The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  “Might be a little cold.”

  “Maybe next summer,” Angelica said, and Pip started to feel trapped by her small hand on his shoulder, and her other hand gripping his.

  The next night in the ballroom, he met two cheerful girls in pretty frocks, Barbara and Maisie. They’d become friends on the crossing, and their families were dining together, and they were happy to share Pip with each other on the dance floor. Angelica was less happy, and she shot him a stormy look when he made the mistake of catching her eye over Barbara’s or Maisie’s smooth round shoulder.

  She cornered him at the bar, where he was ordering lemonades. “Why are you dancing with them?” she hissed.

  “They’re nice girls,” he said.

  “They’re awful!” Angelica said. “They cluck together like chickens!”

  “Oh, they’re all right,” Pip said.

  “I thought you had taste and discrimination!” Angelica said.

  He watched her long blue gown swish away, and then he turned back to Barbara or Maisie, whichever it was, who came smiling to take the lemonade from his hand.

  * * *

  Pip wasn’t used to his shiny black shoes, and had never danced so much in his life. He winced as he sat on his bed and peeled off his socks. The next morning, the steward brought him sticking plasters for the blisters.

  “I’ve seen worse,” the steward said. “One of my young men came back every night with his feet bleeding. Like a cursed prince in a fairy tale.”

  “Did he survive?” Pip asked.

  “They all survive.”

  “None of them jumped into the sea?”

  “Not one.”

  “I don’t think they’ve met Angelica Lowell, then,” Pip said. “Or Deborah the fortune-teller.”

  “Oh, they’ve met worse,” the steward said.

  When the United States slid into her berth in New York a day later, Pip tipped the steward handsomely from his chess winnings.

  “I hope we’ll see you on the return, sir,” the steward said.

  “I might swim back,” Pip said. “Less tiring.”

  “You earned your cabin,” the steward said. “Take care of those feet.”

  Limping down the corridor, Pip received a good-bye kiss from Maisie and Barbara, one on each cheek. At his last breakfast, he saw the ominous Deborah, and she passed him a folded piece of paper. It contained an indecipherable poem about celestial bodies meeting in the sky. Her cheerful father gave Pip his card and told him to look them up if he was ever in Fort Lauderdale. On the staircase, the ghostlike Clara, in a dove-gray coat, offered her cold little hand in farewell.

  The crush of passengers and porters and trunks on the pier in Manhattan was overwhelming, and Pip struggled through it. Finally free of the pier, he stared up at the buildings. Everything here was different from how it was in London: the accents, the shouts, the smells, the traffic coming from the wrong direction, the sounds of the horns. It was winter, but the city seemed to generate heat: the men were ruder than in London, the crowd moved faster, the women were better dressed, sheathed trimly in wool. A man bumped into Pip on the sidewalk and told him to watch where the hell he was going.

  Pip carried his suitcase along, staring at everything, until a chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up beside him on Forty-Sixth Street. Angelica Lowell leaned out the back window, shading her eyes in the sunlight, with a lavender ribbon in her hair. “Can we drop you somewhere?” she asked.

  Pip hesitated. “I’m off to New Hampshire,” he said. “Any clue about trains?”

  “Penn Station,” Mr. Lowell told the chauffeur, who was already out of the car, taking Pip’s suitcase and stowing it in the front.

  Pip got in beside Angelica. Her father faced them in the open backseat. Pip felt that trapped feeling again, the sense that he might never escape these people.

  “I thought you were staying in New York,” Angelica said. “You said you were just going to look around.”

  “I have a friend in New Hampshire,” Pip said. He was struck by inspiration. “Her name’s Janie. She’s the best girl I’ve ever met, Janie is. She’s smart, and loyal, and brave. She’s American, like you. You’d like her.”

  Angelica stiffened. “I don’t know that I would.”

  “Sure you would,” Pip said. “Janie’s great. She’s a peach.”

  Mr. Lowell coughed.

  Angelica gazed out the car window. Her back was so straight that she didn’t touch the upholstery behind her.

  “Penn Station,” the chauffeur announced, stopping the car.

  “Ta,” Pip said, climbing out. “Don’t get out!” Neither of them moved.

  He took his suitcase from the chauffeur and swung it through the air as he walked toward the pillars of the enormous gray station. The bag seemed to weigh nothing. His feet no longer hurt.

  “Wait!” he thought he heard Angelica’s voice call.

  But he couldn’t be sure, so he kept walking. Pip had been released from juvenile lockups more times than he could count, and he recognized the elated feeling he had now: He was free.

  And he realized something else, with a shock: He hadn’t thought of Sarah Pennington all week.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Notebook

  When Janie realized that her notebook and Benjamin’s letters were gone, stolen by Mr. Magnusson or else vanished coincidentally at the moment he came into the kitchen, she went upstairs to the apartment fighting back tears. She didn’t want to explain the theft to Raffaello, for fear he would try to comfort her, so she told him she was just tired and wanted to go to sleep. He gave her a stricken look, went into his bedroom, and closed the door.

  When she was alone, Janie took out the glassine envelope Benjamin had sent, grateful that she hadn’t tucked that into the red notebook. She tapped the last of the powder into a glass of water and drank it down. Then she sat on the living room couch and closed her eyes.

  She imagined Benjamin in the dark on the deck of the Anniken, and was just settling into the memory when suddenly she saw blinding sun. Either she was getting better at this, or it was happening faster as more powder built up in her body. She was on a bicycle, moving through a chaotic city, dodging carts and cars and bicycles and motorbikes in the crowded street. Or no—she was in a kind of cart powered by a tricycle. A rickshaw. Someone else was pedaling. Benjamin must be a passenger. The images had trouble holding. She wished he would stop moving.

  “Benjamin!” she whispered, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her. She thought hard at him: “Benjamin!”

  No response. They dodged an old man with two heavy bags slung over his shoulder. The man, bent nearly in half, didn’t notice that he’d almost been hit. Where were they? What was this city?

  Then they stopped in front of a shop with dusty bottles in the window. The world stopped breaking up and grew steady. The door of the shop said VINORAY APOTHECARY. Was Vinoray a name or a place? Had they found another colleague of his father’s, part apothecary and part magician?

  And how could she tell Benjamin about the notebook if she couldn’t even get his attention? She thought of Magnusson standing by the coatrack, talking and gesturing and slipping her notebook into his pocket, and her cheeks burned with fury that she had let him trick her.

  Then the apothecary shop started to disappear, and Janie had the disorienting feeling that she was moving again, but in a different manner. She wasn’t on a bike, but in a car. She was in the deep, luxurious, leather-upholstered backseat, and a chauffeur was driving, and it was dark outside. In front of her, an enormous pair of pale hands flipped through her red notebook!

  Janie was stunned, and then realized: She had been thinking about Magnusson, not Benjamin. So now here she was, with him. His fingers pulled the folded letters from between the pages of her notebook. In a mumbling, meditative voice she hadn’t heard him use before—nothing like his social booming—he read Benjamin’s words aloud. “Dear J., How’s all? Really beastly industrial nastiness, here. Can’t help i
nsulting natives, apparently.” He didn’t seem to make any more sense of it than she had the first time. He flipped through the notebook’s pages, then stopped. She saw her note:

  Benjamin! Are you in Vietnam? Point to answer:

  YES NO

  The hands moved the open page to show it to someone, and Janie saw that Mrs. Magnusson was also in the backseat of the car, nearly invisible in the corner, tucked inside her fur coat with her eyes closed.

  “What do you make of this?” Mr. Magnusson asked her. “It’s her handwriting. Look.”

  The princess opened her eyes and glanced at the notebook. “You shouldn’t have taken that.”

  “Look, will you?” he said. “It’s like one of those notes Opal used to pass around with her friends. ‘Do you like so-and-so?’ And it’s in Janie’s handwriting. But why the hell would she ask if someone is in Vietnam?”

  “Because she wants to know,” his wife said.

  “But that’s a crazy question, if she can show him the note! If she can show the note, then he’s not in Vietnam!”

  “Maybe she was going to send it to him.”

  “Send it where?” Mr. Magnusson asked. “She doesn’t even know what country he’s in.”

  “They must have a way of communicating,” the princess said, unbowed.

  Janie tensed, watching. They were getting warmer. What else did her notebook reveal?

  Mr. Magnusson grew silent, thinking. “But how do they do it? Photographs? No. Unless they were using a telex machine. But for that she would need an address, a telex number.”

  “Maybe you can’t know everything,” his wife said, with evident satisfaction.

  “The girl could tell me,” Mr. Magnusson said.

  “But she won’t.”

  “I might persuade her to,” Mr. Magnusson said. There was something menacing in his voice.

  His wife said coldly, “You will not stoop to kidnapping.”

  “Oh, won’t I?” he asked.

  Janie’s eyes flew open involuntarily, and she was back in the living room, heart racing with terror. She couldn’t stay in the car with that man anymore, inside his body. She had the usual vertigo, and was careful not to move her head. She was sweating and afraid, as if someone were hiding behind the sofa, about to attack her. That was crazy, of course, but there was someone threatening her. She wasn’t imagining it.

  Magnusson knew she was communicating with Benjamin. Did he know who Benjamin was? It wasn’t clear. But she knew she couldn’t let herself be kidnapped. She wouldn’t be able to keep Benjamin’s secrets under pressure. That was why he and his father had given her the forgetting drug.

  Again, she had the feeling that someone was hiding behind the sofa. She forced herself to look back into the terrifying shadows. No one was there. Just soft little puffs of collected dust.

  She sat back down. It was all too much. She hadn’t even told her parents she’d been expelled from Grayson. She pictured herself trying to explain to them why she’d been kidnapped. “But Mom, the glassware was really fragile and complicated, and it would have taken me weeks to set it up again.”

  No. She could see the whole situation from her parents’ point of view now, and it was simple. It was time to go home. She had money from dishwashing and could buy a bus ticket before Magnusson even knew she was gone. She crept downstairs to the telephone in the restaurant and asked the operator to reverse the charges. She’d be waking her parents up in Michigan, but there were times when it was right to wake your parents up.

  Her father sounded groggy, but he sharpened when he heard the operator’s voice, and he agreed to accept the charges. “Janie?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  It was all Janie could do not to burst into tears of relief when she heard his voice. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed her parents, how much she wanted to be with them. “Dad,” she said. “I’m coming home.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Winter Wonderland

  Pip took a train from New York to Boston and then a two-hour bus ride to Grayson, New Hampshire. By the time he got on the bus, he’d had his fill of the American countryside. Out of boredom, he began a game of low-stakes gin rummy with a man in a gray suit beside him, but the man was a sore loser, so Pip arranged to lose until they broke even, then returned to staring out the window. He was already feeling nostalgic for the luxurious United States, where he could wander about while the miles churned by, and where the gamblers were more openhanded and gracious.

  In Grayson, he left his suitcase in a bus station locker and asked the solitary cabbie to take him to an Italian restaurant. He thought he should next find a bicycle so he could check off every possible type of American travel. Then a unicycle. Then walking on his hands. Either there was only one Italian restaurant, which was lucky, or the cab took him to the right one first, which was luckier. When he asked a waiter about Janie, the man said, “You ask Giovanna,” then fetched a bosomy Italian woman from the kitchen.

  “Janie went home tonight,” Giovanna said. “In the bus.”

  “I just came from the bus station,” Pip said. “She wasn’t there.” Had he come all this way just to miss her? Could he have walked past and not recognized her?

  Giovanna shrugged. “That’s where she went.”

  “All right,” Pip said, trying to think. “Home where? To Los Angeles?”

  Giovanna thought for a moment. “Mitchigan,” she said finally.

  “Mitchigan?”

  “Is a state,” Giovanna said.

  “What city?”

  “How should I know this?” Giovanna asked. “You ask my nephew. He is the friend of Janie.”

  “Is he here?”

  “No. He is practicing for this play. This is Janie’s fault also. I need my nephew to be a waiter. Later I thought he will be a big lawyer, like my brother in Boston. But now he wants to be an actor. Pfft. She causes a lot of trouble, your friend.”

  “Is she okay?”

  Giovanna lowered her voice confidentially. “I think she has some fights with her roommate.”

  “Who’s her roommate? Where?”

  “At the Grayson Academy,” Giovanna said. “A very beautiful girl. I think it is because of a boy.”

  “Where’s Grayson Academy?” Pip asked.

  Giovanna pointed. “Across the street.”

  So Pip used his feet, the simplest means of travel. The campus was dark, but there was music and light coming from one of the buildings. Pip made his way there. It turned out to be a gymnasium, and a dance was going on. There was a folding table outside the gym, where a boy and a girl were taking tickets. The boy wore a tuxedo and the girl a white dress, and Pip wished he had known about the dance. His dinner jacket was in the bus station locker, and he could have blended in. Instead he wore ordinary trousers and a woolen jacket against the cold. He moved away into the shadows and found another door. A boy and a girl came out, laughing and moony, staring into each other’s eyes, and Pip slipped inside before the door swung closed.

  Inside the gym, silver streamers shimmered. Most of the girls were in white, and blue gels over the lights gave everything an underwater glow. The balcony had been garlanded with fluffy cotton to suggest drifting snow. The boys grinned nervously under new haircuts, faces scraped with razors. A fog of aftershave and cologne hung in the air, masking the gym’s undertone of sweat, old basketballs, and disinfectant. The band was playing “Sh-Boom,” and a pale, pomaded singer crooned, “Life could be a dream—if I could take you up—in paradise up above.”

  Pip scanned the room. It was the first time he had seen a whole room full of American kids his age, and the girls were delightfully pretty. The boys were irritatingly tall. What did they feed these brutes in America?

  Then a boy who wasn’t tall moved toward Pip. He was round and wore a brown suit. He approached Pip and stuck out his hand. “Tadpole Porter,” he said. “Dance committee.”

  Pip shook the offered hand. “I’m Pip.”

  “Do you have a ticket?
” Tadpole asked. “You’re a little underdressed.”

  Pip decided to address the last accusation only. “Forgot my dinner jacket.”

  “You’re British, aren’t you?” Tadpole asked. “I’m a big fan of English history. The War of the Roses and all that.”

  “Great,” Pip said. “I’m looking for Janie Scott’s roommate.”

  The boy narrowed his eyes. “Janie’s your friend?”

  “From London,” Pip said. “We were in school together there.”

  Something dawned on Tadpole. “Hey!” he said. “Are you the friend in England she had a letter from? I thought it was from a girl!”

  Pip shook his head. “I’m not much for letters.”

  “You know she got kicked out, right?”

  “Of school?” It wasn’t like Janie.

  The boy nodded, then tilted his head. “Have I seen you somewhere?”

  Pip didn’t feel like having the Robin Hood conversation just now. “So where’s Janie’s roommate?”

  Tadpole turned and surveyed the room. “Over there.”

  Pip followed the boy’s pointing finger, and his mouth fell open. He forced himself to close it. Giovanna had been right that she was beautiful. “What’s her name?” he asked.

  “Opal Magnusson,” Tadpole said. “She’s mean, though. Don’t get all excited.”

  The girl was standing alone in a simple white dress that clung to her body, no fluffy rampart of a skirt like the other girls wore. She had smooth, bare, caramel-colored shoulders and hair like a sheet of silk. She looked up and saw Pip staring. He was standing close to her—somehow his feet had moved him nearer without his knowing it. “Hullo,” he said. He was too dazzled to say more.

  “Hi,” she said coolly.

  “You’re Janie’s roommate,” he managed.

  “I was.”

  “Why’d she get kicked out of school?”

  Opal looked vaguely in the direction of the band. “I don’t know about that.”

  If she had been a better liar, or if her rotten lying had been the result of nervousness, Pip thought he could have forgiven her. But she wasn’t even trying to be convincing. That was how little she thought of him. He resolved to harden his heart. “She’s a friend of mine, Janie is,” he said.