The Viscount's Daughter - [A Treadwell Academy - 03]

by Caitlyn Duffy

  Blah, blah, blah. I hated when parents talked business at the dinner table. My dad was the least likely to do that, since he didn’t really have a business other than touring with the band and licensing his name to a guitar manufacturer for a line of basses. Sometimes even Phoebe was guilty of rambling on and on about boring politics on the set of her television show.

  “Sorry I’m late!” Bijoux exclaimed, bursting into the dining room in her green bikini. White sand was still dusted across the backs of her legs, and she had a faint sunburn across her nose.

  “Bijoux,” my mother sighed, reviewing her appearance. “No bikinis at the dinner table. Come on. This isn’t the Hawaiian Tropic Club.”

  Bijoux stomped her foot and sulked. “But I’m starving!” One of the girls from the kitchen entered the dining room and set a basket of shiny warm rolls down on the table. She did her best not to stare at my sister as she threw her tantrum.

  “Listen to your mother,” Danko commanded her. But I could tell from his tone that he was kind of amused that my sister would strut into the dining room in her skimpy bathing suit. He sounded completely different when he was really angry.

  Bijoux turned on her heel, probably only because Danko had insisted, and we were all treated to her angry stomping up the stairs to the second floor, and then a few seconds later, the third. For someone who was eighteen years old, Bijoux sure could act like a baby.

  I helped myself to a roll and the girl from the kitchen emerged again, this time setting a porcelain plate of broccoli topped with cheese sauce on the table. The girl looked like couldn’t have possibly been more than eighteen years old herself. She was petite, with bird-like clavicles and shoulders, high cheekbones and cement-gray eyes. I observed with disgust that Danko’s eyes drifted toward her rear end and followed her as she returned to the kitchen. He was so gross. Of course my mom didn’t notice his blatant leering; she was engrossed in her file folder full of numbers again.

  “Jelena said that Viktor and Maria are coming next week,” I said, helping myself to broccoli. It was rare that our household staff ever served traditional Croatian food in our house overseas. My mother wasn’t a big fan of the sausages or goulash dishes, and she frowned upon the heavier traditional fare that featured rich creams and pastas made with potatoes. Even though the kitchen staff tried to keep things pretty Americanized, nothing ever tasted quite like it would have in New York.

  “Yes,” Danko said, studying me. “Although, don’t get your hopes up about wanting to run wild with Kristijan and Magda. Your mother received your report card last week via e-mail.”

  I shuddered. It had only been a month since the school year had ended but it felt like the Pershing School, and the long line of private school that had preceded my attendance there, were in another galaxy. I had forgotten that report cards could be emailed out instead of mailed to the house. But I was also kind of blindsided. I had sort of tried hard all spring to do a decent job at school. Well, OK, not really. Bijoux had developed a friendship back in March with the nightlife editor of a major men’s magazine and she and I had become regulars at a few downtown hot spots, which had somewhat interfered with my efforts to complete homework regularly. But I had at least thought about making more of an effort than ever before. Apparently my belief that I had done a decent job on my freshman year finals was misguided.

  “Yes,” Mom said, finally, focusing her attention on me. “A D-plus in English? Betsey, really. You can do better than that. You’re lucky they didn’t make you repeat the class in summer school.”

  My heart sank. First of all, my mom was an idiot if she thought that fancy private schools that cost almost thirty thousand dollars a year in tuition offered summer school. Summer school was for public school kids just to give students with bad grades a fighting chance of catching up and making it to the next level. Schools like Pershing just kicked you out if you failed enough classes. They couldn’t be bothered with helping the stupid kids and the lazy kids catch up. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that I’d earned a D or even an F in math, but English? I thought I’d been on pretty good terms with my English teacher at Pershing. I could honestly claim that I’d tried on my final essay for that class. The topic of the essay was “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding. I had really wanted to like Jack, the fun-loving ringleader in that book, but I could see how there was a lot of truth in the story about how things got out of control when everyone started doing whatever they felt like doing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing that I was expected to say something.

  “Sorry’s not going to get you into college,” my mother scolded. “I’ve already asked your headmistress to email me a contact list of all of your sophomore teachers to see if there’s any extra credit you can do before school starts. I can’t have two drop-outs on my hands. Someone has to run the company after I retire, and at this rate, Yale won’t accept you even though you’re a double legacy.”

  I stirred broccoli in cheese sauce around on my plate and sighed with annoyance when the main course of pheasant roasted with potatoes was served. It was hardly my dream to run Darlene cosmetics after my mother retired. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I sure as heck knew that I didn’t want to work in an office building and bring file folders with me everywhere I went. Throughout my childhood if anyone had asked me what kind of career I wanted to pursue I had blindly said actress. Now I was old enough to know that idea was preposterous. Bijoux had tried to get acting jobs and her skills were deemed so horrible by producers that she only got offers for reality TV shows. Thankfully for television viewers everywhere, her attention span wasn’t long enough to commit to a TV show or she’d be plaguing a cable network with her nonstop blather about how many boys thought she was cute. I’m sure it probably would have been some kind of epic disappointment to my mother to learn that by the age of fourteen, I was already quite certain that running Darlene Cosmetics, Inc. was not among my goals. And I resented her assumption that it was just because Bijoux was too airheaded to ever have a real job.

  My sister returned to the table wearing a t-shirt and shorts over her bikini and took her seat at the table next to me, smiling smugly at Danko.

  “I’m going back to the beach after dinner with Jadranka, is that OK?” Bijoux asked.

  “Easy on the drinking,” Danko warned her.

  She already kind of smelled stale, like beer, but surely Mom and Danko couldn’t smell her from across the table. “I was thinking,” Bijoux began, “that since I’m eighteen now, I really don’t need a curfew.”

  My mother raised one eyebrow suspiciously and swallowed the food in her mouth before replying, “Bijoux, you never followed your curfew even when you had one.”

  Bijoux smiled her infectious grin at my mother and at Danko, and then Mom and Danko exchanged smiles, as if Bijoux’s rebellious behavior was the cutest thing ever, and now that she was eighteen, it was no longer anyone’s concern.

  “Not you, miss,” Danko said to me, before I even had a chance to get my hopes up about staying out until dawn with my sister. “You’ll be home by ten.”

  When we arrived at Okrug beach an hour after dinner, Jadranka and Mili were waiting for us at a table at one of the late night beach bars. They looked like they had been drinking for a really long time, and Jadranka was trying to suppress her yawns with her hand.

  “Betsey!” Mili exclaimed, rising from his chair to hug me. “We missed you earlier.”

  Everyone under the age of thirty in Croatia spoke perfect English. Mili had gone to boarding school in England. Jadranka had gone to an exclusive boarding school for girls in Switzerland. A lot of good their fancy educations had done them; they both just passed all their time at the beach in Trogir, spending their parents’ wealth on drinks. But I liked them both a lot.

  “Can you get us beers, piggy?” Bijoux asked, handing me her credit card once again and nodding in the direction of the bar.

  “Don’t call her that!” Mili scolded B
ijoux. “She’s our adorable little pumpkin.”

  I stuck my tongue out at my sister and took her credit card, grateful that Mili had jumped to my defense.

  I had to elbow my way through the thick crowd to get close enough to the bar to order. I think technically the legal drinking age in Croatia was eighteen, but not only had I never been asked to exhibit identification, I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been asked. The male bartenders at this particular bar were shirtless in the hot night air and they looked familiar, quite possibly the same guys who had worked there the summer before. I ordered four bottles of beer and left Bijoux’s card with the bartender to open a tab, as I was sure that the first round would not be the last. I noticed that there were two guys across the bar watching me, and when I took a closer look at them, I realized they were the guys my sister had met at the airport in Amsterdam that morning. Balancing all four bottles of beer between my fingers, I walked around the bar to say hello to them.

  “Didn’t my sister and I meet you at the airport this morning?” I asked, directly addressing the guy I remembered having given his name as Andrej.

  “Yes,” he said, looking happy to see me. “We were wondering if it was you.”

  “I thought you guys were going to Split,” I said, wondering what had brought them all the way out to Trogir.

  “We are,” Andrej said. “My parents live there, but James wanted to see the beach.”

  “What are you doing here?” James asked me. “It’s so far out of the way for Americans to be here.”

  He was kind of right. If they’d been at the bar long, James had probably already figured out that most of the tourists in Dalmatia, that part of Croatia, were also European. It wasn’t too often that Americans took over the beach. “My stepfather owns a house here,” I reminded him. I was pretty sure that Bijoux had already explained why were flying to Croatia earlier in the day, but that had been about twelve hours ago, and it had been a long day.

  James and Andrej followed me back to the table where Bijoux, Jadranka and Mili were sitting, and of course I had to remind my sister who the boys were, because she’d already entirely forgotten about them since meeting them at the boarding gate. After our second round of beers, the DJ turned the music up exponentially louder, and a crowd grew on the dance floor. When a really hot remix of one of Tawny’s spring hits came on, Bijoux and Jadranka jumped up from the table and ran toward the dance floor.

  “Girls,” Mili muttered, rolling his eyes at James and Andrej.

  Seconds later, Bijoux and Jadranka were back, grabbing me by my hands and dragging me along with them back on to the dance floor, which was really nothing more than an area of the open air bar next to the DJ booth. It was so crowded that we couldn’t really dance, but instead just hopped up and down to the beat with our hands in the air. Everyone was in a great mood. For them, the night was young, but for me, it was after nine o’clock and the party would end all too soon. Usually, Mom and Danko did not enforce a strict curfew with me when I was out with Bijoux, but this report card situation had me a little concerned. It was impossible to predict them; all spring long they had barely noticed that I was running wild with my sister, but when they decided to actually do any parenting, they watched my every move.

  “Oh, no, you can’t leave just yet!” James said when I returned to our table, sweaty and winded, to fetch my purse. “We’re just getting started!”

  “I have a curfew,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

  “One more round,” Andrej insisted.

  I was tempted. It was easy to forget once we were back in New York how fun and carefree summers in Croatia could be. But I really, really didn’t want to bring Danko’s wrath upon myself our very first night at the house. I didn’t know if he and Mom would be waiting up for me, or if just he would be waiting for me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Gotta jet.”

  Andrej tapped his cell phone number and email address into my phone so that we could be in touch the next day. I said hasty farewells, knowing at that point I was pushing the limit on time. The bike ride home took fifteen minutes, at least.

  I pulled my bike away from where Bijoux and I had locked up earlier, and walked it down the paved path through the trees, toward the street. The night sky in Croatia was nothing like the sky in New York, where it was barely possible to see any stars at all. In Croatia, the night sky was a shocking shade of cobalt blue, and the stars were so huge and clear it really felt like you could reach out and touch them if stood on your tip toes.

  It was a beautiful place, really, and it would have been special in my heart if it hadn’t turned into a place I dreaded so much with all my might. It was entirely thanks to Danko that I had ever even visited Croatia, but also his fault that the thought of this place sickened me so completely when it crossed my mind back in New York. Two summers ago when I was twelve, Danko had come into my bedroom with the yellow walls when I had been grounded for getting caught by my mother smoking cigarettes at the beach with a bunch of guys Bijoux and I had met. Danko had told me that my mother thought it was about time for me to start wearing a bra, and that she felt uncomfortable talking about it with me, and had requested that he examine my chest and decide for her. He had made me take off my tank top, and I pretty much had wanted to die while he ran his hands over my skin. The whole thing had been mortifying and weird, especially since afterwards Mom didn’t make any mention of bra shopping until after Christmas time.

  Later that summer, the day before Bijoux and I were due to fly back to New York, I had ridden one of the bicycles from our shed down to the beach with Danko’s nephew, Kristijan, who I was still hoping would visit us the following week. Kristijan and I are two weeks apart in age (I’m older). We were playing with snorkeling gear that we had rented from the beach store at the hotel right on the water. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Danko appeared on the beach, really angry. He made me get in the car and acted like I was going to be in a ton of trouble. But Danko didn’t drive me back to the house. He pulled over in the thick woods between the house and the beach, and he told me that Kristijan was an untrustworthy boy with a lot of evil impulses. He asked me if Kristijan had touched me appropriately, or tried to force me to touch any of his private parts. Kristijan was not like that, not at all. I was totally grossed out, and said no, we had really just been trying to snorkel in the shallow water. But Danko said he didn’t believe me, and made me pull down my bikini bottoms so that he could again “examine” me. Once he was satisfied that I wasn’t lying, he told me that it was his job as my stepfather to protect my dignity.

  Both of those instances had been two years earlier, and I hadn’t told a soul. Mostly because I was mortified, and even though by the time I was fourteen I had figured out that he had basically been lying about my mom telling him to examine my chest and his concern about Kristijan’s involvement with me, I felt like Danko hadn’t really done anything that I could claim was wrong. Sure, I’d learned about molestation in health class at school, but I also knew what rape was and that he hadn’t done that. The thought of telling Mom, especially after so much time had passed, was just too embarrassing.

  She would probably think I was lying or trying to get attention. The worst part was that I was totally guilty of lying about a bunch of other stuff. It’s hard to get people to believe you about important stuff when you’ve told pretty pathetic lies about everything from why you smelled like cigarette smoke to why you weren’t in second period geometry. I’d blabbed about the incident in my own head about five million times, but no matter how many times I retold myself the story, I felt so stupid and gullible that there was simply no way to rearrange the words to make the story plausible. And in the past two years since it had happened, I had kissed plenty of boys, so it wasn’t even like I could claim I was some naïve innocent anymore. It would have boiled down to my word against Danko’s about what he’d done, and I didn’t even know for sure if Bijoux would believe me.

  I had told myself when I was twelve that since I hadn’t fo
und the courage to just tell Mom or Bijoux, I’d have to do a better job of staying away from Danko.

  Of course, that had failed. Now I was back in Croatia, and the summer was just starting.

  CHAPTER 3

  The summer fell into its usual steady rhythm. I woke up late every morning, sweating in my bed as mid-morning sun filled my room, heating it like an oven. I tugged on my bathing suit and took a hot sweet roll from the kitchen with me outside, where I stuffed it in my mouth on my way to retrieve my bike. Typically I would ride to the beach by myself and get there at least an hour before Bijoux would arrive, stretching out on a beach chair and half-heartedly trying to read books off my summer reading list. Death of a Salesman made me fall asleep twice, once before I even had a chance to put on sunscreen. The Alchemist was vaguely interesting but it just made me daydream about how cool it would be to go to Spain.

  It was hopeless; I was doomed to fail English again my sophomore year.

  Inevitably Bijoux would drift her way down to the beach before noon, usually sullen and grumpy, suffering through a hangover behind her huge sunglasses. The two of us spent every afternoon stinking like suntan oil, picking at fried fish and weird new-fangled food from the beachfront restaurants. With the influx of foreign tourists, all of the Croatians were making attempts at global cuisine… ever had Croatian spring rolls? Inevitably every day we would meet new people, mostly boys who would trade phone numbers with us and we’d make plans to hang out later, but we’d never keep them. We already knew what we were doing every night; the plan never differed. We wouldn’t ever pedal our way back to the house until just before dinner time, bickering over who would get to shower first in the bathroom we shared. Mom hinted one night at dinner that she might have to fly back to New York for a board meeting, and my breathing seized. But she didn’t bring up the possibility again, and I began to think maybe this summer would be carefree, after all.