In the Unlikely Event

“We’re…incredibly stereotypical representations of the places we come from.” I roll my nose hoop, moving it around inside its hole. I do that when I’m nervous. Keeps my hands busy.

“Stereotypes exist because they have a seed of truth.” He stops, turns around, and raps the roof of an old Ford the color of bad teeth. “Now, come. We have places to go, things to see, and I’m afraid you must do the driving.”

“Huh?”

“Have you not seen any decent romance movies, Princess Aurora from New Jersey? All the best meet-cutes in cinematic history involve the woman driving the man somewhere. When Harry Met Sally, Singin’ in the Rain, Thelma and Louise…”

“The last one wasn’t a meet-cute. And Geena Davis is not a man.” I can’t help but laugh. How dare he thaw me before I’m ready to defrost?

“To-may-to, to-mah-to.” He throws a set of keys into my hands, and I catch them on instinct. “Your carriage awaits, Madame Semantics.”

This guy is sleek, charming. The worst type of heartbreaker—not compassionate enough to let you know he’s an asshole by actually behaving like one. I bet he leaves a string of half-beating, bleeding, broken hearts in his wake wherever he goes—like Hansel and Gretel left breadcrumbs to find their way home by following the trail. Only I know where this path is leading: destruction.

“Wait. Before we go anywhere, I have something I want to ask you.” I raise a hand. Best to set the expectations right now.

“All right.” He throws the passenger door open, sliding inside. I’m still standing on the pavement when he shuts the door, rolls his window down, and rests his arm on its frame, sliding his aviator sunglasses on.

“You coming?”

“Aren’t you going to ask what that is before you let me in?” I frown.

He raises his aviators and flashes me a smile that can hold up the entire universe with its magnitude.

“What’s the point? I’ll give it to you, anyway. Be it money, a snog, a shag, a kidney, a liver. God, I hope it’s not my liver you’re after. Unfortunately, mine has seen some mileage. Come on now, Aurora.”

“Rory.”

“Rory,” he amends, dragging his straight teeth over his bottom lip. “Much more fitting. You don’t look like a princess at all.”

I arch an eyebrow. I don’t know why his statement annoys me. He’s right. I look nothing like the princess my mother wanted me to be. My best friend, Summer, says I look like a suicidal pixie.

“You look like the more beautiful stepsister in a Disney movie. The underdog who gets the prince at the end. The one who wasn’t born with the title, but earned it,” he explains.

I can feel myself turning red, thinking that ironic, as I just found out I do have a half-sister.

“Oh, she is blushing.” He raises a fist in the air through the window. “All is not lost. I still have a chance.”

“Actually, you don’t.” I douse his enthusiasm in cold water. It makes him laugh harder, because he already knows. The bastard knows he is winning me over.

“I won’t have a one-night stand with you,” I say.

“Of course, you won’t,” he agrees easily. Freely. Not believing a word.

“I mean it,” I warn. “Over my dead body.”

Laughing harder, he taps the passenger door.

“Chop-chop now, Princess.”

Mal directs me out of Dublin in his own peculiar way (“Take a left. No, your other left. Never mind, the original left”), and though I’m terrified driving on the other side of the road, and despite the fact I don’t have an international driver’s license, I still find myself behind the wheel.

Maybe it’s the setting that unchains me from any type of reasonable logic. Maybe it’s Mal himself. All I know is I’m eighteen, newly orphaned by a dad I didn’t know, and I feel like I’m suspended in the air, like a marionette. Between sky and earth. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

We roll into a small village, tucked between green hills a stone’s throw from Dublin, with a white wooden sign announcing our arrival in Tolka, Co Wicklow. There’s a river to our right, an old stone-arch bridge over it, and old houses with bright red doors edging the town’s entrance. It’s more like a main street with a few houses scattered around it, like spots of hair on an otherwise bald head. We drive down Main Street, passing a bright blue house, a church, a row of inns, pubs, and a little cinema Mal tells me offers actual individual seats, and the people operating it still use traditional reels.

The road winds, snaking up and down, and my heart feels strangely full when I park the car, as instructed by Mal, a few buildings down from a pub called The Boar’s Head.

When we exit the car, I stop and take my camera out. The pub is painted stark white, with green windows decorated by flowerpots with marigolds and cornflowers spilling out of them. The Irish flag hangs on a pole by the door.