Chapter 2: Olivia
My eyes shot open and tried to blink past the darkness as I inhaled abruptly, gulping in air as the sound of retching broke the silence of the early morning hours. As I looked around the dim room, my chest was still heaving from the shock of being awoken in a strange place and by sounds that I couldn’t identify.
Somewhere behind me, I heard it again: someone vomiting her guts out in the toilet. Real horror movie shit. Gore that would have opening weekend audiences gagging and crumpling up their popcorn bags. The sound was so loud, so violent, that in my groggy delirium I almost assumed that I was the one vomiting. Then my vision adjusted to the darkness and I realized that I was, in fact, still hunkered down in a twelve-woman bunk that made the orphanage from the musical Annie look like the Ritz.
I reached up and placed my hand against one of the metal bars above me. The blue paint was peeling, and even in the pitch black I could feel the faint indentation of someone’s initials scratched into it, some former occupant of the bed where I slept. When I was a little girl, I thought bunk beds were the epitome of a happy childhood. I yearned for them in silence, too scared to make the suggestion to my mother who would have laughed in my face at the idea. For once, as I lay in a bunk bed for the first time in my life, I realized that my mother was right.
Just when I was about to roll over again, another round hit the toilet. I knew that sleep was about to become a distant memory. Whimpers followed the retching, and I took that as my cue to shake off the bystander effect. Yawning, I forced myself off of my bunk and padded over to the bathroom in my socks. Gross, sure, but when I first packed for this trip I hadn’t planned on braving the cold tiles of a hostel floor.
I knew I should have stolen the hotel slippers back at the Sofitel.
Knock. Knock. “Are you okay in there?” I whispered through the thin bathroom door, the only thing separating me from what I had to assume was a level 4 biohazard.
The anguished sob on the other side of the door told me that she, the vomiter, was absolutely not okay. Without another word, I headed over to my locker where my luggage was stuffed and grabbed a bottle of water, four tablets of Pepto Bismol, and a granola bar.
When I opened the door to the bathroom, I found the bride from the hen do hunched over the toilet while another girl (who was still sporting a necklace with a glow-in-the-dark cock pendant dangling from it) held her hair. Both women looked like absolute hell—or more like hell itself had fled in terror upon seeing them.
“Here,” I offered, handing the bride the supplies as I ignored the agonized (and confused) expressions on their flushed faces. “Drink, take two of the Pepto pills, and then eat half of the bar. Then try to keep all that down for fifteen minutes. If you can do that, finish the water and take the rest of the Pepto.”
The bride stared at me with bewildered, bloodshot eyes adorned by streaks of mascara that ran down her cheeks. At the beginning of the night, she had been dolled up in a tight white dress and stratospheric heels that I knew she would regret within the hour. Now she looked like she was in contention to be the final girl in an eighties slasher flick—and by the look on her face, she strongly suspected that I was the killer.
“You’re the girls from England, right? Not the Swedish ones? Let me know if you can understand what I’m saying. I don’t speak any Swedish, but I can look words up on my phone if I have to.” I gestured at the bottled water that I gave her. “Start there.”
“How do you know all this?” the bride managed to say after she had chugged a quarter of the water bottle.
“My little brother gets carsick, and he gets sick when he eats too fast, and also when he eats a lot of dairy, actually. Look, long story short, the kid throws up a lot and I know what works. I promise, you’ll feel better so soon.”
Blearily, the bride swallowed two of the pink Pepto tablets like I recommended and then she started on the granola bar without objections. A few minutes later, I was back in my creaky bunk and no longer listening to the sounds of last night’s bad decisions. In its place, I was listening to the bride and her friend giggle shrilly through the paper-thin wall separating the bathroom from the hostel dorm. A minor upgrade, sure, but an upgrade, nevertheless.
Wide awake now, I turned on my side and re-read the pair of text messages in my exchange with Davis, the guy I met at the club last night.
Me: Hey, this is Olivia
Davis: Can’t wait to see you at the museum tomorrow
I had texted him as soon as he dropped me off at the hostel, after he insisted on escorting me for the whole walk from the club. He had texted back almost immediately, not bothering to make me wait or to play coy or cool.
No games, no euphemisms, no bullshit; he was excited to see me.
Every time I looked at that message, my stomach flipped over and stayed fluttery. It hadn’t been like that with Paul. With Paul, my stomach had been as steady as a surgeon’s hand. With Paul it had been candlelit dinners and Frank Sinatra and overpriced wine that he pretended to know more about than he actually did. It had been long, intellectual conversations about annoying French philosophers who died of syphilis or something. It had been gifted strings of pearls that reminded him of Medici wives, that I hated but pretended to love because he was always so self-satisfied to give them to me.
Now that he was out of my life after five months, I could finally admit what had been circling my thoughts since the day he messaged me on Seeking Sugar Daddies: He had been absolutely insufferable and I should have called it from the beginning.
In truth, there never should have been a beginning because I should have known better than to fuck my literature professor. Not just fuck him, but let him shower me with jewelry and expensive dinners and dresses and spa days. The fact that I wasn’t surprised that he abandoned me here in Amsterdam—all because I told him that I wouldn’t change my major from accounting to English—was the cherry on top of this fuckery sundae.
Well, good riddance to Professor Paul. I hoped he was enjoying his first-class seat home, maybe losing years of his life to anxiety that I would tell the Dean what we had been doing for the last few months and where it had started.
I wouldn’t, of course. I wouldn’t tell on him. I was complicit after all, even if being with him made me dread waking up in the morning. Desperation is a cruel mistress though. Amid a sea of absolutely revolting men who had messaged me during my short-lived career on that website, he was actually one of the better ones.
The bar was so low, it was basically in hell.
But it was over. Thank god it was over. On the plus side, once I got back to the States I could sell all of the gifts he bought me and make at least four- or five-months’ rent. Charlie and I would be back to eating Easy Mac and Ramen after that, but hey—at least I didn’t have to pretend to like Goethe anymore.
Chuckling softly to myself, I tried my best to expel Paul from my brain as I continued to fixate on my text exchange with Davis. My finger briefly hovered over the internet app on my phone, tempted to Google his name, but I ultimately decided against it. It wouldn’t matter eventually. He would be off to business school and I, theoretically, would be headed back to St. Louis…
…just as soon as I came up with a casual thousand dollars for an international flight back to the U.S.
“Shit,” I murmured aloud into the darkness as the cold reality hit me again. I was stuck here indefinitely—credit cards long maxed out and my funds dwindling. If I didn’t get back to school by the start of the semester, I would flunk out of college in a matter of days. Then my student loans would start building interest, I would fall behind on payments, and Charlie and I would be back in a shelter like we were the summer before I started college.
Maybe I could call Charlie and ask him to start selling the gifts that I had gotten from Paul. Momentarily, I played with the idea, but the thought of asking my eleven-year-old brother to start hawking my possessions to make ends meet was nightmarish. Although, the image of Charlie picking up a pair of Manolos, Googling their value, and trying to resell them on eBay was amusing. I could picture his little item descriptions: Weird, silky shoes with tall heels and jewels and stuff on them that my older sister only wore once because they were the shoes from hell and made her feel old enough to be suffering from fibromyalgia. Gifted from that weird, old guy who she said she wasn’t dating, but I kind of guessed she was. He called me sport, which my sister said is normal for guys who dodged the Vietnam draft. Hey, what’s a draft?
I wouldn’t ask him to do that, even if I knew he would. He was staying with a friend for the week, and from the last email he sent I could only assume he was having the best summer of his life because Kyle’s mom could actually afford to order beyond the dollar menu at McDonald’s.
No, this was for me to solve, as usual—as soon as I finished rereading my text messages with Davis Ridgeway and beaming at them for the hundredth time.