It felt good to walk. The last time she’d been in Prague she’d been so exhausted after far too much clubbing in Berlin that she’d hardly been able to feel her own feet, much less fully register where she was. She knew she should have been jet-lagged today, but she wasn’t. Or if she was, it was buried so far beneath her excitement and the adrenaline of finally being here that it didn’t affect her at all. She hadn’t slept on the overnight flight from New York to Zurich. She hadn’t nodded off in the Zurich airport where she’d caught her connection. And she’d been good and wired on the plane into Prague.
When she sat down at a table in the crowded, open-air café, she waited for a wave of weariness to take her over.
But it didn’t come.
She was amped.
Indy settled back in her café chair and blew on her coffee when it arrived. She was hardly able to believe it was only a matter of hours now. She checked her phone. Less than two hours.
And she could still remember that night in Budapest far too clearly. As if it had happened last night instead of two years back.
Indy had been with some friends she’d hooked up with in Croatia. She’d been two solid years into her world traveler phase and hadn’t seen any end in sight, at that point. These particular friends were the sort she picked up wherever she went. A hostel here, a club there—there were always like-minded people about. Always another party, always another adventure. A new city, a new face, a new story to tell. Indy hadn’t been able to come up with a single good reason why she would ever return to what waited for her back in the States.
That being the hum-drum little lives that all her friends lived in the various places they’d settled down. Nine-to-five desk jobs, paycheck to paycheck, dreary cubicles, and boring conversations about the property ladder.
None of that was any fun at all.
You need to make some real decisions about your life, her father had told her after her college graduation, which everybody liked to say had been a skin-of-the-teeth kind of deal for the not-so-good March sister. Serious decisions.
Indy had felt that she was full up on serious. She had taken a fifth year to get her degree and might have taken a sixth if she hadn’t been so deeply bored by the whole thing. Still, she’d paid her way—meaning there had been no letting anybody down if she made academic decisions that didn’t suit them, like failing a class because she’d forgotten to attend it, or accidentally going off to a music festival instead of taking her exams.
Disappointing them, sure. But not actually letting them down or spending their money. Indy had some standards, thank you. And she had never felt the need to let her father know how she’d paid her way through college. Or why it was she had such a robust savings account come graduation.
There were things a father didn’t need to know.
I know what I want to do with my life, she had told him, wrinkling up her nose in his direction as they’d sat down by the river near her childhood home, fishing.
Or in Indy’s case, pretending to fish while doing what she did best. Lounging.
Okay, what she did second-best.
Nothing is not a good answer, Bill March had replied. He’d shot her a look she knew well, filled as it was with laughter, love, and that particular gleam that made her think, sometimes, that her father knew exactly how free-spirited she really was.
I’m going to live, Dad, she had said. Deep and hard and wild. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a life?
Everybody’s hard and wild until it’s time to pay taxes, her father had said with his typical calm midwestern practicality.
I’m going to be just fine, she had told him, smiling wide. I promise.
And she had been.
She had taken a certain delight in sending her raciest photos to her sister, because Bristol was so easily scandalized. Indy had sent postcards to her parents from every new place she went. London to Bali to Perth to Rio and back again. She’d worked when she needed money, went on marvelous adventures as the spirit took her, and followed her pussy wherever it wanted to go.
The club in Budapest had been one of the underground ones she’d developed a taste for over time, on all continents. She loved the inherent mystery of these pop-up events. A warehouse or a field somewhere, often in a sketchy part of town to make the whole thing feel more edgy and exciting. There was never any possibility of planning for these things, there was only waiting for the text to come and then racing off—no matter her state of inebriation—to dance and howl and party until the sun came up.
That was why a wise woman didn’t have a plan. All the good stuff happened outside those lines.
The night in question had been like all the other nights in all the other cities and fields and beaches she’d discovered on her travels. The DJ had been particularly good and Indy had lost her friends somewhere in the crowd, but that was never something she worried about. She liked to let the universe take a hand in such things. She would either find them again or she wouldn’t, but her experience, everywhere, was that there were always new friends to be made.
You have a low bar for what you call friendship,
