It was cold in Germany in November, the kind of cold that gets clammy on your skin, that turns your face a hard kind of red - the kind of cold that makes your fingers naked without gloves. It wasn't pleasing to the eye, either, for all the trees were brown and bald, and the sky was a strange shade of dawn all day long. It was then, when you hug arms around your wool cardigan and press your face against the frigid metal window, that you decide that you are glad that you left Kentucky.

It gets cold in Kentucky at this time of year, of course, but it doesn't feel the same. It doesn't make you try to remember the past so hard that you'll forget the temperature of your body in the present. It doesn't smell the same, either; the Kentucky cold you grew up with does not have that whiff of Old Spice, hard perspiration, and luck. You think that perhaps that was the only spontaneous thing that you will ever do in your entire life, deciding to come here that is, and from here on out all you will know is this unthinkable, far-away sort of cold. You think about how a couple of words changed your life.

The heater in the bus broke down two days ago, and Lou tells you that they're working awfully hard to fix it. But the money is tight and the time is tight, and the translator he picked up somewhere for a cheap rate isn't always all that reliable. For now he's recommended that all of you should stick with layers.

You keep an eye out for the kid, who you feel just a little sorry for. At thirteen, he is a stick, with a baby face and long blonde bangs that blocked his crisp blue eyes. He's sleeping at the other side of the bus, tucking his knees into his chest and wrapping his arms around his legs. You remember how when you got across the Channel for the first time and the first waves of cold began to slide over the continent, he had confided to you in a sheepish little voice that he had packed "sorta wrong." He was from Florida, see, and the coldest cold they have in Florida is in January, when it's sometimes thirty degrees at night. So he'd packed lots of t-shirts and a couple long-sleeves and a few pullovers, nothing real heavy. You had been surprised that his mother had not packed for him; she seemed to take care of everything else.

You'd taken him shopping that afternoon, sneaking out for a couple hours, two fugitives bound by a common desire, and you'd been shocked at the price of European clothing but you'd bought him everything he chose. He'd pay you back later, see, when they were rich and famous, but now you'd just have to take him on the honour system. It was then that you'd really become friends. Well, you felt more like a big brother than a friend, watching out for him all the time, but you didn't mind when he called you his friend.

Words were funny things like that, the names that people call each other in the dark, when they think that no one is listening. You thumb through the used Munich guidebook copy that you'd picked up at a rest stop somewhere after Stuttgart. It was all in German, and you can't understand a thing, but you like looking at the pictures and guessing at what the captions say. You'd also picked up a German-English phrasebook that was small and pocket-size, and you have that laid out on your knee. You like penciling in the English equivalents of the long, complex-sounding words. It makes you feel industrious, sort of, and it passed the time. There was always a lot of time to kill on these busses. You also have a little bag beside you filled with phrase books from the other countries you'd been to so far on the tour. You collect them like some people collect postcards.

You are so absorbed in the task at hand that you do not notice the kid sliding in next to you until the bangs of his hair fall against your hand. You flick his face away and he bolts upright, grinning and brushing his floppy hair back across his forehead. "Whatcha doing?" he says, in that little-kid whine that grates on your nerves.

"Looking up words," you say. You wish he'd just leave you alone, because sometimes you really hate being the big brother type, but Jane's given him a moment of peace and you do, after all, feel sorry for him. Just a little, anyway.

"Why would you do that?" he says contemplatively, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners as he looks at your chicken scratch.

"To know what they say," you respond, shrugging. You don't really know why you do it. You just have this need to break code, to bring sense to a world of chaos. Or maybe it's you coming to terms with the fact that you're never going back there, to Kentucky, in the same manner again, and you want to hold on to the one language you have known all your life.

"But you know, like, we're only going to be here for a week," says the kid. "And it's like, we're not really having conversations with anyone, just a couple interviews I think, and for those we have the translator guy."

"Well, you have your answer right there," you say pointedly. The cold is suddenly very penetrating, in a manner that arrives subtly, and the kid shivers with the new chill, covering his skin with his arms. You take off one of your layers, even though you probably feel the cold more fiercely than he does, and stuff the sweater around his thin shoulders. You feel sorry for the kid. He's unprepared for this kind of thing, and his mother doesn't really dress him right.

"Thanks," he says, and it's like you've broken open the floodgates. He talks without knowing what he says, a torrent of words that mean nothing. You fidget, running your finger over a faded picture of the Alte Pinakothek building. You think you'd like to see the Rubens collection they have there. There is now a break in the jumble of words strung together, and you sigh with heavy relief. A look at his face makes your shoulders sink; he'd ask you a question, and is impatiently waiting for a lengthy response. You give Kevin, who is reading a magazine behind you, a withering look, and he shakes his head with a knowing smile on his face.

"Um, what was that?" you say, trying to squeeze the exhaustion from your whole face by tightening up your eyes.

"You haven't been listening to me, haven't you? Nobody listens to me around this place. I said, how can a sequel to 'Terminator' be possible? I mean, like, it defeats the whole point of the first movie. By saving herself, Sarah Connor makes that particular future that was there in the first movie nonexistent! Therefore, her son can't exist, can he?"

"It's called a paradox," you intone, but even this bit of chatter has caused your thoughts to go numb.

You can hear Kevin chuckling in the seat behind you, and you wish he had been close enough for a well-aimed kick.

That night you are assigned to a hotel room with Nick, since, as his mother commented bravely, the two of you had been playing so nicely together as of late. It's three a.m. and you are so tired that you can feel your flesh turn to lead. That Munich concert was small, but the crowd was unruly and over-enthusiastic. You are not used to being looked at like that yet. It does not make you feel altogether human.

But the kid. The kid loved the attention. The kid acted like he owned the stage he walked on, and the little girls in the front row screamed vulgar things at him in German so he couldn't understand what they were saying. He should have been absorbed by the lights that illuminated the stage, and engulfed by their brightness, like you had been, but those artificial lights only served to enhance something inside the kid that you had not really noticed before. You didn't understand what that thing was inside him, and you were afraid of it.

The hotel room is really crappy. The carpet is worn and thin, and one of those scratched cheap brands that you can probably find at Wal-Mart. The bed was supposed to be a queen-size, but it looked big enough to fit one and a half persons. You were surprised at how easily and how quickly you had gotten used to rooms like this and nights like this, with the kid chattering away and the noise in the hall and the heating unit making such a racket that it gave you a pounding headache.

Nevertheless, it is warm here, so warm that you have to strip down to a wife beater and boxers and the sweat is pouring down your flesh like rain. But the kid is loving it. With toothpaste in his mouth he tells you of how this reminds him of home, of hot days in Ruskin when the sun pours off your skin just like this. You decide then - hearing him rave about humidity for at least seven minutes - that you will never move to Florida.

When you are done with your teeth and with wiping the sweat off your face, you throw the heavy covers off the bed so that it is just a mattress and a sheet and lie down. You hope for peace and quiet, but you know that peace and quiet is next to impossible when the kid is awake.

The kid slips in next to you, wiping a smudge of toothpaste off his mouth and pulling the sheet up over his chest. He is talking himself to sleep, though he thinks he is having a great conversation with you. You turn over, and try to think of Kentucky in the summer and pretty girls running with horses.

It is then, when the kid grows silent and the only noise in the room is the steady rhythm of the heater, your sensitive hearing picks up something else behind the wall. Heavy breathing, perhaps. Some human noises. It sounds like Howie, you decide. And it doesn't sound like a girl is with him.

Your face is hot as you think of the kid beside you. He doesn't know about the deal with Howie, and you don't want to tell him. It would be like breaking out the birds and the bees, and the thought makes you nervous. But you know that the kid is listening to the sounds, and you don't know how you know without looking at his face, because you just know things like that.

You sigh, and you open your mouth to begin to form words. "You know, Nick�" you say, hesitantly, fumbling about for the right thing to say. The room is dark, so dark that it hurts your eyes, and you shield your face with your hands. "You are too young for this, you know."

You think you can hear the kid breathing unevenly, and maybe sniffling, but you can't sure. It's hard to distinguish the little sounds in this chaos of noise and heat. The kid moves up next to you, and his skin is hot to the touch.

"Ich traume auch, du weiss," he says, his German weak and salty, and you wince uneasily. It is the first time you have understood him perfectly, and it is the first time that he has learned that nothing will ever be the same again, and the first time he's spoken German since he's been in Europe. You don't know how you know; you just do. You wanted to know how he knew how to say that without looking at his guidebooks and his phrasebooks, and the mini dictionaries he sometimes buys. You want to know if he knew what those girls were saying to him at the concert in Munich.

But most of all, you think perhaps that he's not really as stupid and immature as Howie and A.J. make him out to be.

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