Mitch asked me to get him more wine. It’s not my fault.”
“It’s not what you said,” she said, holding her full lips tight. “It’s the way how you asked.”
My inner balloon of self-esteem compressed. Not like it was much of a balloon to begin with.
“A teenager?”
“You seem pretty sad, Justin,” Epp said seriously. “Your eyes seem sad.”
Epp’s words killed me. I knew she was right, but I hated her anyway. At night I laid awake in my bunk, hungover and hot, scribbling my thoughts in my journal. “What comes next? Where do I come from?” I wrote. “I look in the mirror and see a face that I am told is mine. But. But what? Nothing. Nothing to do but slip into drunkenness or slip into sleep.”
“Please let me listen to your music,” said Epp again on the bus. “I really liked it when you sang ‘Ticket to Ride’ during karaoke hour on the ferry last night.”
The only good songs in the karaoke song book had been Beatles songs, so I chose one I could carry. But I didn’t know how much Epp loved the Beatles. She was one of the few who had applauded. The Finns on the ferry just stared at me when I was finished. They didn’t even look in my direction as I exited the stage. They treated every karaoke performer with the same cruel indifference, even the loveable fat drunk who sang “I Love Rock’n’Roll” before me. What was wrong with these people?
Epp narrowed her eyes and smiled at me. She said that she was from Estonia, but sometimes she seemed more like she was from Malaysia, another place that she had once lived and worked. She wore colorful clothing. She had already loaned me CDs of Cantonese electronic pop and Indian chanting music with elephants on the cover. I looked back into her eyes and kept feeling that, if I looked long enough, some supernatural force might materialize. Maybe I would begin to levitate.
“Hey, Justin,” Mitch the Canadian interrupted. “Got any more beer? It’s hot in here.”
“Sure, I snagged a few before we left,” I said, reaching into my backpack.
As I handed a beer to Mitch, Epp reached into my seat and snatched my discman, quickly making off with it to her own seat in front of the bus. My already sunburned face felt hot with embarrassment.
“Give it back!” I cried. “Give me back my music!”
But Epp did not respond. She slunk down in her seat with a mischevous smile and began to play the songs I had recorded alone in my parents’ basement that past summer.
I could hear the drums of the second track of the disc beating from the headphones and I knew it was too late to even bother. Like it or not, Epp had peeled off another one of my layers. Her lips curled as she listened, and I settled, defeated, into my seat. I felt like a crab overturned on a hot beach, my insides open for the plucking.
There, with nothing more than a journal to confess my thoughts, I sat waiting for Epp to give back my CD. I waited all day on the bus, but she kept walking around with the headsets, and I could hear my drums beating when she walked by.
Our group was returning from the Åland Islands. We had gone swimming on a remote beach, or what passed for a beach in Finland. The glacial rocks that seemed to form most of the island of Kökar vanished abruptly into the murky waters. I was nervous about the water, which seemed incredibly black and deep, while Epp dove in and began floating in to the distance, far from the rest of our group.
“Are there big fish in this water?” I asked our Swedish host.
“What?”
“Big fish. You know, like sharks or killer whales?”
“No,” he laughed and puffed his pipe. “No big fish.”
By the time our group had decided to leave the beach, Epp was just a tiny black speck in front of the orange setting sun. After my lake experience, I decided that she might get tired swimming back. I swam out after her. The Baltic Sea, to me, seemed completely foreign and a little threatening. Even if the Swedish host had said there were no killer whales, there could have been other creatures. Giant squids. Killer octopuses. Maniacal walruses.
“What are you doing?” Epp shouted, paddling in my direction. She gasped for air and dipped a bit below the surface of the water.
“I came out to see if you were ok; I was afraid you would get tired!”
“Oh,” Epp laughed, as if I had surprised her with flowers. “I have to give you twelve points for this.”
“Twelve points?” What was that supposed to mean? Many months later, I found out that it was a reference to the Eurovision Song Contest, an event that, at that point, I had never even heard of.
“Aren’t you afraid of being so far away from the island?” I yelled.
“Ha!” Epp declared, gasping again for air. “If you don’t struggle too much, the water will take you where you need to go. It’s like I learned in the ashram! You have to trust the water.”
I didn’t like the way people looked at us when we got out of the sea. Even though we were all in our twenties, with all these new faces, I felt like I was back in third grade.
“So how about you and Epp?” kidded Matjaz the Slovenian.
“Shut up, Matjaz,” I snapped.
“Aww, come on, tell us the details!”
“Give it a rest.”
“Did you two smooch out there on the waves?”
“Let him be, Matjaz,” the Frenchman Florent scolded the Slovenian. “Not everyone is a gossipy little school girl like you.”
I had told myself that I didn’t need a partner. I wanted to be detached and live as some kind of musical monk. Me and my guitar against the world. Sometimes while watching Finnish TV in our dormitory in Helsinki, though, my emotions got the best of me. Each afternoon, Kicki Berg, the perky Swede who hosted a music program called Up North, would come on and take all the pain away. You could say I had a crush on her.
“Justin, you really need a girlfriend,” said Natalie, the British correspondent, as I sat like a zombie and watched my lovely Kicki.
Natalie was a redhead from England and was covered from head to toe in freckles. She was the same age as me, almost to the day, and I felt as if she were some kind of lost twin sister.
“I know,” I sighed.
Epp had finally given me back my CD one day while we were walking around in a little town named Kotka near the Russian border. She followed me and Jevgeni into a music store and pulled me aside in the classical section.
“I have been listening to this for days, and it’s all really good,” she said, handing back the disc. “You should know that you are really talented.” I could feel the energy from her body as it neared mine.
“Talented?” I said, taken by her compliment. “Thanks.”
“My favorite is the song where you sing ‘hopelessly, helplessly’ at the end.”
