THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
"She said, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, honey
Take a walk on the wild side"
Alright"
LOU REED (From the album "Transformer" (1972))
A/N: Okay, so a tiny bit of full disclosure here. Although, I´ve had very brief stopovers in Paris on flights a few times and have passed within visibility range of the city on a bus trip once, I´ve never actually been there myself. All of the info I got on the city was with the help of Wikipedia and Google, so if there are any factual irregularities, I apologize, but I can assure you all that I´ve tried my best to make this chapter as realistic as possible. FYI, while the alcohol laws in France at this time permitted teenagers, who were sixteen or older to legally buy alcohol, it was changed in 2009 to become eighteen years of age, like it is in almost the entire rest of Europe. One thing that shocked me a little when researching it was that it wasn´t until 1956, that they stopped serving wine at lunch to the older students in their school system! I´m all for liberal alcohol laws, but even I´d say that´s pushing it a bit too far!
Anyway, enough of my rambles. Let´s get to what you´re all here for: Joey´s first chapter, where it´s all about her and no one else! Well, Emma too, a little bit!
Sent: February 20th, 1999
From: JenRocks
To: AGirlNamedJoey
Subject: Info, please!
Paris! I want all of the dirt on what happened, and I want it now!
Sorry, if I´m being pushy, but you can´t blame a girl, whom I may remind you, spends all of her time in mostly boring little Capeside, for being curious!
Jen
Sent: February 20th, 1999
From: AGirlNamedJoey
To: JenRocks
Subject: re: Info, please!
Where do I even start? Just know in advance that I won´t be able to fit it all into one e-mail, so I´ll have to breeze over parts of it ...
On their first evening in Paris, after the lovely dinner they´d eaten at the restaurant, where Emma´s ex-boyfriend worked, the two girls decided to just play tourists for an evening and after making their way to the top of the Eiffel tower (where Joey had admit that the spectacular view out over the city beat the heck out of the view from their local water tower, on an average Friday night in Capeside), they´d taken a walk around the main shopping street, doing plenty of window shopping of all of those expensive things in the windows, that there was no way they´d be able to afford. While Joey´s number one plan for the day after was to find a birthday present for her older sister, the prizes on the things in the window displays told her, that the chance of her finding anything that Bessie would love within her twenty-dollar budget, probably were bigger back in Toulouse, than they were in a very "Touristy" place like the city of love. A little after ten, they took the Metro back to the area their hostel was in and after such a long and eventful day, it didn´t take long for both of them to begin to doze off, once they were back in their (surprisingly very comfy) beds.
The next day (their only full day in Paris) began with a quick shower for both of them at the hostel, followed up by breakfast from a cozy little family-run bakery down the street. Even before they´d left Toulouse, Joey had made a plan of all of the things that they just had to see, while they were there and it was her hope that with it being outside of the tourist season, they also wouldn´t have to spend too much time waiting in the long lines, that many of the biggest local attractions were unfortunately infamous for. Luckily, most of the major ones on her list were located more or less within the same few "Arrondissements", as the Parisians call the many small communes, that make up what the French consider one of, if not the greatest of all, cities in the world.
They started off at the Sacré-Cœur church and immediately walking in, Joey could almost feel the sense of all of the history located within one of the most beautiful buildings, she´d seen in real life before. Her mom had told her about the beauty of the arcs and the tinted windows, but nothing could beat seeing it for herself and now that they were there, they of course also had to take the many, many stairs up to the top, where you had a nearly as awestriking view of the inner city, as the one they´d had from the Eiffel tower the evening before. Only nearly, though, that much they could both agree on.
Time waits for no man (or fifteen-year-old girl) though, so they only had three-quarters of an hour there or so, before they went on to the next stop on Joey´s (very long) list, the Louvre castle and museum. She could remember her mom telling her stories of coming there in the late 60´s, when she´d been the same age as Joey was now and how coming there had practically opened up a new world for her and was what had led to her discovering her own passion for all things artful, that she´d so gladly passed onto her daughters. Although, if you had to be fair, it had probably stuck with Joey a bit better, than it had with Bessie, whose inability to discriminate between what is art and what is kitsch sometimes had Joey laughing inside her head over how immensely clueless, her older sister could be on subjects like that. Emma was somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and although, Joey easily could have spent an entire day in there, she could easily tell that just looking at paintings for hours on end was perhaps a bit much for her newest and so far, only British "Chum".
So, after only a little under an hour in there, she decided to give Emma a reprieve from any more museum going for the rest of the day and they instead made their way over the stunning looking Pont de Arts bridge over to the Notre Dame Cathedral, which would also be the first Cathedral that Joey could ever claim to have visited. It was pretty for sure, but she couldn´t decide with herself whether it was prettier or not than the Sacré-Cœur church, that they´d visited only a few hours before. In the end, she had to call even stevens on the subject, because there was no way she could decide which of the two had been the most impressive to her.
Continuing on with their pastime of playing tourists for the day, their next stop was one on Emma´s (much shorter than Joey´s) list, the Père Lachaise Cemetery, that even if it was a little out of their way, had also been the only of its kind on Joey´s list. While there, they (among others) visited the graves of Jim Morrison (lead singer of The Doors), Edith Piaf (arguably the most internationally famous French "Chanteuse" of all time) and of course that of the legendary English poet Oscar Wilde, who was so horribly persecuted for his homosexuality and on whose grave, both of the girls put down a flower that they´d bought from a (well-placed, you have to say) flower shop, not far from the cemetery gates. As they stood there solemnly looking at his headstone, words that Bodie had spoken to her on the subject of homophobia a few months before, when she was still only suspicious that Abby might not be "playing on the same team, as most of her classmates were", began playing through her head. "I´d like to think that we´ve come further than that. Sometimes I wonder, if we actually have", were those words and as Joey stood there feeling sorry for the poor Mr. Wilde, that he had to live in a time period, where people like him were considered either dangerous sexual deviants, who needed to be silenced and put in jail, because they supposedly had the power to "poison the mind of the youth", or were just downright crazy to begin with, she also made a decision within herself. That from then on, she would stand on the side of those like him, who were still here on the cusp of the change of the millennium being unjustly hounded, just for being born how they were and needing to live accordingly to it.
After that rather solemn experience, it was time for the girls to get themselves some lunch and they quickly made a deal to take walk by the Seine River, down to the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile (or "Triumphal Arch of the Star"), that also makes up the entrance to one of the most famous shopping streets in the world, the Champs-Élysées. As they could have told themselves, there was no shortage of café´s down there, most of them filled close to the brink with a mix of locals and the occasional tourist or two like themselves, who´d made their way to their city outside of the usual time, where they would be flooded with literally millions of them each year. Seeing as this was closer to being Emma´s "Home Turf", than Joey´s own, she allowed Emma to make the choice for them and she chose one of those, where it wasn´t completely overflowing with people and it wouldn´t be at least half an hour, until they were served anything. After they´d sat down, it wouldn´t be many seconds until a smiling young teenage waitress (that Joey had to admit reminded her a lot of herself) brought them a pair of menus.
"What are you having?" Emma casually asked, while glancing over her own menu for something, that could catch her fancy.
"Something light. I´m think that I´m giving their Ratatouille a try" Joey answered, picking the one item on their list of dishes, that she knew was always a hit with her.
"Aren´t you the daring one, Joey?" Emma smiling to herself replied, already knowing all too well, that if there was one word in the English dictionary that didn´t fit with Joey, it was the word daring. "I think that I´ll have one of their stuffed baguettes and to go with my culinary feast, one of their local beers" Emma continued thinking out loud.
"You really think they´ll serve you beer? I don´t!" Joey had to say and as Emma put down her menu to look her in the eyes, she also couldn´t help herself from pulling out a small eyeroll for her American counterpart.
"Joey, this isn´t like the US, where you have to be 21 to drink! We didn´t have any trouble buying wine at that corner shop back home, did we?" Emma said, recounting the second time that Joey had indulged in the world of alcohol so far in her life. It had mostly been an entertaining experience, even if she´d been a tad paranoid that her host parents would find out, that she´d broken one of the major rules in the student exchange program and could be sent home for it.
"I´m pretty sure that was only because the shopkeeper had drunk more than enough wine himself, don´t you?" Joey tried reasoning, although it did little to deter Emma in her plan.
"We can pass for sixteen, if we want to and either way, the worst that can happen is that she cards us. Joey, in a few months you´ll be back in a country, where it´ll be over five years, until you can start drinking legally. Five years, Joey! That´s a third of the time either of us have spent in this world so far! Over here, the legal drinking age is only sixteen, so will you please take advantage of it, while you can? Like any similarly non-sensible teenage girl in your situation would!" Emma tried reasoning back and while the almost-overly sensible side of Joey, that always had it in the back of her head that her sister would find out, and would no doubt scold her either incessantly or passive/aggressively for days (or even weeks) on end for breaking the rules, that had been firmly set down, something in the way Emma had said it made sense to her.
"I still don´t think that she´ll serve you alcohol, even if you could easily pass for sixteen or seventeen".
"You could too, if you wanted to. I´ll make you a deal. If she agrees to serve us, then we both have at least one beer here. Come on, Joey! Rules are there to be broken, remember?" Emma pleaded her case, and probably since Joey thought that Emma would get carded for sure, anyway (because that´s what would certainly have happened back in her home country), she went along with Emma´s little dare. To her huge surprise, all their waitress asked was which brand of beer they wanted and after Emma willingly admitted to her, that they were tourists and not that well acquainted, when it came to the local beer brands, she even gave them a nice little rundown on what separated them from one another in taste. They agreed to try them two of them that sounded the tastiest and not long after, both of them had what her dad liked to call a "Nice and Frosty One" sitting on the table in front of them.
"You are hopefully aware that my sister would try her best to physically tear my head off my shoulders, if she was here to see me doing this, aren´t you?" Joey sarcastically asked, while still debating within herself, if it was safe to take a sip of it or not, like she was expecting Pacey´s dad to come busting in through the door at any moment to arrest everyone in there, for running a bar that served a visibly very underage clientele.
"She isn´t here, is she?"
"No, but ..."
"Josephine Potter, you know that I absolutely love you to bits, but all of time that I´ve known you, it´s like you´ve willingly been carrying the entire weight of the world on your shoulders, when that isn´t your job! Even if you don´t always act like it, deep inside you´re still like me, just a big kid, for crying out loud! Acting like it once in a rare while won´t hurt you, trust me!" Emma implored her and held up her glass filled with bubbly and foamy beer for a toast.
"Whatever happens from now on and the rest of the day stays between us for the rest of eternity and beyond. Are we clear on that?" Joey rhetorically asked, before taking a nodding Emma up on her toast and taking a sip of the beverage, that it was so forbidden for her to indulge in back home. To yet another surprise of hers that day, it tasted rather delicious and not at all like that cheap and barely drinkable excuse for beer, she´d had a few cups of that evening at Chris Wolfe´s party back home, where she´d tried for the first time what it was like to get a bit of a buzz on.
What it also tasted like was one more and by the time they´d finished their lunch both of them were already on slightly wobbly legs, as they left the café again, after a lunch that had been more than a little out of the ordinary!
"Emma, can I take you home with me, when I have to go back to the states? I know, your parents probably won´t like it and if my dad is getting out of jail soon, it´ll be very crowded at our house ... hey, remember that band "Crowded House"? They had that song: "Hey, now. Hey, now. Don´t dream it´s over!" Joey began drunkenly (and loudly) singing, while they were down on the street and waiting for Trevor to come down to let them into the apartment building, he lived in. Prior to this had gone an afternoon with more drinking and although, Emma had played the responsible one and constantly reminded Joey that she was a severe lightweight, when it came to drinking and needed to pace herself, they´d had several more drinks that already included a bottle of cheap, but very tasty red wine and a couple of cans of pre-mixed Gin and Tonic. When exactly Joey had turned from sober to drunk, she wasn´t entirely sure of, but now that she already was well toasted, she figured that she might as well embrace it.
"Hey, now. Hey, now. When the world comes in! They come, they come. To build a wall between us. But we know they won´t win!" Emma continued singing the song´s chorus for her, with them also making their best (and probably pretty terrible sounding) attempt at singing harmony on the last part of the chorus. In any case it made both of them break down laughing, just like pretty much everything for the last couple of hours had.
"We probably shouldn´t quit our day jobs, if we´d had any! I mean it though, Emma. I´m really going to miss you, when I go home" Joey told Emma from the heart and wasn´t lying either. For as much as she missed everyone back home, she also didn´t want to say goodbye again to this quirky girl, who aside from being great at leading her into doing all of the things, that she was too scared to try back home, had also become a hugely important person in her life over those past several weeks.
"I´ll miss you too, Joey. Don´t you worry about that! All of that is too far into the future for us to worry over, though. Tonight is about having fun and cutting loose! Do you think it´s within the realm of possibilities that you can do that, little Miss "Always Does, as She´s Supposed to?"
"One of us has to, am I right?" Joey drunkenly asked an agreeingly nodding Emma back and soon after, the door was opened by Trevor, who led them into the elevator, that would take them the five flights of stairs up to the small place, he called home.
It was only a two-room apartment, but he´d made it homely enough with plenty of memorabilia from his hometown, that it made Joey quickly begin to feel at ease there. More wine being served helped too of course, and by the time they´d finished off the pizzas that they´d ordered over the phone, they were already well stuck into their third bottle and to say that Joey´s head was feeling light, was the same as saying that water is wet or that her dad had deserved getting sent to jail, for all of those drugs he´d helped with smuggling and then "redistributing" to the Capeside populace. Some things are just too obvious to even be needed, to be said.
After they´d played a game of "Trivial Pursuit", played as a drinking game where you had to drink, if you got an answer wrong, they´d made their way out on the town, where a party that one of Trevor´s friends was throwing awaited them. Already on the cab ride down there, Joey was beginning to hear a bed calling from afar to her, but mostly for Emma´s sake, she decided to try to push it out of her head. A head, that was more and more feeling like the world around her was spinning at far too fast of a pace for her liking.
Waking up the day after, Joey honestly couldn´t remember if she´d ever felt that horrible before and the leftover taste of alcohol in her mouth made the bile rise up in her throat and practically immediately sent her running to Trevor´s bathroom, in order to make a sacrifice to the toilet gods. With her head throbbing from her nasty hangover, she also needed an extra couple of minutes to steady herself, before she could make her way out of there, to where the smell of breakfast being cooked in the kitchen definitely beat the heck out of the stench, she´d just left behind. Seeing as she was already fully dressed (probably since she´d been too drunk to get undressed the evening before), she made her way out into the kitchen, where Emma was cooking bacon and eggs on the stove, while an already full pot of coffee awaited her in Trevor´s coffee maker.
"There´s the wildest party girl in all of France, if we´re not talking all of Europe!" Emma teasingly turned her head and said to her, just as Joey took a seat at the table, to try to get some semblance of equilibrium back.
"I don´t remember any of what happened, after we left here. We took a taxi, didn´t we?" Joey had to ask, just before Emma put an extremely welcome cup of Joe and a small bottle of headache pills in front of her. She right away took two of them and washed them down with a large sip of the hot beverage, that also helped with getting rid of the still lingering taste of puke in her mouth.
"Sure did. You were the life of the party last night! It´s a shame that you don´t remember any of it" Emma told her and right away, images of all of the embarrassing things she´d seen people under the influence do over the years, began flashing through her head. None of which she felt any particular need to be associated with.
"Please, tell me that I didn´t make an ass of myself?" Joey asked back, already dreading to her bones what the answer would be.
"No, not too badly! I mean, you did strip naked, before you ran down the street screaming "America Rules, France Drools!", at the top of your lungs. I don´t think those policemen took too kindly to that police car, you stole from them or all of those death threats you made against their president and several other members of their parliament either. Especially considering that you did it right in front of them ... come to think of it, we should probably check, before we head to the train station, if there´s anything about you being a fugitive of the law on the news today! It´s nothing personal, I just like to be on the safe side and be prepared, in case that we have to make a sudden getaway!" Emma answered her very insincerely, while not doing the best job of holding her own giggles back.
"You´re such a terrible liar, Emma! Can we try it again, only with the truth this time?"
"The truth is that you fell asleep half an hour after we got there, so we brought you back here to sleep it off. By that point, you were mostly talking complete gibberish anyway, so we figured, it was for the best" Emma relayed to her and immediately, Joey could feel the knot inside of her stomach over what could have happened, begin to untangle.
"Thanks. I´m just sorry, that I ruined your evening for you".
"Ah, don´t worry about it!" Emma told her dismissively, as the two friends smiled at one another. "I was with you, Joey and that´s all that matters to me. Paris will always be here, but this here, you and me having met by chance and becoming this close, at this stage of our lives and with nothing to come between us, even I can see how special that is and that´s something, we´ll only get this one chance to really enjoy. Honestly, I´d be a fool not to try to milk this friendship or ours for all it´s worth, while I can. Which is also why I´m breaking up with Phillipe, when we get home. I don´t know what I was thinking, starting something up with a guy, when I already know in the back of my mind, that in all likelihood, I won´t ever see him again, after this schoolyear is over. You should thank Trevor though, once he gets back from the bakery with fresh bread for our little culinary feast this morning. Not all guys would have done what he did for a girl that he barely knows, you should remember that".
"You made out with him last night, after I´d fallen asleep, didn´t you?"
"Kind of, yeah! I guess, part of me must have realized that I wasn´t as over him, as I first thought, I was. I meant what I said, though. These next three months and change are all that we have together, before it´s back to reality again. I don´t want to waste that time with some boy, who means next to nothing to me, when I could be spending it having a complete blast with the best friend, I´ve ever had and perhaps, will ever have. And just admit it, Joey! You needed someone like me to come into your life and show you, that life doesn´t have to be taken so seriously all of the time and that it´s okay, if you just want to have fun and pretend, that everything is perfect in the world, for a handful of hours now and again!" Emma stated and wasn´t wrong either in any of what she´d said. Or for that matter, if Joey felt the same way back about her.
After they´d freshened up and said their goodbyes to Trevor, they headed down to their hostel to pay up and pick up their things, leaving them with a good couple of hours to kill, before it was time to head down to the train station and catch their ride heading homewards. This only gave them time to catch one more tourist attraction and since Joey got to pick, she decided that they should go to the Pompidou Centre, the huge multicultural complex that had been commissioned back the 70´s by then-president Charles de Gaulle, as a place that brought together all forms of art and literature in one place. Like it was with the Louvre, Joey could easily have spent a whole day in there, but just the taste that she got of it in the hour or so that they had in there, was enough to make her sure, that she would have to make her way back to that wonderous place someday in the future.
On the long train ride home, she couldn´t help herself from daydreaming that when that day came, it would be herself and Pacey as adults, with their two kids (a boy and a girl) in tow, who made their way through its doors. She wouldn´t tell them about everything that had happened on her first ever weekend in Paris of course, but she would make sure that they understood the main parts of it. That while Paris is an incredible city and this was the weekend where at least part of her had fallen in love with it, she never would have if she hadn´t had what she already knew then, would be one the best friends she´d ever have, there to share it all with.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR