The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost by Rachel Friedman Page B

reached a consensus, only to relive our misunderstandings the following week when the electric bill has not been paid by the designated person or we discover Patchi sprawled languidly out on the couch, blissfully chopping away at his feet with rusty clippers.
    Patchi and Portu are terrible slobs. Their room is an explosion of clothes, empty bottles, and cassette tapes (apparently 2002 in the U.S. is 1990 in Spain and Basque). Both of them smoke nonstop and insist on crushing their butts out on our dinner plates. Carly and I strategically scatter more and more ashtrays around the apartment, but we never break them of this off-putting habit. Soon all our meals taste vaguely of ash, but by then I’m smoking so much myself that I barely notice. Unusual habits aside, they are extremely entertaining, friendly guys. Portu especially, his initial suggestive remarks more bravado than anything else, quickly becomes protective and dependable, like an older brother.
    â€œThat man has nothing to offer you,” he concludes at a bar one night, gingerly extracting me from the nameless Irish guy I am drunkenly barnacled to.
    Even Spanish heavy metal, which Patchi blasts during the rare moments he takes time off from his busy dole-collecting schedule to help clean up the apartment, is growing on me.
    Portu’s addition to today’s meal is a Spanish tortilla. It’s like a quiche—yellow, thick, and eggy. I stick my nose a few inches from it and inhale deeply, wondering if this is what Spain smells like.
    â€œIt’s finished soon—only three more months,” Portu says in English. He is much more proficient than Patchi, and I do not laugh when I correct his mistake, since last week I believe I asked him, in unintelligible Spanish, to “throw away any small children he found around the house,” and he showed grave patience while correcting me.
    Carly is preparing dessert. Three plates are piled high with lamingtons, an Australian concoction composed of sponge cake smothered in chocolate and coconut and filled with cream. She is elbow-deep in the sugary ingredients. I reach down for a taste, but her sticky fingers swat me away.
    My roommates’ creations cover every inch of the minute kitchen table. We have to balance our plates on the edge and support them with one hand while we eat. As usual, with the exception of the one night I offered up burned bruschetta, I’ve contributed only the wine—but lots of it.
    After our third bottle, we decide the best idea we’ve ever had is to play a round of Burro. In this game, you’re dealt four cards and you pass around all the rest in hopes of ultimately getting four of the same number. When a person achieves this magnificent feat of intellect, he or she sticks out her tongue. The last idiot to realize she is sitting at a table with three other idiots with protruding tongues loses. The loser acquires the letter “b,” then, “u,” then “r,” and so on to spell out the word “burro,” “ass”in Spanish. Whoever acquires all the letters first, loses. When Patchi is defeated, his determined punishment is to run shirtless around the apartment complex (apparently, the wine has transformed us into eight-year olds). We lose sight of him when he ducks behind the building, and when he reappears, he is inexplicably wearing only his boxers. When we ask him where his pants are, he shrugs and shakes his curly head around like he doesn’t even know where
he
is, much less his pants, of all crazy things. After this, we uncap the whiskey, and thus I remember very little about the rest of the night.
    Each of us hails from a different country, we have different languages and different accents and different reasons for coming to Ireland, but we fit easily together, as if we’ve known one another for many years. Or maybe it’s precisely because we have just met and are bonded primarily by being travelers in the same