to take that boat? Does it mean something better or worse would’ve happened to us if we hadn’t taken that boat? Did taking that boat alter the course of our lives? Is life really that random?”
Willem just shrugs.
“Or does it mean that Jacques’s cousin can’t spell?” I say.
Willem laughs again. The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it’s like, for the first time in my life, I understand that this is the point of laughter, to spread happiness.
“Sometimes you can’t know until you know,” he says.
“That’s very helpful.”
He laughs and looks at me for a long moment. “You know, I think you might be good at traveling after all.”
“Seriously? I’m not. Today is a total anomaly. I was miserable on the tour. Trust me, I didn’t flag down a single boat. Not even a taxi. Not even a bicycle.”
“What about before the tour?”
“I haven’t traveled much, and the kind I’ve done . . . not a lot of room for accidents.”
Willem raises a questioning eyebrow.
“I’ve been places. Florida. Skiing. And to Mexico, but even that sounds more exotic than it is. Every year, we go to this time-share resort south of Cancún. It’s meant to look like a giant Mayan temple, but I swear the only clue that you’re not in America is the piped-in mariachi Christmas carols along the fake river waterslide thing. We stay in the same unit. We go to the same beach. We eat at the same restaurants. We barely even leave the gates, and when we do, it’s to visit the ruins, but we go to the same ones every single year. It’s like the calendar flips but nothing else changes.”
“Same, same, but different,” Willem says.
“More like same, same, but same.”
“Next time when you go to Cancún, you can sneak out into the real Mexico,” he suggests. “Tempt fate. See what happens.”
“Maybe,” I allow, just imagining my mom’s response if I suggested a little freelance traveling.
“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico one day,” Willem says. “I’ll bump into you, and we’ll escape into the wilds.”
“You think that would happen? We’d just randomly bump into each other?”
Willem lifts his hands up in the air. “There would have to be another accident. A big one.”
“Oh, so you’re saying that I’m an accident?”
His smile stretches like caramel. “Absolutely.”
I rub my toe against the curb. I think of my Ziploc bags. I think of the color-coded schedule of all my activities that we’ve kept tacked to the fridge since I was, like, eight. I think of my neat files with all my college application materials. Everything ordered. Everything planned. I look at Willem, so the opposite of that, of me, today, also the opposite of that.
“I think that might possibly be one of the most flattering things anyone has ever said to me.” I pause. “I’m not sure what that says about me, though.”
“It says that you haven’t been flattered enough.”
I bow and give a sweeping be-my-guest gesture.
He stops and looks at me, and it’s like his eyes are scanners. I have that same sensation I did on the train earlier, that he’s appraising me, only this time not for looks and black-market value, but for something else.
“I won’t say that you’re pretty, because that dog already did. And I won’t say you’re funny, because you have had me laughing since I met you.”
Evan used to tell me that he and I were “so compatible,” as if being like him was the highest form of praise. Pretty and funny—Willem could stop right there, and it would be enough.
But he doesn’t stop there. “I think you’re the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren’t even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don’t let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.”
He stops then. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out and there’s a lump in my throat and for one small second, I’m scared I’m going to cry.
Because I’d hoped for baubles, trinkets, fizzy things: You have a nice smile. You have pretty legs. You’re sexy.
But what he said . . . I did once turn in forty dollars I found at the food court to mall security. I have cried in every single Jason Bourne movie. As for the last thing he said, I don’t know if it’s true. But I hope more than anything that it is.
“We should get going,” I say, clearing my throat. “If we want to get to the Louvre. How far is it from here?”
“Maybe a few kilometers. But it’s fast by bike.”
“You want me to wave one down?” I joke.
“No, we’ll just get a Vélib’.” Willem looks around and walks toward a stand of gray bicycles. “Have you ever heard of the White Bicycle?” he asks.
I shake my head, and Willem starts explaining how for a brief time in Amsterdam in the 1960s, there used to be white bicycles, and they were free and everywhere. When you wanted a bike, you grabbed one, and when you were done, you left it. But it didn’t work because there weren’t enough bikes, and people stole them. “In Paris, you can borrow a bike for free for a half hour, but you have to lock it back up, or you get charged.”