She worships Gretchen. I guess it runs in the family.
We take our time getting ready. I decide to change again, so I iron another of the new shirts I bought today. It’s a little too big, so I roll up the sleeves. Audrey’s mascara was confiscated by airport security, so she spends twenty minutes with the hotel concierge trying to determine the British equivalent of her brand. She goes to two different drugstores until she finds it. I’d have accused her of acting especially girlie to cancel me out, except Audrey’s always been this way. Besides, if security had confiscated my binders, I’d have threatened another lawsuit.
We meet Emily at the Angel tube station and walk to her friends’ house. It’s a smaller party than I expected—only about fifteen people, hanging out on the first floor of a group house, wearing droopy reindeer antlers and paper hats. Emily introduces Audrey and me as “my new American brother and sister friends,” and no one seems to think anything of it.
Everyone’s pretty mellow and relatively friendly considering they’re British. They’re especially interested when they find out I go to Harvard. They all want to ask me if I know their friends at Harvard, and talk to me about their plans to go to Harvard for business school, and ask if I saw Reese Witherspoon on campus when they filmed Legally Blonde?
That’s the first icebreaker of the night. The second comes when Audrey starts making out with a British guy named Harvey.
I probably should be keeping a better eye on my sister. Make sure she isn’t invalidating any treaties or picking up any STDs.
I can’t focus on Audrey, though. Because for the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by people I’ve never met before, and they all think my name is Tony.
The guys ask me about football, by which I’m pretty sure they mean soccer. Sadly, I know nothing about sports. The guys mostly ignore me after they figure that out.
The girls, though. The girls smile at me the same way they smile at the guys. They bat their eyelashes the way my high school friends used to do at the guys on the lacrosse team. Two of the girls even invite me to visit them in London while I’m here for the summer. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
These people think I’m a guy. A real guy.
When the girls start yawning, I pry Audrey away from her new friend Harvey. We have to be at the airport early tomorrow, and it’s hard enough getting Audrey out of bed in her own time zone.
In the taxi back to the hotel, Audrey slumps onto my shoulder and closes her eyes. I wonder if she’s drunk. I didn’t see her drink after we left the pub, though. She wakes up when we get to the hotel, but she looks gloomy.
“Are you feeling guilty about Kevin?” I ask as I sort through the rest of my bags in our room.
“Kevin won’t care.” Audrey flops onto the couch and turns on the TV. “We have an open relationship.”
“Oh, right. How’s that working out?”
“It’s okay. I think it was the right call. No offense, but I think it’s too limiting to be a hundred percent monogamous all the time. I mean, what’s the point, right? Look at Mom and Dad. They’re in the most stable monogamous relationship ever, but it only works because they never speak to each other.”
Wow. I try to meet Audrey’s eyes, but she’s staring at some terrible Adam Sandler movie. “Is everything going okay at home?” I ask her.
She shrugs, her gaze still fixed on the screen. “Same as ever, I guess. Just quieter with you gone.”
I swallow. I don’t know what to say. So I sit on the couch and watch the movie with her in silence. Before long, though, the jet lag catches up with me, and I fall asleep.
I don’t know if Audrey sleeps, too, but I know she’s awake at 3:18 a.m. That’s what time the clock says when I wake up to the sound of my sister crying on the couch next to me.
My glasses are bent against the couch cushion. I straighten them out, put them on and blink hard until I wake up all the way.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
Audrey shakes her head at me. Then she gets up, goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. I can still hear her crying as the knob clicks into place.
“Hey.” I sit down on the floor on the other side of the closed door. “You don’t have to hide in there. Just tell me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Her voice is so clear through the thin, cheap hotel wood, we might as well be in the same room.
“Please?” I say.
“You’ll get mad.”
“Why? Did you break something of mine?”
She laughs, then sniffles loudly. “No.”
“Then I won’t get mad.”
“It’s dumb.”
“Just tell me.”
I hear her sliding down to sit on the floor. We’re right next to each other now, with only the door between us.
“It’s harder than I thought it would be,” she says.
“What is?”
“This thing with you. The new you.”
Oh. I should’ve known.