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“We haven’t thought about it.”
    â€œHaven’t you.” It was not a question.
    â€œProbably a youth hostel or something like that.”
    â€œSo in a dorm with fifty strangers all using the same bathroom facilities, if there are any?”
    â€œWe don’t care about that. We are young, Mom. We’re not like you. We don’t care about creature comforts. Where we sleep. What we eat. It’s all fine. So it’s not the Four Seasons. We’ll be in Europe. We’ll buy a student Eurail pass for a few hundred bucks, sleep on trains to save money.”
    â€œWhy would you need to do that?” Lang’s already narrow dark eyes narrowed and darkened further. “You just said you were going to Barcelona. Why would you need to sleep on trains?”
    â€œIn case we wanted to see Madrid. Or maybe Paris.” That was Hannah’s idea. Hannah, the Toulouse-Lautrec artiste.
    â€œParis.”
    â€œYes, Paris. Isn’t France next to Spain?”
    Her mother folded her hands together. “Chloe, I tell you what. Go away and think carefully about all the questions I’m going to ask you next time you sit down and say, Mom, I want to go to Barcelona.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œNope. That’s not how it works. You figure out the solutions to the problems. Oh, and by the way, one of those problems is telling your father. Let’s see how you surmount that.”
    Chloe became deflated. “Perhaps he’ll be more reasonable than you,” she said. “Maybe Dad remembers what it’s like to be young. Oh, wait, I forgot, you can’t remember, because you were born old. Born knowing you’d have a kid someday whose dreams you’d spend your entire life harpooning.”
    â€œI’m harpooning your dream of going to Barcelona?” said Lang. “The dream I didn’t know you had until five minutes ago?” She raised her hand before Chloe could protest, defend, explain, justify. “Where are you going to sleep, Chloe? Why don’t you first work on giving your father the answer to that pesky question. Because it’ll be the first thing he’ll ask. Then worry about everything else.”
    Her parents didn’t yell, they didn’t punish. They were simply hyperaware of every single thing Chloe said and did. The only thing that was expected of her, aside from not flunking out of school, was not to let down half a billion Chinese mothers by going to a Barcelona beach to have unfettered sex with her boyfriend.
    â€œGoing to Barcelona is also an education, Mom,” Chloemuttered. She really didn’t want to face her dad’s questions. What was she supposed to say? We’re going to get two rooms, and the girls will stay in one room, and the boys in the other? What kind of naïve fool for a parent would believe that?
    â€œYes, an education in boys,” said Lang. “What are you going to tell us, that you’ll get two rooms and you and Hannah will stay in one and the boys in the other?”
    There you go. Didn’t even have to say a word.
    â€œYour plan,” Lang continued, “is to rove around Europe for a month with your boyfriend on your hard-earned college savings. This is something you’re seriously proposing to your father and me?”
    Dad is not here, Chloe wanted to say. Dad never really liked Mason, that gentle kid. She didn’t know why. Everyone else loved him. “We could go to Belgium, too, if you want.”
    â€œAre you weak in the head? Why would I want this?”
    â€œYou mentioned Belgium. I could bring you back some chocolates.”
    â€œYour father gets me a Whitman’s Sampler every Valentine’s Day. That’s enough for me.”
    â€œBelgium is safe.”
    â€œIs Mason safe?”
    â€œHannah will be with me. She’s nearly a year older. She’ll protect me.”
    â€œChloe,” said her mother, “sometimes you