Free It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel Page A

lick of French, though she’d mostly left them behind for her crowd of one: Rachid.
    Everyone had their circles but, like me, Maribel didn’t have friends outside the House of Stars. She rarely associated with the other students at Beaux-Arts, who she said were jealous of her being born into artistic fame. Her world was the workspace she’d been assigned in Florian’s studio a few doors down from Delacroix’s old house. I stopped by sometimes after my classes and found her sweaty and barefoot even on the coldest of fall days in that unheated building. Sometimes she stayed all night,
working
, she said, and only took naps on the mattress Florian kept pushed into a corner of his studio to “rest his bad back.”
    By the time Loic asked me who I wanted to invite, the guest list was already a hundred people deep.
    “I don’t know,” I told him. That much was true. “I can’t think of anyone.” That was a lie.
    I’d been hoping Sharif’s name would come up on Tarentina’s list, since we’d run into him a few nights earlier during the Stomy Bugsy show at Le Bataclan. He pushed against the mesh of sweaty bodies to greet Tarentina. In his face I saw bits of Cato, the same pronounced jaw, eyes that drooped at the outer corners into a tiny web of wrinkles. But the real Cato was nowhere in sight, and I thought of him, even after we left the club with a group of dread-locked surfers from Lacanau on their way to some big-wave surfing in the Mentawai Islands; a good-looking but banged-up group, all smiles and happy to share their Kashmiri hashish with the girls back at their hotel in République. Naomi and Rachid had split a taxi home with Saira, Stef, and Loic. I’d gone along with the leftovers and the surfers, figuring their company was better than no company.
    If Tarentina were to invite Sharif, I imagined he’d bring his cousin along, but she hadn’t mentioned him, so I did, at the end of the list-making, as if it were an afterthought, but Tarentina quickly dismissed the idea.
    Every afternoon in the week since our Sunday meeting, I’d walked past Chateaubriand’s park hoping to spot Cato on the same bench. I’d wandered up and down rue du Bac hoping to catch him doing the same. The only person who caught on to my stalking was Romain, who, after seeing me pass Far Niente’s window a few times in one afternoon, came out to the sidewalk to ask if I’d lost something, maybe my mind. I made up a story about dropping my métro card, and he joined my charade of searching corner to corner for a while before going back in to set up the dinner tables.
    I expanded my hunt to include rue Vaneau, hoping to see Cato step out of a doorway. I’d smile and say I’d gotten off at the bus stop at Les Invalides and was on my way home, which wasn’t so far-fetched, and if he was the gullible type he might think it was fate, a coup de destin, but it never happened.
    I want to say this without sounding foolish: In the nights since I first saw him by the torch, I’d felt a surprising hunger for him. I longed for a time we’d never spent together, memories we’d never made, conversations we’d never had, kisses we’d never shared. A strange future nostalgia.
    My education turned out to be very equitable on the gray market of international study. The paper I wrote for Dominique earned her an A, word got out, and within days I had a list of academic orders from other girls in the house and their friends. I experienced a pause of guilt because cheating is immoral no matter how youslice it, even if France made it nearly impossible for me to make an honest franc and I wasn’t even a sans papiers. But Loic insisted there was something to be learned in my fraud; manufacturing all those pages wasn’t intellectual prostitution but my own personal atelier for learning the subject of
people
.
    In trying to write as the girls would, I listened to the stories in their voices, beyond my early impressions and the basic biographical sketches