Just One Day by Gayle Forman

everywhere.
     Tiny churches, hidden corners, alleys. It’s a whole different Paris. And just as dazzling.
    “Shall we take a drink?” Willem asks.
    I nod.
    We cross onto a crowded avenue, full of cinemas, outdoor cafés, all of them packed,
     and also a handful of small hotels, not too expensive judging by the prices advertised
     on the sandwich boards. Most of the signs say
complet
, which I’m pretty sure means full, but some don’t, and some of the rooms we might
     be able to afford if I were to exchange the last of my cash, about forty pounds.
    I haven’t been able to broach tonight with Willem. Where we’re staying. He hasn’t
     seemed too worried about it, which has me worried our fallback is Céline. We pass
     an exchange bureau. I tell Willem I want to change some money.
    “
I
have some money left,” he says. “And you just paid for the boat.”
    “But I don’t have a single euro on me. What if I wanted to, I don’t know, buy a postcard?”
     I stop to spin a postcard caddy. “Also, there’s drinks and dinner, and we’ll need
     somewhere for, for . . .” I trail off before getting the courage to finish. “Tonight.”
     I feel my neck go warm.
    The word seems to hang out there as I wait for Willem’s response, some clue of what
     he’s thinking. But he’s looking over at one of the cafés, where a group of girls at
     a table seem to be waving at him. Finally, he turns back to me. “Sorry?” he asks.
    The girls are still waving. One of them is beckoning him over. “Do you know them?”
    He looks over at the café, then back at me, then back at the restaurant. “Can you
     wait here for a minute?”
    My stomach sinks. “Yeah, no problem.”
    He leaves me at a souvenir shop, where I spin the postcard caddy and spy. When he
     gets to the group of girls, they do the cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing—three times, though,
     instead of twice like he did with Céline. He sits down next to the girl who was gesturing
     to him. It’s clear they know each other; she keeps putting her hand on his knee. He
     throws darting glances in my direction, and I wait for him to wave me over, but he
     doesn’t, and after an endless five minutes, the touchy girl writes something down
     on a bit of paper and gives it to him. He jams the slip deep into his pocket. Then
     he stands up, and they do another cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, and he strides back
     to me, where I am feigning a deep interest in a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard.
    “Let’s go,” he says as he grabs my elbow.
    “Friends of yours?” I ask, jogging to keep up with his long stride.
    “No.”
    “But you know them?”
    “I knew them once.”
    “And you just randomly bumped into them?”
    He spins toward me, and for the first time today, he’s annoyed. “It’s Paris, Lulu,
     the most touristy city in the world. It happens.”
    Accidents,
I think. But I feel jealous, possessive, not just over the girl—whose number, I suspect,
     he now has in his hip pocket if he hasn’t already transcribed it into his little black
     book—but over accidents. Because today it has felt like accidents belonged solely
     to us.
    Willem softens. “They’re just people I knew from Holland.”
    Something in Willem’s whole demeanor has changed, like a lamp whose bulb is dimming
     before it burns out. And it’s then that I notice the final and defeated way he says
Holland
, and it makes me realize that all day along, not once has he said he was going
home
. And then another thought hits me. Today, he was meant to be going home—or to Holland,
     where he’s from—for the first time in two years.
    In three days, I will go home, and there will be a crowd at the airport. Back at my
     house, there will be a welcome-home banner, a celebratory dinner I’ll probably be
     too jet-lagged to eat. After only three weeks on a tour in which I was led around
     like a show pony, I’ll be given a hero’s welcome.
    He’s been gone
two years
. Why isn’t Willem getting a hero’s