“Can you get her a towel?” Compton asked, as Georgia turned off the water and stuck out her dripping head.

“I’m ready.”

Nervously, Hannah stated the obvious. “You are not ready. You don’t have on any clothes and your hair’s wet.”

Georgia’s grin was both wicked and charming. “I’m getting in the van buck naked unless somebody brings me a motherfucking towel.”

Compton wouldn’t have thought it possible, but somehow a mere fifteen minutes later the van rolled away with all of them in it, more or less dry and dressed. Next to her, Georgia’s thumbs were flying over her phone in a textathon with—Compton slid her gaze to the left—her friend Jonah. Jonah, a family medicine doctor, had moved from Charleston to San Diego at the same time as Georgia, following a debacle at their clinic in which he’d been targeted by a clinic administrator for providing medical therapies for transgender patients. Compton didn’t know all the details, but she’d met Jonah in person when he and Georgia had visited New York City for Christmas one year. She’d taken a few days off work and they’d done all the things—the Rockettes; ice-skating in Central Park; fighting their way through the slobbering, shoving hordes at Rockefeller Plaza to watch the light-and-sound show adorning the Fifth Avenue exterior wall of Saks. Compton had expected an irritating slog through overcrowded venues she’d seen a billion times before, but the whole experience turned out to be a hoot. Jonah and Georgia insisted on embracing their Idiotic Tourist roles, wearing red scarves and berets, snapping photos of each other’s foamy mustaches while drinking hot chocolate, joining in an impromptu caroling session in Bryant Park. How had she not realized what a gorgeous, smoky voice Georgia had? It had been years since Compton had seen her adopted city through fresh eyes: she’d forgotten what it was like to experience the sensation of sheer fun.

Georgia finished her texting session and dropped her phone back into her hippie-style patchwork satchel in time to tune in to today’s tour. This morning they’d gotten a new guide, an earnest stoop-shouldered man named Raoul, whose enthusiasm for his native city could not be overstated.

“Now we ascend Montjuïc,” shouted Raoul, “where played the American Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics.” Dutifully, Compton looked up in time to see some buildings sliding by. “Farther down on this side,” said Raoul, somewhat ambiguously, “you have the castle of repressed peoples.” As one of those people who employed dramatic hand gestures to punctuate the end of every sentence, Raoul produced in Compton a constant urge to duck, even though she was sitting two rows away from him. Even the driver flinched from time to time. “Also: Joan Miró, the magic fountain, and far below is the bullfighting ring, a place of much evil and sadness for the bulls. Now, on your left . . .”