A moment later, a young man enters the room. He moves as if he is dancing in a ballroom, and his hair is bright green. I wonder if there were always colorful-haired people in other parts of the world. He gestures us into a room with sparkling white floors and white walls lined with glass windows.
“So, which of you wants to be a model?”
Jack gestures toward me. “Her. Who are you?”
He gives us a look as if to say that is none of our business but finally says, “Rafael. I’m Ms. Stewart’s right-hand man.” He looks me up and down. I feel a chill run through me, as though I were unclothed, but I do not clasp my arms around me to stay warm. Indeed, I fear to move under his gaze.
Finally, he is finished. “No, thanks.”
“Excuse me?” I do not know about what, or to whom, he is talking.
“No. We can’t offer you representation at this time. Thank you.”
He starts to walk away, and I once again feel I can move. “Oh. All right. Thank you.” I do not quite understand what “offer representation” means, either, but I do understand that our meeting is over.
“Wait a second,” Jack says. “We were supposed to meet Kim Stewart.”
The green-haired boy shrugs. “I screen for Kim so she doesn’t have to see anyone unacceptable.”
“And why isn’t she acceptable?”
“Jack…” I touch his sleeve. “We should leave.”
The green-haired boy turns so he is once again facing us but not quite looking me in the eye. As a princess, I am unaccustomed to being ignored in this manner, but I begin to suspect that it occurs quite frequently.
“To be brutally candid,” he says to the air, “she’s too short. And too fat.”
“Fat?” Jack and I both say at once.
“These…” He walks closer and gestures uncomfortably close to my bosom. “…are out of the question. Tyra had to tape hers down when she was modeling. There were designers who wouldn’t hire her because of her hips—which were smaller than yours.”
“So let me get this straight,” Jack says. “Girls can’t have breasts? Or hips? But breasts and hips are cool.”
The boy wrinkles his nose. “If you say so…but you can’t make a living off the SI swimsuit issue, and horny teenage boys aren’t buying couture. Maybe she should try Playboy.”
Jack shakes his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Then there’s her hair. This…” He picks up a curl like my head is a wig on a stand. “The Little House on the Prairie look is completely passé. And there’s something about her skin, too.”
“What about my skin?” I ask.
“It’s just…weird. Do you moisturize at all? Your skin looks like you haven’t done anything for it in ten years.”
Try three hundred.
“Jack!” The door opens, and Meryl rushes in. “Excuse me. Is my brother here?”
I cringe to see her in this pristine setting. Tall and gangly, arms and legs flying everywhere, metal teeth, hair askew, blemishes…blemishing. How cruel would this man be to her if, indeed, he finds me ugly? She places her hands on nonexistent hips and says, “Come on. You forgot to feed the meter and there’s a cop around the corner.”
Jack fumbles in his pockets, coming up empty. “We have to go.” He starts for the door and, relieved, I follow him.
“Wait!” The green-haired boy begins to run after us. “And who is this?” He’s gesturing at Meryl.
Jack laughs. “My kid sister.”
“She’s breathtaking. So fresh! So…thin! This is the type we can use.”
“Use for what?” Meryl scowls.
“As a model? Her?” Jack says.
“Yes. Well, once she gets the braces off and starts on Accutane—although we can airbrush most of that out. But she’s to die for. Look at that chest—like a little boy!”
Meryl looks down, hair falling into her face. “Yeah, right.”
“And the ’tude is perfect.”
Meryl laughs. “No, thanks.” And yet, I can tell she is smiling a bit beneath her scowl. Why would she not be? This…person has just said that I, Princess Talia, gifted by the fairies with flawless beauty, am not pretty while she is a vision of loveliness.
But she looks at Jack. “Didn’t you hear me? They’re about to tow your car.”
And we leave.
We decide to take the stairs, for the elevator frightens me. Meryl is walking backward, then forward down the stairs ahead of us. “Could you believe him? That chest…like a little boy!” She breaks up laughing. “Crazy.”
“I do not think so,” I say as we reach the street and yet another enormously tall, impossibly slender young woman—a model, no doubt—smirks at me. “You are indeed quite lovely.”
Meryl makes a face, but then it turns into a grin. “Well, I know one thing—Jen and Gaby would freak if they knew. How’d it go with you?”
I shrug. “I am too fat.”
“Excuse me?”
“Aw, they’re just crazy,” Jack says. “Standards of beauty change all the time. Most of the paintings I saw in Europe, the women were, like, obese.”
I know which paintings he’s thinking of, and I am indignant. “I do not look like a Botticelli!”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
He starts to say something, then changes his mind. “I meant that you’re beautiful, and that guy is crazy. We’ll find another agency.”
I shake my head. “I do not think so.”
“Okay. Then we’ll go to the beach.”
“After we feed the meter,” Meryl says.
We cross the street to the beach. It is hot and white and strewn with brown bodies wearing very little clothing. How amazing that being tanned is considered attractive in these times. In my day, only the field hands were tan!
Still, when we reach an empty spot and Jack peels off his shirt to worship the sun, I cannot help but look at him. One thing is certain: He is beautiful.
I have been persuaded to wear shorts and a tank top, the better to be ogled by that young man. Jack spreads out a towel, and I arrange myself prettily upon it and pretend to gaze at the ocean. Meryl sits beside me, sketching the sky. I glance at Jack. He, too, is working on something. I wish to ask him what it is, but I dare not intrude. I stare back at the ocean. It is nothing like the seaside in Euphrasia, which I remember from seeing Father off on journeys.
Father!
The ocean is tranquil and blue, and I am lulled into a trance watching its white-capped waves lap at the shore. I could almost go to sleep. Sleep.
Suddenly, the scene before me swirls together with me inside it. The waves rise up and touch the clouds, and from them steps Malvolia.
“Ah, Princess.” Her dark form casts a shadow over the sunny beach. “Still unlucky in love?”
I glance at Jack and am pleased to see that he is looking at me. At my legs, to be specific. He admires me, does he not?
Malvolia reads my thoughts. “Aye. A boy admiring a pretty girl. A rare thing to be certain. But love—true love—is something else.”
But I only need more time. I know I can make him love me.
“You were to be awakened by true love’s first kiss. That has not happened, and I believe it is time for you to come with me.”
No. She cannot take me now. Just a little longer.
“Come with me.” The waves leap. The clouds above them darken, and I see Malvolia’s hand, reaching toward me, hear her voice, soothing. “Come with me. It will be all right. You know he does not love you.”
It is true. I know Jack does not love me, will never love me.
“Then what is there for you? What is there for you if he does not love you?”
Nothing.
“Yes, nothing. Nothing but a family who hates you, a kingdom ruined. Princess, what have you to live for?”
Nothing.
“Come with me.” Malvolia’s hand reaches closer.
“I will come with you.” I rise f
rom the towel and start toward her hand.
“Talia?”
Another step.
“Talia!”
I look down. It is Jack, Jack calling for me. The waves, the clouds, and Malvolia all disappear, as if sucked up by a whirlwind. Instead, there is Jack, half standing before me, a puzzled expression playing upon his face.
“Where are you going?”
I look down. I have walked several steps toward the ocean. Malvolia is gone.
“I thought I might—ah—put my feet in the water.”
Jack laughs. “Take off your shoes first.”
He kneels before me as if he is about to propose marriage. But instead, he unties first one, then the other shoelace. I am reminded of a popular story of my time, about a girl named Cendrillon, who went to a ball wearing slippers of glass. But, of course, Jack would never know this story. It was told three hundred years ago! Still, when Jack’s hand brushes against my ankle, I shiver in the noonday sun.
He stands. “Come on, then.” He reaches out his hand and enfolds it in mine, then guides me toward the sapphire water.
Could Jack love me? And can I make him love me before Malvolia spirits me away?
Chapter 21:
Jack
“Now what?” Talia says in the car on the way home from South Beach. “If I am not beautiful enough to be a model…”
“You’re plenty beautiful,” I say.
“You wouldn’t want to be a model, anyway,” Meryl says. “It’s dopey and vain.”
But I notice she’s actually pushed her hair out of her face since that freaky Rafael told her she could be one. And she’s been looking in the rearview all the way home, too.
“But what else can I do?” Talia whines.
“Um, you can speak four languages,” Meryl says. “You know all about art, and you’re some kind of expert in diplomacy.”
“But for a sixteen-year-old without a high school diploma,” I say, “it’s hard getting a job doing those things.”
Talia stares out at the water a long time, saying nothing. When she does, she says, “The water here is so blue, like the sapphires in one of Grandmother’s necklaces. I used to sneak into Mother’s chamber when I was small and try it on. I dreamed of growing up one day to wear it myself. Now I never shall.” She looks at me. “Perhaps I should return to Euphrasia.”
“To where?” Meryl says.
“Home,” Talia says. “To…Belgium.”
“Why’d you leave in the first place?”
Talia exchanges a glance with me. “It is a long story.”
I glance back to say, Don’t tell it.
“I broke a rule,” Talia says, consolidating the long story into a single sentence. “There were horrible consequences, and my father was terribly disappointed in me. He said he wished I had never been born.”
“Harsh,” Meryl says. “What kind of rule was it—like a curfew or failing in school? Scratch that—you’d never fail in school.”
“Not exactly,” both Talia and I say together.
“Did you, like, sneak out at night with someone?”
“No,” Talia says. “I never sneaked. I was watched constantly, for they were worried I would be pricked with a spindle.” I give her a look, and she says, “I mean, that my purity would be compromised.”
“Did you wreck your parents’ car?” Meryl says.
Talia laughs. “Definitely not that.”
“Smoke pot? Get drunk?”
“No,” I tell her. “Stop asking.”
But Meryl keeps on going, ignoring me. “You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”
“Of course not, Meryl!” I say.
“Because Jack’s done all those things—except killing someone—and my parents keep forgiving him, anyway.”
“Is that true?” Talia says.
“Once, Jack and Travis got picked up by the police for egging cars on Eighty-second Avenue. And one of the cars he egged was the president of Mom’s garden club.”
“Meryl,” I say. “We don’t need to talk about—”
“So the doorbell rings at midnight,” Meryl continues. “Mom opens it in her robe, and there’s two cops standing there. They had a tip from a cashier at Publix that some teenage boys were in there buying ten dozen eggs. The cashier didn’t think they were making a soufflé with them, so she called the cops.”
“Meryl, will you please shut—”
“You threw food at passing cars?” Talia says.
“Just eggs,” I say, glaring at Meryl. “Everyone does stuff like that.”
“But a hundred and twenty eggs could feed ten families or ward off starvation in the wintertime when food is scarce. Do you have any idea how many hens it would take to lay ten dozen eggs?”
“Yeah, Jack,” Meryl says, grinning. “Do you know how many hens?”
Talia keeps going. “It seems dreadfully wasteful and thoughtless to throw them—particularly at another person’s property.”
“That’s my brother, Jack, Mr. Wasteful and Thoughtless.”
“I didn’t take them away from starving people,” I tell Talia. “I bought them.” I never thought about the eggs being food for someone before. How does Talia think of this stuff? Not one other person I know would think about wasting the eggs—not even my parents. When you think of it that way, it does sound sort of…“Okay, it was stupid.”
“Very,” Talia agrees.
“Jack’s always doing dumb stuff,” Meryl says. “And my parents always forgive him.”
“Forgive?” I laugh. “They don’t even notice. They never notice anything I do.”
“They notice plenty,” Meryl says. “You don’t have a bedroom next to theirs, so you didn’t hear them every night for a week, discussing whether to send you to a child psychologist or military school.”
“Military school?” The idea makes me shudder.
“And every time Mom ran into Mrs. Owens—that’s the lady whose car Jack egged—she asked Mom if she was getting dear Jack ‘the help he needs and deserves.’ Mom was totally humiliated.”
“I can imagine,” Talia says. “Poor lady.”
“It was a long time ago,” I say. “Can’t we talk about the dumb stuff you’ve done?” Why does she have to embarrass me in front of Talia? I don’t embarrass her in front of her friends. At least I wouldn’t, if she had friends.
“I never got picked up by the cops.”
“You’re young. There’s still time. Besides, you’re learning from my mistakes.”
“Are you proud of being a bad example?”
“Be quiet.”
But still it’s weird. I always thought my parents didn’t much care what I did, just wanted me out of their way. Could I have been so wrong about that?
“Parents always forgive you,” Meryl says. “Like sometimes, you see parents on the news, and their kid just got busted for murdering a 7-Eleven clerk, and they’re like, ‘But my Bubba’s a good boy. He’d never hurt a fly.’ So I’m sure your parents would forgive you for whatever you did.”
Talia looks out the window. We’ve crossed the bridge, and now there’s nothing interesting to look at, just gray office buildings on both sides. I remember the beautiful castle and scenery in Euphrasia. Finally, she says, “Do you think so, Jack?”
“I’m not sure.” Talia’s father seemed like a real stickler, even for a king, and he did say all that crummy stuff to her. But maybe Meryl’s right (there has to be a first time for everything). Maybe he’d forgive her, even for ruining their entire country. They’re probably worried sick about her—especially considering they don’t have any phone or email or even a radio. So it’s really like she disappeared into a black hole. But I don’t want her to leave.
Talia might have been a little annoying at first. Okay, she was completely impossible. But I realize that’s just because she’s not like anyone I’ve ever known before. No one I know would think of the eggs as…well, eggs.
If she were gone, I’d miss her.
And I g
uess I’m feeling a little selfish when I say, “I don’t know. But we have six more days, so maybe you should think a little more about it.”
Talia nods. “I suppose you are right.”
Chapter 22:
Talia
I am a coward. I am a cowardly coward, full of cowardice.
Part of me knows that Meryl is right, that I should contact my parents, go back home, that they are concerned about me. But I am less certain than Meryl that my father will forgive me.
Jack’s mother seems like a lovely person, and I am certain Jack’s father is likewise so. But they are not royalty. Neither did they call upon an entire nation to guard Jack from harm, only to have him bring it upon himself by some thoughtless mistake. However many eggs Jack threw, he did not bring ruination upon his family, much less his country.
I tell this to Jack as we eat french fries and pull weeds. We have gone, at my request, to the park where Jack once planted the garden. It is a sad sight, full of thorns and none too very many flowers. But, with our help, it looks quite a bit better. I have even touched dirt now! Jack is right. It does smell clean, like the air. After an hour, we walked to the McDonald’s nearby and got french fries. More french fries!
“Who knows if Euphrasia is even a country anymore?” I pull a large weed. “And if it is not a country, then my father cannot be king. He could never forgive me for that.”
“Maybe he could do something else,” Jack says. “Like, take a computer course.” But he looks unconvinced. He sticks a handful of french fries into his mouth. On the other side of the park, children play a game. They are dressed in matching shirts and short pants of gold and ruby and emerald and orange. The object of their game appears to be to kick a spotted ball into a net while preventing the other team from so doing.
At the palace, I often stood by the window and watched the peasant children. Their lives seemed consumed by work. Boys helped their fathers in the fields. Girls milked cows and gathered eggs. But they did play, when the work was done. I watched them sometimes from the windows, and I wished I could join them.
There is a large tree nearby, an old one with moss hanging from it. I nudge Jack.