As if on cue, my phone buzzes. There’s another string of texts from MK that I’ve been ignoring, and a new one has just appeared right on top. Tomorrow, 1PM, meet me at the castle. DON’T be a party pooper this time!!!
A smile drifts onto my face. Guess I’ll have a fun distraction after all.
#
I stayed up until almost three in the morning writing. Not an essay, not coursework, not a creative writing assignment. Just my own poetry, a poem inspired by the quiet Cotswold village we wandered through, and the contrast between its modern conveniences, like the new cars and the mobile phone stores selling brand new touchphones, and the medieval buildings, the cobblestone alleys, and storefronts dating back centuries.
Call me a stereotypical American, but having been raised in a country without a super long history of its own, I love seeing ancient artifacts made so everyday like that.
Of course, staying up until three has its consequences, so I nearly sleep through my alarm the next morning. My ever-absent roommate Stacey is actually here for once when I stumble back from brushing my teeth at noon, already running late if I want to meet MK in an hour.
“Hope I didn’t wake you,” Stacey says with a sheepish smile as she hops into jeans that look at least a size too small.
But hey, I should not judge, as my own jeans are feeling a little tight around the edges after almost a month of British food. “Nah, I had to be up anyway. Meeting Mary Kate for a castle tour.” A sudden bout of friendliness sweeps over me, possibly brought on by sleepiness or the leftover buzz of happiness that comes from anytime I’m actually able to write something I halfway like. “Want to come with?”
She pauses halfway into pulling on a new T-shirt, which looks exactly like the T-shirt she just took off, except with a different band name emblazoned across the front. “Sure,” she says, after a moment of blinking, when she realizes I’m serious. “I haven’t been yet.”
Her accent, I notice now that I’ve stopped being such an asocial jerk and talked to her for more than a second, is Australian. On our walk down to grab snacks from the kitchen, we talk about her hometown of Sydney, and why she decided to study abroad here (“Their medieval studies department is grouse,” she says, which devolves into a long explanation of ways to say “the best” in Australian).
“Although,” she adds with a faux-thoughtful expression, “my mates tell me it’s also the best way to meet blokes—gotta import them from the motherland if you want a decent one!”
I smirk through the coffee thermos I brought with from the kitchen. “You’re crushing a thousand American girls dreams—Aussie guys aren’t total bombshells you mean?”
“Oh, they’re hot, sure, but they bloody well know it, don’t they?”
We cross the campus and the streets thereafter still debating the merits—and demerits—of American, Australian, and British blokes alike. She finds surfer boys hot, though I have to explain to her just how creeptastic the frat boys we get back home truly are. We settle for agreeing that Brits have it best, until we catch up with Mary Kate at the ticket office, who starts in on a whole new set of complaints about British guys (“The smoking is disgusting, and they’re total gits about footie”).
We buy our tickets, complete with an audio tour because MK insists it’s the best part, but we skip half the tour stops because our conversation has moved on to comparing food across our respective country lines, and that gets us into a whole new level of friendly arguments.
“Okay, but the Indian food here. You cannot win there,” Mary Kate says, gesturing with her tour headset for emphasis. “You’ve eaten with me on Brick Lane.”
“Fair enough,” I admit. “But you guys have no idea how to do Mexican. Like at all.”
“How hard can tacos be?” Stacey butts in.
“See what I mean?” I flail my arms. “Tacos aren’t even real Mexican food!”
We carry on like this enough to piss off another tour group, who exit stage right glaring at us, and then, chuckling, we pause long enough to listen to the audio tour explain torture implements employed in the castle dungeons. Most of them are pretty gross, though I have to admit, the stocks give me some naughty thoughts that I really wish I could text Jack about.
Except that he never even gave me his phone number, or an email, or any other sane method of communication. I have his official school email, from the class-wide note he sent out, but I’d have to be very careful about what I said in it. Certainly not Hey have you seen the stocks they used to put people into in the dungeon that hold your head and your hands while making you bend over at just the right height for . . .