One second, he is bounding up the stairs two at a time; the next, he is opening the door and stepping inside.
Aksel doesn’t stop casually when he sees me. He comes to a deliberate halt a meter away from me—like I am either contagious or dangerous.
Aksel Fredricksen hasn’t been at school all week. I’d know. Because harder than catching up on eighteen months of missed schoolwork has been trying to not constantly scan the halls, curious if I’d see Aksel at school—which is why it actually seems weird that I haven’t seen him. Not once. Until now.
He’s even more strapping and formidable than I remember.
Strikingly handsome, his features are angular, with broad cheekbones and full lips. He looks like he’s been outdoors all morning. His light bronze skin is flushed and tan. In daytime, his deep-set eyes are even brighter—a pulsing, electrifying shade of green.
Why am I standing here—staring?
“So you do go to school here?” I blurt out.
I look down at the physics book in his hand. Obviously.
His face remains impassive. “Yeah. Of course.”
“But you’ve been gone.”
“Vacation,” he answers easily.
“All week?” I prod. My cheeks redden. In Waterford, I’m supposed to stop noticing things—details—people don’t like being inspected.
His piercing eyes don’t leave my face. “How’s your leg?” Aksel asks. His voice is deep, slightly hoarse; his lips are round and full and why do I keep looking at them?
Flushing, I bite my lip. How can he make me nervous?
“Healed mostly. It was only a small bruise.” I wring my fingers together. “I’m Sophia, by the way,” I chatter. “I didn’t really thank you previously, so thank you. You’re a good shot. My father would be impressed. He’d say only military snipers would have made those shots …”
As I speak, Aksel’s entire demeanor subtly shifts. His posture stiffens, tensing, like I’ve startled him. Momentarily, his brow furrows.
He looks like he’s inspecting me.
I’m hit by an unexpected sensation of familiarity.
“… Where did you … learn?” I finish lamely.
Aksel watches me uneasily. A sharp tingle rolls up my spine.
Leaning fractionally away from me, Aksel arranges his mouth into a slight, forced smile. “Hunting,” he answers reticently.
Brrrriiiiinnngggg!
The corridor crowds with students.
It’s as though an invisible barrier has descended between us.
Easing his hands into his pockets, Aksel slips back into a composed posture and says, “See you later,” before striding past me down the hall.
What was that about?
Ruffled, I dart to the north hall, collect my assignment, and reach Krenshaw’s class as the tardy bell rings. At the whiteboard, Krenshaw clears his throat and presses out the sleeves of his tweed coat.
The door creaks open. It has a broken hinge, so it swings into the wall with a thud.
Krenshaw’s eyes dart to the doorway, along with everyone else’s.
Aksel strides into the classroom. Our eyes lock. My cheeks ignite.
Mortified, I spin back in my seat and inspect the calculator on my desk.
“Today is your midterm,” Krenshaw declares.
Aksel sits down two seats over.
“No fair!” shrieks a girl to my left. “It’s supposed to be next week!”
Krenshaw raises his arms, silencing the class, before distributing the exam. “Remember, midterms are a third of your grade.”
I’m hyperaware of Aksel’s presence, his movements; beside me, he is seated at an angle, drumming his pencil against his desk.
As the exam begins, I keep my head down, scribbling out factorials.
Yet, my pencil quakes in my hand.
There is something unsettling about the way he looked at me—for a second in the woods and that flicker just now—like he knew me, and I can’t push it aside, explain it away.
I don’t need to be on alert. Aksel isn’t familiar. He lives in Waterford.
The shrill whiz of an electric pencil sharpener knocks me back into reality.
Forty minutes left and I haven’t finished the first page.
However, I didn’t study in bombed-out Crimean hotel rooms, without electricity, only to fail an American high school math exam. I desperately push aside my curiosity and focus.
With ten minutes left, Aksel stands, walks to the back of the classroom, and drops his exam onto Krenshaw’s desk.
Surreptitiously, I watch Aksel beneath my lashes. He strides out of the classroom … without a look in my direction.
“Six o’clock good?” Charlotte asks, hauling open the heavy school door a few days later. “We’ll get ready for the Stomp at my house.”
My eyes have strayed behind Charlotte, watching Aksel stride down the main steps two at a time.
Since the exam, I’ve seen Aksel frequently at school, usually in Calculus and often leaving Physics alongside a ski racer named Henry. We say almost nothing to each other. He’s not mean, he’s just cordially indifferent.
Yet despite the impermeable distance between us, there remains a gnawing in my chest each day as I turn a corner or enter Krenshaw’s classroom. I’m not sure whether I dread Aksel’s presence or desire it.
It’s nagging me that I can’t figure him out, that I’m flustered around him, that if we make eye contact, my stomach inevitably churns like a baby goldfish is swimming around inside.
Like now. And he’s barely out of view.
I snap my eyes back to Charlotte. “You mean a dance?”
“No, a stomp,” Charlotte says, treading over brittle ocher and scarlet leaves piled at the curb as we skirt the crowd stampeding to the parking lot. “You do not go with a date, and if Ryan Rice asks you to see the hay rafters, say no!”
I scrunch my nose. “Hay rafters?”
“Hay rafters, Sophia! You know?” she laughs. “Never mind.”
Opening my front door ten minutes later, I collide with stacks of cardboard boxes piled in the foyer, managing to catch the top box before it topples over.
“Movers left five minutes ago,” my mother says, maneuvering toward me. Her flaxen hair is combed neatly, and she is wearing her typical pearl earrings and a cardigan, buttoned once, the second button down. She wipes her bare forearm against her brow. “It’s nice to see everything again, isn’t it?”
Careful not to bump my thigh, I kneel down. “How long has it been?”
My mother rips the tape off a box. “Four years, seven months, one day.”
Curious, I watch her open it. Inside is her collection of Nordic folk art: wood carvings, embroidered tablecloths, and Dala horses painted red and blue.
I shuffle through several boxes before I spot a familiar piece of lace and velvet sticking out from beneath a mound of crumpled tissue paper.
Katarina looks as I remember her: blond ringlets, a cobalt-blue taffeta gown, and Made in Russia imprinted in Cyrillic letters on the bottom of her black satin shoe.
A Ukrainian diplomat, Consular Petrenko, gave her to me during a posting in Damascus when I was six. I hadn’t known what to name her, so my mother suggested Katarina, a Russian ballerina she once knew.
For a very long time, I took Katarina with me everywhere. Every new place we moved I made a bed for Katarina beside my own. Together we would fall asleep as I imagined Katarina telling me stories of a simple life in the country where we would run barefoot in fields of wild berries and chase fireflies at dusk.
Then our last night in Bratislava, shortly after the movers left with our boxes, my mother flew into my bedroom—a small wallpapered room with a brass bed frame and a window overlooking the Danube River—and swept me into her arms. There was barely time to grab Katarina before I was whisked away—up the stairs and onto the tile rooftop. I watched the window of my bedroom erupt in flames as the helicopter ascended.
Not long afterward, we stop
ped unpacking altogether. I never saw our things again.
Carefully, I wrap Katarina back inside the tissue paper and tuck her into the box alongside the other dolls.
What is the point of having this unloaded? Here? Now?
Since we arrived, I’ve searched my parents’ faces, trying to read between our reality and the facade they have established in Waterford. I can’t find any reason not to trust them, not to believe that we are here permanently. So why don’t I?
“What do you think?”
Startled, I turn. My father could have successfully snuck away from the grizzly.
“Stay alert, Sophia. Even a great predator like the tiger can become prey—”
“Why are we here?” I snap, wanting none of his instruction.
He drops his teasing lecture. “Your mother and I retired,” he says carefully. His face is clean-shaven, and he keeps his silver-blond hair trimmed short. In his left hand, he holds a Prussian sword with a ten-inch hilt wrapped in disintegrating leather.
“Why not retire in Barcelona, or Hvar, or Positano? Why here?” I gesture around. Visible through the windows at the front of the house is a steep alpine summit. I can see golden quaking aspens and emerald pine trees, but no plaster apartment buildings with terra-cotta tiles; no dirty steps leading to underground metros; no art museums in elaborate old palaces.
I don’t wait for his answer, instead broaching the unresolved questions still bothering me. “How did Farhad find us in Tunis?”
He points the sword tip down, looking steadily into my eyes. “I don’t know, Sophia, but we’re safe here.”
“Except they keep finding us. No matter what we do, they are always one step ahead. What if they find us here?”
“They won’t. He was the last one. You saw me kill him, Sophia.”
“But if it’s over, why move us here to the middle of nowhere?”
My father smiles. “I was born in Massachusetts, Sophia. Snow is in our bones.”
“Snow is why we moved here?” I ask skeptically.
He shrugs. “Andrews said Waterford would be a good fit. It’s quiet and mountainous. Soon we can ski—”
“So tomorrow we won’t leave for Prague or Karachi or Nicosia—”
“No, Sophia.”
“And you moved here to do what other retired people do. Not because we’re waiting or hiding?”
My father runs the blade along his palm, examining it. Then he theatrically slashes left, slashes right, and—swish—slides the Prussian sword into its leather sheath.
“We moved here because it’s time you finally experience our country.”
CHAPTER 10
My country.
I’ve seen enough Halloween movies to get the idea. Nothing quite compares to the festivity permeating the air. My mother spends all day making caramel apples, and as I leave, a witch, an astronaut, and Spider-Man ring the doorbell.
We arrive to the Stomp an hour late—on time, if you ask Charlotte—and park in a field adjacent to the barn. Actually, we jolt to a stop; the car lurches forward as Emma mistimes the clutch. I have whiplash by the time she parks.
Charlotte unbuckles her seat belt and dramatically rubs her neck.
Emma scowls. “It’s not my fault I’m stuck with this old Jeep.”
Outside, the sky is a darkening slate. A breeze rustles the amber leaves lining the road; they drift around our ankles as we run through the plowed cornfield toward a gravel path lined with pumpkin lanterns.
“Why is the Stomp in a barn?” I ask, inspecting my costume as we approach the doors. Charlotte convinced us to wear fairy costumes, and to cover our bodies with a radiant, luminescent powder. We look like glowworms.
Charlotte laughs. “It always is—it’s a barn stomp!”
“Your wings!” Emma squeals, pointing to my shoulders.
I reach for the straps—darn. “I’ll catch up!” I say.
I run back down the path, scanning the darkening cornfield ahead. Quickly, I spot the shimmering wings. I pick them off the damp field and shake them out.
As I reach the gravel path, I hear a rustling in the distance. Swishing.
I look over my shoulder.
From out of the shadows, a dark figure emerges. He glides stealthily toward me—not slowing down or speeding up, but with a smooth stride—like a predator stalking prey.
Why did I come out here alone?
Backlit by headlights at the edge of the field, he’s wearing a cloak with an upturned collar; a mask conceals his face.
His pace quickens.
Instinctively, I retrieve my Ladybug from my waistband.
Diverting around the lanterns, I turn the corner toward the entrance and—“BOO!”
Tate McCormick jumps in front of me, laughing.
Simultaneously, the shadowy figure steps out from behind me, snickering. Ryan Rice pushes off his mask and fist-bumps Tate, “Scared New Girl too.”
Hot with embarrassment, I slip the knife back into my waistband. “Surprised,” I say. “And my name is Sophia.”
“You’re safe with us, Sophia.” Tate grins. He is dressed in an old military outfit, navy blue with yellow cording on the structured shoulders. His dark hair falls loose over his pale forehead. He takes off his cap and tucks it beneath his armpit, which is awkward considering Abigail Montgomery, dressed as a La Perla Cowgirl, is tucked in there too.
“Come on,” Abigail squeals, urging us all indoors.
Strung from the rafters, thousands of glittering orange lights decorate the barn. The air is humid with body heat. I stay near the chilly entrance.
Mason walks over, offering me a plate loaded with cider doughnuts, toffee, and pumpkin bars. “Princess?” he asks.
“Fairy,” I laugh, taking a toffee. “Obviously not a convincing one.”
“You’re a stunning fairy,” he says, and his ears go pink.
Mason is wearing a vintage sweater with Calgary 1988 embroidered above Olympic rings and a Union Jack pin on his chest.
“Olympian?” I guess.
“Eddie the Eagle.” He unhooks a pair of oversize red glasses from his sweater and places them on his face. “Gutsiest ski jumper of all time.” With his sun-streaked blond hair and tan skin glimmering in the lights, he looks more like a California surfer.
“Hey, do you want to check out the hay rafters?” a voice whispers in my ear. “It’s supposed to be haunted up there.”
I turn. “Aren’t you here with Abigail?”
“No one has a date,” Tate chuckles, snaking his arm around my neck. “Come on, Sophia,” he continues. “You’re probably the only person who hasn’t been up there.”
“Hey!” Charlotte intercedes, brushing aside Tate’s hand. “Stop running off!” she scolds me, dragging me toward the swarm of sweaty bodies.
Mason snatches Charlotte’s other hand, runs forward, and dashes into the crowd of people.
“Come on!” he yells. Carving into the solid mass like a surfboard through a wave, Mason tows us into the center of the dance floor under the dazzling orange lights.
All of a sudden, I am smashed among bodies. It is like being on the metro in Tokyo, or at a market in Delhi. Except these hot sweaty bodies are jumping and laughing and moving, in swirling unsynchronized steps.
Charlotte and Emma are ridiculously good dancers. Unfortunately, years of ballet did not equip me to dance at a Waterford High barn stomp.
Spunky country music vibrates in the air. Boys I’ve only seen sporadically in the halls push up near us. Charlotte seductively draws them close, then turns her back on them, regaining eye contact with us, her eyes wide with laughter. The only boy she dances with is Cole Richards, her on-off boyfriend for, like, ever, according to Emma.
Tate comes up behind me, places his hands on my hips, and sways with me along with the music. Imitating Charlotte, I playfully push his chest away. When this method backfires and he returns, even more tactile, I elbow him in the chest, right above his second rib. He puts a hand to his heart.
“That hurt!” he laughs.
“It should!” I respond.
A bluegrass song begins. Suddenly everyone is shuffling into lines. Emma grabs my arm. “You stay behind me,” she orders.
At first, it’s impossible. Charlotte kicks right. I kick left. Emma turns sideways. I jump back. Each time I imitate their steps, I lag behind. Kick. Spin. Forward. Cross.
I’m terrible at this.
Charlotte links her hands into mine; in advance of each step, she prompts me. Reverse. Spin. Kick. Repeat. When I accidentally bump Abigail, she giggles, nudging me back in the right direction.
I feel completely out of place. While everyone dances deliberately, I pinball between bodies, two steps behind. But soon the fervor, the energy of everyone moving in synchronization—kick, slide, spin, turn, jump—encompasses me.
In the row ahead, Cole, Mason, Oliver, Liam, and a bunch of other boys expertly rotate inversely, causing a spectacle—even more so because of their ridiculous costumes.
During a double-skip-tap-spin one of my wings tangles with Emma’s. When Charlotte finally separates us, we can barely stand up straight from laughing so hard.
Somehow, by the final chorus, I catch on. The song ends in a fiddle crescendo—at the final note everyone jump-clicks their heels in the air, followed by boisterous applause.
Turns out, American line dances are really, actually, fun.
Several songs later, Charlotte hisses behind me, “Time to go!”
“Already?” I ask, looking back.
Because out of the corner of my eye—I see Aksel. He’s standing at the periphery of the barn with some other seniors. And he’s laughing.
I’m not sure why I feel so surprised to see him here wearing a cowboy hat and boots. Was he here the whole time?
“Isn’t there another song?” I ask Charlotte as she tugs my hand.
“Sure!” she laughs. “But we never stay until the end!”
Outside, the temperature has dropped. Cold sleet falls from the pewter sky. Charlotte, Emma, and I run back through the misty cornfield, trampling leaves and stalks.
“Meet at the Creamery!” Mason hollers to us as we reach Emma’s Jeep.
Girl from Nowhere Page 4