When Rose Wakes

by Christopher Golden

  Yet the room, and the women behind the counter, caught her attention only because she was doing her best not to look at the single other person in the waiting area. Even seated, she could see that the boy would be tall. He had broad shoulders and brown eyes and artfully disheveled hair, and his features and the hue of his skin made her think he must have some Latino heritage. A beautiful boy. When they entered the room he had been slouched in the chair and had glanced up at them with bored indifference, right up until he saw Rose. To his credit, he hadn’t puffed himself up like some kind of peacock, or even sat up straight. But he had shifted a bit in the chair so as not to look overly slouchy, or at least Rose thought he had.

  She felt certain he had taken notice of her, and even now as she focused on the women behind the counter, the boy—stop thinking “boy,” teenage boys don’t like to be called boys, they’re “guys”—continued to notice, to watch her. She appraised him in her peripheral vision, so curious about him and about guys in general. Her aunts couldn’t possibly imagine she could be in school with boys and never speak to them. Of course not. No, she knew what truly concerned them. She had already decided that there would be nothing wrong with indulging a certain amount of interest in boys as long as she kept them at arm’s length.

  “Excuse me, we have an appointment with Sister Anna,” Aunt Suzette said sweetly.

  The sour-looking woman looked up at them, glanced at the empty desk to indicate that its usual occupant ought to be handling this particular encounter, and sighed as though greatly put upon.

  “What is it I can do for you?” she asked, making no attempt to hide her irritation.

  Aunt Suzette began to reply, but Aunt Fay put a hand on her arm.

  “Well,” Aunt Fay said, matching the woman’s acidic tone, “you can begin by standing from your desk and coming to greet us with at least a fraction of the courtesy that your mother must have taught you.”

  The woman flinched as though she’d been spit upon. At the desk behind her, her younger office mate stiffened but did not look up.

  The sour woman stared at Aunt Fay, then sighed and rose, barely hiding a smile.

  “Well, if you insist,” she said as she walked to the unoccupied desk and picked up a heavy ledger or planner. Scanning it, she walked back to them. “I take it one of you charming ladies is Fay DuBois?”

  She appraised them over the top of her glasses, barely looking up from the book.

  “I’m Fay, and this is my sister, Suzette,” Aunt Fay said. “You may call us both Ms. DuBois. This is our niece, Rose. She is meant to take a level placement test today.”

  Rose had been observing this frosty exchange with amused fascination, aware also that the broad-shouldered guy in the corner was overhearing the whole exchange. Up until now Rose’s attention had been split. But now the sour woman focused on her and Rose practically squirmed where she stood.

  “Oh, right.” The woman smiled, suddenly quirky and warm. “You’re the coma girl.”

  Rose felt her face go hot as she flushed deeply and closed her eyes, trying to imagine some way that the gorgeous guy might not have heard the woman’s words. She barely listened as Aunt Fay chided her for her rudeness and the woman issued a lackluster apology and then bade them all sit and wait while Sister Anna finished with whatever conference had caused her to close her door.

  The temperature in the room had dropped twenty degrees, or so it felt to Rose as her aunts flanked her, guiding her to a seat between them against the wall opposite the counter. Their backs to the principal’s office, she thought she could make out muffled voices inside but did not try to eavesdrop. Aunt Suzette whispered something to Aunt Fay, apparently attempting to soothe her and keep her from doing something to the sour secretary, though what Aunt Fay might have done—fisticuffs seemed unlikely—Rose had no idea.

  Only once did Rose glance at the guy, and she caught him studying her so intently that it took him a second before he could tear his gaze away. Rose smiled, liking that he seemed embarrassed. She hadn’t expected him to be at all shy. Maybe he wasn’t as cocky as she had first thought. She took advantage of the moment, studying him in return. He wore the uniform she had seen on the school website, tan pants and a burgundy short-sleeved shirt with the school’s name and logo emblazoned on the breast, but with the shirt untucked and slightly rumpled, he looked really handsome.

  Aunt Fay nudged her. Rose glanced guiltily at her, realized she’d been caught staring at the guy, and looked down at her hands, hoping nothing would be said.

  The principal’s office door opened and they all sat up a bit straighter. An attractive, fortyish brunette appeared, grimly intent on some task that had been set for her, but the moment she saw Rose her face lit up with a smile so bright and full of kindness that it fell just short of delight.

  “Hello!” she said. “You must be Rose!”

  Rose nodded, standing with her aunts. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Oh, gosh, don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” the woman said. “It makes me feel so old. You can call Mrs. Sauer ‘ma’am,’” she said, hooking her thumb toward the woman behind the counter who had sparred with Aunt Fay. “She’s old enough for all of us put together.”

  Mrs. Sauer didn’t even look up. Typing away at her keyboard, she muttered, “And Mrs. Barkley thinks she’s funny enough for all of us put together.”

  The pretty brunette, whom Rose took to be Mrs. Barkley, rolled her eyes with a grin. “Someone’s got to be.”

  She went on, welcoming the aunts, but Rose barely listened, distracted both by the amused grin on the cute guy’s face and by the fact that the sour woman’s actual name was “Sauer,” which seemed all too appropriate.

  “If you ladies will come in, Sister Anna would like to speak with you for a minute before we bring Rose in,” Mrs. Barkley said, looking at Rose. “As soon as you’re all done in there, I’ll take Rose to an empty classroom and sit with her while she takes the test.”

  Mrs. Barkley held up a hand to hide her mouth as though sharing a secret, but she spoke in a stage whisper. “Don’t worry, kiddo, it’s not that hard.”

  And then Aunt Fay and Aunt Suzette were being shuffled into the principal’s office. Aunt Fay seemed to hesitate, glancing back and forth between Rose and the cute guy as though she might say something awkward, but then the door closed behind them and Rose exhaled, happy to have dodged that bullet.

  “They’ll just be a minute,” Mrs. Barkley assured her. “I’ll let you know when you can go in.”

  The secretary turned to the cute guy, arching an eyebrow mischievously. “As for you… just sit there. She’ll get to you eventually.”

  Rose thanked Mrs. Barkley and the kind woman lifted a portion of the counter and went behind it, returning to her desk. When she sat down, only the tops of the three secretaries’ heads were visible behind the counter, and it was almost as though Rose and the cute guy were by themselves in the room.

  Her face felt warm and her palms itched. She looked everywhere but at him.

  “That was awesome,” he said, voice low.

  She hesitated a second before looking at him. His smile made her jittery.

  “What was?”

  “Your aunt versus…” he said, nodding toward the counter, obviously not wanting to say more.

  “I can hear you, Jared Munoz,” Mrs. Sauer said amidst the tap-tap of her keyboard.

  Jared Munoz. Rose tried the name out in her mind and found she liked it.

  “Wow,” Jared said, “and they say hearing is the first thing to go.”

  Delivered differently, the teasing might have seemed obnoxious, but Jared spoke with a warmth Rose doubted the woman deserved, and Mrs. Sauer actually laughed.

  “You just wait and see if you get brownies the next time you’re over,” Mrs. Sauer said, still without looking up.

  Rose shot a questioning look at Jared.

  “She lives up the street. Her granddaughter goes here,” he explained. “So, what’s this test you’re supposed to t
ake?”

  Rose shifted awkwardly in her chair, hating the idea of talking about this, but Mrs. Sauer had already called her “coma girl,” so Jared would already be wondering what that was about. And once school started, people would find out her story anyway and would talk about it. She would rather tell the story herself than have them talking behind her back.

  “It’s a placement test,” she said, “to figure out what grade they should put me in.”

  Jared frowned. “I don’t get it. What grade are you supposed to be in?”

  “That’s sort of the point. I’m sixteen. I guess I should be a junior, but I’ve missed a lot of school…”

  She hesitated.

  “Because you were in a coma,” Jared prompted.

  Relieved, Rose nodded. “Yeah. Almost two years. And then there’s been physical therapy, which kept me out longer.”

  “And you’re from, like, Paris or something, right? I can tell by the accent.”

  “France, yes, but far from Paris,” she said, remembering her aunts’ description of the place. “A seaside village called Beaulieu-sur-Mer. So it’s difficult to determine what grade I should be in and… voilà, the test.”

  Jared studied her with great interest, and she found that she loved his eyes. They looked like milk chocolate and had a real warmth in them that comforted her. She ought to have been a wreck just talking to him, but somehow he set her at ease. She wondered how she looked to him, if he liked red hair and green eyes, if her pale skin made her seem like some kind of ghost, if he thought it was odd that she wore a dress.

  “You’ll do fine,” he said.

  “I’m not so confident. I… well, the doctors say I’m recovering very well after what I’ve been through. I was thrown from a horse, had some head trauma. Something happened then, or during the coma… they don’t really know, but my memory is just gone.”

  “Whoa,” he said, eyes wide. “That’s awful. I mean, it must be really hard. Real amnesia. Wow. It’s the kind of thing you think only happens on TV.”

  “I wish,” Rose said, glancing away a moment before looking back at him with a smile. “I’ll be all right. My memories will probably come back, but until then I’ll be busy making new ones. Anyway, that’s my story. What’s yours? What are you doing here?”

  Some of the light went out in his eyes and his smile faded.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” she said quickly.

  He made a face and glanced over the counter at the tops of the secretaries’ heads. “Another time, without an audience?”

  Rose’s heart skipped a beat, and she felt herself flushing again. Another time. For the first time it sank in for her that there would be another time, that she would be going to school here and that she would indeed see Jared again. And he wanted to talk to her again, to have a conversation no one would be around to hear. All of her aunts’ warnings about boys reverberated in the back of her mind, but she pushed them away. They were impossibly old-fashioned. If she ignored all of the boys at St. Bridget’s, she would quickly get a reputation as an arrogant bitch.

  Arm’s length, she reminded herself.

  “I’d like that,” she told Jared.

  He nodded and leaned back in his chair. “Me, too.”

  A phone rang in the office and she heard it answered. A moment later, Mrs. Barkley stood and walked over to the counter.

  “You can go in now, Rose. And don’t worry, you’ll do fine. I think you’re going to like St. Bridget’s.”

  Rose thanked her as she stood and went to the principal’s door. As she opened it and stepped in, she glanced back at Jared. So do I, she thought.

  The test lasted ninety minutes, during which time Rose had no idea what her aunts did to occupy themselves—perhaps took a tour of the school. Mrs. Barkley continued to be sweet and enthusiastic, certainly the most welcoming person at St. Bridget’s, except maybe for Jared Munoz, but the comparison wasn’t exactly fair to the school secretary.

  When she finished, Mrs. Barkley took her test and pencils and escorted her back to the office, where Aunt Suzette awaited her with an almost meditative calm, hands folded over her generous belly. Rose glanced at the chair were Jared had been sitting and fought the urge to go sit there for a moment. She wondered what class he was in right now and how much trouble he had gotten in for whatever it was he had done.

  I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. Just because he was the first guy her age she could remember having a conversation with did not mean she ought to be obsessing over him. There would be a lifetime of conversations and boys to obsess over.

  “Well, she’s smiling,” Aunt Suzette announced. “She must have done all right.”

  Mrs. Barkley put a hand on Rose’s shoulder. “I’m sure she did just fine. It was nice to finally meet you, Rose. Ms. DuBois. I’ll be in touch by the end of the week with Sister Anna’s decision on Rose’s placement.”

  After they had thanked her and left the office, Rose glanced around the corridor.

  “Where’s Aunt Fay?” she asked.

  “She needed some air,” Aunt Suzette said in the same offhand tone she always seemed to use when she wanted to talk about something else.

  Rose couldn’t think of any reason why such a question would make Aunt Suzette uncomfortable, but in the preceding days she had found more and more that her aunts were often difficult to predict. They comforted her when she had bad dreams but never attempted to ascribe any significance to them. Despite their belief in various superstitions and their reliance on herbal remedies, they discounted dreams entirely, except to say they were reminiscent of make-believe games she’d played as a girl. But Rose had been wondering about them more and more.

  You must’ve had a pretty vivid imagination, she told herself. Either that, or her subconscious had taken those games of pretend and turned them into something incredibly vivid, with a narrative all its own. In her dreams, everything seemed connected. Rose thought it might be her subconscious trying to jar her memories into returning—not that she’d actually lived in a castle or seen war up close and bloody, or known anyone who believed fairy women lived in the forest—but that her mind was trying to use the images from those childhood games to tell her something.

  Maybe the castle was meant to symbolize her coma. She’d been trapped inside it. And the king she always seemed so afraid for in her dreams, well, that was obvious. Her father Guillaume, brother to Fay and Suzette, had died when she was only seven years old. So at least the fear of losing her father made sense.

  She had to make some sense out of the dreams. If they meant nothing, were just her imagination run wild, then she feared she might be just a little bit insane.

  “Rose?” Aunt Suzette said. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m sorry, Auntie, my head was in the clouds.”

  “I asked how the test went.”

  Rose hesitated before replying. “Well enough, I guess. But there are some things that just elude me, you know? Things I feel like I should know but don’t. The author of A Tale of Two Cities. Or the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—”

  “But you’re French,” Aunt Suzette said. “Surely you can’t be expected to know everything about American history or English literature when you’ve never been to an American school.”

  They pushed through the front doors, the chilly October breeze embracing them.

  “I suppose,” Rose said. “But I feel like they’re things I do know and I just can’t come up with the answers.”

  “You’ve been through an ordeal, darling. They’ll take that into consideration,” Aunt Suzette assured her.

  Rose glanced down as she descended the steps in front of the school and frowned. For just a moment she had thought she had seen writing chalked there, the peculiar symbols that were on the wards and little wooden and metal charms that hung in front of most of the windows of the apartment on Acorn Street. But she must have imagined them, because looking at the steps now, they were just ordinary granite, tracke
d with city grime. When she turned toward the school, something similar happened with the keystone carved with the school’s inception date.

  “What the hell?” Rose whispered, blinking and shaking her head.

  The keystone was ordinary, except for the engraving. She had been spending much too much time cooped up inside that apartment with her sweet but superstitious aunts. She needed normal people and the real world. No matter what year the principal placed her in, she couldn’t wait to start school. At first she had been anxious, but now she was glad that Aunt Fay had rushed her.

  “Are you all right?” Aunt Suzette asked, taking her arm.

  Only then did Rose realize just how weak she felt. Her legs felt unreliable. She looked around, thinking she needed somewhere to rest, and then sat down hard on the stairs, breathing deeply.

  “This was too much for you,” Aunt Suzette cried in alarm. “I knew it!”

  “No, no. I’m fine,” Rose said. And she was. Her head was already clearing, momentary disorientation fading. “I’m just not used to so much exercise, but I need it. You know what Dr. Kittredge said.”

  But Aunt Suzette did not seem convinced.

  “I do. But I still think we’re going to have to postpone our shopping until tomorrow.”

  Rose might have protested but she was distracted by movement off to her left. She turned to see Aunt Fay coming around the corner of the building. There were several trees obscuring her view—the only foliage on the street was already turning the oranges and reds of autumn—but she stared in fascination as her aunt appeared. Aunt Fay swayed and then twirled in a circle before pausing to close her eyes and clasp her hands together as if in prayer.