Page 58 of Guy's Girl
“Do we want to do a tour?” Clay asks as they head to the ticket window.
“Absolutely not.” Ginny links an arm through Adrian’s elbow. “This man will know far more than any tour guide could tell us.”
“That’s not—” Adrian starts, but Ginny is already dragging him inside.
Adrian has never introduced his city to foreigners before. In the past, when he visited, he hung out only with his grandparents or childhood friends, and none of them was particularly interested in sightseeing.
He did visit Buda Castle on a school trip once. He remembers filing inside, his classmates in their navy uniforms, his best friend, Jozsef, at the front of the pack, tugging Adrian along with him. He remembers their teacher explaining the castle’s long history, the many times it has been destroyed and rebuilt.
Adrian leads them straight to his favorite part of the castle: the view over the Danube. You can see everything: the Chain Bridge; the massive, red-domed Parliament Building; Gresham Palace; Fisherman’s Bastion; and Eötvös Loránd University, way down south. His gaze lingers on the university buildings. On instinct, he scans for the spire of the math and science department.
“I can’t tell you much about the castle itself,” Adrian says, clearing his throat and turning back to his friends, who are staring out at the view in awe. “But I do remember that it was first built as a fortress in the thirteen hundreds, and when Sigismund became the Holy Roman Emperor in the fourteen hundreds, Buda was named Europe’s political capital. I remember this quote our teacher told us. They said that Europe had three crown jewels: Venice on the waters, Florence on the plains, and Buda on the hills.”
“Damn.” Clay cups a hand over his eyes. “You know more than you think you do.”
Adrian shrugs. “I guess I do.”
He points out the landmarks to them, talking at length about parliament and the current corruption that is Hungarian politics. He’s warming up now, recalling facts that his friends and grandparents mentioned in passing. Stories of kings and queens, invasions and affairs, scandalous court intrigue.
As the boys take selfies with the view, Ginny leans in to Adrian’s shoulder and says, in a low voice, “Eötvös Loránd University—is that where your father taught?”
Adrian pauses. His eyes flick down to Ginny, then over to the school. “It is.”
She nods. They stand together in silence, staring at the ridges and clock towers of the university.
Eventually, Adrian turns back to the group and says, “I have something to show you.”
He leads them into the castle, through a series of hallways, then down a staircase markedthe labyrinth.
“What is this?” asks Clay, running a hand along the rough stone wall. The lower they descend, the cooler the air becomes.
“There’s a huge network of tunnels beneath this part of the city,” Adrian says. When they reach the bottom of the staircase, they enter a long arched stone hallway lit by eerie orange lights on the floor. “Criminals used to hide here when the authorities were after them.” His voice echoes off the tunnel. “When I was a kid, my grandpa told me that vampires lived down here, too. He said Dracula himself moved from Transylvania to Budapest because he liked the climate better.”
Ginny laughs at this story, a burst of unexpected noise, and the sound bounces off the tunnel walls. Adrian glances at her. Her choppy, layered hair glows a burnt orange. She’s acting happy. She danced in the car, chattered about nothing, and skipped ahead as they walked up to the castle. But it isn’t a happiness that Adrian believes. Not after last night. It’s a hostile sort of happiness, asawtooth smile, sugar-sweet words with barbs at the center. In the dim light, her laughing mouth is like a black-filled breach in the earth.
As they walk the labyrinth, Adrian tells a story about Jozsef, who, during their field trip to Buda Castle, hid behind one of the stone statues and, in the middle of their tour guide’s lecture on vampires and mythology, jumped out and scared the guide so badly that he wet himself. The prank earned him a round of applause from the students and a week’s detention.
In Jozsef’s words:érdemes. Worth it.
Even as Adrian speaks, he keeps one eye on Ginny, on the distance to her normally watchful gaze, on the tremble of her fingers as she reaches out to brush the stone gargoyle at the entrance to Dracula’s Chamber. If the rumors about her and Finch were true, he wonders how she can stand to be near him right now. How she can plaster a smile onto her face—however barbed, however filled with wounded hate.
They will eat lunch on Váci Street, just as Tristan planned. Váci is, unsurprisingly, a complete tourist trap, but the outdoor terraces are great for people watching. Plus, Adrian knows a café that serves excellentpaprikás csirke.
On their way to the café, they pass the towering statue dedicated to Mihály Vörösmarty, a famous Hungarian poet and playwright. The boys walk right past it, but Ginny stops and stares. Vörösmarty is seated high above her on a platform surrounded by Hungarian men and women—workers, couples, families, all carved from stone. Representatives of the population that Vörösmarty’s words touched so deeply.
After a long moment, Ginny says, “They built this... just for a poet?”
“He wasn’t just a poet.” Adrian glances over his shoulder. The boys, seemingly unaware, have continued out of the square. Helooks back at Ginny. “He was a beloved patriot. Like the Hungarian version of Shakespeare.”
“And they made a statue for him,” Ginny says.
“They did.”
Ginny continues to stare up at the figure. For the first time all morning, she seems focused, entirely drawn into the present. Slowly, she climbs up onto the platform and runs her hand along the inscription below Vörösmarty’s likeness.
“ ‘Be steadfastly faithful to your homeland,’ ” Adrian translates. “The opening lines of one of his poems. It’s like a second national anthem here.”
“A second national anthem,” Ginny repeats. She says nothing else. Just stays up on the platform, one hand hovering over the words, the other dangling at her side, fingers rubbing together, as if aching to grip something between them.
