Panic grows inside me. What if he left? It’s not like he really came here to buy a lip pencil. What if I’ve missed him? What if this is it? I’ll never find out his name. Where he lives. Whether he is Team Guns N’ Roses or Nirvana (he’d better be Team Guns N’ Roses, or he’ll have a lot to answer for).

“He go after you,” tsks the pharmacist over the counter in a thick Spanish accent.

I turn to him. “He did?”

“Yeah, he was fast.” He smiles apologetically. “But you, faster.”

TWO

For the next week and a half, we eat and drink and visit cathedrals and Camp Nou and Bershka. Pippa hooks up with guys in clubs, I shop till I drop, and Smoker Dude becomes almost a myth, someone I’m not sure even existed anywhere but in my head.

Four days before we’re scheduled to go back to the States, we even find a good deal to Gran Canaria and hop on a plane. Pippa makes fast friends with a group of American girls on the plane, and this is how we find ourselves at a beach party the night before we’ll board a flight back home.

The moon is fat and white. It hangs over my head like a lollipop. The sand, tan and cool between my toes, is different from the blond grains of San Francisco.

I sit in front of a bonfire, pop music blasting from the speakers. There are probably a hundred people here, all in different stages of undress, drinking and dancing.

Pippa is somewhere among them. She disappeared twenty minutes ago with three girls from Tallahassee for a game of flip cups.

I sip my bottled beer and think about Smoker Dude. More specifically, how brutally random life is. All that separates me from him in this day and age is his full name. I want to be Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. I want to make it to the train. I want a do-over. To choose right this time.

Beside me, I notice a black canvas backpack. There’s a notebook spilling out of it. It looks abandoned. Thrown haphazardly, looking for a new owner. My fingers tingle to touch it. The girl hasn’t met a book she didn’t want to read, my mom often brags, and it’s true.

I’m aware that reading this thing without permission is wrong. Still, temptation crawls over my limbs like ivy.

I mean, it is strewn here, on a beach full of people, with the bag open. If it were private, its owner would carry it with them.

I decide to give the owner of the notebook ten minutes before I read it. If they went to the bathroom, they’ll have a chance to stop me. If they are somewhere else, well, then they don’t care so much about anyone reading it.

Ten minutes pass, then fifteen. I pick it up and open it at a random page. My heart is racing in my chest. I feel like a thief. It looks like some kind of journal . . . an essay? The words bleed into one another, like they were written in a great hurry.