I delicately lifted the medallion and looked at the writing on the other side. I held it closer to the light, but all I could really understand was one word:
Iselin.
My last name.
I’ve spent enough time browsing antique and vintage stores to know that I’d stumbled across something unique — the kind of thing they keep locked up in the glass display cabinet by the register, not just sitting out with the old belts and costume jewelry.
This had obviously belonged to someone really important — or at least really rich.
It rested in the center of my palm, the size of a fifty-cent piece, heavy and cold.
I knew my father’s family had come from France. Big deal — everybody comes from somewhere. But maybe being from an important French family would get me enough coolness points to make up for the fact that I had suddenly been plunked into a life of abject poverty.
I had a vision of myself visiting a museum in Paris, and an old curator spotting the medallion hanging around my neck. He’d get really excited and then tell me that my family had been noble and prominent. And the rest of the girls on the trip would gather around, and even though they’d be too cool to act impressed, inside, they all secretly would be.
Even Hannah.
Just last week I’d found the perfect white spring dress at the Salvation Army. I’d been planning to wear it with my black blazer and a pair of well-worn cowboy boots I’d picked up at a garage sale. All the outfit really needed was some little piece to tie it all together.
And I was holding that piece in my hand.
“YOU’RE SURE YOU have everything?” My mother held my arm so tightly that my fingers were going numb. “Phone cards? Emergency credit card? Passport?”
Gently, I loosened her grip. “I checked three times before we left.”
The unloading zone bustled with travelers. Mom’s head whipped back and forth as she watched the crowds move by.
I took advantage of her distraction to pry off her hand completely. “Come on, Mom. You’ve had sixteen years to prepare for the day you’d have to set me free to walk fifty feet through an airport unattended.”
“What if you can’t find your teacher?”
“She’s right there.” I pointed through the window. “See? Surrounded by all those girls whose mothers let them go inside.”
Mom’s forehead creased. “I’m sorry, honey.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Just unhand me, woman.”
I’d intended to break the news about my summer with Dad at dinner the night before, but the right moment hadn’t come along. So all the way to the airport, I’d had the words on the tip of my tongue, goading myself to stop being such a baby and spit them out.
And here was my chance. I opened my mouth to speak.
My mother interrupted me, her brown eyes shining. “Oh, Colette. I’m so excited for you. A week in Paris … just think of all the amazing things you’re going to experience.”
I almost said something sarcastic about how dopey she was being, but I choked the words back. Instead, I threw my arms around her and kissed the side of her head. To my horror, the beginnings of tears nipped at the back of my eyeballs.
“I love you so much,” she said.
“I love you, too — now go, before you get a parking ticket!” I gave her a gentle push toward the car and turned away before she drove off.
Swallowing the lump in my throat as I walked through the automatic doors, I thought about Mom’s excitement, her certainty that this trip would broaden my horizons.
Cheesy or not, I was sure it would be true.
I just had a feeling, down deep at the base of my stomach, or my heart or something, that going to Paris would change the way I looked at the world …
That it might even change my life. Forever.
I checked in with Madame Mitchell, our French teacher and chaperone, and then looked around for my friends.
“Hannah and Pilar upgraded to first class,” Madame Mitchell said, seeing me scan the group. “They went through the priority security line, and they’re waiting at Starbucks.”
I nodded, trying to hide my disappointment. It wasn’t a surprise or anything. Hannah and Pilar had probably never flown economy in their lives, and I couldn’t expect them to do it for my sake. It was just kind of a bummer because it meant I’d be sitting in the back of the plane with a bunch of people I didn’t know very well.
Once we got through security, we all swung by Starbucks. Hannah and Pilar sat at a little table, engrossed in their phones. Physically, my two friends couldn’t have been more different. Hannah was tall and thin (like “Are you sure you don’t have a size double-zero in the stockroom?” thin), with straight white-blonde hair, a perfectly turned-up nose, and sleepy green eyes. Pilar was five foot nothing, she would never be smaller than a size ten, and she had long, curly black hair and wide, anxious brown eyes.
They both lived in houses big enough to hold practically my entire apartment complex. They had both gotten fancy German cars for their sixteenth birthdays. They both had wardrobes big enough to stock a Banana Republic store (except they’d never shop somewhere so pedestrian).
Hannah’s dad was the CFO of some gigantic corporation that sold everything from corn to military tanks. There were pictures on their living room wall of him with presidents and senators. He always “knew someone who knew someone,” and Hannah had never heard the word no in her life.
Pilar’s mother was Mariana Sanchez, a famous pop star who’d had a bunch of number-one songs from when my parents were in high school and then retired to Ohio with a herd of Grammys and gazillions of dollars. Pilar — whom I liked to call “Peely,” to Hannah’s supreme mortification — had inherited her mom’s musical talent. She could play any instrument, and she had perfect pitch. The only thing she lacked was the stick-thin pop-star body, a point Mrs. Sanchez never let her forget.
Socially, they were la crème de la crème at Saint Margaret’s Academy. Me? I’d been a nobody until the end of sophomore year, but at the start of junior year I’d managed to become friendly with Pilar. Then, over the next few months, Hannah had accepted me. By Christmas break, I was lumped in as one of their group. Now everyone in the whole school thought of us as an inseparable threesome….
Except me. There was just something about Hannah that made you feel like your contract was always up for cancellation with her. But even with that ever-present uncertainty, the benefits of being her friend far outweighed the negatives.
Rationally, I knew I was a good match for them. Smarter than Pilar, but not as smart as Hannah. Thinner than Peely, but not as thin as Hannah (nobody was as thin as Hannah). My wavy strawberry-blonde hair fell past my shoulders, and my blue eyes were framed by short, unremarkable lashes. My face was heart-shaped, with a smattering of pale freckles across my nose and cheeks. People called me “cute” a lot more than they called me “beautiful.” In short, I was pretty enough to hang with Hannah … but not pretty enough to upstage her.
“Ladies, we’re all going to stick together as a group, starting now,” Madame Mitchell said. At school, she was always put-together, but today, her brownish-gray hair had fallen out of its clip, and her reading glasses were sliding down her nose. She already looked like she’d been following a bunch of teenagers around for a week. “Everyone find a buddy.”
There were nine girls, and Hannah and Pilar were obviously taken. I looked around and locked eyes with Audrey Corbett, inwardly groaning.
Audrey was nice, but if I had to be her buddy, I’d never hear the end of it from Hannah. There was this stubborn cluelessness about Audrey that was totally bewildering in someone so smart. Take her outfit. She was traveling to Paris, France, for heaven’s sake — wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and an Ohio State University sweatshirt. Her skin, a dark, rich brown, didn’t need foundation or concealer — but would it have killed her to put on a little lip gloss every now and then? Her hair was divided into two Afro-puffs, which might have been c
ute if it had been at all ironic or self-aware — or if she were seven years old. But no, you just got the idea that she had been looking for the fastest way to put up her hair. She wore a pair of tortoise-shell plastic-framed glasses and — most appallingly — ginormous white tennis shoes.
But if we were stuck with each other, then so be it. We’d been on the Academic Games team together freshman year, so I knew Audrey’s personality was better than her fashion sense.
“Hey, Aud, want to be my buddy?” Brynn Peterson, wearing her hair in two long brown braids, snuck up beside her.
Something flickered across Audrey’s eyes as they met mine…. Was it haughtiness? Defiance?
Whatever. Let her and Brynn frolic around Paris together looking like second graders.
I turned to find someone better.
No luck.
“Audrey and Brynn …” Madame Mitchell made a note in her book and looked down at me. “So I guess we’re buddies, Colette.”
“Oh, joy,” I said. And then, realizing how that must have sounded, I opened my mouth to retract it.
“Don’t bother.” Her voice was flat as she clicked her pen shut and put it in her pocket. “It’s written all over your face.”
On the walk to the gate, Pilar and Hannah came up and flanked me.
“Here.” Pilar handed me a cup. “I got you a latte.”
“It’s a trap,” Hannah said. “She’s trying to load you up on caffeine so you can’t sleep on the plane.”
“It’s the best way to beat jet lag!” Pilar protested. “Staying awake on the flight is the only way to feel human when we land.”
I glanced at Hannah, who shook her head, her green eyes wide with warning.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the coffee.
“Oh, you’re not going to drink it. I can tell.” Pilar grabbed the cup back and dropped it into the nearest trash can.
I laughed, but inside I was kind of horrified that she’d thrown away a perfectly good six-dollar coffee.
She looped her arm through mine. “Aren’t you excited? Is this really your first time out of America?”
“It really is,” I said.
“How is that possible?” Hannah asked. “I thought your family was going to Italy over Winter Break.”
“That fell through,” I said.
What I didn’t say was that our Italy trip went poof! the day my parents’ marriage went poof!
I’d never had to think about money in my life, but after my parents’ divorce, it was suddenly a huge thing. When Dad first left and Mom was forced to get a job at the Royal Hills Mall, I’d just started hanging out with Hannah and Peely, and at the time I’d been too embarrassed to say anything about it. Then, when we had to sell our house and move into our shoe-box apartment, I still hadn’t breathed a word about it to my friends. The hardest part was, so much time had passed that it would be weird to say anything now. Mom spent the whole year scrimping and working extra shifts just to send me to Paris, and I had to pretend like it was no big deal.
“No Italy trip and no car,” Hannah said. “I think your parents are trying to torture you.”
“Can we not talk about my parents? I want to think about Paris.” We were literally minutes from boarding. My stomach tingled with anticipation.
“Exactly,” Hannah said. “Who wants to travel with their family, anyway? We’ll have way more fun by ourselves.”
She smiled then, her thousand-watt smile that made you feel like you were being bathed in warmth. Hannah was the most incredible combination of beautiful, witty, and nice — when being nice worked to her advantage, that is. It was what made her so popular and sought-after.
And I got to be her friend. Sometimes it kind of blew my mind.
We stood in a jittery group at the gate, and Pilar started listing off all the qualities of the ideal French men she was sure we’d meet: artistic, sensitive, brooding, and, most of all, absolutely mind-bogglingly handsome with soul-twisting gorgeous accents.
“You make them sound like vampires,” I said. “You really think we’ll have a chance to meet guys?”
“You have to make your own opportunities,” Hannah said.
“Actually,” Peely said, “Madame Mitchell said we have a new tour guide this year — since the old one retired — and he’s in college and he’s supposed to be super cute.”
Hannah looked disbelieving. “You’re trusting a teacher’s taste in men? She’s like forty.”
“Just because she’s old doesn’t mean she can’t tell the difference between cute and not cute,” Pilar huffed. “Watch. He’ll be adorbs.”
“In that case, I call dibs,” Hannah said. Hannah always got dibs.
“You can have the men — I’m not going to Paris to meet anyone,” I said. “I’m going for the … Frenchness.”
“Then the men will all be drawn to you by your captivating aloofness.” Pilar lifted her nose in the air and tossed her curls.
Hannah looked mildly annoyed by the suggestion that anyone other than her could captivate a man. “We’d better go. They just called first class.”
Pilar grinned and leaned in to air-kiss my cheeks. “Bon voyage, Colette! See you in Paris!”
PIERRE BEAUCLERC SAT at the sidewalk café, drumming his fingers on the table as his father droned on about family honor, pride, and keeping up appearances. Apparently, “borrowing” a parked police car and driving it around the city didn’t fit into his father’s idea of what the heir of the Beauclerc family should be doing with his time.
Pierre’s tie felt like it was strangling him. He loosened it with a sigh. He’d already been lectured that morning, by the judge (who, after accepting a bribe from Monsieur Beauclerc to go easy on his son, decided to at least make it look like he was being tough on the young man). Why did these useless people think their words mattered to someone like him?
He was twenty years old, tall and slender, with silky black hair. He looked like a movie star, and he not only knew it but also used it to his advantage on a regular basis.
He snapped back to attention as his father stopped talking. All the old man required from Pierre was a few bland apologies and an insincere promise that it would never happen again. They’d been through this a half-dozen times, for a half-dozen different offenses, and though his father always threatened to cut off Pierre’s allowance, it had never happened — and never would happen. Pierre knew his father actually admired his brazenness, and, after all, the law could always be bought.
Now he smiled winningly at his father, called him Papa, and cracked a joke that made the old man grin, recalling his own youth.
Pierre and his father finished their cups of café au lait and left some coins on the table. With a good-natured hug, the two parted. Pierre paused to check his reflection in the plate-glass window, pleased with everything about his appearance except for a dark stain on the skin of his wrist; some filthy person must have brushed against him at the courthouse. He’d wash it off later.
He cut through an alleyway toward the parking lot where he’d left his motorcycle, whistling as he walked, kicking litter out of his path and then imagining how handsome he looked doing so. If only there were a pretty girl around to watch.
He didn’t see the woman who stood in his path until he’d already kicked an empty bottle in her direction.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, preparing to shout at her for being so careless.
But then he saw two things at once: first, that the woman wore a huge, elaborate dress — like something out of a history book, and second …
… that the bottle he’d kicked passed right through the dress, landing on the ground behind her with a clink.
“Qui êtes-vous?” he demanded. In his fear, he lashed out. “Vous avez l’air ridicule!”
She didn’t answer. She only stared at him. He’d been wrong, of course — if anything, she was the opposite of ridiculous.
Pierre felt a chill travel up his spine, and for reasons he couldn’t understand, he wished he hadn?
??t insulted her. Her silence was terrible, and yet Pierre felt that were she to speak, it would be even more terrible.
Then, at last, she did speak.
“Le fils de la famille Beauclerc,” she whispered.
Confused, Pierre said, “Oui?” He was the son of the Beauclerc family. But how did the strange woman know that?
He took a step back, glancing over his shoulder to see if there was an easy place to run. He needed to get away from her.
He was in luck. Just to his left was an old metal fire escape, attached to the side of an abandoned building. He ran toward it, intending to leap up and grab hold of the ladder.
But his foot landed on the bottle he’d kicked, and he slipped and fell backward. He found himself on his back, staring up helplessly at the woman in the dress.
After gazing down at him, she moved away.
Pierre breathed a sigh of relief before he noticed that the entire fire escape above him had come loose from the wall of the building.
And he had just a moment to realize what was happening before the rusted old handrail dropped down and separated his head cleanly from his body.
I’M IN PARIS.
Just thinking the words made me feel like I’d been waiting my whole life to be able to say them. Determined to savor every detail of the trip, I took a long, deep breath….
Unfortunately, as we were standing in the shuttle bus pickup area at the airport, I got a lungful of French exhaust fumes.
The flight had been as agonizingly long as I’d suspected it would be. I’d been stuck in a middle seat between a girl who took approximately fifteen bathroom breaks and Madame Mitchell, who snored like a freight train. I hadn’t been able to shut my eyes for more than twenty minutes at a time.
But none of that mattered. We had landed safely, pushed through the mobs in baggage claim, and were about to start our drive right into the heart of Paris.