The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost Read Free Page B

altogether different species from the rush-hour traffic. I’m delighted by this timely reminder that I am spending the summer before my twenty-first birthday in a country where the legal drinking age is eighteen.
    â€œLet’s get a beer,” I say conspiratorially.
    â€œAfter you.” Matt bows chivalrously as he opens the door for me.
    We order Guinness, since that seems like the Irish thing to do, though I notice only two elderly men nursing the same thick concoction. All the younger patrons are sipping fruit-accessorized cocktails. The bartender tips my pint glass to one side. He pours it nearly full with creamy brown liquid before setting it atop a sticky bar mat. The beer trickles down like sediment, light, foggy brown giving way to deeper colors. A minute later, he returns, holds the glass directly under the tap this time,and places a small spoon upside down over the rim, the hump extending up toward the ceiling. This time he pushes the handle away from him, letting the beer cascade over the spoon and become a half inch of dense white foam. It’s not sweet—not by a long shot—but the bitterness is more subdued than when I tried it back home, and it goes down smoothly. We order a second one, then a third.
    I know absolutely no one in Ireland other than this stranger I have just spent the afternoon with. I imagine my lawyer mom finishing up the day’s client meetings, my professor father being greeted by students’ groans as he distributes a pop quiz. Erica is back in Connecticut, maybe unpacking the contents of her dorm room, unloading clothes into her childhood dresser or shopping for a new skirt to wear the first day of her internship.
    I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once. As centuries of inebriated Irish before me have surely found strange wisdom at the bottom of their Guinness glasses, so too do I as I polish off my third one: apparently, I am not the center of the universe, and the earth will continue to revolve around the sun whether or not I decide to spend a purposeless summer in Ireland. This is the kind of revelation that is liberating when you are drunk, and rather depressing when you are sober, but luckily, at the moment I am the former.
    Back at the hostel, the last thing I mumble to Matt before drifting into a deep, drooly sleep is “see you tomorrow,” but in the morning he and his bags have disappeared. He is replaced by three massive Dutchmen who make my oversize suitcase look like doll furniture. They appear as I am exiting the room, andnaturally “Oh!” is all I can think to gasp at the disconcerting sight of them.
    â€œUh,” one of them replies in a cross between a greeting and a grunt. He steps aside to let me pass. Each guy is bigger than the next, like a matryoshka set. All top six feet and are thick as tree trunks.
    â€œHello!” says the last of the threesome cheerily. He offers me his baseball mitt of a hand. “We are from the Netherlands.”
    This cannot be happening. Staying with Matt was one thing, but bunking with three Brobdingnagians is another thing altogether. As I hurry downstairs, I think that the Dutchmen are probably at this very moment sweating and farting and lying around the room in their gigantic underwear. But none of this is as worrisome as the fact that I have to sleep in there with them. As if this is even an option; whoever put those three hulks in a room with a five-six American girl who has never set foot on foreign soil on her own is seriously deranged. I’ll bet it was that snarky blonde at the front desk.
    I hear my mother’s voice. If I’m uncomfortable, I need to be an adult (I
am
an adult, after all) and let the person in charge know. After all, I doubt my parents will be too thrilled when their