Beautiful Americans Read online

  I know my dad’s story like I know Jeremy’s acoustic ditties, but the truth is I barely know him. If it weren’t for the photos of him in the Wall Street Journal whenever he makes some massive overseas shipping deal, I wouldn’t even know what he looks like. My mom caught him cheating with our Quebecoise nanny when I was about five, and he’s been the invisible man, so to speak, ever since.

  “It’s really no problem,” I tell PJ breezily. “You want to take a spin through Duty Free with me before we take off?”

  PJ hesitates. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I think I’d rather just go to Starbucks. I need a cup of coffee really badly.” There go her hands again, trembling as she pushes her long blond hair off her face.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll come with you. I could use a picker-upper, too.”

  PJ’s blue eyes meet mine. “Alex, I could never repay you for how you swooped in today. In Paris, I am going to try. But right now, can I just be by myself?”

  I nearly choke. Is my company that terrible? It’s just a cup of coffee. I know her type: ungrateful, awkward loners. Her beauty clearly does not match her personality.

  “Well, okay,” I say, shocked. “I’ll go to Duty Free alone then.”

  Three lip-glosses, four packs of gum, and a new Burberry rain hat later, I emerge from Duty Free.

  I spot PJ, shivering from the overly air-conditioned terminal in a seat by the gate. I don’t make eye contact, but I’m carefully aware of her, of what she’s doing. Even in her brown, unseasonable wool sweater, she looks elegant and somehow poised despite how she fidgets. Her chilly dismissal of me, how she rejected my friendship before we even got to Paris, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Good thing I bought all that gum.

  I’ll outshine the blonde spazz sitting in coach with no credit card. I’ll bet PJ is not even from New York. No New Yorker I know would ever wear Birkenstocks to Paris.

  French Airways is boarding first class passengers to Paris. I line up to swipe my boarding pass and flash my passport at the gate agent. This is it!

  This is the end of Jeremy, of New York, of failure. Paris is my chance to start over. And I can hardly wait.

  2 . OLIVIA

  The Dance of Discovery

  I try to get comfortable in my seat at the back of the shuttle as I stare at Madame Cuchon, the director of Progamme Americaine at the Lycée de Monceau. She is totally not what I expected from the first actual French person I met. Mme Cuchon is eccentrically dressed in a getup consisting of several layers of Indian-print flowing rayon and pointy, elfish clogs on her large, long feet. She looks more like she belongs in the desert at the Burning Man festival than as the person in charge of one of the most well-respected high school study-abroad programs in the world.

  “Do you have kids of your own, Madame Cuchon?” PJ, an ethereal blonde from Vermont, asks her in perfectly accented French. I envy how cool and ungreasy PJ’s skin looks, despite the mugginess of the van. I’m roasting and near passing out from exhaustion. Not to mention, I have motion sickness like I’m on a ride at Disneyland. That and my heart is pounding wildly at the realization that I’m in a foreign country, halfway around the world from California.

  Don’t puke, don’t puke. I take a long drink of water from the liter bottle I bought as soon as my plane landed. I can barely focus on the new world outside the van’s windows—the beautiful, long-dreamed of streets of Paris! Is this nervousness or is Mme Cuchon just a really, really bad driver?

  Mme Cuchon talks nearly as fast as she drives.

  “Do I have kids, you mean, besides the hundreds of Americans who’ve passed through my program at the Lycée?” she chuckles. “No, the antics of les étudiants turned me off that notion long ago.”

  How Mme Cuchon manages to expertly field our many questions while also weaving a fifteen-passenger van in and out of Paris traffic I will never know. As far as I can see, that’s just Madame Cuchon. She has a voice like a foghorn and must have eyes on the back of her head, hidden by the taut chignon of her bright red hair.

  The Lycée van, jerking along the highway from Charles de Gaulle airport, is packed with kids fresh off flights from the U.S. Every time we turn a corner, my stomach lurches.

  Sticky with sweat and stale airplane grease, I’m squished between a leggy South Carolinian named Sara-Louise and Mary, who’s from L.A. Mary is almost as short and small as I am, so we’re sharing a seatbelt.

  When Mary leans forward to hear Mme Cuchon better, Sara-Louise widens her eyes at the tattoo in the shape of an anchor on the back of Mary’s bare neck, just above the collar of her formfitting black t-shirt. I try not to give away my disgust—the idea of a needle polluting my body with permanent ink is just too gross for me to take seriously, even if the design is pretty awesome. Sara-Louise, in her pink sundress and blonde Shirley Temple curls, looks absolutely scandalized and totally impressed.

  “Well, I’ll be darned!” a guy named Zack hollers as he spots the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Zack has the tousled, shaggy haircut and hipster outfit of a shoe-gazing emo rocker, but his Southern drawl gives away his Memphis roots before he can tell us where he is from. Zack is already chummy with Alex, who is from New York. Everyone besides Alex (who can’t be bothered by it) leans forward to try to catch La Tour Eiffel before it disappears again behind the skyline. PJ, in the front seat, has her mouth hanging open at the sight of it.

  “Wow,” she breathes. It is pretty spectacular. Alex looks up at me from the message she is texting on her Blackberry and gives me a generous smile. When she looks at PJ, though, her smile turns into a look of disdain.

  Alex and Zack keep rolling their eyes at PJ. I can see why Alex might feel threatened by her—PJ is a dead ringer for Heidi Klum. But it would be stupid for Alex to feel that way—she herself is a total knockout. Alex, with her creamy skin and almond-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes, her bouncy layered black hair and huge boobs, is easily the envy of every girl in this van and surely will be the envy of everyone in our program that we haven’t met yet, too. She also has a killer outfit on. The body-hugging top shows off her great cleavage and small waist to full effect. On her lap is an enormous leather tote bag, which she cradles as lovingly as one might a newborn kitten. On her face are Gucci sunglasses that probably cost more than my entire outfit from American Eagle. I’d been excited about making a good impression when my mom bought me the denim carpenter shorts and the white ruffled sleeveless top, but now I just melt into the crowd. I’m not wearing any makeup, and my hair is pulled back into a simple ponytail to keep it out of my eyes, like always.

  Back at the baggage claim at Charles de Gaulle airport, Alex told us as we waited for our bags that she’s been to Paris many, many times. Her dad is French-Vietnamese, and her mom lived here for several years after college. Because of her mom’s magazine job, Alex gets to tag along on trips to Paris all the time.

  “Oh, look you guys,” she points out, casually motioning toward some patisserie where she once had a fabulous coq au vin with some of the actors from Amelie several years ago. “One of the guys told me,” Alex says, “that my French was the best he’d ever heard an American speak.”

  “Really?” I gasp, immediately self-conscious of my own French. Besides my ballet teacher back in San Diego, I’ve never even tried speaking French with a real French person. Even our French teacher back home isn’t really French—she’s from Fresno. Alex’s self-confident grasp of Paris is enviable. And I can’t help liking her more and more.

  “Look!” Alex says again. “See the Moulin Rouge? That was one of my favorite movies.” She points to the windmill on top of the famous Paris cabaret. Her smile is infectious.

  “Me, too!” Zack and I exclaim in unison.

  I, for one, have never been to Paris. Once off the freeway, the city is, in a word, amazing. I feel like I’m at Universal Studios or something—everything looks like an old movie set. There are women in five-inch heels leisurely walking lanky Great Danes along with a sack of baguettes tucked under one arm. Fl
ower shops on the corners overflow with roses in every shade, along with lilies and tulips and every other beautiful, tasteful flower. Men in trim-cut suits are running down the street, clutching their cell phones and briefcases, and still looking as agile as Baryshnikov as they rush by. Paris, like a grand ballet, seems expertly choreographed, with each dancer and player knowing just their part, how much to shine and how much to contain. It’s breathtaking.

  And all I can think about is how much I wish my boyfriend, Vince, were here, too, his arm around me, protecting me.

  “Paris is so cute,” the Texan girl behind me coos to her twin sister. “Isn’t this just the best?”

  This elicits more eye rolls from Alex and Zack. I do have to admit, the twins are a little grating. Their squeals are disorienting, making it hard to shake off the feeling of dread that descended over me as soon as my flight from San Diego pulled off the runway.

  I’d be mortified if anyone knew this, but if someone had asked me five hours ago how I was feeling about coming to Paris, I would have ended up sobbing face-first in their lap. Maybe because I was flying over a strange black ocean I’ve never seen before, or maybe because I was dehydrated, or cramped from sitting still for so long, but I woke up a few hours after takeoff, shuffled to the bathroom to pee, and ended up bawling my eyes out over the little sink. All I wanted to do was to turn the plane around and go right back to San Diego where I belong.

  But back on solid ground, and a little high on the adrenaline of so many new things at once, I’m feeling excited, if unsettled.

  Even if you end up hating Alex, Zack, those twins, everyone, I think with a deep, decisive breath, don’t forget that this is a chance of a lifetime. You came here to dance. You came here to land a UCLA scholarship. Don’t forget why you’re here. Dance is first. Everything else is second.

  For a moment, I get anxious all over again, remembering that, unlike the rest of these kids, I have a dance audition to prepare for.

  “This is the Lycée,” announces Mme Cuchon from the front seat as she pulls over in front of an impressive stone building. I look up. Several stories high, the Lycée looks more like a fortress than a high school. I recognize it from the Lycée’s glossy recruitment brochure. Like the buildings around it and all the buildings we’ve passed as we got deeper into the crooked streets and alleyways of central Paris, the Lycée is built from brushed stone bricks in the washed out gray-tan color of centuries past. Every time I couldn’t sleep over the past few months, I would get up, turn my light on, and look over the orientation materials from the Lycée again. And yet the Lycée itself is more majestic than I ever could have predicted.

  “Your host families will meet you here and take you back to your respective homestays to get settled,” Mme Cuchon explains as she pulls forcefully on the parking break. “Then we’ll meet here tomorrow morning for an orientation session and your first day of classes.” With a jerk and a shudder, the van stills, and we pour out into the soupy heat of the street, pulling our suitcases and backpacks through the heavy iron front gates of the Lycée.

  In the large foyer, we sort out our luggage and greet the group of French people, our new “parents” and “siblings,” waiting and smiling hesitantly at us as we come in. Mme Cuchon directs me to my host mother, a middle-aged woman with a thick gray pageboy haircut and dressed in a silk, salmon-colored suit. She kisses me dutifully on each cheek, and I laugh self-consciously.

  I didn’t know they really did that! A year from now, will I be kissing everyone like that when I meet them?

  “This is Mme Rouille,” Mme Cuchon says. “C’est Olivia,” she says to Mme Rouille.

  “Bonjour, Olivia,” Mme Rouille says with a tight, formal smile. The way she says my name sounds beautiful and exotic—Oh-LEEV-ee-AH. I can’t help giggling.

  I can’t tell if I am going to always have to address my host mother as Madame, which seems very formal for someone whose standing in for my mother, but for the time being she doesn’t offer me anything else to call her.

  “You’ll be living in an apartment not far from Mademoiselle Penelope in the seventeenth arrondissement,” says Mme Cuchon. “Though I don’t see her host mother yet. C’est strange, n’est-ce pas?” She looks around among the quickly scattering students.“Anyway, you two girls might walk together to school in the mornings this year.”

  “Penelope must be PJ,” I think, watching the tall, lonely girl twist a strand of her long blonde hair around her finger as she waits on the front steps. No family has claimed her.

  “Alors, Olivia, you must be off now,” Mme Cuchon prods me toward Mme Rouille’s waiting cream-colored Mercedes. “The Opera is expecting you at one o’clock for your placement audition.”

  “Today?” I say, trying not to show my dismay. Is she crazy?

  I’ve barely slept—my head is swimming from fatigue. I’ve been prepping for this audition all summer—for the advanced class at L’Opéra National de Paris, what everyone in the dance world calls “The Opera” for short. It will most certainly provide me with the training and credentials for the scholarship that I want—no, need—to win next year. But I thought I’d at least get a good night’s sleep before it happened!

  “Oui, cherie,” Mme Cuchon confirms. “Your mother wants you to be able to begin with the advanced class right away. There’s not a moment to waste. Good luck this afternoon! Bon chance!”

  Ah, my mother. Of course. When it comes to me winning the UCLA scholarship, my mother is right—there’s not a moment to waste. She must have implored Mme Cuchon to schedule my audition the moment I got off the plane—not realizing that I might have people to meet, or sleep to catch up on.

  Mme Rouille and I stop very briefly at her apartment so that I can put on my leotard and tights and throw my toe shoes into my dance bag. The apartment is located inside a gorgeous, stately limestone building with spiraling stairs leading up to a different apartment on each floor. An elderly concierge, complete with a little tasseled cap, greets us and takes my bags from me, disappearing into a back hallway with them.

  Mme Rouille lives on the fourth floor, so we take the little wire-cage elevator up. The concierge, like a miracle, has already left the bags by the front door and disappeared again.

  A maid, also in uniform, opens the door for us and scurries ahead with my bags while Mme Rouille does a cursory tour of my new home. We’re also greeted by three adorable miniature poodles yapping at our feet.

  I coo in delight. I’ve always wanted a dog! When one of the poodles pees on my foot, I don’t care in the slightest. These dogs are just the cutest little puppies in the world!

  “Elise!” Mme Rouille bellows when she sees the little puddle and the drops on my flip-flop. The maid reappears and wipes my foot and the floor aggressively with a hot, soapy towel. I look up at Mme Rouille, laughing. She shrugs. I hope she knows that I don’t mind. What’s a little dog pee among new friends?

  “Seriously,” I tell her. “I, like, looooove dogs. My mom won’t let me have one. I’ll walk them, whenever you want. Every morning!”

  “D’accord,” Mme Rouille accedes, perhaps more to get me to shut up than anything else. The dogs bark their agreement, and it’s settled.

  Mme Rouille’s apartment is not large, but it is very fancy, crowded with furniture and Baroque in its over-decoration. It’s almost scarily clean. The polished hardwood floors gleam as though they were still wet from being scrubbed. Every piece of crystal in the gargantuan chandelier in the living room flashes reflections of the light streaming through the spotless, opened window panes.

  Mme Rouille quickly explains to me that she’s just finished having her apartment repainted. That’s why the light green walls of her son’s room—the room where I will be staying—are bare. She hasn’t hung his posters back up yet.

  “Thomas lives in le dortoir now,” Mme Rouille says, a little sadly. “He is too busy studying to be a docteur for to visit his maman. He’s brilliant, my son.” At the French word for doctor her voice brighte
ns with pride a bit. “You can make this room your own, if you want.” Then she bustles out, clearly not one for long conversations.

  I want to flop down on the twin bed and close my eyes for at least the next twelve hours, but my audition awaits. Growing agitated, I choose my favorite leotard, a new black one with halter straps and a sweetheart neckline, to wear for my big moment.

  We hop back into the Mercedes and set off for the ballet academy. I steal another glance at my host mother.

  Madame Rouille is impossibly put together, unlike the moms I know in Southern California who live in flared jeans and tank tops. She’s obviously very rich, with her posh apartment and her live-in maid. Looking at her, wanting her to like me, I resolve to shed all my grotesque American habits as soon as humanly possible. My feet, for example. Sticking out of my flip-flops are dry, callused toes covered in spotty, chipped hot pink polish. No Parisian wears flip-flops, I’m sure. Dance has made my feet as mangled enough as it is—the least I could have done was get a pedicure before I left.

  I was too busy saying goodbye to Vince, I guess. I didn’t have time to properly prepare for my swanky new lifestyle.

  “This neighborhood is called Ternes,” Mme Rouille states in a nasal, snooty voice as we drive along a wide street called Boulevard de Courcelles. “It’s a very elite area of Paris. Full of good families.” Mme Cuchon had told us that our host families would speak to us in French, but Mme Rouille addresses me in English only. It seems like she has nothing much to say to me, in either language, at all. At this point I’m feeling so weary and overwhelmed that I don’t really mind.