We were afraid to eat lunch at the high school, Kristin and I, we were afraid to even talk to the boys living in our building. We knew their French would be fast and mottled and feared our ears would not be deft enough to pick it up. But each new person we meet is nicer than the last and the boys, though we haven’t exactly talked to them yet, will appreciate us for the two young girls that we are, I think.

They clump together in the hallways, these boys, they are a sinister presence hiding themselves in cubby holes of bedrooms on the other side of the building. They scuffle by in their awkward bodies, prodding each other and telling jokes. The one I’ve been introduced to makes eye contact, says “bonjour,” and then when he passes I hear his friends teasing him, cooing and ooh la la-ing. We have no fridge here in our rooms so we’ve snuck down to use theirs on the weekends and in hours of the night when we’re unlikely to see them. Last night we finally made a timid attempt at contact in leaving a note on the blackboard announcing our presence. It was nice, there were smiley faces and chipper phrases, so I should have expected the response we got from it later that night…

For the first time all week we rose early enough in the morning to eat a proper French lunch without being shooed out of the cafés and told to come back for dinner at 7pm. I walked to the bakery for some breakfast, drooled over the tartes aux fraises, and then walked back along the narrow lane to Nitot (our dorm building) taking time to enjoy the sunny weather and the houses covered in ivy. After we nibbled on bread for a while we dressed and neither of us said much on the way over to meet the faculty. We were probably pretty silly to them, two normal American girls huddled together, too meek to open our mouths. Soon, though, we asked a woman there to point out an English teacher to us and a woman across from her looked up and smiled. Immediately after she introduced herself she started to help us find housing on line and then other teachers filed in, surrounded us, and welcomed us with warm smiles and English at which point we decided it would be okay to breathe. We ate in the cafeteria with the students, about 85% boys, their eyes stuck to our faces and our jeans and their heads bobbing in whispered adolescent boy jokes. What can a girl do? I ignored them and smiled, confidently, at the wall on the other side of the room.

While we ate innocently in the cafeteria at the high school, the boys at Nitot were reading our note. We didn't think about it again until I went down into the kitchen to pick up some cheese. I listened at the door first - the coast was clear - and I timidly snuck into the room. They had added to our note, the rascals! They wrote "gros bisous" (kisses!) and "à très bien tôt" (see you very soon). I couldn't help but giggle.

Back in the room I was hungrily digging into some Boursin cheese and spreading it onto the rest of my bread with a spoon I stole from the boys’ kitchen, thinking it would be my dinner, when there was a knock at the door. Kristin and I looked at each other and shrugged. We opened it to find that her other boss, Frédéric, who she had tried to phone earlier that day, had come to find her. First, he showed us how to get from Nitot to his school, and then he invited the both of us to dinner at his house where his wife quickly accepted us as one of their own and told us of the family crisis going on that day. We drank their wine, Kristin smoked their cigarettes (they insisted!), we ate a delicious meal followed by yogurt, fruit, cheese, etc, all while they worked out what to do over his father leaving his mother that very day. Again, we were fed and entertained for hours on a whim.