A Drop of Night(10)

“Good.” I watch a twisted old tree by the side of the road grow closer, larger, gone. “Also, normal people didn’t go on this trip.”

“I don’t know; you’re pretty regular. Garden variety, some might say.”

“Excuse me?” The words drop with a cold, dull thud.

“I’m kidding, gah.”

He’s probably making a face, furrowing his brow, being weirded out. I don’t care. I do care, but at some point you have to stop caring or you become Chernobyl-dead-zone levels of crazy. Of course I’m excited to be here. I can’t wait to get into the palace, start discovering things, forget about New York, forget about college and the next sixty-plus years of my life that I still have to muddle through. I just don’t know how to communicate that to people.

“So, what are you here for?” Jules asks. “What are your stakes?”

I jam my feet up onto my seat and stare at the tips of my sensible brogues. I can’t actually tell him. What am I going to say, that I’m being all Huck Finn and running away? Rebelling against the status quo, searching for redemption, trying to find an identity outside of being a punching bag for my dysfunctional family’s psychoses? Because that’s what I’m here for, and I don’t need him to tell me that what I really need is therapy/some people have actual problems/those shoes are Prada; how could you possibly be unhappy?

“I’m here for the experience,” I say. Lie. Wow, I can’t even be a not-sociopath right. “And to practice my signature forging.” I sling a wrist across my forehead. “Those selection rounds, whew! Got any dotted lines requiring signatures from parents and guardians? I’ll sign them for you.”

“You forged your parents’ signatures? Wait, do they even know you’re here?”

“They think I’m in Azerbaijan. I left a note.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong with your parents?”

“Look, Jules? You’re nice and everything, but you need to mind your own business.”

The Mercedes rumbles through some road construction. Bright cones flicker past like little lighthouses, gone in an instant. My chest feels tight. I don’t look, but Jules’s expression is probably bordering on disgust.

“Well, you certainly look like you’ve had a rough life,” he says. “Malnourishment. Constant threat of war. No clothes but what you could scrounge out of the charity dump. How did you ever make it this far. . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. D’you think it’s strange they’re letting teenagers into a find like this? I mean, they could have gotten some veterans. Famous art historians or something. Doesn’t it strike you as odd?”

I squint at him. “No. There are going to be famous art historians and veterans. Dorf’s here. And anyway, we worked for this. We have qualifications. I’m sorry you have such a low opinion of your skills, but I feel like I’ve earned this.”

I don’t. I don’t feel like I’ve earned anything.

“You’re not even out of college,” Jules says. “You’re saying you’re right up there with the greats and they couldn’t have gotten anyone better if they tried?”

“I’m saying, no one’s been down there yet,” I snap. “I’m saying there haven’t been many tests or age verifications, and no one knows anything until we get in there and start combing the place. So until then, yeah, teenagers are a great option. Good night.”

I curl myself into the corner, and I feel empty, straight-up miserable. Wave at your chances of friendship as they pass, Ooky. You’re being diligent as ever. There’s this special talent humans have that they can be unhappy no matter where they are. No matter who they’re with and what they have. Or maybe that’s just my talent.

I pretend to fall asleep. Jules isn’t talking to me anymore anyway.








Chateau du Bessancourt, October 6, 1789


The market women marched on Versailles yesterday. They killed two guards, relieved them of their heads, and mounted their grisly trophies on pikes. “Like apples on a spit,” Guillaume told the servants gathered around him in the front hall, and a gasp went up, a frantic chorus of rustling aprons and whispered oaths.

We were not supposed to hear, my sisters and I, but we stood at the crack in the music room’s doors and listened.

Guillaume had been at Versailles, waiting to deliver a message from Father, when news came of the market women’s approach. He claimed to have seen the queen herself running for the hall of mirrors with the young dauphin. He said that the royal family fled to Paris, that Louis XVI was as good as headless already.

My sleeves stick uncomfortably to my wrists. My mouth is dry. I hurry my sisters out the other side of the music room, and I try to distract them with fumbled card tricks, but I cannot focus and I drop the deck. Father has already left the chateau, gone down to the Palais du Papillon. Again a casket was sent to Mama, an invitation asking her to come with him into his palace. Again I intercepted it:

My darling, it said, the writing splattered and uneven, ink beads on an ink thread, as if Father paused many times during the forming of each letter to consider the next.

It is no longer safe to remain in the chateau. I have heard whispers, received letters. A storm brews in Paris that will rain blood and ruin on France as it has not seen in a hundred years. Soon there will be looting and death and chaos. The king will be beheaded and his wife as well. A wave of human filth will flow across the land. But you, my chérie, you have nothing to fear. For such a catastrophe as this I built the Palais du Papillon: so that no matter what terrors befall the world, our way of life shall go on, the beauty and tranquility of our grand culture preserved forever. I promise you, you shall have every comfort in the palace. You will be safe, my treasure. You will be cared for.