Most people headed toward the city bus stop. A couple of cabs stood by but no one took them. Neil looked around for someone who could be the daughter of a mail-order girlfriend of his father’s—he was pretty sure that was the situation. But aside from a lot of blue eye shadow or something, he didn’t know exactly what such a person would look like, and anyway, it was hardly fair. He could only imagine what the friend’s daughter would be expecting of him. So Neil looked around again for a normal female person. A youngish woman sat at the city bus stop, but she was talking on her phone with a serious British accent. A bus came and she got on. Nobody got off. Neil crossed the street to the ticket-buying area. There was a girl smoking a cigarette outside. Neil smiled but she didn’t. She ground out her cigarette and didn’t seem to notice as he passed. Neil went inside the ticket office. A guy with no shoes was asleep across the chairs, despite the armrests. Behind the ticket window a woman ate a vending machine sandwich, avoiding the crusts.
Neil went back outside. He checked his phone, but no one had called. Maybe she forgot. In a few minutes he would call Veejay and probably wake him up and get him to dig through the stuff on Neil’s dresser to find the notebook where he’d written her number, which he had forgotten to put into his phone and which was going to be embarrassing, because Neil was pretty sure he’d written a couple of incriminating lines of poetry in that notebook about Amanda. Neil was no poet, but Amanda had a way of tracing her fingertips along the edges of her clothing while you talked to her. It was literary, or so Neil had thought the night before, when he was supposed to be watching Arsenal but was really watching her, and when he was likely to have already been slightly drunk. Maybe it was better to leave Veejay sleeping, his notebook safely buried under pizza boxes, and just go home.
Another city bus came and went. Neil stood with the now only mostly wrapped souvenir bow and arrow under his arm. He was suddenly sick with the thought of the stupid things he’d said to Amanda last night, combined with the thought of her fingers brushing along the edges of the shirt she’d been wearing. His breath mint was almost totally gone, and he felt his hangover gathering strength for a last assault before burying itself in the patient recesses of his liver.
“Ni-yell?” It was the girl with the cigarette, who had apparently decided to notice him.
“Oh hi,” he said. “I didn’t know it was you.”
“I am waiting for you on the other side,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” Neil said. “I guess you didn’t see me.” She seemed distracted, like something interesting was going on behind him. Maybe she’d expected someone better looking.
“We should walk?”
“Okay,” Neil said, and they started up the street. “Cool town.”
“London is more cool,” she said.
She was about Neil’s age, or maybe a little older. She didn’t seem to have on eye make-up of any color, and Neil felt like a jerk for expecting her to look like a hooker or something, though she did have an accent like the hot robot in Warcraft Reloaded. Jesus, what was her name? Had she said? He couldn’t remember.
“How’s your mom?” Neil asked.
“She’s good,” she said.
“She went back home?” Neil asked.
“Yeah. She’s having one restaurant now in Vilnius,” she said.
“Oh, wow. What kind of restaurant?” Henry IV had spent a lot of money trying to invade Vilnius before he turned his attention to deposing Richard II, but Neil couldn’t remember what modern country it was in. Belarus?
“Pizza,” she said. They crossed through a mostly deserted shopping center, then a little park. A fountain dribbled over mossy tiles. It made Neil have to pee. He wished he could remember where Vilnius was. Being a European History major, it was pretty bad that he didn’t know.
“Pizza is new big thing in Lithuania,” she said. Lithuania, Neil thought. Lithuania, Lithuania, Lithuania.
“Oh, yeah, I bet,” Neil said.
“And your dad?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, he’s good,” Neil said. “You know.” Which was a stupid thing to say, she didn’t know his father, and if her mom had told her anything it was just that he’d been all alone in a big house since Pop died. They walked quietly for a little while, and Neil looked hard at the patchy flowerbeds, trying to think of something to say.
“So, what do you do?” Neil asked, just as she was starting to say something too. Their words got jumbled up in the air and they had to start again. “You first,” Neil said.
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I am only asking it is okay to go to my house?”
“Sure,” Neil said. He really had to pee.
“So, what do you do?” he asked again.
“I work at one club,” she said. “Like giving drinks and things. It’s okay job, but, you know. And you?”
“I’m in school,” Neil said.
“At university?”
“Yeah. It’s like an exchange program with my school in America. They let you spend a year studying in London if you want to.” Studying in London. Jesus. She probably thought his dad was really rich. “See, usually you have to be a junior, but I’m trying to finish in three years to, you know, save money”—which was true enough, though with all his AP credits he was practically forced to graduate early—“so they’re letting me do it a year ahead of time. See, they have this program here, for what I’m studying—it’s actually better to learn about it here, because it’s European History, and this is Europe. I mean, I thought this was Europe until I got here and heard all the British people talk about Europeans like they were an alien race or something.” That was something the American kids in the history department joked about, and obviously she didn’t care, it might even be offensive, since she was a European. Her gaze kept flicking up past his shoulder, like she was trying not to look at him. He wondered if he had something on his face.
Her purse began to ring, and she dug around for her phone, which gave Neil a chance to do an all-over exploration of his face with his fingertips. He smoothed his eyebrows and wiped the sides of his mouth and the corners of his eyes. Since he hadn’t eaten anything, he could hardly have food stuck in his teeth. When he was done she was still on the phone, saying, “Yeah, it is plugged in by the wall? You are sure?” and he had a chance to really look at her for the first time. She had a very round face and hair that was intentionally cut at different lengths so that it wisped out at the slightest bit of wind, and she had on high-heeled boots like no one ever wore back home. American women in high heels always looked apologetic, like they knew they were crushing the dreams of their suffragist grandmothers or giving themselves varicose veins, and women in London wore heels with such grim awareness of how good they looked that Neil no longer found them attractive. But on what’s-her-name the boots had the effect that only Eastern European women could pull off. She didn’t look comfortable, exactly, but she walked like it was no big deal—and that in itself did something nice to her hips.
She finished the phone call, saying something in another language and then, “No, I am not talking to you when you’re calling me this . . . yeah, I know this, yeah okay good-bye.” She threw the phone back into her bag, which was large with a lot of buckles and fringe.
“Everything okay?” Neil asked, though it wasn’t his business.
“Well, everything is shit,” she said. She had one grayish tooth, like Neil had had when he was a kid and the roots of one of his baby teeth died after he got hit in the face with a swing.
They had turned onto a residential street—rows of houses with pale curtains across the windows and gardens in the back filled with hollyhocks and pieces of tricycles. She didn’t say anything more, but Neil felt like he couldn’t just leave it at that.