Chapter 23

A fist pounds against my door. My eyes jolt open, and my first coherent thought is this: -ai, -as, -a, -âmes, -âtes, -èrent. Why am I dreaming about past-tense-er verb endings? I'm exhausted. So tired. Sooo sle—WHAT WHAT WHAT? Another round of rapid-fire knocking jerks me awake, and I squint at

my clock. Who the heck is beating down my door at four in the morning?

Wait. Four o'clock? Wasn't there something I was supposed to—?

Oh, no. NO-NO-NO

"Anna? Anna, are you there? I've been waiting in the lobby for fifteen minutes." A scrambling noise and St. Clair curses from the floorboards. "And I see your light's off. Bril iant. Could've mentioned you'd decided to go on without me."

I explode out of bed. I overslept! I can't believe I overslept! How could this happen?

St. Clair's boots clomp away, and his suitcase drags heavily behind him. I throw open my door. Even though they're dimmed this time of night, the

crystal sconces in the hall make me blink and shade my eyes.

St. Clair twists into focus. He's stunned. "Anna?"

"Help," I gasp. "Help me."

He drops his suitcase and runs to me. "Are you all right? What happened?"

I pul him in and flick on my light. The room is il nominated in its disheveled entirety. My luggage with its zippers open and clothes piled on top like

acrobats. Toiletries scattered around my sink. Bedsheets twined into ropes. And me. Belatedly, I remember that not only is my hair crazy and my face

smeared with zit cream, but I'm also wearing matching flannel Batman pajamas.

"No way." He's gleeful. "You slept in? I woke you up?"

I fall to the floor and frantically y squish clothes into my suitcase.

"You haven't packed yet?"

"I was gonna finish this morning! WOULD YOU FREAKING HELP ALREADY?" I tug on a zipper. It catches a yel ow Bat symbol, and I scream in

frustration.

We're going to miss our flight. We're going to miss it, and it's my fault. And who knows when the next plane will leave, and we'll be stuck here all day, and I'll never make it in time for Bridge and Toph's show. And St. Clair's mom will cry when she has to go to the hospital without him for her first round of internal radiation, because he'll be stuck in an airport on the other side of the world, and it's ALL. MY. FAULT.

"Okay, okay." He takes the zipper and wiggles it from my pajama bottoms. I make a strange sound between a moan and a squeal. The suitcase final y

let's go, and St. Clair rests his arms on my shoulders to steady them. "Get dressed. Wipe your face off. I'll take care of the rest."

Yes, one thing at a time. I can do this. I can do this.

ARRRGH!

He packs my clothes. Don't think about him touching your underwear. Do NOT think about him touching your underwear. I grab my travel outfit—

thankful y laid out the night before—and freeze. "Um."

St. Clair looks up and sees me holding my jeans. He sputters. "I'm, I'll step out—"

"Turn around. Just turn around, there's no time!"

He quickly turns, and his shoulders hunch low over my suitcase to prove by posture how hard he is Not Looking. "So what happened?"

"I don't know." Another glance to ensure his continued state of Not Looking, and then I rip off my clothes in one fast swoop. I am now official y stark

naked in the room with the most beautiful boy I know. Funny, but this isn't how I imagined this moment.

No. Not funny. One hundred percent the exact opposite of funny.

"I think I may be, possibly, vaguely remember hitting the snooze button." I jabber to cover my mortification. "Only I guess it was the off button. But I had the alarm on my phone set, too, so I don't know what happened."

Underwear, on.

"Did you turn the ringer back on last night?"

"What?" I hop into my jeans, a noise he seems to determinedly ignore. His ears are apple red.

"You went to see a film, right? Don't you set your mobile to silent at the theater?"

He's right. I'm so stupid. If I hadn't taken Meredith to A Hard Day's Night, a Beatles movie I know she loves, I would have never turned it off. We'd already be in a taxi to the airport. "The taxi!" I tug my sweater over my head and look up to find myself standing across from a mirror.

A mirror St. Clair is facing.

"It's all right," he says. "I told the driver to wait when I came up here. We'll just have to tip him a little extra." His head is still down. I don't think he saw anything. I clear my throat, and he glances up. Our eyes meet in the mirror, and he jumps. "God! I didn't . . . I mean, not until just now ..."

"Cool. Yeah, fine." I try to shake it off by looking away, and he does the same. His cheeks are blazing. I edge past him and rinse the white crust off my face while he throws my toothbrush and deodorant and makeup into my luggage, and then we tear downstairs and into the lobby.

Thank goodness, the driver has waited, cigarette dangling from his mouth and annoyed expression on his face. He yammers angrily at us in French,

and St. Clair says something bossy back, and soon we're flying across the streets of Paris, whizzing through red lights and darting between cars. I grip

the seat in terror and close my eyes.

The taxi jerks to a stop and so do we. "We're here. You all right?" St. Clair asks.

"Yes. Great," I lie.

He pays the driver, who speeds off without counting. I try to hand St. Clair a few bil s, but he shakes his head and says the ride is on him. For once, I'm so freaked out that I don't argue. It's not until we've raced to the correct terminal, checked our luggage, passed through security, and located our gate that he says, "So. Batman, eh?"

Effing St. Clair.

I cross my arms and slouch into one of the plastic seats. I am so not in the mood for this. He takes the chair next to me and drapes a relaxed arm over

the back of the empty seat on his other side. The man across from us is engrossed in his laptop, and I pretend to be engrossed in his laptop, too. well,

the back of it.

St. Clair hums under his breath. When I don't respond, he sings quietly. "'Jingle bel s, Batman smells s, Robin flew away ...'"

"Yes, great, I get it. Haha. Stupid me."

"What? It's just a Christmas song." He grins and continues a bit louder. "'Batmobile lost a wheel, on the M1 motorway, hey!'"

"Wait." I frown. "What?"

"What what?"

"You're singing it wrong."

"No, I'm not." He pauses. "How do you sing it?"

I pat my coat, double-checking for my passport. Phew. Still there. "It's 'Jingle bel s, Batman smells s, Robin laid an egg'—"

St. Clair snorts. "Laid an egg? Robin didn't lay an egg—"

"'Batmobile lost a wheel, and the Joker got away.'"

He stares at me for a moment, and then says with perfect conviction, "No."

"Yes. I mean, seriously, what's up with the motorway thing?"

"M1 motorway. Connects London to Leeds."

I smirk. "Batman is American. He doesn't take the M1 motorway."

"When he's on holiday he does."

"Who says Batman has time to vacation?"

"Why are we arguing about Batman?" He leans forward. "You're derailing us from the real topic. The fact that you, Anna Oliphant, slept in today."

"Thanks."

"You." He prods my leg with a finger. "Slept in."

I focus on the guy's laptop again. "Yeah. You mentioned that."

He flashes a crooked smile and shrugs, that full-bodied movement that turns him from English to French. "Hey, we made it, didn't we? No harm done."

I yank out a book from my backpack, Your Movie Sucks, accollectionRoger Ebert's favorite reviews of bad movies. A visual cue for him to leave me alone. St. Clair takes the hint. He slumps and taps his feet on the ugly blue carpeting.

I feel guilty for being so harsh. If it weren't for him, I would've missed the flight. St. Clair's fingers absentmindedly drum his stomach. His dark hair is extra messy this morning. I'm sure he didn't get up that much earlier than me, but, as usual, the bedhead is more attractive to him. With a painful twinge, I recall those other mornings together. Thanksgiving. Which we still haven't talked about.

A bored woman cal s out rows for boarding, first in French and then in English. I decide to play nice and put away my book. "Where are we sitting?"

He inspects his boarding pass. "Forty-five G. Stil have your passport?"

I feel my coat once more. "Got it."

"Good." And then his hand is inside my pocket. My heart spazzes, but he doesn't notice. He pul s out my passport and flicks it open.

WAIT. WHY DOES HE HAVE MY PASSPORT?

His eyebrows shoot up. I try to snatch it back, but he holds it out of my reach. "Why are your eyes crossed?" He laughs. "Have you had some kind of

ocular surgery I don't know about?"

"Give it back!" Another grab and miss, and I change tactics and lunge for his coat instead. I snag his passport.

"NO!"

I open it up, and it's . . . baby St. Clair. "Dude. How old is this picture?"

He slings my passport at me and snatches his back. "I was in middle school."

Before I can reply, our section is announced. We hold our passports against our chests and enter the line. The bored flight attendant slides his ticket

through a machine that rips it, and he moves forward. I hand mine over. "Zis is boarding rows forty through fifty. Blizz sits until I call your row." She hands back my ticket, and her lacquered nails click against the paper.

"What? I'm in forty-five—"

But I'm not. There, printed in bold ink, is my row. Twenty-three. I forgot we wouldn't be sitting together, which is dumb, because it's not like we made our reservations together. It's a coincidence we're on the same flight. St. Clair waits for me down the walkway. I shrug helplessly and hold up the boarding

pass. "Row twenty-three."

His expression is surprised. He forgot, too.

Someone growls at me in French. A businessman with immaculate black hair is trying to hand his ticket to the flight attendant. I mutter my apologies

and step aside. St. Clair's shoulders sag. He waves goodbye and disappears around the corner.

Why can't we sit together? What's the point of seat reservations, anyway? The bored woman cal s my section next, and I think terrible thoughts about

her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I'm reaching

for my book again—it's going to be a long flight—when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me.

"Pardon me, but I wonder if you wouldn't mind switching seats. You see, that's my girlfriend there, and she's pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes, I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when . . . well . . ." St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around. The paper crinkles dramatical y.

The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend?

"Thank you. I was in forty-five G." He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy on his other side stares at us in horror, but St. Clair doesn't care. "They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts. There's no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together."

"That's flattering, thanks." But I laugh, and he looks pleased—until takeoff when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingly similar to a key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we're above the clouds.

Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight.

We don't talk about what awaits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph. Instead, we browse SkyMall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world's largest

crossword puzzle.

"At least they're practical," he says.

"What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh, I'm sorry, Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across,

Norwegian Birdcall.'"

"At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding 'unsightly utility posts.'You realize you have no lawn?"

"I could hide other stuff. Like . . . failed French tests. Or illegal moonshining equipment." He doubles over with that wonderful boyish laughter, and I grin.

"But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?"

"Use it in the bathtub." He wipes a tear from his cheek. "Ooo, look! A Mount Rushmore garden statue. Just what you need, Anna. And only forty dol ars!

A bargain!"

We get stumped on the page of golfing accessories, so we switch to drawing rude pictures of the other people on the plane, fol owed by rude pictures

of Euro Disney Guy. St. Clair's eyes glint as he sketches the man fal ing down the Panthéon's spiral staircase.

There's a lot of blood. And Mickey Mouse ears.

After a few hours, he grows sleepy. His head sinks against my shoulder. I don't dare move. The sun is coming up, and the sky is pink and orange and

makes me think of sherbet. I sniff his hair. Not out of weirdness. It's just . . . there.

He must have woken earlier than I thought because it smells shower-fresh. Clean. Healthy. Mmm. I doze in and out of a peaceful dream, and the next

the thing I know, the captain's voice is crackling over the airplane. We're here.

I'm home.