Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE VISCOUNT’S DAUGHTER
By Caitlyn Duffy
© 2012
Copyright © 2012 Caitlyn Duffy
1st Kindle Edition
This is a Treadwell Academy Novel
Published by Lovestruck Literary
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Lovestruck Literary.
www.lovestruckliterary.com
ISBN 978-0-9856574-4-4
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental.
This book is dedicated to everyone who carries a secret. There are so many Betseys in this world.
CHAPTER 1
It was early July and I clutched the armrests of the jet taking me and my sister to New York’s JFK airport, watching the buildings of Washington, D.C. grow into miniature forms through my window. Bijoux, my older sister, always wants the aisle seat when we travel together. She claims it’s because she wants easier access to the bathroom to freshen up and check her make-up throughout the flight, but I have my suspicions that she is a big old chicken about flying. Bijoux usually gets what she wants, but in this case, letting her have the aisle was fine with me, because I prefer the window. I like to put in my ear buds and wonder who lives in all those houses below the plane, and if they can see us, and if they’re looking up at the source of the roar in the sky, wondering about me, too.
I wasn’t happy to be leaving Virginia that afternoon. We had come to the end of our annual week with our dad, on that particular year joining his band, Pound, on tour during the leg of their concert schedule in Virginia Beach. It wasn’t so much that we cherished our time with our dad; he seemed pretty indifferent most of the time about seeing us since he had gotten married to his second wife, Phoebe. Phoebe, I was pretty sure, really hated having us around. I was more reluctant to leave because we had come to look forward to our weeks with Dad as time away from Mom and our stepfather, Danko. When we were with Dad, there were no rules, no curfews, and no punishments. With Danko, there was a rule for everything, and a corresponding punishment for when we would inevitably break it.
That year we had actually had fun visiting Dad, which wasn’t the case every year. The previous year, Dad and Phoebe had been home in Los Angeles when Dad had just finished working on the band’s new album. But a week in Beverly Hills was seriously less glamorous than one would imagine, because Bijoux received a D.U.I. our very first night at Dad’s. She not only had her rented Mercedes taken away, but Phoebe was a tyrant during the rest of our visit. Phoebe has a touch of O.C.D. and she commanded the maids to follow in our footsteps, sterilizing everything we touched. Anyway, that whole trip was a mess because then Bijoux had to reschedule a photo shoot in Tokyo for a cosmetics line to fly back to California two months later for traffic court.
But this time had been different. Dad had actually planned things for us to do. He had made us go kayaking at First Landing State Park and I had laughed so hard when Bijoux fell out of the boat. It was only into three feet of water, but if you could have seen my sister’s face, you would have laughed, too. My dad refers to my sister as a “piece of work.” She wears purple colored contact lenses that make her look a little bit like she’s on drugs all the time, and often does airheaded things like wear 4-inch wedge sandals on a hike around Runyon Canyon. So it was definitely a historical event to witness her fall into muddy water in a really ugly outfit.
It made my chest hurt to think about it on the flight back to New York, but I had actually really enjoyed myself in Virginia Beach that summer. The lead singer of my dad’s band, Chase, had his oldest daughter, Taylor, on tour with Pound, too. Don’t get me wrong, my older sister is awesome. Boys worship her, she has a closet full of clothes anyone would envy, and she always includes me in everything even though she’s four years older than me. But it was really nice having someone else closer to my age around for a week. Bijoux is always quick to say things suck and are stupid. Taylor didn’t care if Bijoux thought she was childish for wanting to sit by the pool and go down the water slide. I found myself really wanting Taylor to like me more that whole week, wishing she would offer to braid my hair the way my sister used to and ask to keep in touch with me on Friendbook.
When we left for the airport, though, Taylor had been grounded over the three of us staying out too late one night, and she was in no mood to say goodbye to me. I felt kind of lousy and ashamed of myself that I had probably spoiled a chance at a friendship with her. Some years, we spent Christmas with Dad in New Jersey if Phoebe’s shooting schedule (she was an actress on a sitcom) permitted her to leave Los Angeles. So I was still holding out hope that maybe I’d get to see Taylor over the holidays at some point and try to rectify things.
We weren’t even going home to our apartment in New York once we arrived; we were switching terminals and immediately getting on another flight to Croatia, where our mom and Danko were spending the summer on Danko’s family estate. Danko is some kind of royalty in Croatia even though the country has a president. Technically he’s a viscount, the second cousin of the last prince of Yugoslavia. So, if I were his real daughter, I’d be referred to as “The Honorable Elisabeth Norfleet.” Or, I guess in that case my last name wouldn’t be Norfleet, it would be Andordevic with a bunch of weird accents in it. Anyhow, titles don’t apply to step-kids. So even though our mom is now technically royalty, Bijoux and I are still commoners.
The whole royalty thing is meaningless and dumb anyhow, because royals don’t have any power in Croatia anymore, but they do have a whole bunch of money. After our mom and dad split up, our mom dated this guy who owned a bunch of fancy hotels for a long time, and through him she met Danko. Mom’s family produces the Darlene skin care and cosmetics line, and even though she and Aunt Janice are totally loaded and sit on the board, she only dated rich guys after Dad. Dad always used to say the way to her heart was through her pocketbook, but I never understood what he meant until we were invited to Danko’s apartment on Park Avenue for the first time after he and Mom become engaged. The fixtures in his powder room were platinum. I mean, I had grown up privileged, I knew that, but Danko’s wealth put our wealth to shame.
I really didn’t like spending summers in Croatia even though I knew that Bijoux loved it there. She had already dropped out of school, and was free to go straight to Paris or Berlin or wherever she wanted at the end of the summer. I had no choice but to go back to New York with my mom and start my sophomore year of high school at the Pershing School. There was nothing wrong with my school, and I was looking forward to seeing my friends again. But Bijoux had been talking for weeks about wanting to move out and get her own place in the East Village, and my mother and Danko had been taking her seriously about it since she had turned eighteen in April. There was little they could do to stop her, anyway. She had her own handbag line, manufactured in China, and made enough money modeling and hosting parties that she could have moved out any time she wanted.
I liked to think that she st
uck around longer than she absolutely had to in order to keep an eye on me, but that’s probably giving my sister a lot more credit for caring about my wellbeing than she deserved.
When we landed at JFK, we had a two-hour layover before we boarded our international flight to Amsterdam. From there, we’d have another layover, and then take a much smaller plane to Split, the small city on the coast of Croatia close to Danko’s ancestral estate.
“Oh my god,” Bijoux whined in the ladies’ room at JFK. “My hair looks so bad.”
Bijoux’s hair never looked bad. But she liked complaining about how awful she looked even though pretty much at any given moment she could have torn off her tank top and posed as the cover model for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. She insisted that we peruse the Duty Free store for perfume, candy, and makeup while we had some time to kill.
“What do you think?” she asked me, rubbing her lips together after spreading them thick with raspberry-colored lip gloss. “Swag, right?”
“I think you’re going to get a bunch of sick mouth germs from that lip gloss tube that everyone on earth has sampled from,” I told her bluntly.
“You’re probably right,” Bijoux said, putting the lip gloss back. “It’s garbage, anyway.”
Of course, it was the new Darlene lip gloss, available in eight shades, named after flowers. Only Bijoux would refer to our own family’s over-priced line of cosmetics as garbage. And only Bijoux would waste time in the Duty Free store trying on a lip gloss that Mom could give her for free.
We meandered over to the food court, and stood in line at McDonald’s. Bijoux batted her eyelashes around intentionally, probably hoping there were paparazzi around.
“What are you getting, little piggy?” Bijoux asked me, standing behind me and leaning over me, resting her elbows on my shoulders and her chin on the top of my head.
I exhaled loudly with annoyance. Little piggy was Bijoux’s pet name for me. I never got the feeling that she used it with malice, but it always embarrassed me. She’d called me that for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t my fault that no matter what I ate, my shoulders were broader than hers, my hips were wider, and I had inherited Dad’s chubby cheeks instead of Mom’s sharp cheekbones. If Bijoux were a long thin line, then I was a solid square block. Thankfully Mom and Dad didn’t also call me “little piggy,” but they also never told Bijoux to stop saying it to me. The only person who ever told Bijoux to stop was Phoebe. Phoebe’s intolerance of my nickname may have been the only good thing about her.
I considered all of the food options on the big illuminated menu over the counter and decided on a big burger, fries, and a soda. It would be my last indulgence in cheap fast food until the school year, since there weren’t any chain restaurants on the seashore near our summer house. There was a McDonald’s in Split, but the food was totally different than what you would get at McDonald’s in America. Besides, it was over an hour’s drive away from our house, and we had a private chef, so it was impossible to convince anyone to ever drive me into the city.
“And an apple pie,” Bijoux added to my order after I told the guy behind the counter what I wanted. She blushed and winked. I couldn’t help but notice that the guy behind the counter wearing the brown McDonald’s visor didn’t charge us for the apple pie. Another perk of being Bijoux Norfleet? People – men and women – always gave her things for free. As if they didn’t notice her wearing $900 Chloe platform sandals.
Bijoux did what she always did: refrained from ordering any food for herself but then ate more than half of my food once we sat down in the busy seating area. She had pretty much the fastest metabolism of any human being on earth. Bijoux ate whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and the only exercise she ever did was walking towards shoe stores. Dad always told her one day she’d wake up and it would all catch up to her. Man, I sure hoped he was right. I loved my sister, but if she ever woke up one morning enormously fat from all of the cups of frozen yogurt and orders of onion rings she had stolen from me during my lifetime, I would cheer.
“I can’t wait to get to the beach,” she murmured. We would arrive around one in the afternoon the following day, so she would have plenty of time to drop off her suitcase at the estate and then ride a bike down to the beach while the sun was still bright. I could see that she was already wearing her lime green bikini beneath her sundress. She practically never took her bikini off during the summer.
“I wish we didn’t have to leave Virginia Beach,” I said, for probably the two hundredth time that day. I hated the sound of my own voice, so boyish, so gravelly.
The trip in total was going to be about eighteen hours. But I didn’t mind that we were going to be on planes for so long. In fact, I would have been happy if any of those flights had been delayed, prolonging our journey. I wouldn’t have been the least bit sad if we had gotten on the wrong flight, landed in Timbuktu, and spent the rest of the summer trying to make our way to Croatia. The thought of landing in Split and seeing my mother standing there, with Danko’s arm around her, was making my whole stomach feel weird, like the time I ate dumplings with Bijoux from a food truck and had to lock myself in the bathroom at Starbucks in Tribeca for almost an hour while angry people knocked on the door.
But I hadn’t eaten any dumplings in a long time.
I fell into a silent and stormy mood once we got to the gate and stood in line to board our trans-Atlantic flight. I swapped boarding passes with my sister and let her have the aisle without even saying a word. I even handed her the cookie that came with my meal four hours later when the meal cart came through First Class, before she asked for it.
I just didn’t want to see Danko, and didn’t want to be in that big house by the seashore.
If my dad’s wife, Phoebe, was open about her dislike for me, Danko was, by comparison, completely schizophrenic about his opinion of me. When he was around, I could never do anything right. He always had a nasty comment about how I was dressed, if I looked like I was gaining weight, if I wasn’t being polite enough to my mother. Even though he and my mom had been married since I was eight, his cruelty toward me seemed to be getting worse as I grew older.
But moments when he took any kind of interest in me were even worse than his cruelty. Thankfully, they were rare. I had grown to dread moments when he would ask to have word with me. There had been three occasions (at least, that I could remember) when he had totally and completely freaked me out, to such an extreme that I felt too weird about it to even tell my mom. All three of those times had been in Croatia, which was a huge part of why I had desperately wanted to stay on tour with Taylor and Pound instead of joining Mom overseas.
Danko never, ever approached me in our apartment in New York. I kept my bedroom door locked at night and sometimes put a chair underneath the doorknob, too. Whenever I thought about those weird instances in Croatia, I felt like I was going to barf. Often, I thought of asking Bijoux if Danko had ever acted strangely around her like that. But somehow, without even asking, I knew he’d never dare. Bad things never happened to Bijoux. It was as if her prettiness was some kind of armor. Her good looks protected her from the evil intentions of other people.
Danko always called me Elisabeth instead of Betsey. He was the only person who did that. Dad hated Danko and always referred to him as “your mother’s fancy husband.” He always warned me not to be impudent. When I came home to the apartment one night the year before after curfew, he had taken my phone away and went through the messages and then grilled me about all of the messages with dirty language from a boy named Kevin. Kevin, of course, was totally gay but I couldn’t tell Danko that because he was exactly the kind of jerk who would call Kevin’s parents and out him just to cause trouble.
Danko had been the main reason why I had been sent to fat camp then I was eleven. I had protested emphatically about that, and had begged my dad to prevent me from being sent off to Connecticut. But in the end, my mother drove me to Camp Delilah and I spent four pissed-off weeks eating t
una salad and doing stupid aerobics in a gymnasium. I lost all of ten pounds, which I’m pretty sure I gained back as soon as sixth grade started and I was back in my middle grade cafeteria every day at lunch time, with pizza slices and French fries just a few crisp dollar bills away. The shame of having been sent away had stuck with me. Every single time we were at dinner since that summer and I had a second helping of anything, Danko would comment about the money he wasted on my weight loss camp.
Somewhere over the ocean, I reached under Bijoux’s seat and found a sleeping pill in her purse. She, of course, was already passed out, with a slim string of drool dripping out of her mouth and onto the blanket she had pulled over herself. The movie she had ordered was playing on the screen in the back of the seat in front of hers, unwatched. First Class was dark and quiet, illuminated by lots of flat screens playing movies that no one was watching. My stomach was tied in such tight knots that I was willing to do anything to be able to fall asleep until we landed in Amsterdam. I just wanted relief from the relentless dread, even if it would only be temporary.
We landed in Amsterdam and it was early in the morning. Groggily we poked around at all of the airport stores. Our flight had landed at an odd hour, when there weren’t many other flights scheduled for take-off, so the airport was strangely empty. There was one store in particular inside that airport that I loved, because they put tons of Gouda cheese out on plates for people to sample on toothpicks. I liked the idea of buying a big wedge of Gouda cheese with a red wax rind at that store and bringing it with to Split. I could give it to my mother as a gift, or stick it in my backpack carry-on and keep it all for myself in my room. But that was silly. Bijoux would have made fun of me endlessly if I bought myself a wheel of cheese. Just thinking about it made my cheeks hot as I ate my third sample of cheese on a toothpick.
I spent a long time in another gift shop lingering over a display of wooden shoes. We had never spent any time in the Netherlands other than at the airport. I really liked the posters in the airport of tulips and windmills, and smiling people walking across bridges in Amsterdam.
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