by Joy Preble
All of which would be neither here nor there except for one thing—my brother David had played football. He was the top varsity receiver his sophomore year, when both Adam and I had still been in eighth grade. Things were a little less glorious his junior year, of course, since that’s when the cancer was diagnosed, and things kind of went downhill after that. But he’d been this absolutely phenomenal player—the kind who probably goes on to get college scholarships and maybe even has a chance at going pro, if he wants to.
Unless, of course, he dies before he even takes his SATs.
I’d seen the tribute invitation on the kitchen counter a few weeks ago. Neither of my parents had mentioned it beyond that. Two years might be a long time for some things. But for this, for them, it was more like two seconds.
Adam nods, and we kind of look at each other for a few moments while all this goes through my mind and some of it possibly goes through his.
“I’m gonna be late,” I say eventually, and even though it’s true, it sounds sort of lame. But honestly, what else is there to say?
There’s a break in the crowd, so I make a run for it. I’ve hooked my backpack over just one shoulder in my rush to leave Coach Wicker’s class, and it’s starting to slide off, so I yank it a little higher. But then something sort of catches on my already crooked sweater, and I turn my head to see what it is as I round the corner to chemistry.
So I don’t notice the tall, leather-jacketed boy until I’ve smacked into him hard enough to cause my backpack to crash to the floor, smashing a couple of my toes in the process.
I mutter a couple of words that, were she still in earshot, Mrs. Kaplan would find just as objectionable as the length of my sweater. All I want to do is get to chemistry, and this idiot is blocking my way.
Only then I look up at his face. And realize it’s him.
The guy from the ballet. The one Tess calls Mr. Stealthy.
My toes—the same ones I’m going to have to shove into pointe shoes this afternoon—are screaming, but he’s standing there with that same annoyingly perfect posture. And staring at me with those sky blue eyes.
Lots of things happen here at good old Kennedy High. But having my blue-eyed—and, okay, lean and definitely packing some serious muscle under that leather jacket—stalker appear out of thin air was not something I expected.
We eyeball each other for a few seconds. And then a few more. He shoves his hand through that slightly shaggy, chestnut hair, like maybe he’s a little shy or nervous or possibly just aware that he’s kind of freaking me out with all the staring.
“I—uh, I saw you the other day,” I say finally. Maybe Mr. Stealthy is actually mute or overdosing on lithium or something. “At the ballet,” I finish lamely when he continues to say nothing. “You know, Swan Lake? I’m in pointe class this year, and we have to go to at least one ballet each semester so that we can…”
I dry up. There’s no point in babbling if he’s only going to stare. Even if maybe Tess was right and he is sort of hot. But then I remember Adam and remind myself that guys who can’t carry on conversations usually try to express themselves in other ways that eventually get boring and repetitious.
“I’m Anne,” I tell him. I have no idea why I’m telling him, except that it’s been an odd couple of days with the dreams and all, and maybe my defense system isn’t what it used to be. “Anne Michaelson. And you are—?” I flash him a smile and hope it will finally encourage him.
Amazingly, it does.
“Ethan,” he says. “Ethan Kozninsky.” He smiles back and opens his mouth as if to start another sentence, except the warning bell bleats and cuts him off just as things are finally starting to get somewhere.
I bend down to retrieve my fallen backpack. But Ethan bends down too, and we sort of smack into each other again. And his arm brushes—hard—against mine as we both grab the backpack at the same time.
We both jolt backward. A rush of something that feels like energy courses through my arm, flashes upward until I feel it in my face like a fever. Ethan holds my gaze with those blue eyes. And then he smiles.
“Some static,” he says mildly.
“Static?” I grab the pack from him. Pain still spikes through my arm so intensely that for a few seconds, it’s hard to collect my thoughts. “That was more than static. I don’t know what it was, but it was way more—”
The bell rings again. A few feet in front of us, Mrs. Spears’s door is still open. If I sneak in now, I can escape getting another tardy.
“Anne,” Ethan says. And then he pauses.
“I’ve gotta go,” I tell him. I make a dash for the room. But something makes me stop just as I’ve got one foot in the door. I turn around.
And realize that once again, Mr. Stealthy is gone.
Tuesday, 11:00 am
Ethan
“Dude.” A girl with a ring through her eyebrow and a small stud right at the top of her lip steps out of the bathroom as I head down the hallway, now mostly empty. “Can I bum one of those? I’m all out.”
It’s only then that I look down and realize I’ve yanked the pack of Marlboros out of my pocket.
“Uh, sure,” I tell her.
Clearly, I haven’t grown any more articulate in the last thirty seconds.
Or any brighter, as she continues to stand there until it occurs to me that I need to pull a cigarette or two out of the pack and hand them over since that’s what I’ve offered.
“Thanks, dude,” she says, and then I hustle myself out of the building before I make an even bigger mess of things than I already have.
I’m still dying for a cigarette, but as I’ve finally remembered that I’m supposed to be an eighteen-year-old senior standing on the sidewalk outside his public high school, that’s pretty much out of the question. So is the dying, for that matter, but that’s quite another story—one to add to things I’ll eventually impart to Anne. Once, that is, I figure out a way to stop actually acting like the tongue-tied schoolboy I seem to be.
So I have to wait until I’m well out of sight and headed down the street to where I’ve parked my car before I fish the Marlboros back out of my jacket pocket, light one up, and take a few deep drags.
I realize that I could smoke the entire pack and still be what Anne would call me if she knew the word.
Zalupa . As in, Russian for dickhead. As in, the guy who waits and searches for decades for this specific girl and then when he finds her, stands there like an idiot and just stares. As in, the guy who is me.
Ethan Kozninsky. Zalupa.
Maybe the words froze in my throat because suddenly they were too big, too monumental, too important to say. Or maybe it was because, in truth, there is no way to prepare her for a destiny about which she knows nothing—and a task I’m fairly certain she will reject as impossible or crazy or both.
Maybe I’ve always been the wrong one to tell her, but it’s far, far too late to do anything about that. I can only keep walking to the car that I’ve parked a fair distance from the school because it’s the Mercedes sedan I’ve always favored, and I figured it would stick out in the student parking lot. Only I’ve clearly underestimated the conspicuous consumption of the North Shore Chicago suburbs and have realized with one glance around the lot that the Mercedes is actually a lot less flashy than I thought.
Now it’s occurring to me that smashing her to the floor in between classes in order to inform her that she is the girl who alone has the power to save the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov from the hands of the witch Baba Yaga is just possibly not the best plan I’ve ever had.
Like I keep saying: zalupa.
I slip the Mercedes key out of my pocket as I cross the tree-lined street, flick the remains of the Marlboro to the pavement, and click the remote to open the door. Then I strip off my jacket, toss it in the back seat, and lean against the car while I roll up my sleeve.
My breath hitches a little as I see it.
The mark—round and red—sits on my forearm, just where it
brushed against Anne. It throbs as I run my fingers over it, the pain radiating up my arm. But it is there, this physical marking that connects her to me—the sign for which we have all been waiting for so very long.
Ever since that day in 1918, when I truly was the person I still appear to be. Since the time even before that, when Brother Viktor pulled me aside in the small stone chapel and told me what was coming.
“There will be blood, Brother,” Viktor had said. “Blood and suffering and destruction. The Romanovs are on the brink of destruction.”
His words did not surprise me. The troubles in Russia had been brewing for a long while. The scandal with that crazy bastard they called Rasputin—who died of poison or bullets or drowning or maybe even the darkest of magic, depending on whom you chose to believe. The obsessions of the tsarina and the weakness of the tsar. All of them had led to this moment.
But what he had said next—well, that was a different story.
I did not have to understand, he said. I simply had to do what I was told. The Romanovs must survive. They were believers, like us. That is why the Brotherhood existed. To protect them from those who wished them destroyed.
Still, what he had proposed shocked me. I had seen many things in the years I’d spent in the Brotherhood, learned many spells. But always there had been one rule: the natural order of life could not—must not—be disrupted.
Until now.
When I was a child, my sister Masha and I had loved the old Russian folktales—tales of the gigantic witch, Baba Yaga, who would eat us if we strayed too far from home. Of the pure and innocent Vasilisa, who traveled through the forest to the witch’s hut and who alone knew how to outwit the hag. But until that day, they had just been stories. Nothing more.
Only I was wrong.
And I think now as I roll down my sleeve, climb into the Mercedes, and turn the key in the ignition that perhaps there’s another reason for why I behaved so ridiculously with Anne. Because how do you tell someone that a fairy tale is real? That Viktor found magic old enough and powerful enough to hold back death? That Baba Yaga, the witch from those childhood stories I loved, truly existed? Our magic had compelled her to save a Romanov. And until Anne, like Vasilisa the Brave, could find a way to reach Baba Yaga’s hut, that same Romanov would remain trapped.
In truth—and it is occurring to me that this type of truth is not something I’ve explored for a while—I must admit that there is more to this tale—a tale that is mine and real, not something from a child’s storybook.
How will I tell Anne that I should have wondered more at what Viktor told me? That I should have questioned, even as I was afraid? But I was young, and I did not know the things I do now. I had little idea about history and still less about destiny. Even now, I’m not sure that I know enough.
I only know that back then, I was willing to pledge my life. Anastasia Romanov is not the only one who is trapped.
But all that seems about to change. I’ve found the girl who can reverse what happened that July day so many years ago—the day the Romanovs fell in a rain of bullets and blood. The day I watched as the air stirred and darkened and Baba Yaga’s enormous hands—the hands I believed were just part of a child’s fairy tale—reached down and closed around the tsar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, and swept her away. The day the world believed she died.
Through my sleeve, I touch the mark on my arm once more. I think again of Anastasia, held captive for so long. We will come for you, I tell her, even though I know she cannot hear me. Anne and I. We will be there soon.
But only if I can stop being such a zalupa.
Tuesday, 11:55 am
Anne
“What’s with your sweater?” Tess asks me, then takes a swig of her bottle of green tea. “Do you know it’s crooked?”
I just shake my head. “I so don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “Although it’s been a big conversation starter, let me tell you.”
Tess squinches up her forehead, shoves a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear, and, when I don’t choose to say anything further about the sweater, grabs the plastic fork that’s sitting next to her and digs into her salad.
She’s got the fork to her mouth when she looks at me again.
“You okay?” she asks. “Honestly, Annie, you’re kind of pale. You feeling sick or something? Maybe it’s the smell of this cheese.” She pokes her fork at the hunks of feta she’s extracted from her salad before my arrival. Tess loves to eat, but she’s notoriously picky about what crosses her lips. “’Cause it is seriously stinky.”
“Not sure,” I tell her as I flop down into a chair, unzip my backpack, and pull out my lunch sack. “About me, I mean. Not the cheese.”
An hour of chemistry has come and gone, and now it’s lunchtime. I’ve managed to make my way to the cafeteria, where everyone else seems to be ticking along just like always. Tess has picked all the feta cheese out of the Greek salad her mother has packed for her because it’s Tuesday and Tess’s mother—who lived in Athens her junior year at Brown because she was a Classics major—makes Greek salads on Tuesday. Our friend Sarah, who’s sitting across from me, is alternately texting her boyfriend and sipping a strawberry smoothie.
I, on the other hand, am a mess.
My arm no longer aches, but I’m pretty sure the only other time I’ve ever felt a buzz like the one that shot up my arm when I bumped into Ethan occurred when I was three and David convinced me to stick a My Little Pony barrette into a light socket.
Only that time wasn’t accompanied by a full Technicolor flashback of the girl and the creepy metal-teeth lady from my recurring dream. Or a feeling that everything was about to somehow shift in some way that I wasn’t sure was good and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it when it came.
Before my brother got sick, whenever something would go wrong, my mother would always tell us, “It will be okay.” No matter what the problem was—the time in Little League baseball that David struck out five games in a row; my unrequited crush on Jared Pierce in the fifth grade; the time I came down with the flu and couldn’t go on the seventh-grade trip to Washington, D.C.—she’d smooth her hand over my hair or rub David’s back and say, “It will be okay.”
And honestly, it seemed that it always was.
Until David got cancer, that is, and nothing was okay. Then I understood that she’d never really been sure—just hopeful—which is really not the same thing at all.
So now I don’t know what to think about what I’m feeling, and I’m suddenly missing my brother with an intensity that actually has tears stinging the backs of my eyes, even though the last thing I plan on doing right now is crying. David, I figure, would know just what to do about this Ethan guy, because that’s what older brothers are for. Like I’m certain he’d have pounded the crap out of Adam for plying me with three Jell-O shooters at Emma Hartwell’s party last June and then hoping I’d let him take my shirt off which—vodka or no vodka—I so wasn’t about to let happen.
Although I’m wondering if even David would know how to solve the mystery of a guy who keeps appearing and disappearing and whose touch seems to have the zapping equivalent of a stun gun or something.
“Feta?” Tess has forked up one of the hunks and is sort of waving it in front my nose and then in front of Sarah’s.
“Gross,” I tell her, but Sarah grabs the hunk of cheese off the fork and tosses it in the garbage can a few feet away.
“Enough with the stupid cheese,” Sarah says. She flips her cell closed and stuffs it into the pocket of her jeans. “You are so freakin’ compulsive sometimes.”
“I just like what I like,” Tess tells her, grinning, and all at once, everything feels normal again.
“You are so not going to believe who I saw before chemistry,” I say as I finally dig my turkey sandwich, apple slices, and bottle of water out of my lunch sack.
“Adam?” Sarah guesses. “’Cause actually, I saw you talking to him while I was headed to physics.”
&nbs
p; “Well, yeah,” I tell them. “I did see him. But it’s not him.”
“Then who?” Tess asks around a mouthful of salad. She pokes her fork into the plastic container, spears up another tiny crumb of feta, and holds it in front of my face.
“Do you have any attention span?” I swat her hand away. “He’s here. Ballet guy. I bumped into him—literally, I might add—right there in front of Mrs. Spears’s room. I mean like I crashed into him so hard that I dropped my backpack on my foot. And then we both bent down to pick it up and—”
“Stealthy hot guy?” Tess turns to Sarah. “Seriously hot. Wicked—oops, sorry, I know I promised—hot. He’s got this hair and these blue eyes that—well, you just have to see him.” She flips back to me. “He’s here? At Kennedy? Is he, like, a student? You’d think we’d have noticed or something. What did he say? Did he remember you?”
“What’s his name?” Sarah manages to squeeze in the question before Tess can ramble on again.
“Ethan,” I say. “He said he was Ethan Kozninsky. But other than that, he didn’t say anything. Which I guess is sort of weird, but I don’t think I really gave him any time, because the bell was ringing, and besides, when he bumped into me, it was like—”
“Like what?” Tess interrupts again. “Like you leaped on him right there in the hallway and performed your own special little love ballet?” She grins her evil Tess grin and forks up another bite of salad.
“You are seriously so annoying.” I chug some of my water, then break off a bite of the turkey on whole wheat and pop it into my mouth.
“Oh that’s right,” Tess says. “I forgot.” She turns back to Sarah. “Our friend Anne here thinks he’s a loser because he has über good posture. So,” she directs this part to me, “was he standing up really straight today?”
“Ha, ha,” I say. I pick off another bite of sandwich—and realize as I chew that, posture aside, I have my own series of unanswered questions about Ethan.