1
London
October 2009
I'd never been a great actor or a convincing liar, and an American in Britain will always be scrutinized. I prayed the ticket inspector might think I was an idiot, like all Americans, and not a crook, like most of the people he found on the train to Brighton without a ticket to cover their fare.
Instructors like me had to pay for our own tickets when we traveled to teach weekly SAT-prep sessions at posh boarding schools around the English countryside. Not that you'd know they were schools-more like mansions, refurbed monasteries, drafty Hogwarts-type castles. I'd seen a few already in the four months I'd worked for Kramer Test Prep, but this was the first time I hadn't had the money for my train ticket. I'd formed a weak plan on my way to the station. A shite plan, my flatmate Andre would've said. My first plan had been to borrow the money from him, but he hadn't come home last night.
I'd been poor all my life, in a mundane, lower-working-class way-food stamps, hand-me-downs, pancakes for dinner-and it had bred in me a scrappy sort of boldness that only backfired about fifty percent of the time. Sometimes it seemed like that scrappiness was the only thing I still shared with my father.
The plan was a big risk, but I'd be fired if I missed my class. The travel bonus was £40 each trip; that alone made a typical ten-week class worth more than half a month's rent to me. I'd emailed my supervisor the second the Brighton class was posted, terrified that someone would scoop it up before me. I needed that bonus, even if it only came at the end of the whole class, months later. Months of Saturdays spent on long train rides, cursing everything: the city of Brighton, its icy coastal winds, its historic clifftop boarding school for girls, which I had never heard of but which, when mentioned, impressed my British acquaintances so much-You teach at Roedean?-that I'd quickly learned to use it as social currency.
But it was actual currency I needed, and so far I hadn't seen a pound for my Roedean SAT class.
The shite plan was not complicated. For the first forty-five minutes on the swaying, southbound train, I only had to pretend to sleep. No easy task, my body thrumming with nervous energy. Fare-dodging was no joke here. I'd once seen a ticket inspector rap his knuckles loudly on a train window for ten minutes, trying to wake a "sleeping" man, certainly ticketless. The man later hid in the bathroom, and two stations later the ticket inspector walked him off the train to a waiting semicircle of British Transport Police. Here on an easily revoked student visa, I feared even the lightest brush with the law.
The visa was my ticking clock: I had a year, essentially, to create a solvent, stable life. By this time next year, if I wanted to stay in London, I'd need a completed master's degree, which would earn me a two-year "post-study" work visa. Then I could really begin to make my way in this place that felt more like home than home had in a long time.
On good days I believed it was possible. I could walk through London, my city, and feel that I had achieved something great just by being there. Here I was, taking the Tube, rising on an escalator, emerging on the South Bank, strolling along the Thames and snapping photos and stopping on benches to read my book whenever the sun came out. But then I'd be sitting there, the breeze flipping the pages of my book, not reading but wondering if I had enough to buy a panini and a tea at the little café tucked into the bridge arches near Waterloo. Some days I did have enough, and it was a perfect day, a day I could make a Polaroid snapshot in my mind and store as evidence that I'd made the right choice in coming here. And on days when I didn't have enough, and I went back to the flat and ate spaghetti with butter and stale Parmesan shaken from a can, it was still a perfectly good day for a broke grad student, getting by, not asking for help from my father or anyone.
Finally, I heard the ticket inspector coming down the carriage, pausing at each seat. I kept my head against the window, eyes closed, hands folded in my lap, my teaching textbook open on the tray table. I felt a blush rising and willed it away.
"Ticket, miss," the inspector said, standing over me. He had lowered his voice slightly, perhaps trying not to startle me awake, and the possibility of this-his kindness-filled me simultaneously with hope and self-loathing. I let my eyes flutter open.
"Oh, yes, I've got it here," I said, a bit breathless, reaching into both pockets to search for it. And then, with an apologetic smile, rummaging through my book bag as well.
My stomach was churning. I'd come to London to leave this feeling behind. I didn't like what it said about me-that I was still scraping together the same threadbare life I'd had back home. That I was capable of this deception. Morally and literally bankrupt. Today would be the last time, I decided.
Finally, I handed the inspector the ticket I'd purchased with my last pounds at Victoria station. With one hand he held the ticket, and with the other he brought out his hole-puncher to mark it spent. I did not breathe. Maybe he wouldn't look. Maybe he'd punch it, hand it back, and walk away, and I would be free.
"This ticket's for Haywards Heath."
My stomach dropped, and I felt the first beads of sweat form on my spine. I would have to do the full show, then. I summoned a smile. "Yes, that's right."
"You need a ticket to Brighton, miss."
"Oh, why?" I said, leaning on my American accent. "I'm only going as far as Haywards Heath."
The inspector looked away up the carriage, then back at me. "That was two stops ago. We're nearly to Brighton now."
"What?" I said, and made to stand, bumping into the tray table, tipping my textbook off and onto the floor, where notes and marked tests sprayed from its pages. The inspector bent for the book while I made a show of struggling to close the tray table.
"I've missed my stop?" I asked, letting in a small note of hysteria.
"She was sleeping the whole time, poor dear," the woman across the aisle said, unfurling a deeply posh accent. She handed some of my papers back.
The inspector nodded deferentially to the woman but continued to reach for his radio. "There are protocols for this kind of thing," he said to me. "You'll have to pay at the next station, I have to report it-"
Panic surged up my spine. "Oh, I knew this would happen," I interrupted. "I should've just gone straight to the school."
The inspector glanced at my textbook, still in his hand. The kindness had gone from his face; he was scrutinizing me now. I'd miscalculated. "You're a student?"
I had always looked young: something soft in my curved lips and heart-shaped face, girlish in my long, straight, dark blond hair. No doubt he'd encountered many broke, ticketless students in his time on the trains.
"No," I said, stepping out into the aisle. "I'm a teacher." I had dressed the part-a knee-length, collared shirt dress, belted at the waist, without a single wrinkle. Neat black flats. All purchased at H&M for less than £25, but exactly the bohemian-professional chic that all the high street shops were selling for £125. I'd pulled my hair back into a trim bun. "I was supposed to stay with a friend in Haywards Heath this weekend. I start at Roedean Monday morning."
Both the woman and the inspector looked at me with surprise.
The Roedean day and boarding school had not educated any actual royals, but it did the next best thing-welcoming their cousins, stepchildren, and inconvenient love children, plus the sons and daughters of Sussex aristocrats, international financiers, and various other new-money progeny. It was beautiful: huge Victorian halls of soft Easter-egg-yellow stone, perched on famous white cliffs high above the English Channel. All designed by Sir John Simpson in 1885 and scarcely modernized since. I knew it mostly from a cold, medieval classroom and toilets that hardly even pretended to flush when you pulled the chain, but I didn't need to say so. I hoped the warm glow of those historied halls might extend its protective warmth to me, here in the train carriage.
"It's just for a few weeks," I said, smiling modestly as if I couldn't quite believe it. "It's for the university entrance exams, in America. That's where all the students want to go now."
The inspector studied me and said nothing, but the woman across the aisle laughed. "Want to be far off from their parents, I expect," she said. "Those boarding school types, you know."
The inspector looked at her. He looked down at my textbook. I held my breath.
Finally, he shook his head in surrender. "You'll have to ride on to Brighton, miss, and get the train back from there. Two stops to Haywards, any northbound train." He handed back the punched ticket. "Probably won't set you back half an hour, if you're lucky."
"Lucky to have you to set me straight," I said. I was so grateful, it was all I could do not to hug the man. He seemed to notice something of this in me and turned quickly away.
When he was gone, I dropped back into my seat, heavy with the weight of my relief. I smiled at the woman across the aisle. "Such an idiot, I'm going to be so late now."
"Can you ring your friend?" she asked. "Let her know you'll be on a later train?"
I agreed that was exactly the thing to do, and then had to pretend-dial my phone and pretend-tell my friend the whole story from the beginning, pausing for replies. Pantomiming this was exponentially more humiliating than lying to the ticket inspector had been. I wanted to feel my triumph-paying with charm and class instead of money-but all I felt was the unanswerable failure of needing to do so. I tried to imagine the shame running off me like rain off a coat, like I was too hardened to feel it.
My Roedean class would go well, I told myself. I would remember all my students' names. On break, the teachers' staff room would be empty, as it always was on Saturdays, just a low table with self-service snacks and coffee and a jar for payment, overfull with coins and bills. I would borrow what I needed for the train ticket home to London and pay it back when I was down again next weekend, after my bartending paycheck came in. Next week would be better.
2
I traveled all over London on the Underground for my SAT-tutoring students, captive time I normally used to read for my master's program. But today I'd finished the reading-a rare miracle, I was always behind-so I picked up a left-behind magazine from the next seat. The Tube rocked us from station to station, and I passed the time picking through a special travel feature on Cannes. The article itself was pointless and vague, but it was hard to believe the beauty in the photo spreads: that sand could be so pale, that water could be so brilliant, that fields of lavender could feel so soft and swaying on paper.
I'd spent many hours of my youth lost in glossy pages like these-National Geographics specifically, slipped from the bottom shelf of library stacks and carried to the comfiest chair. I dog-eared the best photos, the most exotic locations. It was a game Mom had invented for me when I was too young to sit still with a book. A game for me to collect and show her the photos at the end, before we left. Later on, it was the internet Mom came to the library for, for Craigslist ads, but in the beginning, it was just the newspapers. She wasn't looking for jobs; both my parents worked at the nursing home in town, Mom as a health aide and Dad doing maintenance. She was combing the classified ads for blood glucose test strips. Matchstick-sized plastic tabs to measure her sugar levels from a finger-prick of blood. She'd had Type 1 diabetes since she was twelve.
The test strip packs at the pharmacy could be $60 or $70, which didn't go far, testing so many times a day-morning and night, before and after meals, and whenever Mom's levels felt off, which seemed to be always. But sometimes other diabetics had more test strips than they needed, or didn't need to test as often, or someone died, and then they resold the packs for much less, and Mom would scoop them up, even if it meant a long drive with me along for company. When I was older, I discovered that Mom also rationed her doses of insulin, which cost a fortune even with insurance. Later, when it was too late, when she was dying, the specialists said that she had shortened her life by decades, as if it was something she'd done on purpose-weighing not just the sugars in her bloodstream but the dollars in the bank with each injection. Because this one essential thing that other bodies made for free, her body had to pay dearly for.
In those early days at the library, I tried to find three or four beautiful photo spreads to show Mom. She'd squish right into the chair with me and slide her fingers over the pages as if she could feel them; thin, curving beaches; chalky Roman ruins; big skies and craggy seaside cliffs. Whenever there was a road on the page, her fingers had to follow it. "When we retire, I'm going to travel," she said. It didn't have to be abroad; Yellowstone was her favorite, the ripples of rock waving like water. Her retirement plans: renting a used RV, driving around with Dad. "We don't need to live like kings," she said.
When I was old enough to read real books at the library, I imagined myself traveling, too, into those pages. While Mom disappeared into the classifieds, I disappeared to mythical lands: danced at court with Lancelot and King Arthur, wooed Maid Marian with Robin Hood, stepped lightly off a London windowsill with only Peter Pan's hand to fly me. Mom talked to the librarians and pulled more books about England off the shelves for me. It was a long time before I realized this magical place was a real country, just across the ocean from Massachusetts. She laughed when I asked her-was England like Neverland?-and soon it became a teasing sort of joke between us. England was a dream place, but one that maybe I would someday get to visit. If I was good, if I did my chores, if I studied hard.
Copyright © 2025 by Emily Everett. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
