by P. J. Fox
Except—she was here.
He glanced up, once, before returning to his work. He said nothing. She stared at the bed for a long time before finally admitting defeat and climbing in. Besides, she didn’t know what else to do. When it came to demonstrating her defiance, she found that she suffered from an increasing lack of imagination.
She curled up into a ball, and thought. Behind her came the soft susurrus of stylus on tablet as Ash wrote a note. She didn’t think she’d possibly be able to sleep; she’d lie here all night, just as he’d said she would, hating herself and wondering why, if she hated him, she felt so confused. Wondering why she’d let him do that to her. And she had let him; there was no argument about that. Just as she had enjoyed parts of dinner, even as she struggled not to. She’d….
Sleep took her.
TWENTY-EIGHT
She woke up alone.
No, not quite alone. Luna was there, perched on the edge of the bed, looking at her. Seeing Belle’s eye crack open, she beamed.
“Good morning!” she cried.
And Belle wondered how, exactly, she’d gotten into the room. Even now, under circumstances that would have given the average person pause—Belle was certain of this—her factotum was offensively cheerful.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
Belle couldn’t believe that this was happening. How had it gone? Really? But, astonishingly, the other girl seemed to be waiting for a serious answer. Belle sat up, and winced. “It hurt,” she said. “And I don’t want to be here.”
“Oh.” Luna’s face fell.
“What,” Belle asked, injecting more venom into the words than she actually felt, “were you expecting to hear that we’d fallen in love?”
“Well—”
“Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” Attacking Luna was like kicking a one-legged dog. She was defenseless and, Belle thought, probably delusional. “It was fine,” she said.
The truth was, she didn’t know how it was. She didn’t know how she was; how was she supposed to feel? She tried to examine herself internally, running through a sort of checklist: was she unhappy? Did she feel violated and ashamed? Was she angry? Did she secretly fantasize about waiting until Ash was asleep and cutting his balls off?
The honest truth was, no. She was supposed to feel that way. Years of feminist indoctrination had taught her that every single event, every single moment of the past few days had been wrong. Men were supposed to be kind, and sensitive, and take no for an answer. But the only violation she felt was academic; she knew, intellectually, that what had happened was wrong. According to all of society’s standards, everything she’d been raised to believe.
But it didn’t feel wrong. Only…strange. She’d had a much better experience last night than Charlotte had had, her first time. That experience, according to Charlotte, had been nothing but blood and tears and embarrassment. The boy in question had never spoken to her again. But Ash…he’d made her feel desired. Beautiful. And as much as she disliked him, she also felt oddly comfortable with him. She’d never thought, even for a minute, that she’d fall asleep—ever. And yet she’d slept beside him all night, without stirring.
She wondered, briefly, where he was. There was no sign of him. “I guess…well, it was alright.” She forced herself to smile at Luna. Luna, tremulously, smiled back.
“I’m glad,” she said. “You seemed so….”
“I’m grumpy,” Belle supplied, “because I’m still sleep deprived and everything hurts.” Which was close enough to the truth. It wasn’t a lie, anyway; just not a complete picture.
“Oh.” Luna brightened. “Then let’s get you up and ready and then we can order you some clothes!”
Belle was, she discovered as she climbed out of bed, looking forward to a shower. The simple routine of first washing herself, scrubbing off the last cobwebs of sleep, and then drying her hair and moisturizing her skin and completing all of the myriad little tasks that made up a morning ritual felt refreshingly normal. She could devote all of her concentration to each step, blocking out thoughts of the future.
It was how she’d gotten this far.
She brushed back her boring, stick-straight hair, putting it up in a loose bun as she studied her reflection in the mirror. The mirror, like the bathroom, was huge. The entire castle was huge. Never an enormous person to begin with, she felt dwarfed. But, even in the short time she’d been here, she discovered that she was also getting used to it. Like Ash had said: the hedonic treadmill. Maybe she was adjusting, too.
Clothing had just materialized. Luna, it seemed, had guessed at her sizes—at least for the knit cotton top and loose drawstring pants she wore now. They hung low on her hips. She looked like a refugee from Bora Bora. Or a yoga studio. She smiled, testing out the expression. She was relieved to discover that she hadn’t forgotten how. That, in spite of everything that had transpired, she still wanted to. But as she’d observed that first night, staying frightened forever was exhausting—and impossible.
“We’re going to take your measurements,” Luna called from the other room, “and order you some things.”
Belle returned to the bedroom to discover Luna sitting on the floor with all kinds of design booklets and high end catalogs spread out around her. She looked up from one especially glossy brochure that she’d been studying with some interest. “There’s really no place to actually go shopping,” she said apologetically. “The nearest real store—I mean, what you’d think of as a store—is in Bucharest.”
And Belle wasn’t allowed out of the house anyway, came the unspoken addendum. Belle knew, and Luna knew; there was no point in antagonizing the girl over something she couldn’t change. “Luna,” she asked slowly, “have you been…assigned to me? How does this work?”
Luna seemed relieved to be on firm ground, discussing a topic where she knew the answers—and where Belle, hopefully, wouldn’t get upset. Seeing her relief, Belle again felt bad. “Yes,” she enthused, “I suppose that’s as good a term as any. There’s a large staff here and the prince felt it would be best if you had your own—”
“Minder?”
“Servant.”
“Do you want to be my…servant?”
“Sure. It’s a lot easier than the other jobs around here. I don’t have to do much, except entertain you and make sure you have what you need and really, you’re not that demanding. Not demanding at all,” she modified. “And you’re…about my age. So I’d hoped that we could be friends.” She dropped her gaze. She’d said that before. “I don’t have many friends.”
Belle was spared from finding a suitable answer because, at that moment, the door opened and breakfast arrived. Whatever view of Ash’s private quarters she’d had as some inviolate sanctum had been shattered; the place was crawling with servants, doing all manner of domestic chores. Belle was presented with juice, grapefruit, and an English muffin.
“We make them here,” Luna told her. “We have to make everything here.” She sighed. “The roads are terrible and no one delivers, anyway. I mean, anything. Growing it, or baking it, or killing it yourself is the only way to get fresh food.”
Which, to Belle, sounded medieval. Then again, she was living in a castle. “This is very good,” she said, trying her muffin. The jam was good, too; a little like blackberry, but different.
“But you can’t possibly grow the grapefruits.” A fresh gust of wind battered the windows above them, rattling the glass in its casings. “It has to be close to freezing out there.”
“But we do! We grow them in containers, in the greenhouse. I can show it to you later, if you’d like.”
“Alright,” Belle found herself saying. “That would be fun.”
Soon, she and Luna were alone again, pouring over designer fare as they lounged in the warm patch of sun. Belle was surprised—again—to discover that she was having fun. She actually did like Luna; the other girl’s enthusiasm was catching. And her, for lack of a better term, innocence was touching. She genuinel
y wished Belle well, and wanted her to be happy here. She wanted Belle to like Ash. Belle found herself telling Luna about her childhood in Maine, her trips north to Nova Scotia and inland to the lakes. About college, and the people she’d met there, and her decision to chuck everything and do a semester abroad. About her desire to escape the monotony that was a life without real choices, where every decision was bounded by a hundred years of thinking on what constituted right and good and desirable and success. Where success, according to how others defined the term, was the only thing that mattered—more than happiness, more than anything.
She realized that she probably sounded bitter, but she didn’t care. Until she was forcibly removed from it, she hadn’t realized how much the pressure was getting to her—hadn’t wanted to realize. Fleeing Harvard had been a temporary escape, and TUD was really no better. At some point, she’d have to face the fact that she was on a collision course with the future. No amount of education could halt the passage of time, and going to school wasn’t a substitute for knowing what she wanted out of life. At some point, she’d have to face the fact that she had no idea what she wanted out of life.
Everyone dreamed of going to Harvard; Harvard was great. But then what? The fact of an ivy league education was no guarantee of anything, and the truth was that Harvard wasn’t all that great. It was just as full of losers and posers and people with serious anger problems as every other place; they just, some of them, used bigger words. Harvard Square—all of it—smelled like a urinal. In the warmer weather, it smelled like a urinal with notes of stale cigarette smoke and melting asphalt. The cute little shops and independent cafés that had made the place so famous had all been driven out due to the high rents.
The “Harvard Yard” that everyone thought of, and that was in all the movies was only for freshmen and the freshmen dorms too smelled of pee. Everything at Harvard smelled of pee. It was Harvard’s dirty little secret. Pee.
Yes, your classes were taught by real professors but a lot of them were still giving the same canned lectures they’d written back in 1976 and still others liked to spend class talking about why their colleagues sucked. Except you couldn’t use words like suck; you had to say intellectually moribund and well-meaning but hopelessly outmoded. When suck actually expressed what you were trying to say much better.
Luna was the first person, oddly enough, whom she could really talk to. Probably because Luna was completely outside Belle’s frame of reference; she didn’t share any of the same prejudices and preconceptions as the other people in Belle’s life and she listened without judgment. She didn’t secretly think that Belle was wasting her life studying the humanities, when she could be earning a sure living as a dental hygienist; she didn’t think that Belle was foolish for doing so much navel gazing. She didn’t believe that money was the ultimate arbiter of success and, indeed, the only success worth achieving.
She just…listened.
Luna wasn’t particularly impressed by Harvard; Harvard didn’t feature much in the shows she watched. She, for some reason, was fascinated by the University of Wisconsin and had somehow become convinced that Wisconsin must be a very glamorous place to live. She also expressed sympathy for Belle that she hadn’t gotten in to UCLA or the University of Hawaii, where she could have seen the palm trees.
Ash had evidently attended Exeter College, Oxford’s fourth oldest college and a wretched-sounding place indeed. The high point of each year was Burns’ Night, where the students gathered to praise Scottish poet Robert Burns and eat haggis. A delightful combination of sheep’s pluck—that would be the heart, liver and lungs—minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices and salt and then stuffed into a sheep’s stomach and cooked until tender.
Luna was very impressed with that.
She didn’t look down on Belle for being confused, didn’t immediately lecture her on how she needed to grow up and get a job and art could be a hobby that she practiced on the weekends, and she thought the fact that Belle had been a ballerina was glamorous. “Besides,” she pointed out, as she measured Belle for a skirt, “you have a job.”
“I do?” Belle asked.
Luna made a brief notation on her pad. She was left-handed, Belle noticed. “Yes. Entertaining the prince. He’s a full time job, and no mistake.”
TWENTY-NINE
Belle didn’t see him again until that night, when he once again asked her to have dinner with him. He didn’t even ask her in person; he sent up a note, or rather had a note sent up, telling her that he expected her in the small parlor at a certain time. She toyed with the idea of simply not showing up; she had no intention of teaching him, or anyone else, that she came when called. Or that, by complying, she was somehow giving them the right to order her around.
She said as much to Luna.
“But why?” Luna asked.
“Because I don’t like being told what to do.” Belle sat curled on the couch, a cup of coffee in her hand. Dusk had fallen early, and the wind had risen. It was the kind of afternoon that made a person glad to be inside. She’d spent enough similar afternoons on her father’s boat, before he’d lost it, to know that for certain.
“You arrived for class at the scheduled time,” Luna reasoned. She was curled up on the opposite couch and she, too, had a cup of coffee. Between them, the fire roared merrily. “And when you lived at home, you had a curfew, right? You drove at the speed limit—”
“No I didn’t.”
“But you understand the point I’m making, right?”
“I chose to do those things, when I did them. I chose what classes to sign up for, and I came home when I was supposed to because I respected my mother—or at least her nagging—and didn’t want her to worry. I did those things for me. Because I wanted to. To further my own agenda. Not because someone else told me to.” What she didn’t add was that, not only was there nothing in it for her to obey Ash but quite the opposite: she had every reason in the world to thwart him. She wanted to go home.
“I had a paper due today,” she added.
“On?”
“The diplomatic relations between ancient Sumerian city states.”
“And you chose this topic?”
“No.”
“But you chose the class.”
“Actually,” Belle said, “no. It was a requirement for my major. I have to take a certain number of classes, in addition to my extra-major requirements like calculus, you know, things that have nothing to do with what I’m studying, that are within the same department but not on the same topic. So, like, since I’m interested in modern politics I have to study a certain number of ancient civilizations as well.” Having hit her stride, she kept talking. “I actually think ancient Sumer is incredibly dull but—”
“But you study it anyway, because someone told you to.”
Belle’s mouth snapped shut. On that score, she was stuck. She’d preferred it, she thought, when Luna was stupid. But Luna, for all her vapid tendencies, had a way with words. And logic.
“You know,” Belle said, sipping her coffee, “I hadn’t even finished the paper when I agreed to go out with Charlotte. Hadn’t even really started. I don’t know why but I just…couldn’t bring myself to care. The deadline was looming—it was a big paper and counted for almost forty percent of our final grade—and I’d actually started having nightmares about it, but I just…I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”
“It doesn’t sound like school made you happy.”
Belle opened her mouth to protest and then closed it. Of course school made her happy, she wanted to say. She was a feminist, a woman of the world. She believed in a woman’s right—no, her duty to be educated and self-sufficient. Although she’d grown up watching Disney movies and dreaming of her own happy ending, she’d learned in the interim that women weren’t supposed to have such dreams and that Prince Charming was a myth besides.
She’d tried, over the last few years, to reconcile those earliest dreams—of finding her prince in the woods, like Aurora, or stumbl
ing through that portal—with what she’d come to know was true. That there were no princes, anymore, and a woman had to make her place in the world. Her mother, Donna, had dropped out of school to marry her Prince Charming. And look how that had turned out.
But the truth was, Luna was right. She sighed. “I’m good at school,” she said. “I get good grades, for the most part, because even when I’m not good at a subject I work hard enough to compensate. But I just….” She shifted position. A fresh gust of wind hit the windows behind her. “A woman has to know how to go out and make her way in the world. I have to.”
“Why?” Luna seemed genuinely puzzled.
Of course, she’d lived in this palace her whole life: a palace of 94 rooms and who knew how many tens of thousands of square feet. There were bedrooms and ballrooms, yes, but also scores of pantries, larders, sculleries, and who knew what else. Room upon room devoted simply to the task of keeping a handful of people in the comfort to which they’d become accustomed. “My family doesn’t have any money, or connections,” she said. We didn’t grow up in a palace, she wanted to add. “My mother can barely afford her own rent, let alone help me. Without a job—”
“Surely you can ask the prince for help.”
“What?” Belle stared, aghast. She hadn’t thought it possible, at this late date, to experience genuine shock. But, once again, she was wrong. She should just get used to the feeling, she decided bitterly. Why should life make sense, simply because she wanted it to?
“You’re his—”
“Concubine? Sex slave?”
“Responsibility!” Luna finished.
“For now,” Belle spat, the bitterness she felt creeping into her voice. “Until such time as he tires of me and finds the next girl. And then what? My life will be ruined, I’ll have no money and no self respect and no education, and what? What then? I’ll be out on the street in a strange country where I don’t speak the language and it’s hardly like, at that point, I can go home and say, hi guys, I’ve been a sex slave for a few years, how are you?”