I’m a fresh 15 years old. I have braces with a wire to pull down a recessed tooth. I wear green acrylic glasses that make me look like an extra in Mr. Robot. I’m in Biarritz, France, a small resort city on the southwestern coast. Americans brought surfing to France here. I bring cargo shorts and a French-translated copy of A Game of Thrones. I’m three weeks into a summer immersion language program. I feel very, very young.

Everyone else on the trip is seventeen or eighteen. I live in the home of a couple in their 30s, who live with their daughter in one room. I am one of three American boys staying there. The daughter, 8, hates us because we have stolen her room for the summer, and because our French is bad, and because she is scared of us as boys. 

I am scared of these boys: Javier and Markus, both 17. They are tall and thin. Their skin is tauter than mine, their cheeks less round with youth. They know how to put in contact lenses, and how to speak to our homestay family with the subjonctif, and how to smoke a cigarette, and talk with confidence to one another. They wear thin tee shirts that hang off wide shoulders, board shorts, white sneakers. They know how to gauge who around them is worth looking at, and who they will make fun of in a Snapchat group. They know that our teacher—a red-faced Midwesterner with strawberry-blonde pigtails—is uncool, and that she is not worth their listening, and that making it to class is less important than sitting on the beach—the Grande Plage— all night with the girls and beers and cigarettes. 

They know how to kiss and have sex. They know how to talk about people’s bodies, to dissect them into references and innuendo. They know how to count the boys they walk alongside, and the girls they kiss and touch and ignore. They know how to charm our host mother, how to kiss bisous, how to say grace. 

I know none of these things. My French is shaky and slow. I can’t keep pace on our runs, and the shirts we buy at the surf shop swell and pucker on my round shoulders. I hate the polo shirts I’ve packed. I hate their fluency with girls and the fact they want them. I had come to learn French, but I am being asked to learn pauses, gestures, and looks, and I hate it. I don’t hate things. I hate that I hate this. 

Javier is nice to me: he sleeps in the bed parallel to mine, and lends me his books, and sometimes holds me back before we get to the Grande Plage to whisper advice. He points me to a girl I should talk to, and I talk to her, and I feel proud when he smiles. He speaks Spanish, and so while the Americans jabber loudly, he slinks away to sit and smoke a joint with the Spaniards down the beach. 

Markus makes my skin crawl. He’s thin and fit and does pull-ups on a beam in our room. He asks me how many I can do, and he laughs when I answer. He comes back past curfew and turns on the lights, waltzing in and asking us to smell his fingers. He keeps a list on his phone of the girls he has gotten on this trip. He’s a slob. He smells like cigarettes. He’s obsessed with Germany and I think it’s lame. It’s shameful, or instructive, or worse, to know him. 

Every night, we go to the Grande Plage and everyone sits with their feet in the cold wet sand and drinks and smokes. My hands are clean. The city goes right up to the beach, and still the sand is fresh, and the water clear. No one speaks any French. There must be a hundred teenagers here every night, communicating in broken English and Spanish and German, showing each other photos on our phones and immersing ourselves in anecdotes and body language. I hold a White Claw sometimes, but I don’t drink it. Markus tousles my hair. 

He drinks a ton. He shoves a beer at me and calls me a pussy when I place it down unopened. And I feel like a pussy, or I feel like a wimp, or I feel very gay, and quite young—incessantly, shamefully young. I can’t learn how to grow up right now, maybe never at all, and not like how he has. His spectre distorts and mutates. He’s a sociopath. He’s a fast learner. He’s a charmer, or the snake. 

When I can, I slip away from the horde and look at the dark water and remind myself I wanted to be here. I try desperately to make this a learning moment, but I won’t learn. I don’t grow up at all. I don’t have my first drink, and I don’t kiss anyone or smoke a cigarette. My French does not improve. 

This night, Javier goes off as he does to speak to the Spaniards. There’s a girl around his arm. I spend a while talking to some of the other younger kids. The 14-year-olds, two of them, have a curfew and complain. In Brooklyn, they can stay out later. I go back to the top of the beach, where the older guys lean against a wall and smoke. Markus is there alone, lying on the sand. He has had a lot to drink, someone jokes. He sits up, hearing his name, and turns over, puking. A girl in our class asks me to bring him back to our apartment. I get him to his feet, and put his arm around my shoulder, and begin the trudge up the hill from the beach. 

He starts to ramble like usual: he misses Utah, but not because he’s Mormon, he is Mormon, but Mormons are gay. The guys here act gay because they’re rich. France is so lazy. We stop at a bench so he can throw up in a trash can. He’s hungry. I buy him a cheeseburger. He eats it slowly, and when we get up to walk further up the hill, he pukes again, and I hold his head up, awkwardly, my ring fingers around his neck. 5 minutes later, we sit down at a bench along a busy road and he dozes off. I call my mom and tell her in a bored tone that I’m walking Markus up to our apartment because he’s drunk. We’re taking a break because he’s tired and I am tired. No, I wasn’t drinking, you know me.

Markus hears me and curses me out, so I hang up, and pull him to his feet. I grab his left arm and sling it around my shoulder—he’s taller, and so his knees bend and sway as we head up the hill. With each step I take, he lurches forward, his shoulder digging into my back. The air smells like spruce trees and nighttime and trash. I turn my head to the left to breathe in. Markus reeks—of hot breath, of sweat, of perfume, cut with beer, vomit, and cigarettes. 

We make it to the apartment house at the top of the hill. I shrug him off onto a bench and look up in the window to see if our home stay mother is asleep. It’s long past curfew, and she has been upset before. I hear Markus groan and turned to see him unzipping his pants. His head lolls back, mouth agape. He’s pissing in her garden.

Shit, shit, shit. It’s too late. We go inside, and quietly make our way upstairs. I get him into bed and make sure he takes out his contacts. Javier sits up, and then back down. I pass out as soon as I hit my bed. The lights are on.

The next morning at breakfast, I receive a death stare from our host. Apparently I’ve peed in her garden, she begins to tell me in English. It takes a while. Chansons play from a small radio, but are interrupted with an ad for Les Indestructibles 2. I stare at a digital clock as the divider between hours and minutes pulses. Markus has a headache. His seat is empty.

Je me uh regrette. I apologize in broken French: for the earth I did not soil, for my youth, for my slowness. Markus has a headache. Javier and I head by ourselves to class. He checks Snapchat and doesn’t look at me. I smell like sweat. Nothing changes. I cannot learn and will not learn.