“She has a kind face.”

“She did the best she could with eight of us running around,” I said, eyes downcast as I stuffed the book back in my bag, embarrassed to be seen reading anything other than the Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski from the ragtag hostel library, not that Molly or Britta would have been impressed by that sort of thing. Of course, I looked nothing like Tia; I don’t look like anyone. Well, I guess I did look like a miniature version of my real mom, who I’d never known. Same curly red hair, blue eyes, but I lacked her glamorous length of bone; she stood six feet in flats, while I was just five one. Small and small boned. A social worker once told me my mom—who overdosed when I was a baby—had been a poet; in my fantasies she was a brilliant one, too brilliant to live, like Sylvia Plath.

Molly sorted the condoms from the pile and stashed them in her pants pocket. “Thanks for doing this. Mark’ll be here in a few days. He never has anything.”

“No problem,” I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder. “But I’ve got to go.” Thirty-four beds needed a change of sheets.

“Me too. Britta’s alone at check-in. Bad idea.” We grinned at each other. Britta rarely stopped flirting long enough to write down reservations and keep the beds from being double-booked. A nightmare when dozens of exhausted international travelers flooded in nightly, all of them desperate for food and sleep, none with the cash for a real hotel.

Halfway up the stairs, I turned back to look at Molly, to find her gazing after me. “A turkey, really?” she said.

“Yeah. I wore a big coat. Pretended I was pregnant. Worked like a dream.”

None of us ever had enough cash. Evenings off, we made spare change washing dishes alongside laughing toothless grandmothers in local cantinas. On the best days, we nailed the occasional gig teaching English to the sons and daughters of rich families in parts of the city with dreamy names like Cala Cala or El Mirador. We were picked up in big, noiseless town cars to spend an hour or two with their precious babies in vast rooms with balconies featuring jaw-dropping views of the city and mountains beyond, then taken back to the Versailles, to our damp room with floors that glittered with silverfish. Otherwise, we worked constantly at the hostel—booking rooms, cleaning floors, washing linens, and cutting onions and potatoes for enormous pots of stew till our fingers bled.

All of us were running away from something. I’d been suckered down that January to teach English at a school that didn’t exist. Stole the money—over time at a shit job in an appliance store—for plane fare, got here, no one met my plane or answered my calls. I had maybe five dollars on me, which got me a cab to the Versailles. I begged my way in, then stayed, too broke to go home.