Free Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble Page B

to stand in the middle of a market square, or a park, or a beach and take in the smells and the sounds of a world that was completely new to her. She loved being an anonymous extra in a crowd scene, like some real-life “Where’s Waldo?”—
    a tiny face, wide-eyed with wonder, in a vast, ever-changing picture. She didn’t get frightened. Well, hardly ever. Once, in Malaysia, packed into a boat she knew was too full, asked to sleep for eight hours on a deck no more than four feet deep. And maybe a few times on trains and in buses, feeling a thousand strange eyes on her and her belongings, and fighting the overwhelming desire to sleep. But she was a smart girl—she didn’t do stupid things, and she didn’t take daft risks. Mum had insisted on at least one phone call a month, and she’d always made it—and, of course, now there was e-mail everywhere, and it was almost impossible to be lost. She supposed, briefly, that she’d call Mark now.
    If she was running away, and not running—arms wide—toward the world, she was running away from responsibility and pressure and obligation. And she wondered why the whole world didn’t have the sense to do the same thing. Surely, she was the sane one.
    It was at least five degrees colder the next morning. Bex had a day off, and Josh had never even made it home, so Amanda went to work alone, stopping outside the tube station to pick up one of the free papers that had nothing interesting to say, so that, five stops in, the paper languished on the empty seat next to her, and she was almost back 58 e l i z a b e t h
    n o b l e
    to sleep, her head leaning back against the bulk of the thick scarf around her neck. She was thinking about warm water lapping at her toes, splayed in white sand.
    “Excuse me—is this yours?”
    Her head sprang up with an awkward snap. It was Tintin. What were the odds? He was holding out the free sheet.
    She shook her head, and he sat down. Winter coats made the seats too small, and his whole length made contact with hers. She shifted slightly and sat up straighter.
    She wasn’t sure he recognized her, or that if he did, he intended to acknowledge the fact, until he turned to her and smiled the sheepish smile of yesterday again.
    She looked at their fellow passengers, establishing that there were no obvious candidates for his equally obvious admiration in the carriage, and replicated his small shrug by way of reply, rolling her eyes.
    “Sorry about that.” His voice was deeper than she was expecting.
    Tintin had quite a high-pitched voice. But Tintin was Belgian, wasn’t he, and this guy was clearly British. Although not very—British people didn’t normally try to establish a conversation with you on an underground train at 8:15 in the morning.
    That was another thing she loved about traveling. Donning Birken-stocks and a rucksack—a proper one—was like wearing a sign on your forehead that said “Talk to me—I’m up for making friends with like-minded individuals!” Like a secret handshake, granting admission to a society where you pretty much liked everyone else who belonged.
    “Hey,” she smiled. “You’re a guy, aren’t you?”
    The commuters around them started to listen, although they didn’t look up from their newspapers and romance novels and county court summonses. A couple who’d been hanging on to the central pole and facing the other way, staring into space, angled themselves so that they could see who was talking. You may as well be on an orange box at Hyde Park Corner.

    T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 59
    He smiled a broad, surprisingly sexy smile. The sheepishness had vanished. “And you’re a feminist, I gather?”
    “Just a woman who’s learned that men are utterly predictable. More realist than feminist.”
    “So young, yet so jaded.”
    She laughed. This was a novelty. Normally conversations like this were limited to old episodes of Dawson’s Creek, which she only knew about because