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turn to look at her and she smiles. I can tell she’s not used to having friends with her on these adventures. I love my parents, and I’m sure Maggie loves hers, but there’s just something so much more exciting about seeing the world without a guide. Without limits.
    And that’s how it feels tonight — like there are no limits.
    “What do you wanna do next?” she asks.
    “Well, first I definitely wanna take a photo just to prove that I’m really here! Nobody back home will believe me, otherwise!” I say, whipping out my phone and pulling Maggie in beside me as I turn the camera toward us. We both flash our most genuinely blissful, goofy grins and I snap the photo. Paris sparkles in the background, like the city herself is smiling, too. Always ready for a photo op.
    “Have you ever had a crepe with Nutella?” Maggie asks suddenly, grabbing my arm as though it’s the most important question in the world.
    “What’s Nutella?” I ask, furrowing my brow. Maggie throws her hands up and squeals.
    “Girl, you’re gonna find out en ce moment !” she replies, the French phrase rolling delicately and expertly off her tongue. For the first time, I feel the slightest dash of envy toward her. It’s not her money or her privilege that unsettles me — it’s the fact that she can speak the local language with such ease. While my high school only offered either Latin or Spanish as a half-hearted foreign language option, Maggie explained off-hand that during her lifelong travels with her parents she’s picked up French and Italian pretty fluently, and enough Spanish, German, and Russian to get by if need be.
    So not only is my roommate rich, but she’s also a language savant.
    Still, just like her money and familiarity with Paris are a benefit to both of us, her ability to easily communicate with the locals and read street signs are an enormous advantage. As long as I’m with her, I’ll never really be lost here.
    And I’m realizing, as we race back to the lift, that I am not simply a leech in this blossoming friendship — I have something else to offer. Maggie is coming out of her shell, possibly for the first time in her life, now that she has someone to adventure with. In the few short hours we’ve spent together, she has unfolded like a morning glory under the dawn of a bright sun. When we first met on campus, she was stiff and almost cold, her words and gestures awkward. Everything about her screamed ‘fish out of water.’ But with me encouraging and reassuring her, she’s really begun to express herself.
    For even though she may have felt at home waltzing in and out of designer boutiques, she was still reluctant to address a man selling pretty scarves on a street corner. She couldn’t meet the eye of the taxi driver. She apologized profusely any time she had to cross a street, even when we had the right-of-way.
    But now, the two of us are skipping and laughing down the Champ de Mars, the green grass tickling our bare ankles. At my insistence, before we left the flat to embark on our citywide tour, I managed to get her into a little black dress from my own suitcase. For although Maggie has many items of designer clothing, they all fall on the hyper-conservative side. She wears the kinds of clothes one would expect of a Sunday school teacher, not a world-traveler with a perfected French accent. So with much coaching, she put on my black dress, and I slipped into a white, lacy frock. The pair of us look like we belong in a hipster photo shoot, but I think we pull it off swimmingly.
    We find a crepe vendor on the edge of the green, and Maggie buys us both banana-Nutella crepes and a giant bottle of water. Then we settle down on the grass, staring up at the starry sky. The crepe is spectacular! Chocolatey, nutty, and just oh so light and delicious! And the evening? It’s amazing to me that we can still see the stars, faintly illuminated beyond the fuzzy glow of city lights. Back home, everyone always says