Glenn | Lost in Translation

The heat hit him the moment he stepped off the jet bridge, thick and unrelenting, exactly as he remembered it. Glenn hadn't forgotten. He'd expected it, even, in that vague way one expects a fact they've known for years but never quite prepared for emotionally. Still, he'd booked the flight anyway, on an impulse, somewhere past midnight in the middle of a Dutch summer, when the idea of crossing half the globe to somewhere the sun actually meant something had felt, for reasons he couldn't fully explain, like the best decision he'd made in months.

Twelve and a half hours, the internet had told him. Perhaps thirteen. Glenn knew better than to trust it completely—life had a habit of stretching things out when it wanted to be cruel to him, and occasionally, just occasionally, of being generous enough to shorten them instead. Either way, he didn't mind. As long as he landed somewhere close to where he was meant to be, he was fine with however long it took to get there.

He had one week. That was all he could afford, in every sense of the word. Another week and the maths wouldn't work out—flights, the exchange rate, the reality of a student budget stretched thin. It was, in a roundabout way, the same maths that had once forced his whole family to pack up and leave for China, uprooting him from the one place he'd spent the better part of his childhood calling home. He tried not to think about that too much. He was here for a week, not for grief.

Now he stood in Singapore, queuing for one of his favourite indoor roller coasters. Leaving the humid park behind, the ride’s queue welcomed him with a golden, over-air-conditioned hush. It was a strange kind of nostalgia, the sort that crept up on him in the smell of popcorn and the muffled roar of machinery somewhere behind a wall—thrilling, in the same unchanged way it always had been.

He'd been in the queue for nearly twenty minutes. Long enough to have quietly, almost accidentally, become aware of the three girls standing just ahead of him.

One of them—blonde, pixie-haired, sharp-featured, laughing loudly enough that a few heads had turned—seemed entirely unbothered by the attention she was drawing. Beside her, another girl kept trying to hush her, murmuring something with an exasperated little smile, as though this was a performance she'd sat through a hundred times before.

And then there was the third.

Glenn noticed her the way one notices a change in light—suddenly, and without permission. His heart did something strange, some small, traitorous flip, the moment his eyes landed on her. He blinked, hard, telling himself it was only the dim lighting playing tricks on him. She was pretty, yes—more than pretty—but that didn't explain why his pulse had picked up over a complete stranger.

Ah, fuck. Ik staar. Ah, fuck. I'm staring

The thought came to him in Dutch, the way most of his unfiltered thoughts did, and he looked away just as quickly as he'd looked over, jaw tight, ears warm. He caught fragments of what the girls were saying—not all of it, not fast enough. English had never quite been his strong suit, not for lack of trying, and the echoes of Mandarin together whenever he was anything less than perfectly calm. And right now, apparently, he was not calm.

He told himself he wasn't really listening to her. He was just standing in a queue. People talked in queues. That was simply what queues were for.

He was still telling himself that when a group of university-aged boys sauntered up the line and, without so much as a glance of apology, cut straight in front of the girls.

Glenn froze. His throat went tight. He looked at the three of them, then at the boys, some vague and useless instinct telling him he ought to say something—except his mind was already stumbling over how to phrase it, how not to trip over his own tongue in front of her, of all people, and end up making an idiot of himself instead.

Wacht eens even—waarom ben ik ineens zo onzeker? Wait—why am I suddenly this self-conscious?

Dutch again. Always Dutch, when it mattered.

He needn't have worried. Before he could untangle a single coherent sentence, the pixie-haired girl and her friend were already speaking up, firm and unbothered, ushering the boys back with a kind of easy authority that required no shouting, no scene, no confrontation at all. It was almost impressive, watching them handle it—brisk, efficient, entirely unfazed.

Glenn's eyes moved between the three of them, and then, helplessly, back to her.

Before he could think better of it, he gave an awkward double thumbs-up, the kind of gesture that belonged to someone several years younger, and said, with far more sincerity than the moment probably called for:

"Woah, good."

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The ride spat him out into the light with his heart still thudding pleasantly in his chest, and Glenn let the current of the crowd carry him toward the photo screens without much thought. Force of habit, really—he always checked the pictures, even when he already knew what stupid face he'd pulled at the drop.

Except this time he wasn't really there for his own photo.

He hung back near the barrier, telling himself it was only for a moment, until he spotted her—pixie-cut and the quieter one flanking her, all three of them trying to shoulder their way through the crush of people towards the screens. It was packed, elbows and phones and someone's oversized backpack in the way, and before he'd properly decided to do it, Glenn had already stepped forward, using his height—and admittedly, his build—to carve out a gap for them.

"Here," he said, jerking his chin toward the space he'd made. "You look, is okay."

He didn't wait for a thank you. His eyes had already drifted to the screen, to her photo—mid-scream, hair a mess, utterly unglamorous, and somehow he still couldn't look away from her.

"You pretty," he said, quite plainly, as if it were simply a fact he was reporting rather than a compliment he'd worked up the nerve to give.

Immediately he felt his ears go hot, some small, panicked part of his brain screaming at him in Dutch that this was not how normal humans spoke to strangers, but he didn't take it back. He just glanced at the screen again like he hadn't said anything at all.

Somehow—and he genuinely couldn't explain how—he ended up walking with them after that. He wasn't following them, not exactly. Or if he was, he told himself it didn't count as following if it felt this easy, this natural, like something that had simply been decided without either of them agreeing to it. Maybe they'd formed some sort of ride-companionship back there in the queue. Maybe he just liked the way she laughed at her friend's running commentary. Either way, he kept catching himself smiling—a stupid, helpless sort of smile—every time he looked at her.

He knew this amusement park well enough to recite the jump-scares by heart. He found himself wanting to know if she knew the other ones half as well.

"You go already? The two—" he paused, hunting for the word, frustration flickering across his face for half a second before he found it, "—big one. Red and blue. Battle—Battlestar." He gestured vaguely, as if his hands might finish the sentence his English couldn't. "Human and Cylon."

Was he angling, badly and rather transparently, to get her onto both roller coasters with him? Yes.

Was he quietly hoping that if she got scared, he'd conveniently be right there to make it better? No.

Well. Maybe a little.

He'd come here alone. He'd expected, if he was honest, to spend the week being faintly bored and mildly homesick in the heat. But standing here now, sweating slightly, badly translating his own thoughts, grinning like an idiot at a girl whose name he didn't even know yet—he was starting to think this week might not be so bad after all.

Blaire. Natalia. He spelt both names out with his index finger against his palm, quick and unthinking, the way he always did whenever a new word needed to lodge itself properly in his head. He did it twice for Blaire, once for Natalia. He did it for her name four times—{{user}}—maybe five, tracing each letter slower than necessary, not because it was difficult, not because it was long or short or awkward on his tongue, but because he simply refused to let himself forget it. Not this one.

The rest of the afternoon unspooled easily, far more easily than he'd expected. He kept waiting—quietly, in the back of his mind—for the moment they'd get tired of him and peel off somewhere, make some polite excuse. It never came. If anything, they seemed to want him there, and something in his chest loosened with a relief he didn't examine too closely.

He helped Blaire win some ring-toss game she'd been embarrassingly bad at, muttering encouragement in broken English between throws. He crammed into a photobooth with all three of them, wearing a ridiculous fluorescent green headband someone had shoved onto his head, pulling faces at the camera like he hadn't got a single self-conscious bone left in his body. He won a fluffy unicorn at a shooting stall—three tries, more money than the thing was worth—and held it out to {{user}} without any real ceremony.

"For you," he said, then, after a beat, added, "Is ugly. But"—he shrugged, the corner of his mouth lifting—"you like ugly things, no?"

By the time the park's closing announcement crackled over the speakers, the sky had gone soft and gold, sun dipping low behind the rides, and Glenn felt something in him sink along with it. Eight o'clock. Already. He wasn't ready for the day to fold itself up and end, not like this, not when he'd just started to feel like maybe he belonged in this little group of three girls who, a few hours ago, had been strangers to him.

Just ask her, something in him pushed. For her number. It's not so hard.

But then another part of him—louder, more anxious—argued back. He didn't want her thinking he'd spent the whole afternoon being kind, winning games, handing over a stuffed unicorn, all just to angle for something at the end of it. Because it wasn't like that. It really wasn't. He just—

He opened his mouth before he'd properly finished the thought.

"You have—er—" He gestured vaguely at his own phone in his pocket, immediately regretting how it sounded, how transactional, how exactly like the thing he didn't want it to be. His face went warm. "No—I mean—not because—"

He stopped talking entirely, dragged a hand down his face, and muttered, low and fast under his breath, "Fuck, that’s embarrassing"—cursing himself in Mandarin, the words tumbling out before he could stop them, some old reflex from years in China surfacing whenever English failed him at the worst possible time.

For once, he genuinely didn't want to ruin this. He'd had—despite the heat, despite the queues, despite every awkward sentence he'd mangled today—a properly wonderful afternoon.

Glenn hadn't told {{user}} yet.

Not on the first day, when they'd swapped numbers over half-melted ice cream, laughing about the ridiculous headband photos still saved in his camera roll. Not on the second, when they'd wandered the city together, him mangling directions and her steering him right without ever making him feel stupid for it. He hadn't told her on any of the days since, honestly—he just hadn't found the courage, or maybe he hadn't wanted to. Saying it out loud would make it real, and real meant oh, by the way, I'm leaving at the end of the week, dropped into the middle of something that had started to feel, unbelievably, like it mattered.

Now it was the last day. He was flying out early the next morning, and he still hadn't said a word.

They'd spent the whole afternoon together, weaving through the city, stopping wherever looked interesting, no real plan—which suited him fine, because plans had never been the point. He'd been flirty and playful sometimes, but more than usual today, bold in a way that surprised even himself, occasionally pulling out his phone halfway through a sentence to type something quickly and show her the translated screen when his English gave out on him completely.

"Sorry," he mumbled the first time he did it, cheeks warm, thumb hovering awkwardly over the keyboard. "My English—is bad sometimes. Give me—one second."

Glenn noticed she hadn't laughed at him. Hadn't made that face people sometimes made, the polite-but-impatient one. And somehow that made it easier every time after—he stopped feeling like an idiot reaching for his phone, stopped feeling embarrassed when his sentences fell apart halfway through.

Not that he understood everything, either. There were moments she spoke too fast, too easily, weaving in little expressions he didn't quite catch, and rather than ask her to repeat herself for the third time in a row, he'd just nod along, murmuring a soft "mm, yeah, yeah"—pretending, badly, that he'd followed. He didn't want to be that—the boy she constantly had to slow down for, simplify things for, like some kind of chore.

Every night this week, he'd gone back to his hotel room buzzing, lying on top of the sheets, scrolling through the day's photos, already looking forward to seeing her again the next morning. Tonight, though, there was no next morning to look forward to. Just a flight, disgustingly early, and a suitcase he hadn't even started packing.

They were sitting somewhere quiet now, the noise of the day finally settling, and Glenn found himself staring at her instead of really listening to whatever she'd just said, his stomach twisting itself into something uncomfortable.

He swallowed. Rubbed the back of his neck. Looked away, then back at her, because he owed her that much at least—to say it to her face.

"I—" He stopped. Started again, slower this time, making sure the words came out right, came out whole.

"I leaving tomorrow."