Sometimes By Moonlight (2 page)

“Oh,
cherie
, you’re crying! What’s wrong?”

I wiped my wet eyes against the sleeves of my sleep shirt. “Remember that boyfriend I told you about?” I said in a small voice. “He’s in your magazine with Eva.”

“What? No!” Marie-Rose jumped out of bed and picked up the tabloid. “That’s your Austin with her?”

I nodded, still snuffling. “Apparently, he goes for the beautiful, famous type now.”

Marie-Rose sat down next to me and put her tiny arm around my shoulders. “It is probably not what you think,” she said. “I’m sure Eva is photographed with many people.”

I shrugged out from her grasp. “I told you he hasn’t been in touch for months.”

Marie-Rose’s eyes were kind behind her wispy red bangs. “Until you know the truth about why he hasn’t written, there is no reason to get upset. He will be in many magazines, that boy. It’s hard to avoid when you are the son of a rock star.”

I had to admit, my roommate had a point. The tabloids had always plagued Austin and his family. It was a fact of his life. “And what about that Eva girl?”

“She’s got a different boyfriend every month, if you believe the rumors. Now, we should turn off the lights and sleep.” Marie-Rose climbed under the covers of her bed. “As my
maman
says, everything will look better in the morning.”

I extinguished the light, and moonlight flooded the room again. Just as my eyes closed, I swear I heard a wolf’s cry off somewhere in the night. But that, of course, was probably wishful hearing.  If I know anything about the night and the moon, it’s that you can’t trust the dangerous tricks they play.

***

You would think, being in Europe and all, that the Steinfelder Academy for Girls would have good food. That world-class chefs, hired to feed the errant girls of the wealthy, would be staffing the kitchen, preparing an array of delicious, unpronounceable foodstuffs. Instead, every meal was almost impossible to choke down. Maybe it was some sort of secret diet plan our parents had us on: we would become so broken down by malnutrition we would become the complacent robots they’d always hoped we’d be. Or maybe the owners of Steinfelder were just horribly cheap.

Anyway, as I sat down to our culinary torture the next night, I was still deep in shock from having seen the picture of Austin with Eva Maleva, perfect European pop princess. Marie-Rose floated down next to me on the bench, her normally serene face showing concern.  If I didn’t already feel like crying, the air was thick with the smell of burnt onions.

I rested my chin in my hands on the long oak table, looking toward the windows, which revealed a darkening landscape. The poplars at the edge of our field were glazed with ice crystals reflecting the fluorescent glow of Steinfelder’s security lights, and in the distance, the chain link fence was a reminder that there was no easy way out of this place. If you somehow made it over the fence, you’d face the extremely steep, icy road that led down from our mountain perch. The duke who’d built this place had wanted absolute solitude. That was our inheritance. Our punishment.

The dining room, always silent before meals, came alive as the first-year students finally arrived at the tables with the food. Our puny server pranced over, giggling, and nearly knocked her domed silver platter onto the floor.

“Whoops,” she mumbled, setting it down with a crash, which slopped juice of some sort onto our table. “Sorry.”

Anxious to get it over with, I lifted the lid and found a pile of steaming something, surrounded by blackened baby onions. “Oh, yum.”

The server girl took the lid from my hands. “It’s sweetbreads and cow tongue. Enjoy,” she said, skipping off back to the kitchen.

I grabbed a serving fork and prodded one of the brown chunks. “What are we supposed to do with this?”

“We eat it. As on every other night.” Marie-Rose took the fork from me and selected a big piece, slapping it onto my plate. Then she served herself.

“Just once, I’d like to uncover a juicy porterhouse steak.”

“Yes,
un bisteck avec des pomme frites
,” Marie-Rose said, looking down wistfully at her plate. “
Alors
, I’m going to pretend we are sitting in a bistro on the Left Bank.”

“Good luck with that.” I tried to cut the piece of meat on my plate, but as expected, it was rubbery. I know that some people actually like guts and stuff when they’re cooked right—I’ve watched enough Travel Channel shows to know they’re a delicacy—but this stuff had been boiled to the texture of a Super Ball. Sighing, I helped myself to another hunk of Steinfelder’s dense wheat bread. Then I grabbed the meat platter, spooning some of the baby onions onto my plate.  I would fill up on vegetables, even if they were burnt.

As I set the platter back down on the table, though, I felt something near the rim. Something taped there. Had that been why the server girl had giggled? Without letting anyone see, I dislodged the tiny piece of folded paper and shoved it into my pocket.

I forced down some of the onions and the bread and listened to Marie-Rose’s recap of her Advanced Math class earlier that day. Near the end of her story, the servers came around to clear the table, and I earned a scowl for leaving my meat on my plate. I knew what was next on the menu, a watery pudding dessert, but at least that might kill the taste of Super Ball and blackened onions.

“So, are you going to tell me? What did you find?” Marie-Rose whispered. Always observant, she must have seen me pocket the note.

“I’m not sure,” I said, unrolling the little paper in my lap.

It won’t be long now.

Seriously. That’s all the stupid thing said. Like I knew what to do with that.

Marie-Rose elbowed me in the side. “What is written?”

“Shh.” I passed it to her.

She read it in the folds of her napkin, and then handed it back to me. “What does that mean? Do you know who sent it?”

“Someone in the kitchen, I guess.”

“Maybe it was meant for another table?” she whispered. “But who is A?”

“A?” I unrolled the note again and looked at it more closely. Sure enough, in the tiny script in the lower left corner was the letter A. I turned over the paper, looking for more writing I had missed, but I didn’t see anything. Could A be for Austin? My heart swelled with hope as I stared down at the little missive, hoping I was right.

“And, what do we have here, girls?”

Marie-Rose and I straightened up.

“Nothing, Madame,” Marie-Rose said.

Madame LaCroix, headmistress of Steinfelder, stood at the foot of our table, a beatific smile improbably displayed on her thin lips. “It looks as if you were passing a note,” she said, her voice like icicles down the back of my neck. “Hand it to me, please.”

I crushed the note in my hand, trying as hard as I could to smudge the writing, to break down the fibers of the paper so it was unreadable.

“Come, come,” she said, smiling as if doing so pained her. Her hand shot out, a collection of keys clinking like chimes behind the jeweled bracelet on her wrist.

“We found it,” I said, dropping the note into her palm. “I’m not even sure what it means. Maybe it’s referring to dessert?”

Madame LaCroix donned the reading glasses hanging from the gold chain around her neck and peered down at the paper. She made no comment as she folded it into a crisp square and stowed it in her bosom. “
Mesdemoiselles
,” she said, turning to address the crowded dining room. “As all of you know, we don’t pass notes here at Steinfelder.” She swiveled back toward us. “I’ll see you two girls after your last class tomorrow for extra homework. And in case you’re wondering, the note is mine. Don’t even entertain the thought of my returning it to you.”

Like I wanted to touch it after it had been stored in her bra. “Um, okay,” I said. “No problem.”

Madame LaCroix sauntered off to yell at a girl who’d fallen asleep next to her dish of pudding.

“Do you think A might be…” Marie-Rose trailed off, making the connection herself.

I shrugged, not sure what to make of the mysterious note, but the thought of Austin made me smile as I forced down the barely edible dessert, which had just landed on our table. Had he found a way to get a message to me in this awful place?

My heart lifted with the thought that “It won’t be long now” meant Austin was coming to Steinfelder. And that I’d find out what had kept him away in the first place.

I just hoped it had nothing to do with Eva Maleva.

Chapter Two

The wind howled with extra vengeance the next afternoon, bringing with it more snow. Beyond the school library’s leaded glass windows, Steinfelder was a world of white. The naked poplars were coated with a frosting that reminded me of powdered donuts, which I would have given my right arm for. But there wasn’t time for daydreaming about American treats. Marie-Rose and I were painstakingly copying the entries for the letters F and G from the massive dictionaries before us. I’d heard horror stories of floor waxing, statue cleaning with toothbrushes, and snow shoveling, so I knew Madame LaCroix had gone easy on us with this punishment. And the library wasn’t entirely cheerless. Over in the corner, a hearth blazed beneath a decorated mantle, so if our penalty afforded us some warmth and light in these dark and drafty November days, I wasn’t complaining.

“Did you see that?” Marie-Rose pointed toward the window.

“See what?”

“I saw a flash of black out in the snow.”

“Probably Madame LaCroix patrolling.” I scratched away at my paper.

“I don’t think it was Madame.” Marie-Rose glanced toward the library doorway, where Mrs. Lemmon, who’d been assigned to supervise our punishment, nodded off in her overstuffed armchair.

“Well, what is it then?”

“I will see.” Gracefully, Marie-Rose floated her way to the window. She’d told me she’d been a pretty good dancer before everything turned to
merde
at the ballet school, and with her chin tilted to see out the glass and her torso holding perfect posture, Marie-Rose did look the part of a ballerina. All she needed to do was sweep her long red hair into a bun and take her place at the barre.

“So?” I asked, putting a period on the end of my dictionary definition. “What is it?”

“Ah, well, it’s a little dark out there, but I can definitely see something moving near the stone wall.”

I got up from the table, my wooden chair scraping loudly against the stone floor.
Oops.
  Mrs. Lemmon grunted and rolled her large head to the other shoulder.  I let out the breath I’d been holding and tiptoed over to the window.

Marie-Rose frowned out at the snow. “It’s gone now,” she said. “Maybe it was nothing.” She stepped back over to her chair.