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cigarettes, and brag about all the museums he’d visited in a ridiculously short amount of time, as if there were some kind of race on.
    She took them back to her tiny room, shushing them on the narrow stairs if it was after the hostel’s curfew. They brought a cheap bottle of wine from the market on the corner, drugs if she was lucky, cigarettes, and enough condoms to get them through the night. She liked their tattoos, the intricate dragons and goofy leprechauns and leaping dolphins and quotes from poetry and full sleeves that wrapped up their skinny arms. She liked their smells—sour wine, stale cigarettes, Dr. Bronner’s in peppermint, almond, coconut. She liked their foreignness, how they struggled to find a particular English word or called sweaters jumpers and hoods bonnets , how they liked techno music that made her cringe, how they used too many hair products and needed orthodontia and didn’t go to the gym. Except the Americans, of course. The Americans she hated for their familiarity.
    When she woke up, usually around noon, the guy gone, she wandered, hungover or still slightly stoned, her Street Wise Paris map in her hands. She tried to remember when different museums were free, but she always managed to mix up the days ortimes. She walked in the rain, she walked in the sunshine. She walked, searching for inspiration. But late every afternoon she found herself back at one of the cafés filled with tourists, ordering her first vin maison of the day. She opened her small notebook and stared at the mostly blank pages there, writing something, anything, just to try and fill it. Vin maison , she’d write. Or: Musée d’Orsay is not free on Thursdays . Or: Woman in the purple coat. Possible character for story?
    Too much drinking and walking, too many drugs and too much sex, had made her thin and gaunt. Her hipbones jutted pleasantly against her jeans, the outline of her ribs showed through her threadbare sweater. She liked it, liked to trace her hand along the sharpness of her bones. When she looked in a mirror, she didn’t recognize herself—the shadow of dark circles beneath her eyes, the tangled bed hair, the sharp cheekbones above hollow cheeks.
    Then one night she left Les Deux Magots alone. It had been unusually empty, possibly because of the hard rain falling. The rain was cold and relentless, and she had no umbrella, so she decided to take the Métro. The night stretched hopelessly before her. She would buy a bottle of three-euro wine, and go to her small room, and stare at those postcards until she drank all of it and, hopefully, passed out.
    The Métro too was oddly empty. For a moment, as she settled into a seat, dripping rain onto it and the floor, she wondered if something had happened. A terrorist attack or a madman on the loose. How would she ever know?
    A man’s voice interrupted her rising panic.
    â€œTu es trempée jusq’au os.” You are soaked to the bone.
    Across from her, the man smiled.
    She didn’t smile back.
    â€œPrends mon parapluie,” he said, holding out a black umbrella, folded up neatly like a gift.
    The man was a man, not a boy like the ones she picked up in the cafés. He had a full head of longish, dirty blond hair, a hooked nose, a trench coat belted tight around his impressive girth. He looked like Gérard Depardieu, her favorite French actor, Maggie thought. Except not as big and not as old.
    â€œAh!” he said, smiling again and revealing adorable crooked teeth. “You don’t speak French!”
    She answered in perfect French that she did, in fact, speak French, but she wasn’t in the habit of taking umbrellas from strange men on trains.
    He laughed, obviously delighted.
    â€œHow did you acquire that accent?” he asked her, sticking to English.
    â€œI went to a lycée in the States for eight years,” she told him, sticking to French. “And my mother teaches