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

by Caitlyn Duffy

  “I don’t hate it,” he clarified, “but I don’t want to study it for the rest of my life. I told my dad I really want to go to art school.”

  Shock barely covered my response to what I was hearing. I had always thought that Viktor and Maria were very strict parents, even more strict than Danko. Viktor had wanted Kristijan to follow in his footsteps.

  “And your dad was OK with that?” I asked.

  “Not at first,” Kristijan said, “but he’s OK now. He thought about it for a few days and he decided that if I don’t want to study finance, it’s pointless to make me continue. So I’m switching schools.”

  “Wha..?” the whole conversation was so strange; I was suspicious that Krisitjan was pulling my leg.

  “I’m going to art school in Madrid,” Kristijan said. “I’m going to focus on computer animation.”

  “You don’t even speak Spanish.”

  “I do, too. I’ve been studying Spanish for three years.”

  I sighed, defeated. Of course students in Croatia who already spoke Croatian and English would master a third language before completing high school. I had given German a shot for one semester at Pershing and had barely passed.

  “Prove it,” I challenged.

  He rattled off a sentence in what sounded to me like flawless Spanish. Of course, I had absolutely no idea what he’d said.

  I heard a knock on my door and nearly jumped out of my chair.

  “Who is it?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Open this door.”

  I heard Danko outside in the hallway and my immediate reaction was panic. But then I heard my mother’s voice echo further down the hall, perhaps in the kitchen. Completely forgetting that Kristijan could hear and see everything going on in my bedroom via my laptop’s video camera, I rose from my desk and rushed to my door to open it just barely a few inches. I braced myself for annihilation. Surely it was punishment time.

  “Who are you talking to in here?” Danko asked, peering inside my bedroom. He was strangely not at all angry.

  “Kristijan,” I said, looking over my shoulder at my laptop.

  Kristijan, naturally hearing what was happening in my room, shouted out a greeting over video chat in Croatian at his uncle.

  “Hello,” Danko said, suddenly sounding more pleasant now that he knew Kristijan was listening. “Your mother thought it would be nice if we have lunch at the Boathouse.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. Really? I had stayed out all night – ALL NIGHT – drinking and hanging out with people decades older than me until sunrise, and no one had even noticed?

  “OK,” I said, defeated. “Where were you guys last night?”

  Danko raised an eyebrow at me as if he couldn’t believe my stupidity. “Last night was the charity dinner for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation that your mother has been organizing all summer. It was at the Waldorf-Astoria. Didn’t you read the note your mother left you on the fridge?”

  My mind was racing, trying to put the pieces together in my head. I was drawing a total blank on anything related to my mom organizing a charity event. All she’d talked about all summer was Night Complex blah blah blah. There had been no mention of fancy dinners. How could I have planned my big night of breaking all household rules on a night when they were in midtown in a hotel suite, completely oblivious?

  “Uh, no,” I said. “I must have overlooked it.”

  Danko looked me over from head to toe dismissively. I felt nausea wash over me. His voice made me sick and even the most casual conversations with him the apartment were unbearably uncomfortable for me. “Get dressed, it’s almost one.”

  I closed my door again but didn’t bother locking it, knowing that if he happened to hear the pop of the lock from the hallway, I’d be in for an earful. I sank back down into the chair at my desk to find Kristijan pulling his nostrils up high with his thumbs, and sticking his tongue out at me.

  “Very sexy,” I assured him.

  Throughout lunch at the fancy restaurant overlooking the reservoir at Central Park, I could barely focus on conversation between Mom and Danko. I gathered that Bijoux was planning to return home the next day and resume her apartment hunt. That was not good news for me. Mom’s trip to Paris to work on the new night cream product was definitely happening, and she was considering going two weeks early to be there for Spring Fashion Week. My heart was sinking. My big effort had been a colossal failure. Mom got invited to those kinds of big events sometimes, Bijoux, too. Not me, at least not yet.

  That night, I was so angry I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t cried even once since that terrible night in July, and I had promised myself that I wouldn’t cry about it, not ever. But that night, I was pretty close to tears. Kristijan had barely even had to ask his parents for boarding school and they had agreed.

  The next day, I was inconsolably depressed. Mom and Bijoux went apartment hunting downtown together. I retrieved my backpack from Christie’s apartment and told her I couldn’t hang out long because all she wanted to do was blab about how many awesome people like Seth Zable had been texting her all weekend, and I wasn’t in the mood to hear it. I walked around Central Park aimlessly until the sun went down and it started getting cold outside, not wanting to be in the apartment unnecessarily. Everyone’s life was so great except mine. Several times it occurred to me that maybe I should tell Christie about what had happened in Croatia, but the whole idea made me very uncomfortable. Christie wasn’t the kind of friend who would have known what to do, she would have just said gross and changed the topic to Thom DaSilva’s hair.

  I sulked through dinner, not wanting to hear about Bijoux’s great adventure in Los Angeles rubbing elbows with actors, or about how Tobin was moving to New York to be with her when he wasn’t shooting episodes of the show. I saw Danko and Mom exchange concerned looks about this; I’m sure neither of them was enthusiastic about buying an apartment where some up-and-coming actor was inevitably going to freeload. Bijoux’s life seemed completely separate from mine. Never before had my sister felt like less a part of my life.

  The idea of continuing to live this way behind locked doors was making me feel desperate. I had to keep reminding myself as my eyes swelled with tears that I didn’t want to die; I just wanted to be elsewhere.

  By Monday morning when I put on my Pershing uniform, I had solemnly sworn to myself that I would focus on nothing but ways to get out of our apartment.

  I walked to school in a dream-like state, speaking to no one, ignoring the friendly crossing guard at our corner. Walking through the lobby of the school, I felt like a complete idiot for having really believed when I had last walked the halls on Friday that I wouldn’t be back. My first period class on Mondays was Chemistry, which I was probably failing already even just two weeks into the school year. I tucked my textbook for my second period class, Ms. Kumar’s, beneath my desk and retrieved a lab coat from the stack of freshly washed and folded pile of them in the lab area of the classroom, which was double the size of most classrooms at Pershing. Our chemistry lab teacher, Dr. Himelstein, was one of the oldest teachers at the school and she wore her thick gray hair in a huge bun at the top of her head. I took off my maroon blazer and set it on the back of the seat at my desk.

  “We are continuing our study of the properties of bases today, class,” Dr. Himelstein announced as we all snapped the front closures of our white lab coats over our uniforms. “Today we will be working with phenolphthalein and potassium, so I’m going to ask that you all wear safety glasses for this exercise. When you’re ready, please turn to page 48 in your text for the instructions. And please prepare your notepads to record your observations.”

  I stood alone, foolishly, at the lab station I had been assigned on the first day of school, looking around wildly through my scratchy plastic safety glasses. My lab partner, Julianne, was nowhere to be seen. Not at her desk, not near the pile of lab coats… absent.

  “Betsey and Jessica, it looks like you’re both in need of lab partners toda
y. Betsey, why don’t the two of you work together at station twelve?” Dr. Himelstein ordered.

  I gritted my teeth and picked up my spiral notebook to cross the lab for Jessica’s station, which was at the back of the room near the big metal cabinets where Dr. Himelstein kept our lab materials locked away, and the emergency shower. Jessica offered me a fake smile, surely no more enthusiastic about having to work with me than I was about having to work with her. I really didn’t like Jessica. Before I arrived at her lab table, I saw her roll her eyes at her friend Monica across the room. I looked across the room toward Amanda for my own support system, but she was oblivious to my plight, happily busying herself with her experiment at her own lab table with her partner.

  Ignoring Jessica, I opened the textbook to the right page, and following the first instruction, I reached for a beaker from the cabinet beneath our lab table. I filled it half-full of water at our sink, and set it in one of the holes in our wooden beaker holder.

  “Can I do the next step, or are you going to just do the entire experiment by yourself?” Jessica asked me smugly, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking her head.

  “Be my guest,” I said, stepping back. I wasn’t sure what I had ever done to make such an enemy in this pint-sized little blond girl, but chances were good I hadn’t done anything. That was just how life was inside a girls’ private high school. If you didn’t like the looks of a girl, the appropriate response was to treat her as if she had insulted your whole family.

  I let my mind wander as Jessica filled an eyedropper with phenolphthalein. Chem lab was probably my least favorite subject, other than gym. I didn’t like the white coats, didn’t like the smell of sulfur in the lab, and didn’t like the element of danger, reinforced by the presence of that ominous safety shower just a few feet away from me. On the first day of sophomore year when Dr. Himelstein had walked us through her one-page hand-out about lab safety, I had cringed when she described the circumstances that might ostensibly involve use of the shower. If any chemical solution were to be spilled on a student’s body other than on her hands, she would have to stand under the emergency shower, strip, and remain there until the fire department arrived. Dr. Himelstein assured us that the shower had only been used once during her ten-year career at Pershing, but because of an accident involving a block of sodium being exposed to water at a boys’ private school on the Upper West Side, she was dead serious about the purpose of the shower. That high school had been sued into bankruptcy by the parents of a boy who hadn’t flushed his eyes thoroughly after the accident with water and had suffered permanent vision loss. Pershing would be taking no such chances.

  “Um, it’s your turn,” Jessica said, snapping me out of my reverie.

  I consulted my textbook, scanning with my eyes to figure out what we were supposed to do next. Around the room, little puffs of smoke were appearing at each lab table, followed by comments and note taking, so it was pretty obvious that in our next step, a chemical reaction would be occurring. In the world of chemistry class, it was show time. I lifted the long metal spoon that Dr. Himelstein had set out on our lab table before class began, and scooped up a very small amount of potassium from the tiny mound that Dr. Himelstein had measured out and placed in a petri dish prior to the start of class.

  I was supposed to pour the tiny bit of potassium into the mixture in the beaker. As soon as I tilted the spoon to begin pouring it in, I heard Jessica sigh. “You’re spilling it everywhere!”

  She was really, really getting on my nerves but I knew better than to try to get any sympathy from Dr. Himelstein; Jessica had one of the highest grade point averages in the sophomore class and was basically every teacher’s pet. So, instead of telling her to back off, I lifted the beaker out of the holder and held it in my left hand while I resumed pouring in the powder with the spoon in my right hand.

  “Be careful,” Jessica hissed.

  And in that moment of her unnecessarily cautioning me, a light bulb went on over my head. Eureka! This was my moment, the opportunity from the heavens to transport myself to boarding school. The whole thing, including the decision to just go for it, happened so quickly that the deed was done before I had a chance to think it through. There was an unexpected POP and a small puff of smoke, but my brain registered the puff of smoke after the beaker became way too hot to hold between my fingers. I panicked as my fingertips burned. But it was perfect.

  I tossed the beaker. Or rather, the contents of the beaker, in the general direction of Jessica Johanessen.

  As the mixture splashed across her lab coat, she shrieked so loudly that I was pretty sure everyone in the entire Pershing building heard her.

  All chemistry lab activity stopped and heads turned. The mixture from the beaker was turning pink on Jessica’s lab coat. Dr. Himelstein practically hurdled over desks to reach Jessica. This was the kind of classroom accident that chemistry teachers anticipated their entire careers.

  “You bitch!” Jessica screamed at me. A long vein popped out in her forehead like a bolt of lightning about to strike her left eyebrow.

  I took a few steps backward, a little terrified of what I’d done. It was nothing, really. A pink stain on a lab coat. But Dr. Himelstein was pushing Jessica toward the shower. The classroom was closing in on our lab table. Girls abandoned their experiments to come closer and get a better look.

  “Oh my god.”

  “She did it on purpose!”

  “Jessica, we have to follow procedures,” Dr. Himelstein was telling Jessica, who was refusing to step beneath the shower. Dr. Himelstein was turning the knobs on the tiled wall, and water was everywhere suddenly. A monstrous-sounding gurgle escaped from the drain in the floor beneath the shower as water began swirling into it. Jessica closed her eyes as her hair began to dampen. Dr. Himelstein pulled off her lab coat, revealing that the pink stain had saturated Jessica’s lab coat as well as her thin white uniform blouse beneath.

  Everyone was freaking out. Savannah Goldfarb was hysterically crying, which was odd, because Jessica wasn’t.

  “Nicolette! Go to the principal’s office and inform Principal Silvestri of what’s happened! And take Savannah with you,” Dr. Himelstein barked over one shoulder.

  Jessica stood silently beneath the flow of the shower in her wet bra, panties, knee socks and shoes with her arms crossed over her chest. Her mascara began rolling down her wet face in streams.

  “Why did you do that, Betsey?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  Voices were coming at me from all directions and I was starting to sweat. “It was an accident!” I kept saying. “She said I was spilling everything.”

  “You threw it right at me!” Jessica bellowed without opening her eyes beneath the stream of the shower. “That wasn’t an accident, and my parents are going to have your ass kicked out of school!”

  “Please be respectful,” Dr. Himelstein encouraged us in a shaky voice. We couldn’t stop watching. She had really made Jessica strip down to her underwear in the middle of the chemistry lab. I wasn’t sure who, other than me, remembered that Dr. Himelstein had said on the first day of class that the emergency shower automatically triggered a call to the Fire Department of NY. I wasn’t proud of what I had done, but in watching the chaos unfold and the mortified horror on Jessica’s face, I felt relieved. I was certain that this would guarantee my delivery to the Treadwell Academy.

  A year ago, standing practically naked in a classroom while my classmates pointed and stared would have been my worst nightmare. But now I knew there were things far worse than public humiliation. I kind of wished, standing there watching, that there could have been a way for me to tell Jessica that I was sorry but that she was doing me a greater favor than she could ever know. I immediately felt bad for what I’d done to Jessica; it hadn’t been completely intentional. It was selfish for me to think this way, but a few minutes of her embarrassment was nothing compared to what I’d had to endure, and what I’d have to continue to endure if I didn’t
get sent away. The whole chemistry lab incident was at least eighty-percent an honest accident, inspired by surprise. There was such a fuss being made over Jessica that I only noticed when the firemen arrived that I had blisters on my fingertips from where the beaker had scalded me.

  Of course because we were in Manhattan, the firemen sent to handle the “hazardous materials” emergency were pretty much the most smoking hot studs ever to set foot in the Pershing School. Concern for Jessica was instantly forgotten by my classmates as four tall, muscular, dimple-cheeked firemen in full fire gear strode into our class room, followed by several other concerned teachers and Principal Silvestri. The rubber boots of the firemen made squishing noises against the tile of the chemistry lab floor.

  “What seems to be the trouble here?” one fireman with jet black hair and blue eyes asked Dr. Himelstein. Jessica’s eyes opened at the sound of grown men in the room, and she looked nothing short of mortified that she was standing beneath a shower in her soaking wet underwear.

  Now that help had arrived (never mind that the help had no idea what potassium hydroxide was, or how caustic it might be to skin), Dr. Himelstein was able to focus on interrogating me about what had happened.

  I stuck to my story that I had no idea that the beaker would get so hot, and that Jessica had told me to pick it up to prevent myself from spilling so much powder on the table. OK, that last part was an embellishment; she had never specifically told me to pick up the beaker with my bare hands. But it was close enough to the process as it had unfolded in my mind that I didn’t really consider it a lie.

  “I am shocked, Betsey, simply shocked. How many times in the last two weeks have I told you girls that chemical reactions often take in and release heat? I can’t begin to understand what would possess you to pick up a beaker, but why on earth weren’t you wearing your safety gloves?” Dr. Himelstein demanded. She was red in the face, and perspiring.

  I squirmed. Gloves? I couldn’t remember ever seeing gloves anywhere before in the chemistry lab.