"Where Tom Jones is From"

         I have a headache that's radiating through my eardrums. The pain starts in the inner corner of my eyes and throbs outward. I imagine that my head is probably water-logged from holding back tears since Amsterdam-Schiphol, so the pain must be my brain trying to escape the flood by seeping out through my ears. It's not that I'm particularly sad to be out of Colorado, or to be away from my grandparents, and I'm not scared to be alone. It's more shock than anything, because I can't believe that I've actually done it. Leaving was always the plan because I've never seen anything wrong with running away from your problems. Three airports, eight time zones and thirty-six hours and I've finally reached Cardiff International. The captain assures us that it's 7:40 AM, but my body wholeheartedly disagrees.

         One of my carry-ons is stuck in that fucking overhead compartment but the population of the plane, as a whole, is totally lacking in compassion for my situation. I punch at the worn canvas of the bag, tug and silently plead for this miniature disaster to be over. 'Please God, please Saint Michael, Saint Anthony...whatever saint it is that watches over travelers... What's his name?' Immediately I conjure up a sparkling image of Mother Superior in my head. 'Saint Christopher!' she says emphatically. I give the bag a final tug, frowning with concentration and it topples out of the overhead into the middle of the aisle. I pick it up and throw the strap over my shoulder. It immediately breaks. The canvas bag cradled awkwardly in my arms, I struggle toward the planes exit, trying to wrangle my backpack in the same breath.

         The entire trip had been hellish. I'd attempted to read the first chapter of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter four times but hadn't comprehended anything beyond Spiros Antonapoulos wearing a stupid smile and making candy. After this unsuccessful attempt at bettering myself I spent the majority of my time alternating between The Kinks 'This Time Tomorrow' and Bob Dylan's 'My Back Pages', the first of which made me wildly excited and the second of which had my mind muddled and reduced me to a practically unrecognizable mass of mess.

         When I step off of the plane, though, somehow everything feels better - lighter. The air is bracing. It seems to be denser than the air at home, maybe because of all the extra precipitation. Lamely enough I label it a 'healing elixir' in my head and make a mental note to talk to Hawkeye about it. He would understand. I imagine that I can taste the salt but that idea fades after my initial romanticism, which lasts about forty seconds, ends.

         Nevertheless, the five-minute walk before entering the building and reaching the customs counter is like heaven. We reach the queue, which is as oppressive but quick-moving. I try to balance filling out my arrival card, holding onto my bags, searching for my passport and making it into the right line. The customs woman that finally calls me forward is pleasant-looking: blonde, bronzed and big-boned. She's also exceptionally cheery.

         "Hiya!" She chirps in what I assume has to be an over-exaggerated accent. "'Ow wuhz yer fly-it, then?"

         I don't understand her and I make no secret of it. Instead I just blink at her and shake my head back and forth stupidly. She raises her voice to try to imply that she is indeed speaking English and that I should be able to understand her, despite her valley accent.

         "Are ya stayin' in CAREdiff?" She asks, tilting her head to the side to show me that she's asking me a question even though her intonation falls at the end of the sentence instead of rising.

         "Care-eh-diff?" I experiment like shy toddler.

         "Yeah," she replies very slowly and still quite loud, enunciating each syllable, "do yeh know where yehr goin'?"

         "Oh, oh. Pontypridd?" I sort of mumble the name, unsure if I'm pronouncing it correctly.

         "Oh aye," she responds with a certain giddiness now, "Ponty! 'Swear Tom Jo-ens is from, ya know!" She taps on a day-to-day calendar sitting next to her computer screen. Todays page features Tom Jones in a black Speedo squatting awkwardly in front of a pool, a cross necklace barely visible through his nest of chest hair.

         "Oh?" I say, but she doesn't seem to appreciate my lack of enthusiasm so I add, "Oh!"

         "Aye!" She takes my passport, examines it and questions me about my plans. Where am I staying? How long will I be staying in the 'Island of the Mighty'? And God, I wish I knew so I could be honest, but I can't. I assure her I'm visiting a friend in Pontypridd for two weeks, which she seems to think is a reasonable sort of vacation so she lets me through.

         The buses don't start shuttling people to the train station until 9:12 so I claim a corner in the front lobby of the airport and start a mental list of all of the things that can possibly go wrong before noon. I'll get on the wrong bus, I'll get on the wrong train, I'll get pick-pocketed or molested or rained on. If I do make it to Cardiff I'll never figure out how to get to Pontypridd. Even if I do make it to Pontypridd, I'll never find Isabelle's house. And if I do defy fate and make it to Isabelle's house, she definitely won't be home. It's at this point that I wish I would have left a more serious answering-machine message for her instead of the short and rather ominous, "It's Audrey. I'll be there on Thursday morning at 7:40 AM, flight 9368 with KLM. I'm serious this time, really." Impromptu planning never pays off. I stretch my arms out over my carry-on and rest my head on them, figuring I'll just rest my eyes until the bus starts running for the morning.

. . .

         "What are you doing?" Isabelle is roughly shaking my awake and untangling my carry-on strap from my throat, which in turn gets entangled in her long white-blonde hair. "Sorry we're late!" She continues, leaving no room in between to breathe before she switches to, "Kyle is a complete waste of time when it comes to driving, and I don't know why he didn't let me drive in the city. I mean, I told him, 'Just stay home with the dog', just let me have, what...ten minutes without him? But God! If it wasn't for that job, I swear to you, I'd never have any time to... Oh! There we go. Here he is."

         Christ I'd forgotten how fast she talks! Isabelle draws a compact cell phone out of her jacket pocket and balances it between her ear and her shoulder, at the same time picking up my carry-on.

         "Fuck off please!" She says loudly in the receiver, and then listens. "Oh, no. Yeah, thanks." She nudges me with her toe as she chucks the cell phone back in her pocket. "Come on then. He wanted to know if we needed help with the bags. But God! You didn't pack much. Is this all you packed?"

         "I didn't think you'd get my message."

         "Of course I got your message," she responds matter-o-factly, "don't you know how answering machines work? I suppose you don't, John Hawkes and Claire never had one, did they? Well, welcome to the 1980's and beyond."

         I'm still sitting on the floor, clutching my backpack. For the first time, Isabelle looks at me - really looks at me, and her draw-on eyebrows raise and her eyes soften and she smiles. "You look like hell."

         I snort and avert my eyes to the dirty tile underneath me. "The Cardiff sun isn't doing any favors for you either."And it was true. The copper tan she'd always been so proud of had long ago faded, leaving her as pasty as me.

         "Ha, you got that right. Come on. Let's go home." She says.

. . .

         I wake up in a small dark room. The heavy beat of MGMT pulses strongly from the room beneath me and I'm surprised that I hadn't woken up before. There's a faint smell of hand-rolled tobacco in the room, but it's not that stale smoke smell. It's fresh, like it's still rolling out of a cigarette tip. I struggle to open my eyes, my mascara-covered lashes disentangling themselves from one another. I adjust to the light in the room - artificial, the light of street lamps streaming in through the one window in the corner of the room. Standing close to the doorway is a man. He looks to be around twenty-five, chest-length dreadlocks and a very thin mustache. His face is all angles and his eyebrows are knitted together. He's obviously scrutinizing me as he pulls lazily on a stubby cigarette.

         "Are you coming down?" He asks with a weird sort of English drawl.

         "Who are you?" I return, pulling the blankets on the bed into a protective cocoon around me.

         "Thom, Thom with an a-sch." He says simply.

         "A what?"

         "An 'h'." He repeats.

         "Oh." I say, and we sit there for a moment just staring at one another. "Well, what the hell are you doing in my room?" "Just wondering when you're going to come down to the party," He says completely unaffected. "Isabelle sent me up to get you." He leans against the wall and tilts his head a little, almost challenging me to be angry.

         "So," I reason aloud, "Isabelle sent you to get me and instead you decided to watch me sleep."

         "Yes I did." He grins, looking pleased with himself rather than ashamed.

         I push the covers off of me violently and get up, reaching the door in two steps. Thom recoils, as if he's used to being hit by girls, but I open the door and brush past him right down the narrow staircase. The entire first floor of the house is packed with people, all very presentable compared to me in my current state. I haven't showered in 48 hours and I'm still wearing my crumpled traveling clothes. I have an unforgivable case of bed-head and even under normal conditions I consider myself to be somewhat unsightly. Isabelle is waiting at the bottom of the stairs in a short satin dress with an empire waist. She looks like she's going to a cocktail party.

         "Oh good, you met Thom!" She chirps, holding her hands out to me as some sort of gesture of friendship or protection, I'm not sure which.

         "Isabelle, please. That guy freaked me out, I'm tired, and I’m starving. Do you have something to eat?"

         "Oh God Audrey, I'm so sorry! We don't really keep that much food in the house. I'm a terrible cook. We usually just go out for dinner." She looks genuinely disheartened, but then brightens almost immediately. "Oh, we have Jell-o! Well, Jell-o shots..."

         "Jell-ee shots!" Says one of the men walking by the banister.

         Isabelle nods at his correction. She points toward the kitchen and I push my way through the crowd of over-dressed twenty-somethings. Not only are the dresses short enough to be shirts but the overwhelming height of the heels the girls are wearing makes me at least three inches shorter than anyone else. God, I'm disgusting. I attempt to brush my fingers though my hair to make myself slightly less disheveled but to no avail. My fingers get caught in the ratty waves and tangles and I give up.

         By the time I reach the kitchen I notice something: everyone is looking at me. Apparently I am the new center of attention, and I couldn't be less prepared for it. The Jell-o shots, when I find them, are red, white and blue. It's at this point that I realize the party is probably in my honor. Oh God, could this be any worse?

         "How long have you been here?" I ask the girl standing next to me whose hair is set in elaborate finger-waves all over her head.

         "Oh, three hours I would guess. Say, are you Audrey?"

         I nod guiltily.

         "I'm Claire!" She spouts, immediately excited. "I work at 10 Feet Tall, Kyle supplies us with our local lagers. We've become pretty good friends."

         "Oh, I forgot Isabelle's husband owns that brewing company." I start to respond, but within seconds Isabelle is yanking my arm and pulling me away from Claire, leading me back toward the staircase.

         "I hate that bitch." She announces, and glares icily at Kyle who's across the room. He shrugs his shoulders at her comically in a 'what the hell did I do now?' sort of way. Within minutes of being by the banister I'm set upon again by my "new friends" who Isabelle says that she's handpicked for me. "Except Claire. She has no redeeming qualities. None whatsoever."

         I meet Gareth and Rhys from CIA, which stands of Cardiff International Arena, which is apparently a great music venue in Cardiff. I meet Daniel who works with Kyle at the Artesian Brewing Company, and Gwyn from one of Isabelle's favorite haunts called Troutmark Books. Edwyn and Aisling run the only Silent Disco in the United Kingdom, Jez is Isabelle's personal stylist at Top Shop and Ffion apparently helped Isabelle find the right face wash one time at that hippy vegan soap place called LUSH. I immediately forget how I'm supposed to know Gemma and Geraint, and by the time it comes to Maxwell and Owen I really couldn't care less. Thom tries to re-introduce himself a total of three times but Isabelle shoos him away like he's a gnat.

         I quickly begin to understand that the best way to trick people into thinking you have something in common with them is by pretending you know where they're from. In Wales, this is done by asking where someone is from, waiting for the answer, and then responding, "Oh, that's the one with the castle, right?" And the answer is always yes, because there are more castles in Wales than there are people, probably.

         With each new person I meet comes another Jell-o shot, one after the other, like they're bearing gifts in order to earn my time. Red shot, blue, red, white, white, red and blue again. I'm tipsy in ten minutes, drunk in a little more than fifteen and by the time the clock strikes 1:00 AM I'm having a great time but barely keeping myself pulled together. I'm dancing in between Gareth and Rhys who have immediately taken me under their wing. 'American Boy' is playing on Isabelle's 'US of PartAy' playlist, and I'm singing Kanye's part while Rhys takes Estelle's. Thom is prowling around the dance floor like a scavenger, waiting for me to get off on my own again. Then the music stops suddenly and everyone dances for a couple more seconds while their bodies try to catch up with their brains. Everything seems like slow motion as Geraint lifts me up from my waist and sets me delicately on a coffee table in the middle of the living room. I stand there like a muppet as Isabelle directs everyone to raise their glasses to me in a toast. It's like I'm standing in a sea of sequins and sloshy drinks while everyone stares up at me with their full attention on my platform.

         "To my best friend Audrey," Isabelle starts, "who I couldn't be happier about having here in Pontypridd with us."

         I nod dumbly as the party guests erupt in cheers and cliché American catchphrases. I swallow a few times, trying to keep everything in my throat running in the right direction - down, and I shift from foot to foot anxiously as she proceeds.

         "Audrey, I hope you're happy here with us," she continues, “and I want you to show everyone what being an American woman-"

         And it's at this point that I turn away from the crowd in front of me and heave red-white and blue into an ice bucket set very-luckily at the corner of the table. Most of the guests gasp although there are a couple of intermingled 'oohs' and 'ahhs'.

         "-is all about," Isabelle concludes as I finish puking and gagging all over the various bottles of beer in the bucket. It takes me a few seconds to gather myself, but eventually I wipe my mouth of on my hand and, placing both palms on the table I'm standing on, push myself upright onto my feet.

         "Thank you." I say as sincerely as I can manage, and then I sway slightly.

         Thom is at my side in a heartbeat, hands on my arms and helping me to get down from the tabletop safely. "Come on Princess," he says as he holds me to him with an arm around my waist and guides me toward the stairs. Thom wrangles me toward my bed and helps me lie down, then wipes my face off with his bare hand and smoothes my hair back from my forehead. He doesn't say anything to me for a few moments but just smiles reassuringly. Then, "It's okay sweetheart. Welcome to Wales."

         The last thing I hear is someone yelling, "God bless America!" from downstairs.