The email came to me in the basement of what I then called my life: unemployed, twenty-three years old, still living too close to campus. Looking to travel the globe? Become a Program Advisor for Stoddard’s pre-college tours.
My parents were thrilled to hear their eldest would travel Europe. Really any job would do; it helped that this one was glamorous. Lately I had begun calling home for money not understanding the ruckus it caused. My father said he wished I lived closer, probably so he could place both his lumpy hands on my shoulders and sigh. College had duped me into believing I was like everyone else, meaning I had forgotten I was lower-middle-class with parents who didn’t travel. My mother had terrible agoraphobia and had only flown once, to a skincare conference in Atlanta she’d spent in the convention center bathroom. She bought a travel book of UNESCO sites from a bargain store for $3.99 and said I had to sign the ones I had visited by Christmastime.
I knew the job must suck doorknobs from the way the ladies in the Stoddard study-abroad office doted on me. Did I smoke? No. Did I drink? Only socially. Did I use drugs? I couldn’t afford them. Did I have sex with random women? No, and they didn’t need to know I had sex with random men. Did I have a passport? That part was flexible. I was offered the job immediately. Seventeen kids, seventeen years old; seven boys (thank God only seven) and ten girls for seven weeks abroad. As my passport documentation changed hands, I spent weeks in the office folding itineraries, annotating a schedule with little stars for our dinners and asterisks for lunches.
Turns out I had signed up for a nunnery. No drinking, no smoking, no strangers on our floors. The kids needed me sober, but all the time? Yes. I also had to control the budget, wield the credit cards, make museum appointments and meal reservations, and pull emergency cash from ATMs. I laminated cards for students with allergies to nuts, seeds, fruit latex. I printed out the phrase fish and vegetables okay in ten languages, which was how I became an international citizen.
The office ladies explained I’d be assigned a professor, but I never once saw him on campus. He was a philosophy guy named Gareth Sorensen. I’d never taken a class with him, or even heard of him, which concerned me. Philosophy resided on the top floor of the humanities building where it beheld all of campus from its great, thoughtful promontory; Gareth was up there somewhere watching me from his office. I emailed him and he never got back to me, and when I discussed this later with Study Abroad, they laughed in my face. Gareth Sorensen has worked on this program for a decade, they said. He had a new companion each summer, mixing up their name with the ones before it. The ladies spoke of him darkly. Don’t expect him to learn your students either, Edna laughed—I’d learned her name on day one—as a buoy of gum bobbed on her tongue. And sure as hell don’t let him handle the money.
Later, when I recalled Gareth Sorensen, that lovely mess of a person I once knew, I remembered our bus ride to London.
I hadn’t slept well on the plane. My flight to Stansted had blindfolded and spun me round and as a result, I was five minutes late to meet the bus. I waited in line at Tesco for a sandwich I ditched in the queue, but it didn’t matter. When I mentioned to Gareth what had happened, he split his turkey BLT and passed a half of it across the aisle. There he was, in black jeans and a black Izod shirt, with gray hair and a slightly grayer beard. He offered tales of summers past as we fetched students from across terminals in Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton—so many airports I could barely keep them straight. I asked him if I should include the bus driver in the conversation; he said we’d go through thirty of them by the end of the summer. We loaded the shell-shocked kids on the bus and ordered them to the back to sleep or watch a movie or view London through the windows. We’d do names once we’d collected the entire troupe. In the meantime, he and I talked.
He had survived a blown-out tire in Sweden and, on the same trip, another in Slovakia. He had endured bedbugs, stomach flus, anaphylaxis—too many trips to the ER to count. There was a student who’d disappeared in Krakow the night before the Auschwitz trip and showed up the next morning on site in a cab. The cabbie wouldn’t go through the main gates so this kid had to trudge up to the camp on foot, a walk of shame past the gas chambers and barracks. Gareth said that it would either be a great summer or it wouldn’t, like surviving it was a matter of enduring any kind of probability. It all depended on the kids. “Pray we get off easy,” he said.
Our bus tour had barely started and already I wanted to sprint to the Lufthansa terminal. I had the drug information for a couple of gimpy kids in my satchel bag. Hal needed Lexapro and an inhaler. Allie couldn’t be near pine nuts. Leila was allergic to sulfa. But what was sulfa, and did they even eat pine nuts in Europe? And just how close was “near?” I could tell Gareth was used to professing. There was London out my window; I might never see it again, and I could only look at it for a minute for without seeming rude.
“You think, they’re old enough,” he said, grandly. “But imagine if you were used to a maid or a nanny, and suddenly you had to deal with everything yourself.”
I nodded.
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Oh,” he laughed. “Well.”
“But my mom sent me to school a year early.”
The parents had written a fat check for a summer study tour and disappeared to their estates or private islands. So these teenagers had their dreams of pool parties replaced by humid walking tours of old churches with runic stones. If they saw Europe as nothing but a necklace of museums, I couldn’t blame them.
That first day went by in a blur of so many names I could hardly sleep for trying to keep them straight. I learned them slowly by the way they arranged themselves: room by room, table by table. The Kendalls, blond, and the Sarahs, also blond, their lips shiny with the ChapStick shaped like an egg that was in vogue that summer. The interesting ones—Hal, Mnemosyne (her mother was a movie star), Leila—had fun names and outfits, were all queer and multicolored and some declension of gay. They were four to a room in hostels with names like Elevation and Summit and Vitality; they only complained about the lodgings a little, but about the walking they groused a lot.
Some of them called Europe “America’s Museum” because it was old and stuffy, and because it was funny, and because Tony P, the class clown, did it first. (Also because they were seventeen, which explained pretty much everything they did.) He made the joke on a Friday at Versailles, among the loopy oblong lawn ornaments. The Sarahs and the Kendalls laughed. I did too, even though it wasn’t my role; I was meant to brood alone in corners, lost in stormy discernment. I fully intended to pull Tony aside and lay into him between the hedges, but I just couldn’t. It became a meme then and was thus unstoppable.
“Do you know what I would’ve given to be here at seventeen?” I dreamed of asking him. But of course, Tony P had no idea.
I called my parents every night from London, Amsterdam, and Paris until I couldn’t bear to any longer. Invoicing and docents and head-counts had chewed me up. Each evening, I sealed shut the hostel doors with a bracelet of masking tape, the test I’d devised to prevent sneaking out, sent a quick email to the parents—as the guide, I was tasked to write up a brief weekly digest for our website—and then the world was mine. I saw the Champs-Élysées at dusk right as the halogen lamps turned on. I saw the Arc de triomphe covered in a white tarp and had no one to go through it with. Eventually those nights grew lonely and disconnected, so one night I asked Gareth to come along with me.