“I just can’t believe that I was so mistaken about him. He seemed so perfect. And so interesting. And—”
“Handsome?” my sister interrupted.
I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, Georgia. Not handsome. Gorgeous. Like heart-stoppingly amazing. Not that it matters now.”
Georgia stood and looked down at me. “I’m sorry it didn’t work. It would have been nice seeing you out and about enjoying yourself with some hot Frenchman. I won’t keep bugging you about it, but as soon as you’re ready to start living again, let me know. There are parties nearly every night.”
“Thanks, Georgia,” I said, reaching out to touch her hand.
“Anything for my little sister.”
And then, without me even noticing, summer was officially over and it was time to start school.
Georgia and I speak French fluently. Dad always spoke it with us, and we spent so much time in Paris during our vacations that French comes as easily for us as English. So we could have gone to a French high school. But the French system is so different from the American that we would have had to make up all sorts of missing credits to graduate.
The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they’re still back at home. I saw it as a place for lost souls. My sister saw it as an opportunity to make more international friends who she could visit in their native countries during school breaks. Georgia treats friends like outfits, happily trading one for another when it’s convenient—not in a mean way, but she just doesn’t get too attached.
As for me, being a junior, I knew I had two short years with these people, some of whom would be leaving to go back to their home country before the school year was even out.
So after walking through the massive front doors on the first day of school, I headed directly to the office to get my schedule and Georgia walked straight up to a group of intimidating-looking girls and began chatting away like she had known them all her life. Our social dice were cast within our first five minutes.
I hadn’t been to a museum since I had seen Vincent at the Musée Picasso, so it was with a sense of trepidation that I approached the Centre Pompidou one afternoon after school. My history teacher had assigned us projects on twentieth-century events happening in Paris, and I had chosen the riots of 1968.
Say “May ’68” and any French person will immediately think of the countrywide general strike that brought France’s economy to a halt. I was focusing on the weeks-long violent fighting between the police and university students at the Sorbonne. We were supposed to write our papers in the first person, as if we had experienced the events ourselves. So instead of looking through history books, I decided to search contemporary newspapers to find personal accounts.
The materials I needed were in the large library located on the Centre Pompidou’s second and third floors. But, since the other floors housed Paris’s National Museum of Modern Art, I planned on following my schoolwork with some well-deserved art gazing.
Once settled in at one of the library’s viewing booths, I flipped through microfilm spools from the riots’ most eventful days. Having read that May 10 was a day of heated fighting between police and students, I scanned that day’s front page, took some notes, and then flipped past the headlines to read the editorials. It was hard to imagine that kind of violence happening just across the river in the Latin Quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from where I was sitting.
I ejected the spool and replaced it with another. The riots had flared back up on July 14, France’s Independence Day. Many students, as well as tourists visiting Paris for the festivities, were taken to nearby hospitals. I took notes from the first few pages, and then flipped back to the two-page spread of obituaries and their accompanying black-and-white photos. And there he was.
Halfway down the first page. It was Vincent. He had longer hair, but he looked exactly like he had a month ago. My body turned to ice as I read the text.
Firefighter Jacques Dupont, nineteen years old, born in La Baule, Pays de la Loire, was killed in duty last night in a building fire believed to have been sparked by a Molotov cocktail thrown by student rioters. The residential building at 18 rue Champollion was in flames when Dupont and his colleague, Thierry Simon (obit., section S), rushed into the building and began pulling out its inhabitants, who had taken cover from the fighting at the adjacent Sorbonne. Trapped under burning timbers, Dupont expired before he could be evacuated to the hospital, and his body was received by the morgue. Twelve citizens, including four children, owe their lives to these local heroes.