Free The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

her dollars on the cab and had only francs and lira—and while I was waiting for my change, I noticed one guy looking in our direction. He said something to the guys he was with, and they looked over, too.
    We’d barely sat down when one of them came over to us.
    â€œHi,” he said. He was cute and, like so many students at Rogers, blond; only Scandinavia could claim a higher blond-to-brunette ratio.
    â€œHi,” I said.
    He asked if we were freshmen, and I said we were, and I might as well have said, You can kiss me if you want to.
    Then Venice jumped in, introducing both of us, and I understood that she was being efficient rather than friendly, and he did, too; introducing himself, he seemed slightly crestfallen.
    Once she’d learned his name, she used it: “Tad,” she said and told him how tired she was and that she’d been traveling all day and would he please forgive her?—she was incapable of conversation.
    â€œSure,” he said. “Absolutely.”
    But he didn’t go, maybe because his crowd of friends was watching. He said, “Where are you coming from?”
    She looked at him for a long moment, a reprimand, before saying, “Antibes.”
    His “wow” had more bravado in it than mine, but I could tell he was a fellow untraveler when he immediately turned the conversation back to the world he knew: “Where are you living?”
    Venice had given him a chance to exit gracefully, and he was nottaking it; now she answered in the perfunctory manner of filling out a form: “Bancroft.”
    â€œNice,” he said. “Bancroft is nice.”
    She looked away from him to me, a signal to resume our conversation. He was looking at me, too, now, for help. It was hard for me not to give it to him, but I could see that this was between them, and my role was auxiliary—I was the nurse and she was the doctor; I was the nanny and she the mother.
    â€œWell,” he said.
    She said, “It was nice to meet you, Tad.”
    â€œLikewise,” he said.
    I felt bad for him when he walked away and said, “He seemed kind of nice.”
    Venice didn’t respond. She closed her eyes, and I thought that she really must be tired, and that Tad had made her even more tired, and that soon we would go home, and I would have a chance of waking up for my eight o’clock class and becoming the good student I’d always meant to be.
    But when she opened her eyes, her face was dreamy instead of sleepy. Almost to herself, she said, “This morning I was in Antibes,” and I thought, I’m going to be here all night.
    . . . . .
    It was after one when we got back to Bancroft. We undressed with our backs to each other, and I noticed that hers was evenly brown from her shoulders to her underpants—no hint of where a bathing suit top might’ve been, and I wondered if she’d just pulled the straps down and unhooked the back or if she’d gone without.
    We were in our beds when I looked over and saw that all that separated her from the mattress was a beach towel. She was using shirts for a blanket. I said, “You want a sheet or something?”
    â€œI’m fine,” she said. “Thanks.” She explained that she’d mailed her bedclothes from Italy a month before, and they were probably waiting for her at the post office. “But,” she added, “you know how slow the mail from Italy is.”
    No, I didn’t, and it kept me from offering her my top sheet and bedspread.
    We said good night, and I turned off my light.
    In the dark, though, it occurred to me that she was probably the only freshman whose parents hadn’t brought her to school. I wondered if that bothered her. I wondered if her parents were having too much fun in Antibes to leave and help her get ready for school and buy her sheets and connect her speakers and meet the other parents. I found myself feeling sorry for her.
    I