I wasn’t sure whether to blush or laugh. “Anyway, thanks for trusting me.”
“Oh, I wasn’t worried,” she said, waving her hand. “I know he’s not your type. Besides, I’m sure your friends don’t approve, so it’s not an issue.”
As I climbed up to the suite, I couldn’t get her comment out of my head. She hadn’t said it in a mean way, or as if she were trying to call attention to some giant flaw — she’d said it like it wasn’t a big deal at all. As if everyone in the world knew I didn’t take a single step without the approval of Hannah and Pilar.
Well … do you?
I didn’t have time to answer the question — or even think about it — before I opened the door to the room.
“There you are!” Pilar said.
“Where have you been?” Hannah demanded.
I took a second to hang my bag in the closet before I faced them. “Hi,” I said.
“Seriously,” Hannah said.
“I was out.”
“With?”
What would happen if I said, Mind your onions?
I didn’t dare find out.
“With Jules,” I said. “And Audrey.”
I threw the Audrey thing in because I didn’t want them spending too much time thinking (or asking) about what Jules and I did all day by ourselves. It was a calculated risk, and it seemed to work.
“Ugh, really? Why?” Hannah looked up at me, a cross expression on her face. But then she started telling me about a store she and Pilar had found that sold both brands of jeans she’d been hoping to buy, and I knew I was off the hook.
“AAAAAANNND LOOK OVER here,” Hannah said. “Another dead person. What a shock.”
I cringed. Hannah was in rare form that morning. Even Peely had tried to shush her once — we were in a church, after all — and was rewarded with a look that might as well have been a slap. So now neither of us said anything.
We were at the Basilique de Saint-Denis, where the kings and queens of France were buried. I was glad it was on our itinerary. As time passed since our day at Versailles, the rational part of my brain began to get the upper hand, insisting (to my relief) that I hadn’t really seen a ghost. Getting a look at the final burial site of Marie Antoinette and her husband seemed like a good way to reinforce that. Once I could assure myself that the queen was safely stowed away in a massive stone casket, I’d stop thinking she was following me around.
All the remains were in giant marble boxes, like above-ground coffins, and atop each one was a lid that had a sculpture of the occupant in a state of eternal rest, lying down, hands pressed together in prayer. It was amazing how different they all were — and how well-preserved, even though some of them were about eight hundred years old.
At the feet of most of the men were lions, and at the feet of the women were dogs. Many of the dogs were sleeping, some were holding the women’s robes in their mouths … one had even caught a rabbit. Considering how morbid the whole place was, they were pretty adorable.
Finally, we came upon the memorial for Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.
As I looked up at the sculptures of the late king and queen, instead of the sense of reassurance I’d been hoping for, I immediately felt ill at ease, like there was a trickle of freezing water running down my spine.
“This is different,” Pilar said in a hushed voice. “They don’t look peaceful, they just look … sad.”
All of the other memorials featured people in peaceful repose. Marie and Louis, on the other hand, were depicted kneeling at prayer benches — looking the opposite of restful.
Louis was praying, and he looked sort of resigned. Marie clutched her chest, staring down at the floor like her heart was breaking. The carvings were amazingly elaborate, with intricately draped fabric and royal crests made of stone.
Brynn gazed up at them. “Why don’t they get to lie down?”
“A good question,” Jules said. He spoke loudly enough for the whole group to hear, but still in a tone that had a hush to it. “This memorial was constructed in 1830. It contains only the partial remains of the king and queen. So they are not technically at rest here. Also, their positions represent the tragic circumstances of their deaths.”
They are not technically at rest here.
My stomach tightened. I turned away.
“Around the corner,” Jules was saying, “you will find the mummified heart of Louis the Seventeenth, the son of Marie and Louis, who died in captivity at the age of ten during the Revolution. His heart was preserved after his death — which was typical for the hearts of royalty — and confirmed to be legitimate by DNA testing in the year 2000.”
“Now that actually sounds interesting,” Hannah said.
Mummified heart? No, thanks. I was already having stress-induced hallucinations of a ghost in a ball gown. Seeing the shriveled heart of a ten-year-old boy wouldn’t exactly nurture the cool, collected state of mind I was struggling to regain.
I started to walk away … but then I got the feeling that someone was following me.
Oh, God, please don’t let it be the ghost.
Bracing myself, I spun around, my eyes wide and unblinking.
“Bonjour,” Jules said, looking startled. “Are … you all right?”
I took a second to calm myself before I spoke. “I’m okay…. Just thinking about Marie and Louis.”
“You don’t want to see the heart?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I really don’t. Their tomb is bad enough.”
“You know, it may not even be their actual tomb. There’s a lot of controversy based on the fact that they were originally buried somewhere else, in the Madeleine Cemetery.”
“Oh,” I said. “But then they were exhumed and brought here?”
“Well,” he said. “That is what some people say.”
My spine tingled. “It’s not true?”
“The problem is, when they removed the bodies, Marie was identified only by … this bone — le maxillaire?” Jules ran his fingers along his jawline.
“Her jaw?”
“Oui, the jaw. By a man who had met her twenty years before.”
“That would be impossible,” I said. “Wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe so,” Jules said. “It depends who you ask.”
“So she’s still buried there?”
He shook his head. “Probably not. The bodies from the Madeleine Cemetery were moved to another cemetery, the Errancis.”
“So the queen’s body could be at the other cemetery, and it could be some random person’s bones in this vault?”
Jules shrugged. “Some people say the queen and king were buried in coffins, which made them easier to identify.”
“What do you think?”
He smiled. “I wasn’t there. It has been an ongoing argument for many years.”
“Is the Errancis Cemetery one of the places we’ll be going?” Even if it were an unmarked, mass grave, I could know that the queen had found some closure — the closure I’d been hoping to find at the Basilique.
“Ah, I’m afraid that is not so easy, either. The Errancis was closed after only a few years, and later most of the bodies there were taken to the Catacombs.”
This was getting ridiculous. “Well, are we going to the Catacombs?”
“Yes, on Thursday.” Jules looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “You are very interested in the queen.”
“Sort of,” I said. “But before you ask again, I really don’t want to see the heart.”
He smiled. “I understand.”
A shriek of laughter came from behind us, and we turned to see Pilar, pink-faced, darting away from Hannah.
“How could you say that?” Pilar cried, her voice echoing off the stone walls around us.
I winced.
“I just think your mother would appreciate it,” Hannah replied, in a voice that carried throughout the church, “since she loves you so much.”
“Gross!” Pilar squealed. “No one’s going to pickle my
heart!”
They burst into laughter, drawing annoyed stares from other tourists.
Jules sighed and walked over to them. He said something in a low voice, and immediately, their grins disappeared. Pilar looked embarrassed and Hannah looked like someone had told her that her diamond earrings were made out of plastic. They spied me and walked over, Hannah venting under her breath.
“I know it’s a church,” she seethed. “Hello, I go to a Catholic school. I know how to act in a church.”
Clearly not, but …
Pilar was glancing around, worried about who might be mad at her.
Hannah noticed. “You can relax, you know. Jules isn’t God.”
He was right, though. I looked over Hannah’s shoulder and saw that he’d wandered away from us. I didn’t blame him. I kind of wished I could walk away, too.
“You don’t really like him, do you, Colette?” Hannah asked. “He’s such a dork.”
“I don’t know, Hannah,” I said, feeling tired all of a sudden.
Despite her insistence that there had been nothing wrong with her behavior, Hannah was much quieter for the rest of the visit — but she was quiet like a half-buried land mine.
As we were leaving the Basilique de Saint-Denis, Hannah pulled me by the arm away from the group. “We’re not going with them. We’re taking a taxi to a costume rental house to find something to wear to the party.”
I wanted to say good-bye to Jules, but Hannah insisted that we hurry or risk missing our appointment.
The cab pulled to a stop outside of a warehouse-style shop for theatrical rentals. A sign on the door announced PAS OUVERT AU PUBLIC, which Hannah proudly translated as meaning “not open to regular people” as she rang the bell.
Inside was a wonderland of clothes. I drifted down the aisles, studying the hundreds of costumes. There were soldiers’ uniforms, 1960s go-go dancer outfits, and long, elaborate dresses that could be straight out of a movie about Paris a hundred and fifty years ago.
I slowly made my way over to Hannah and Pilar, who stood in front of a rack of ginormous ball gowns. Some were the flattened bell shape I’d seen on the ghost — I mean, on the woman. The completely alive, nonghost woman.
An attendant glanced at each of us and pulled dresses in various sizes, hanging them on a smaller, separate rack. She grabbed one of the gowns and gestured for Hannah to follow her behind a curtain into the changing room.
Pilar and I waited on folding chairs and listened to Hannah’s surprised exclamations of pain and discomfort.
“How much does this thing weigh? A hundred pounds?” she whined at one point.
Then the curtain parted, and Hannah stood before us in a pale-purple gown covered in clumps of pink ribbon flowers. Across the skirt were stripes of ivory lace, and the same lace flowed over the collar and poured from the sleeves.
“Voilà!” she said. “What do you think?”
“Wow,” Pilar said. “It certainly plays up — um …”
What she meant was that the top was very tight and very — uh — encouraging.
“I know, right?” Hannah said. “That’s what I like about it. Colette?”
“It’s pretty,” I said.
Hannah narrowed her eyes. “But?”
“But —” What I couldn’t say was that it looked disturbingly like something you’d expect to see on Little Bo Peep. “I think you should try the green one.”
Hannah turned imperiously to the attendant. “Bring the green dress.”
The woman closed the curtain without a word. There followed more whining and little yelps, plus Hannah’s sharp admonitions of “Be careful!”
The curtain opened once more.
This gown was pale sage green, edged in a metallic gold lace. The fabric draped heavily over its wide hips. The skirt was made up of dozens of gathered scallops, and the bodice was constructed of horizontal pleats that opened up to a gauzy explosion of gold tulle at the neckline. Every element of the dress was carried out with ruthless attention to detail. Each pleat, each drape of the heavy fabric, was precise and perfect.
Hannah’s pale-green eyes shone as vibrantly as emeralds.
“Colette?” she asked.
The words just popped out of my mouth: “You look like an evil queen.”
Pilar gasped and shot me a scandalized look.
“I mean …” I couldn’t think of how to say what I meant — or what I would have meant if I hadn’t just said exactly what I meant, which was that she did look like an evil queen. The kind who keeps a bucket of poisoned apples right next to her cursed spinning wheel.
“Oh, I know what you mean.” Hannah studied herself in the mirror, her lips pressed into a triumphant smile. “This is the one.”
The woman helped her change out of the dress, then hung it on a rack near the small office.
“Pilar, your turn!” Hannah said.
A few minutes later, Pilar emerged through the parted curtains. “Oh my God, I can’t breathe!”
“Wow, Peely!” I said.
She stopped short, mouth open. “That’s a good wow?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Turn around.”
This dress was simpler than Hannah’s — it had a smaller skirt, one that was just round instead of sticking out on the sides. But it looked like it had been made for Pilar. Its dark-red satin brought out the warmth in her skin and made her black curls look dramatic, especially in contrast to the white satin ruffle that encased the square neckline. The same style of ruffle, tight and neat-looking, adorned the ends of the sleeves. The back of the gown was bustled, the red satin slightly gathered to reveal an underskirt of black lace.
“It’s perfect for you,” I said. “It makes your waist look nonexistent.”
“Nonexistent like a barrel?” Pilar asked.
“No, like a wasp,” I said.
Pilar grinned at her reflection. If Hannah was the evil queen, then Pilar looked like the sweet, charming fairy-tale princess who the queen was determined to poison.
And it almost seemed like that was the case. Hannah was the only person in the room not infected by Pilar’s happy smile.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said, shrugging. “It doesn’t look very French.”
The attendant drew back, horrified. “Eet ees very French!”
“Be reasonable,” Hannah said. “I just don’t think the color suits you.”
Peely glanced at her. “But Colette likes it.”
“Colette doesn’t know everything about clothes,” Hannah said, and I felt her glare out of the corner of my eye.
“Yes, she does!” Pilar said. But she looked doubtful.
“There must be something better,” Hannah said, pulling me to the rack.
This was a test. Nothing would be better than the dress Pilar was wearing, and I wasn’t going to outright lie and say so. I reached out and touched one that was a stiff purply-mauve material covered in starched lace of the same color.
“This fabric is really cool,” I said lamely.
Hannah grabbed that dress and handed it to the attendant.
When the curtain opened, Pilar waited for our response.
The dull purple of the dress had just enough gray in it that it didn’t bring out any of the warm tones in her skin. In fact, it was another dress that would have looked fantastic on Hannah’s cool pallor. But on Peely it was nothing special.
“Great,” Hannah said.
“I like the lace,” Pilar said glumly. “Is it glued on?”
The attendant sniffed but didn’t condescend to answer.
“I’m tired,” Peely said. “I guess I’ll take this one.”
“Perfect,” Hannah said. “Now Colette’s turn.”
As Pilar changed in silence, I went over to the rack to look at the other dresses. There was a teal one with a fitted, jacket-style bodice. I had a sense it would look good on me — too good for Hannah’s taste — and passed over it, reaching for a dusty tan gown that would completely wash out my complexion. But the atte
ndant pushed in front of me, grabbed the teal one, and pulled me into the changing area.
Getting dressed was a squinchy, pinchy process, but I tried not to complain. After she’d buttoned the jacket, the woman looked at me, her eyes shining. Before I could step through the curtain, she grabbed me by the shoulders and aimed me at the mirror.
“C’est parfait,” she whispered, pulling my medallion out and settling it over the crisp neckline.
It was perfect.
The jacket hugged my rib cage and cut in sharply at the waist, flaring in a short peplum over the top of the skirt. The color, like the ocean on a sunny day, made my skin look as radiant and luminous as the portrait of the duke at the Louvre.
I almost didn’t recognize myself. Hannah’s and Pilar’s dresses, however pretty they were, still looked like costumes. But I looked like a girl who’d woken up in 1785 and put on her traveling outfit.
For a moment, I had the same disoriented feeling I’d experienced in the mirrored room at Versailles, like my eyes couldn’t quite focus on my own face — and when they finally managed to, somehow it wasn’t my face I was seeing. Once again, my eyes were wider and my lips were fuller, and my hair was piled up on my head in an elaborate updo. I reached my arm out to lean against the wall, and the attendant took me by the elbow and swung me around.
Suddenly, it was like the spell was broken. I could see again. And I could breathe again —
But just barely.
What was happening to me? Was I losing my mind?
Who was the woman I’d seen in the mirror, the woman whose face was so similar to my own?
I didn’t have time to think. The attendant pulled the curtain back, revealing me to my friends.
“I don’t like it,” Hannah said immediately. The attendant sucked in an annoyed breath.
Pilar was silent for a moment. “Could you … turn around?”
I turned to let them see the back, which was just as perfect as the front, I knew.
Out of curiosity, I glanced at the tag hanging off the sleeve. 249 EUROS/SEMAINE + 100 NETTOYAGE, it read.
Um.
There was no way on earth I could afford to pay 249 euros (plus another 100 for whatever nettoyage was). My dress for the winter formal at school had cost nine dollars at a brown-bag sale at the Women’s League thrift store. The most expensive item of clothing I’d bought in almost a year was a shirt I got for nineteen dollars on clearance at the mall.