“Ugh, here we go.” Molly slid between us with two tequilas.

“Easy for you to say, Little Miss I’m-Outta-Here,” I said, checking out the men on the sly.

“Don’t tell me you like Bolivian guys.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re all macho, drug-dealing assholes.”

“Maybe she likes macho, drug-dealing assholes,” Britta said. “At least they have cash.”

Working at the hostel afforded us our pick of single male travelers: the long-limbed Germans and Swedes; the gung-ho Americans; the big, brawling Australians. An international all-you-can-eat buffet walked through the doors of the Versailles every single evening. Still, in my three months at the hostel, only one backpacker had ever really appealed to me, this sweet French guy who read Camus and smoked continually, but after hanging out for a few weeks, he just took off one morning—bed perfectly made—and I never saw him again. In the end, most of the guys seemed sanitized and self-important, or privileged and full of shit, on their way to Machu Picchu in their high-end hiking gear, on the phone with their girlfriends back home in between lame pickup attempts.

“Tonight,” Molly said, setting her shot glass down with a thud, “I’m celebrating being an expat. We’re the coolest, am I right, ladies?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Fuck McDonald’s. Fuck Burger King.”

“Fuck all the Burger Kings in Austria,” Britta said with a little beer burp. “You know we have those, right?”

“Fuck malls,” I said. “In fact, fuck America, that place is so screwed up, pulleeze!! I don’t care if I never go back!” I knocked back my drink with a wince and thought: I am not a child anymore. Friends will have to do. I slammed my glass down. “Fuck everywhere we’ve lived before here, and everyone we ever knew before us. And fuck guys, too, right, Britta?”

She winked and smiled and said, “Anytime.”

I glanced up at a nearby circle of men gathered around a card game. They stubbed out glowing cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays, countless empty beer bottles scattered around their table. One of them seemed utterly disinterested in the game. He sat tilted back in his cheap plastic chair, arms crossed behind his head, a smile playing at his mouth as he stared at me through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I squared my shoulders and looked away, kept talking shit about America and how we were going to be intellectuals and artists and save the world from its asinine self. All the while, hot embarrassment at being watched licked up my neck.

Something clammy and small groped my forearm: a little boy’s brown hand, fingernails ringed with dirt. I pulled away, but he stood his ground, staring up at me with thickly lashed eyes. With his other hand, he thrust at me a sweaty bunch of heavy-headed purple and crimson flowers. After I accepted them, he turned and hurried back to the man who’d been staring at me, and was slipped a coin or two before sprinting off down shadowy streets.