“So, Valentine,” Mrs. Denby said, pushing papers aside and sitting back to look up at me, “how did your first day go with our new student? I gather she came as something of a surprise to you.”
“Uh, yes,” I said, not sure exactly how to proceed.
Mrs. Denby smiled. “I’d have alerted you first, but I assumed you knew she was coming. She did ask for you by name.”
“She did? How did she know my name?”
“Why, I thought—isn’t there some family connection, some mutual friend or relative?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, not that I know of.” There could be some link through my uncle Tim, maybe. Very maybe. Uncle Tim was not what you would call widely traveled. The last I’d heard, he was working for an insurance company in Idaho.
Mrs. Denby pulled out a file and looked through it. “Well, she put your name down here, and she said that she knew you.”
Could it be through one of Mom’s authors?
“Valentine,” Mrs. Denby said, “Bosanka has a very turbulent background. We understand that she comes from an old, aristocratic family that was broken and scattered in the breakdown of Yugoslavia and then nearly wiped out in the fighting afterwards. I don’t know what she had to do to survive, but wartime marks people. Don’t be surprised if you find her a little—well, strange, a little secretive.”
Not to mention racist, weird, and already cutting classes, or so it seemed at this point. I didn’t know how to bring any of that up tactfully with Mrs. Denby. And besides, Barb might have the racist part all wrong. You can’t just throw charges like that around at people.
I must have looked doubtful. Mrs. Denby leaned forward, coaxing. “Val, I don’t want to stick you with someone you don’t like because of some bureaucratic error, but under the circumstances—if you think you can hang in there, at least until the end of this term—”
“Sure,” I said.
Dimwit.
Not Mrs. Denby; me.
Outside the school building, I found Lennie sitting on the stoop, drumming silently on his thighs with both hands, eyes shut. I parked myself next to him.
He quit drumming. “So how’s the new girl?”
“I don’t know, Lennie,” I said. “There’s something weird about her.”
“Not weird, just foreign,” he said after a minute. He knew what he was talking about. I felt a surge of warmth for him—I had been his first friend in America, years ago. “She’s probably okay when you get to know her.”
Peter Weiss walked up and homed right in: “Call that a girl? Bosanka-the-tanka!”
Lennie said amiably, “So what are you, Peter-the-parking meter?”
“She’s weird,” Peter said, making me wish instantly that I had picked another word to describe her myself. “Jason Scales tried to talk to her, and she gave him this fish-eyed look you wouldn’t believe. But she talks to Val. Only to Val, in fact, from what I hear. Hey, Val, maybe she’s queer, and she’s stuck on you!”
“Peter, you’re a pig,” I said.
Predictably, he oinked at me. Peter was a bright jerk, what a country neighbor of Uncle Tim’s once called a studious idiot.” Whatever had happened on New Year’s, it hadn’t changed him a bit. Too bad.
“So where’s old Tank Girl come from?” he went on. You would never have guessed that Peter was a candidate for a National Science Scholarship—assuming nobody killed him first.
“Bosnia, according to Corelli,” I said.
“Yeah?” Peter said, interested. “So where’s she now? Off changing her armor or something?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She doesn’t live with me, Peter, she’s only my foreign guest at school.”
Peter said confidentially, “Well, she’s not from Bosnia, for starters.”
“How do you know?” Lennie and I said together.
“The name she wrote on her attendance card is ‘Bosanka Lonatz,’ and that’s not a name,” Peter explained loftily. “Not for a person, anyway.”
“No?” I prompted. “Then for what?”
“Restaurants,” said Peter, the world traveler, “usually have something on the menu called bosanski lonatz, meaning ‘Bosnian hash, stewed leftovers.’ And I think ‘Bosanka’ means ‘Bosnian girl’. So who’s going to name their kid ‘Bosnian girl stew’? ‘Bosanka Lonatz’ has to be a code name. She could be anything—an Albanian muslim terrorist, or a Bulgarian gangster’s moll—or an undercover spy for the Russians!”
Peter, who was very smart for a jerk, knew a lot of odd things from living abroad with his parents on army bases. He was now obviously about to start in on his favorite subject: conspiracies.
His politics were to the right of Corelli’s, which was saying something.
Lennie, in a rare quick move, cut him off.
“Hey, Val,” Lennie said, “come on over to Woof Woof Music with us.”
I made a face. “I can’t. I told Bosanka I’d go shopping. She wants to buy blue jeans.”
“Blue jeans!” Peter crowed. “My foot! She’s probably meeting her contact over here. Keep your eyes open, Val.”
“Peter, go away,” I said.
Lennie winked at me and grinned.
He stood up. “Is this punk bothering you, miss?” He grabbed the back of Peter’s jacket. “Come on, pal, into the paddy wagon with you!”
And he hustled Peter, who yelled and lunged around in protest, away down the street.
Just in time. Here came Bosanka, walking straight toward me.
4
Royal Blue Jeans
“WHERE WERE YOU?” I said. “I didn’t see you in our last two classes this afternoon.”
“I go to the park,” she said casually. “I study there. Good parkland, but the foresters make too open.”
Foresters? What was this, somebody’s operetta, The Gypsy Princess?
“Too open for what?”
“It’s no undergrowth,” she said. “No cover for the game.”
“Listen,” I said, “the kind of games that get played in the park, you don’t want any more ‘cover’ than necessary.”
She looked thoughtful. “I saw animals fenced in. You’re afraid of them, so you cage them up?”
“Don’t you have zoos where you come from? The animals are locked up to protect them from the people.” She gave me an unreadable look, and I added, “That’s only partly a joke.”
She still wasn’t carrying any books. Obviously she didn’t worry about homework. My mom always said that kids from European schools were way ahead of American kids in most subjects. This was not going to make Bosanka popular in school.
Somehow I didn’t think she’d mind a bit.
“There’s a store down Madison, this way,” I said. “They have nice jeans. Sometimes a regular human person can even afford them. So what kind of school did you go to back home?”
“No school,” she said.
Aha. I remembered Mrs. Denby’s remarks about an old, aristocratic family. “You mean you had private tutors?”
“Like that.”
I whistled. “Wow. Your family must have been pretty rich.”
“We ruled,” she said, striding along next to me and easily keeping up. “How far?”
“A c-couple of blocks,” I stammered. Could this be for real? “We ruled” didn’t mean Daddy was president or prime minister or whatever. Presidents and prime ministers govern. Only one kind of person rules: a king or a queen. Was Bosanka the foreign student claiming to be royalty?
No wonder she was using a false name that meant stewed leftovers! Nobody would ever guess a royal identity from that name. Besides, maybe sometimes she felt like leftover hash, being royalty in exile and so on.
Or she could be pulling my leg. Off.
“You mean,” I said, as offhandedly as I could manage, “that your family used to be the royal family of your country?”
She made an impatient sound and said, “I am highborn, yes.”
I walked along trying to think. I had
n’t even known there was a royal family of the old Yugoslavia, though of course there had to have been something before the Second World War and then the Cold War. God, if only we studied some decent history in school, and recognized the existence of the rest of the world instead of just the United States!
“Oh, here we are,” I said. “This is the place.”
We went into the store. A salesclerk hurried up to us. “Can I help you?”
“We’d like to see some blue jeans, for my friend, here,” I said.
My friend? Was that what Bosanka was?
“What size?” the clerk asked.
Bosanka shrugged and held her arms out from her side. “Measure,” she said.
Instead of being offended, the salesclerk grabbed a tape measure and got down on her knees without a word of protest.
And this was the East Side, mind you.
“My clothes got always made on me,” Bosanka observed idly.
Well, bully for you, I thought; but I didn’t say it.
“Size sixteen. Over here, please,” the woman murmured. “I can show you—”
“We’ll look for ourselves, thanks,” I said. I was determined to pump Bosanka for more information in private.
“Does anybody know about you?” I whispered as we checked over the shelves. Mrs. Denby sure hadn’t seemed to. “The FBI, the State Department?”
“No.”
“But shouldn’t they be protecting you?”
“I protect myself,” Bosanka said. She tossed aside a pair of jeans. “Bad sewing. You should close it down.”
Close down what, Taiwan?
“Look, what am I supposed to call you?” I said. What did a “highborn” rate in what was left of Yugoslavia, or out of it? Not, please lordy, “Your Highness!”
“I told you,” she said flatly. “Bosanka.”
“Bosanka,” I said, a little disappointed but warming up again as I went on, “so where’s the rest of your family, the, uh, the king and so on?”
She shot me a sharp look and I thought, Big mouth, what if muslim extremists or even communists, way back when, had killed them all, like the Romanovs? I knew about that from one of my favorite old movies, Anastasia, about the lone survivor (or else an imposter) of the massacre of the Russian royal family.
Bosanka turned away again, flipping through a pile of pants. “That we find out,” she said curtly.
They must be in hiding then, and she had lost contact with them. A lost princess! And I was her student host, out shopping with her for her first pair of jeans! Who knew what kind of bond could grow out of this?
Not that I was an aristocrat myself, of course, but I was some kind of special person, wasn’t I? I had the family talent. Wait till we got to be friends and I let her in on that! Even a royal type would be impressed, wouldn’t she?
I saw myself in nonchalant attendance at a royal wedding (though I couldn’t imagine a groom for Bosanka, exactly), at state dinners with tables as long as subway cars, on the royal yacht. The West Side wouldn’t be able to hold me anymore!
“So who are you here with?” I asked, thinking of secret guardians, loyal retainers, giant faithful dogs.
“With you, Balentena,” she said. “Which you know it well.”
Another meaningful stare, but meaning what, exactly? She seemed to be deliberately misunderstanding what I said. On the other hand, why should she trust me enough to give me straight answers so soon? I could at least show her that I understood that her position was serious and that she had a right to be cautious.
“You must be pretty nervous, being on your own like this,” I said. “I mean, people must be looking for you, like agents from the Bosnian government. How can they relax while the royal family is running around loose? Suppose the people asked you to come back and help them throw out the present government and—and restore the monarchy?”
She walked into the fitting booth with me trailing after her, feeling suddenly bowled over by doubts. I mean, how likely was any of this? Maybe she was just deluded.
I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go on. Lord or loon—which was I with in this little dressing room?
Bosanka muttered under her breath as she worked her way into a pair of jeans that were too small for her, whatever the tag said. It was a little like shopping with Margie Acton in one of her fat phases.
Maybe Bosanka went around from school to school trying her royal fantasy-life in each one until they caught on and threw her out? So where did she really come from, Long Island? Not a chance.
“God, I’m starved,” I said. Excitement has this effect on me. “Listen, I’m going to run out and get something to eat while you try on the rest of these. You want anything?”
She turned to look at her blue-denimed butt in the mirror. “I don’t eat today.”
“These jeans are made in Asia, where people are little,” I pointed out quickly. “They get the sizes wrong for us. You don’t look bad, you don’t need to starve yourself.”
She gave me this contemptuous look, which is not easy to do when you are half wearing a pair of pants a size and a half too small for you. “Once a week, maybe twice, I take a day to not eat.”
What was this, some special eastern European form of anorexia? “Why?”
“For strong will,” she said. “One who rules others must rule first the self.”
Now this was serious stuff. Food is not a trivial matter.
“What kind of ruler, exactly, Bosanka? Do you have a—a title?”
She turned back to the mirror, zipping up the last pair of jeans. It fit. Closely, but it fit. Turning to see herself from all angles, she said, “Oh, many. First Hunter, Keeper of the Wild, Breath of the Horn, others.”
First Hunter? Breath of the Horn? Were there titles like that, even in darkest fairy tale country?
“You don’t believe?” she said, spiking me with a chilly look. Royally gracious she certainly was not, but she was under a lot of pressure, right?
“I do, I believe you,” I said quickly.
“You need to believe, Balentena. I am as I say.”
She walked out front and tossed her jeans on the counter. The salesclerk rang up the price. Bosanka dug a crumpled wad of bills out of her skirt pocket. She had more than enough, singles mostly, and she pocketed her change without counting it.
While the sales clerk folded the jeans, I went to the door and looked outside, half expecting to spot a black SUV full of square, scowling gunmen waiting. There was nothing like that, of course, only a couple of ladies in running suits walking a pair of little, wrinkly dogs.
Behind me, Bosanka said sharply, “Look, Balentena. I want you looking.”
So I looked.
The inside of the store went suddenly dim—or was it the inside of my head? The aisle down the center, with its beige carpeting, was now a damp dirt path. The racks of sport clothes were green and rustling undergrowth that led my eye back into dark, damp forest depths.
Close by, something made soft, nervous sounds, a kind of churring that vibrated with an anxious undertone. Where the sales clerk had been stood an animal like a giant kangaroo, round-shouldered and covered with short yellow fur. It was fumbling around with something it held down with its paws under a little fall of water from a rocky outcrop. The air was thick with a wet chill and a smell of soaked earth and vegetation.
“My God,” I said, but not a sound came out of me.
I heard water splashing on stone, and some start-and-stop rustling noises from back among the trees. The tall animal nattered softly to itself as it worked with what it held under the water—a wad of wide, flat leaves. They were purple.
“You see,” Bosanka said.
At the sound of her voice, the kangaroo-clerk jerked its head up and blinked at us, plainly alarmed. Its open mouth showed uneven yellow teeth and a bluish-tinged tongue. The creature dropped the leaves it had been washing and began shifting nervously from one foot to the other, rubbing its paws together in front of its stomach. I could
see the gleam of its dark, delicate claws.
“Bosanka, stop it!” I gasped. I caught the doggy smell of the animal and saw the panic in its bright little eyes. It began making fast clicking sounds and wrinkling its lips, showing more teeth.
“Easy, easy now!” I fumbled frantically behind me for the door handle.
There wasn’t one. I reached through fog and touched the rough bark of a tree. I felt steepness dropping away around us, as if we stood with this human-sized and agitated creature on a high mountain crag inside a cloud.
“You see,” Bosanka said again. There was a scornful twist to her mouth as she watched me sweat.
“I see, I see,” I jabbered, stepping sideways along where the front wall of the store had been, away from the ex-clerk. “I believe you, honest!”
My foot slipped on wet leaves. I tottered and flailed.
Bosanka grunted irritably and did some quick, intricate moves with both hands, like making a cat’s cradle without string. The foggy air thickened into a white blanket which melted away in an instant. There was the store clerk, coughing and snuffling and poking around under the counter. I slumped against the heavy glass door of the shop, breathless with relief.
The clerk bobbed up again with a little wad of tissues clutched in her fist. “Oh, excuse me,” she panted, looking wildly around the inside of the shop. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Allergies, I think, even if it is still winter. Isn’t it?”
“It’s the damp,” I agreed hastily, shaking fog droplets off the sleeve of my quilted coat. “It can really get to you.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. She flashed me a grateful, terrified smile. “Now, is there anything else I can do for you ladies?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “Have a nice day.”
I shoved the door open and staggered out into the bright winter afternoon. Behind me I heard the clerk saying, “Don’t forget your package, miss.”
Bosanka answered, “I don’t forget. You forget.”