my name is not loulou 2

For a while I told everyone my plan. Friends smirked. My social studies teacher, a man I idolized, told me baldly that I couldn't do it. "But I read this book," I explained to him, fervent and eager. "By this guy. He did it -- he traveled the world like that, he really did."

"The difference is," he said severely, "He is a he, and you are a she." I gaped and recoiled like he'd slapped me in the face. It was 1982. Hadn't he heard?

After a while I stopped talking about it. It got embarrassing -- not the plan, but the condescending smiles. And then things changed -- I mean, I changed. Like everyone else, I got caught up in SATs and college applications. I ended up at one of those colleges where people tell eachother, "We're practically an Ivy League school -- in fact, we're better than the Ivy League schools -- but we don't concern ourselves with silly labels. We're serious people who care about academics, about research. But we could be one of those schools -- an Ivy League school -- if we cared! But we don't!" I turned eighteen in late October, not in a hardscrabble mountainside village or jungle camp south of nowhere, but at a packed campus showing of American Werewolf in London.


Four and half years later, graduation loomed. Everyone else was busy buying expensive suits, having signed on with Price Waterhouse or Smith Barney or whatever, companies who'd come to campus in the fall dragging a wide net to get the bottomfeeders. The others were all aced in for grad school or med school or scholarships at Oxford. They high-fived eachother in the lecture halls: So Maryland said yes! Way to go, bro! I hadn't found the heart to commit to anything. I was on the verge of becoming a hanger-on, one of those rare embarrassments who find work at the bank or liquor store after graduation and stand hungrily on the fringes of the university, trying to keep a desperate grip on campus life while it rushes past them as uncaringly and unstoppably as a train.

Somewhere in the long blue pause of senior year, I remembered the old dream. Travel the world -- I could do it now! On the loose in Europe and beyond, I could pass myself off as not just an aimless drifter, but a free spirit! An adventuress! A girl too damned interesting to follow the crowds of my classmates as they trudged forward into lives of witless drudgery!

I went back to my mother's home to gather up a few things I'd need for the journey. I would take only the essentials: bike, passport, sleeping bag, socks, tools, Eurail pass. When I was all packed, my panniers were brimming and my tools-and-important-stuff bag had just a little bit of extra room. It turned out that I had barely enough room to fit my Loulou, when I got her -- as small and cunning as she was.

But as I counted the days down nervously, clutching my one-way ticket in sweaty hands and fending off my mother, Loulou had not yet come across my path....