Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
We got off the Eurostar at noon at Waterloo Station, and we didn’t stop exploring until midnight. We found the cheapest hotel we could, forewent taxis and even the subway as too expensive, and walked and walked and walked. We picnicked in the vast London gardens, stretched out on the lawn. There are almost no parks where people touch grass in Paris, and Sébastien was rhapsodizing on the experience of lying on turf when he froze. “Look, Laura! There’s a squirrel!”
I glanced at the squirrel, which looked pretty much like any gray squirrel to me, and back at him. I had dated men in my hometown who shot squirrels. One of my own brothers used to shoot squirrels that came up to his birdfeeders, until he read that without bullets in its body a squirrel could live twenty years; then he felt horrible. Sébastien whipped out my camera and started taking pictures. “Here.” He handed the camera to me. “See if you can get a picture of us together.” He squatted, stretching one finger out toward the squirrel. He must have stayed that way half an hour, vainly making coaxing noises and trying to get the squirrel to come play with him. The squirrel looked at him as if he had lost his marbles, which was exactly how the men in my family would look at him if they ever saw this moment, and eventually hopped away. “Wow, a squirrel!” Sébastien sighed. “I can’t believe it! A real squirrel!”
We walked from one end of the city to the other, went into the Tate Gallery, photographed Westminster, ate in a delicious Indian restaurant, contemplated the Eye of London but decided it was too expensive. We made our way through Soho at midnight and back to our room even later, where I fell into instant sleep out of exhaustion and remnants of cowardice. If Sébastien had any expectations about our sharing a hotel room on a romantic trip to London, he didn’t mention them. He just sighed and grinned and borrowed the Harry Potter book I’d bought at a London bookstore earlier that day. The cover had looked kind of weird, but since the copies of it filled half the bookshelves in the store, I’d figured it must be some kind of local cultural phenomenon and decided to check it out.
“No, you can’t have it back,” he said on the train the next day. “You deserve to suffer, and I want to see what happens next. I don’t have as big an English vocabulary as I thought, though. What does ‘Muggle’ mean?”