Philadelphia Weekly

Illustration by Karen Klassen

I'm on the tram heading into town, leaning against what I hope is the door that won't open next, on my way to see Paul from school. He told me to meet him at a bar called Rì-R�, which means chaos in Irish, which suits my mood exactly.

I just needed to get out of that house, that's all. I'm living in digs, which means I rent a bedroom in Simon's cottage but am allowed to use the stuff in the rest of the house. And I keep breaking things.

"I must be the worst lodger you've ever had," I moaned, an apology for the mug I'd just dropped with a subtextual reference to the time I set off the burglar alarm and it went on for so long that the people next door came out, babies on their hips, asking if the robbers got much.

"No," Simon said thoughtfully. "There was the Korean girl who offered me 5,000 pounds to marry her. You're not as bad as her."

The tram rattles past rows of white cottages with bright painted doors, past a neighborhood called Dolphin's Barn, a name that conjured the strangest images for me until someone told me it came from a man named Dolphin who let the Catholics have Mass in his barn back in the day. Three girls in maroon school uniforms are pretending to smack each other and shrieking.

At Abbey Street I get off the tram and start toward the river. It was raining half an hour ago, but the sun has come out just in time for it to go down. The sky is all oranges, the clouds low and streaky-the Celtic twilight is beginning its shifting, glowing slow burn. I've never seen anything like it. It must be a reward for Dublin's all-day grayness.

As I push through the slow-moving crowds on the bridge, I can hear a street musician playing pipes, which I guess is just tourist stuff but sounds bright and lively to my ears.

Rì-R� turns out to be lively too, but not bright. Dim. That suits my mood too. Paul's already at the bar, elbows propped. I regard him in the minute before he notices me. He has a tender, unexposed look, with pink skin and blue eyes and strawberry blond hair-a more feminine description than I mean it to be, but that's what he looks like. He made me a card for Thanksgiving that said, "Happy Birthday, America!", and he calls me his cousin from across the water.

"Hey cuz," I say, positioning myself on the stool next to him. And then it's sl�inte, cheers, and I swallow from the pint of cider he ordered me despite the fact that he makes fun of me for always drinking the chemical-flavored stuff at the bar on campus. I'm not sure why Paul invited me out tonight-we've never hung out just the two of us before-but it doesn't seem to matter. We drink in cozy silence for a while.

"So, Katie. Are you gonna be clever, or will you be bold?" he asks in his crazy Cork accent, all ups and downs. He has to explain: Will you drink just enough, or more than that? I shrug, as if to say, "You can't plan these things," even though he and I both know you can.

And then suddenly, surprisingly, like the blood that wells up in that pain-free first moment after you cut yourself shaving, my eyes fill with tears. It's hard when every single thing people say is different, when trousers means pants and pants means underwear and you announce to a room full of people that your pants are dripping wet.

I bat back the tears until I remember that I'm in Ireland, and it's fine if I cry in public. So I do. This culture has its share of rules, but pretending to be happy when you're not ain't one of them. And that suits me more than anything.

Paul looks up at me with slightly raised eyebrows, nothing more, and apparently makes some kind of silent exchange with the bartender because a moment later a round of shots is plunked down in front of us. Sl�inte.

And before I know it he's pulling me off my stool and we're moving through a dance floor packed with people making harmless rì-r�-singing and kissing and thinking about whom they want to take home with them. And now we're pushing our way outside, past the smokers trapping a cumulus under the awning, running halfway down the street on glistening cobblestones.

And now Paul is hugging me to himself, lifting my feet off the ground and spinning me around. And I don't know if it's the drink or the tears being out of me or the fact that someone here cares enough to lift me up, but when he finally sets me back down, I'm still sort of spinning, but I also feel surprisingly sure-footed, like I could stand here forever.