by Alex Flinn
Meryl looks up, then back down.
A moment later, I laugh again.
“You like anime?” Meryl asks.
I take this as permission to look at her, which I do. A blank look.
“Anime?” she repeats. “Japanese cartoons?”
I shake my head. “I have never seen one.”
“You’re watching one now.”
“Oh.” I look at the screen. The pink-haired girl is hitting someone very hard. “It seems quite lovely. I like how the girl, Sakura, will become a fighter, too, just like the boys. She is rather like Judge Judy, isn’t she?”
“Judge Judy?”
I shake my head. “Never mind.”
“Sakura’s my favorite,” Meryl says.
She goes back to her drawing, slightly less sullen. The television show ends, but another of the same begins. Meryl pays it little mind, engrossed in her art. I can hear Jack and his mother talking in the next room, but the blaring television prevents my knowing what they are saying. I stifle a yawn. My eyes begin to close. If I do not speak, I will begin to fall asleep.
Finally, I say, “I am sorry for looking at your sketch earlier.”
Meryl sketches a few lines, then says, “Whatever.”
“It is just,” I say, “that back in my country, I studied with an Italian master, Signor Carlo Maratti.”
“Woo-woo for you.”
“Oh, I am not bragging. I have no talent whatsoever, I assure you. Signor Maratti despised me. He told my father that teaching me was a waste of his time, and he went back to Italy to paint.”
Meryl laughs. “Pretty embarrassing, getting kicked out of art.”
“Quite. But you have talent, the sort of talent I wished to have.”
Now she is holding the sketch pad so that I might catch a glimpse of it, but I do not attempt to do so. Instead, I point at the television. “I like her hair. Is it common in your country?”
But Meryl moves her sketchbook closer. “I don’t think it’s very good. I can draw people and stuff, but then I have trouble with stupid things like the sky.”
I pull my eyes from the television. “May I see?” When she hands it to me, I take a look at it. As she says, the sky looks false against the realistic person and animals. “Ah, I see what you are talking about, although this is really quite wonderful. Have you studied the concept of negative space?”
“I don’t take art, actually. My dad says it’s a waste of an elective. What’s negative space?”
“Signor Maratti was quite enthusiastic for it—it is the idea that instead of observing the positive space of an object, one should draw the shape of the space around the object—the mermaid, for example, or this seagull.”
“But I tried doing that, drawing the sky first. It still comes out bad.”
I look closer. “That is because you drew the outline first. What you must do is draw up to the object, then draw the object afterward. Can I see your pad?”
She hands it to me, and I turn to the first blank page. Then I attempt to sketch the sky around the shape of a bird. “It is quite bad, I know, but the concept is true.”
Meryl attempts it herself. I try to nod encouragement without appearing patronizing. When I was her age—three hundred three years ago—I felt patronized by everyone. But no, she seems genuinely pleased by my interest in her art. Finally, she finishes the bird, a much better bird than my own, surrounded by a much better sky, and shows it to me. “Wow, that’s incredible,” she says, smiling. “It really does look a lot better that way.”
That is when Jack and his mother walk in.
“Talia,” Jack says, “I’m afraid my mom has some bad news.”
“Wait a second,” Jack’s mother says. “Meryl, was that you speaking just now?”
Meryl shrugs. “Yeah.”
“And that is your sketchbook?” She reaches for it. Meryl snatches it back. Jack’s mother says, “Am I to understand, Meryl, that you have allowed this…this…girl…”
“Talia,” Jack says helpfully.
“…that you have allowed Talia to see your sketchbook?”
Meryl has secreted the sketchbook behind her person again. “She studied with an Italian master. Isn’t that cool?”
Jack’s mother nods. “Yes.” She looks at Jack. “You say her parents will be back to get her in a week?”
Jack nods.
“And you have actually met her parents?”
Jack laughs. “Boy, have I!”
“All right. She can stay the week. But she has to sleep in the study downstairs, on the air mattress.”
I wish I knew what an air mattress was.
Chapter 13:
Jack
“An air mattress is a strange thing, indeed,” Talia says.
“It’s rubber,” I say. And the study is way too small for it. Talia’s going to be wedged between the desk and the door out to the garage, but I couldn’t talk Mom into letting Talia stay in the guest room. Too near our rooms. For my own security. So we’re putting a princess on an air mattress. By the garage.
“It is ingenious that people of your time have found so many uses for such an unpleasant substance.” She feels the top of it. “Is it not possible to put something else inside it, like feathers?”
“Look, I’m sorry. My mom, she’s a little weird about things. We’re not going to do much sleeping, anyway. We’ve got that party tonight.” I look at her. “Boy, is Amber going to freak when she sees you.”
“Amber?” Talia says.
“Yeah, you know, the girl you talked to on the phone. My ex-girlfriend.”
“She did not seem very nice.”
I shrug. “She’s usually nicer.” I’m not even sure that’s true. I realize that maybe Talia didn’t know that Amber’s going to be there tonight. “But anyway, you’re so beautiful, she’ll flip out when she sees you.”
“Flip out? I am sorry, but what does that mean?”
“It means she’s going to be really jealous when she sees us together.”
Talia puts her hands on her hips. “That is why we are going, then? To see this girl, Amber, to make her jealous?”
I don’t say anything. I mean, yeah, it’s the reason, but when she puts it that way, it sounds like I’m using Talia. Which I sort of am, I guess. But this party is the chance I’ve been waiting for all summer. Bringing Talia home was just about driving my parents nuts at first—but it will be incredible when Amber sees her and realizes I’m not just waiting around for her. Finally, I say, “Hey, I brought you back here. I talked my mom into letting you stay. I thought the least you could do was—”
“Fine.” She looks away. “But should you not be spending your first evening back with your parents?”
I shrug. “My mom’s got a meeting tonight, and Dad’s out of town. As usual.”
Talia nods like she understands, but I doubt she does. Back in her time, mothers didn’t go to meetings, and fathers worked on the farm, with their sons by their sides. But she’s being nice about it. Actually, she’s being nice about everything, the Chinese food that she choked on—I guess they don’t have soy sauce where she’s from—my weird mother and my weirder sister, and now the air mattress. They don’t have anything where she’s from, and she thinks it’s all awesome.
I change the subject. “So, you were actually talking to my sister?”
“Mm-hmm. She seems lovely.” I laugh, and she says, “What is funny?”
“It’s just…my sister and I mostly just insult each other.”
“Have you tried talking to her about something which interests her?” Talia pokes the air mattress with her finger.
I shrug. “I didn’t really think anything did.”
Talia tries to sit down, but the mattress bucks her off. I help her onto it. “In my time,” she says, “there was not much to do but talk. We had no televisions. We had no telephones—neither the kind in your pocket nor the kind on a table. We had no movies or cars. So we talked. I learned that it is possible to make co
nversation with anyone, if you figure out what they wish to discuss.”
I remember how Talia got me to talk about the gardening thing. I’ve never told anyone else about that, but with this girl, I sort of feel like I can be myself without worrying about looking uncool. After all, she doesn’t even know what “cool” is.
But the problem with having someone come to your house and be with you all the time is you start seeing what your life is like through their eyes. Like, why didn’t someone show to pick me up from the airport, or at least call to tell me they weren’t coming? Why doesn’t Mom have any real food in the house? It’s not like our food rotted when we were asleep for three hundred years, but that’s sort of what it looks like. And why can’t I get my sister to talk to me?
“Yeah?” I say. “And what did you figure out about Meryl?”
“That she is lonely, has few friends. She tries to befriend the neighbor girl, who only makes jest of her.”
“Jennifer picks on Meryl?”
Talia rolls her eyes. “You do not see what is right before you. But Meryl is a talented artist and finds solace in that. That is what we spoke about. Art.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I never noticed she had talent. She never showed me her sketches or anything.
“Whooo! This is fun!” Talia’s standing on the air mattress now. It’s underfilled, and she’s trying to walk across it, which is a bit like walking on a surfboard.
“Stop. You’ll fall.”
“What shall happen if I do? Hit my head and sleep three hundred years?”
“Maybe. Why not?”
“Oh, you are just an old bore! Lady Brooke was always trying to stop me having fun. Well, you cannot!”
“Oh, yeah?” I grab the air pump and turn it on full blast in her face. “How about that?”
She squeals and covers her face. “Better!” But in the next moment, she falls. I catch her, and for a moment, I hold her there, and I think what it would be like to kiss her. To kiss her again.
But that’s silly. I don’t even like her, and she’s going away in a week. Then I’ll never see her again. What I really want is to get Amber back, so kissing Talia isn’t part of my plan.
She grabs the air pump out of my hand. “Attack of the ninjas!” She turns it on my face and, at the same time, kicks my legs out from under me. I fall on my butt. “Oh, I am learning from your television.”
I don’t kiss her. But I do think I’ll miss her when she’s gone.
Chapter 14:
Talia
A party! I am wearing Meryl’s “Abercrombie & Fitch” shirt and a pair of blue jeans, both of which are relatively modest. The bathing costume, I place inside my purse, never to see the light of day.
Jack wears a “tank top” and his own bathing costume, which is somewhat more modest than those prescribed for women. Still, it reveals a great deal more flesh than I am accustomed to seeing revealed by the gentlemen at court.
I try to focus my eyes properly on the back of Jack’s head or, perhaps, the floor as we traverse the stairs and the hallway on the way to Jack’s car. And yet my eyes continue to travel downward, sideways, or in general away from their proper destination—for the destination they seek is the back of Jack’s legs and other nether regions which have been properly covered in recent days by his trousers.
I remember that delicious moment in the study—that horrible little room next to the place where they keep the cars, where I am to be consigned these next seven nights—when I fell from the air mattress, and I thought Jack was going to kiss me. Was he going to? Will he ever?
I sneak another glance at Jack’s legs.
Signor Maratti had a book filled with colored plates of subjects appropriate for young ladies, flowers and fruit and other vegetation. These, he showed me often, the better to reveal my own inadequacies as a painter. But one day, when Signor had excused himself to clean the paintbrushes, I ventured to glance at the book. It fell to the floor and, in my haste to retrieve it, I saw a plate which made me gasp.
I knew immediately why Signor Maratti had not shown me that particular page. One would have thought that the realization of this fact would have been all that was necessary to cause me to avert my eyes in a ladylike manner.
One would have thought wrong.
The picture was of a young man, quite naked but for a bit of leaves where a codpiece would go. I assured myself that, had it not been for that bit of leaves, I would have turned the page. What struck me about the picture was how different this young man’s body was from my own: muscular where mine was soft, angular where mine was round. I could not quell the momentary thrill at the thought—I knew it was an improper one—of beholding, even touching such a body one day in person—when I was properly married to a suitable consort, of course.
Then Signor Maratti entered, and I was forced to pretend I had been looking at the flowers. I am afraid I did not concentrate for the rest of the lesson, and it was a blessing that Signor himself was old and fat, the better to calm my racing heart and mind.
He never left me alone again.
But now, hundreds of years later, I am beholding a male body, a body which was not even a wish of a prediction of a dream on that long-ago day, and yet I feel the same excitement at the thought of it, the same wondering how it would be to touch it.
We reach the party at good speed, thanks to the service of Jack’s car. There are numerous other cars parked on the grassy area in front of the house. To whom do they belong? Will their owners like me? At parties at my father’s castle, I was always in the company of Lady Brooke and other female companions, who were under strict orders to keep me entertained, as if I were a fussy infant. There will be no such orders here.
What if they hate me?
I was quite perturbed to find that Jack was using me to make this Amber person jealous. On the other hand, it is gratifying to know that he believes me so beautiful.
Suddenly, Jack is beside me, rapping on the car window. “Coming?”
I manage to rip my gaze from his muscled arms long enough to say, “I am afraid.”
He glances at his wristwatch. “They’ll all love you.”
This seems unlikely, but Jack opens the car door and grips my wrist firmly in his hand. It is so warm, and I remember that he is my intended, my destiny. There is only the obstacle of Amber to be gotten past.
“Do you really think so?” I edge closer to him than I have dared before.
“Sure.” He is near enough that I can feel his breath upon me, and with his free hand, he pushes a lock of hair from my face. “You’re so beautiful, Talia. How could anyone not love you?”
I hope this is true, of him. I am, indeed, used to being adored. But I was adored because I was a princess. Will I still be adorable when I am merely Talia?
I begin to follow him toward the door. “But what if I say something…foolish?” I ask before we go inside.
“Believe me, people will be too drunk to notice.”
No one answers when Jack knocks upon the door, so finally we push it open. This is shocking to me. Is there no guard? No servant to announce us? But when we enter, I am no longer surprised.
It is chaos. There is music louder than any that I have heard before. I realize that Jack was correct that I need not worry about saying anything foolish. No one would even hear it. Dozens of people talk and laugh and dance in a most improper manner, and every single young lady at the party is dressed in a bathing costume similar to the one Jack provided. In many cases, they are even less modest.
“Come on,” Jack says. “I’ll introduce you around.”
I am pleased that he does not release his grip upon my hand. It would be terrifying to be lost here. The patio, as Jack calls it, is barely quieter than the house and even more crowded. Here, the crowd centers upon a large artificial lake—the pool—where people are swimming.
My every muscle urges me to stop—nay, to flee—but my mind urges me forward. These are Jack’s friends. They must like me. He
must like me and not think me a misfit from another time.
A portly boy greets us. “Hey, Jacko, you made it.”
“Stewy!” Jack slaps the boy’s hand. “This is Talia. She’s from Belgium.”
“Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said she was beautiful.” He touches my shoulder with a hand that is wet and ice-cold, and he does not remove it. “Does this mean Amber’s available?”
“You’ll have to ask her boyfriend.” Jack guides me toward him, which has the effect of separating my shoulder from Stewy’s clammy hand. “Let’s get a drink.”
“Help yourself. My parents are paying for it.” Stewy leans toward me. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you better, Talia.”
He leers at me. I try to think of a proper response. As a princess, I might have slapped him or called the guards. Now, I simply turn away. “So kind of you.”
Soon, Jack and I have put several chairs and people between ourselves and Stewy, and I am glad of it. Jack thrusts a cold, cylindrical object into my hand.
“Thank you!” I say, staring at it.
“It’s a beer.” He looks around the patio.
“I am familiar with beer,” I say, although I have never drank one and have certainly never seen this sort of container for one. I watch as Jack opens his own beer, then places the cylinder to his lips, his eyes still glancing about.
I do the same. It is so cold that, for a moment, my teeth begin to ache. When I have recovered, I say, “Is Stewy a good friend of yours?”
I have to say it twice before he looks at me, but finally he does.
“He’s okay. We go to school together, and…” He stops. His eyes suddenly fix elsewhere. I follow his gaze to its end. I see what he has been looking for.
It is a girl. She emerges from the pool, and she is—I would like to believe—no more beautiful than myself, but she wears a bathing suit more revealing than the rest—so revealing, indeed, that I wonder if some of the fabric of it may have shrunk in the water, or if someone played a trick on her. Her auburn hair is long and curly, and although her skin is a shade of tan that ladies of court assiduously avoided through the unrelenting use of headdresses and powder, I suspect this is no longer the case, for every male eye on the patio is suddenly upon her.