Dreaming Anastasia (5 page)

Tuesday, 4:35 pm

Anne

What you need,” my mother tells me, grinning, “is the tiara.” She lifts the little silver-and-rhinestone crown from the display case and settles it on my head. I'm already wearing the matching rhinestone bracelet, but as you can never have enough tacky bling, I let her have her way.

We're standing in the Jewel Box, the vintage and estate jewelry shop my mother helps manage. It's a small store just a few blocks from Miss Amy's Studio, where I'm headed for my five o'clock class.

“I am so the princess,” I say as I peer at myself in the little mirror standing on the counter. The bracelet is heavy and really kind of ugly, with dozens of rhinestones alternated with marcasite to up the sparkle level. But I like the tiara, because honestly, what girl doesn't have royal aspirations?

And what I really like even better is that every piece in this shop has a story, and everything used to belong to someone else. I guess some people might find that kind of icky—like Tess, for example, who last time she was here with me picked up a pair of intricate, coral clip earrings and commented, “I can just see these on some fat old lady with boobs that look like a shelf”—but I don't mind at all.

I like knowing that there's a story behind this bracelet and tiara and that they used to touch someone else's skin. Maybe even though I think the bracelet is the definition of hideous, some lady somewhere thought it was really pretty—or maybe she didn't, but she wore it once in a while because her husband or lover or whoever had thought it made her look beautiful. All of which, in my opinion, is way more romantic than Adam telling me that my new, pink, Gap scoop-neck T-shirt would look better if he could take it off me.

In any case, my mother and I are alone in the store, because the owner, Mrs. Amelia Benson, is off this afternoon, and currently, no customers are in sight. Mom is cataloging new pieces, and I'm arranging the displays, only the tiara and bracelet were too over the top to pass up, so I convinced her to let me try them on. I stopped in on impulse—something I clearly don't do enough, judging by the level of surprise on my mother's face when I arrived about ten minutes ago. But my day has been just so crazy that I found myself heading over here without even thinking.

Not, of course, that I plan on telling my mother about the whole Ethan thing or the pain in my arm that's still lingering just under the skin like a nagging toothache, or even about last night's dream, for that matter. And I'm certainly not planning on telling her about the voice that echoed in my ears while the whole world started spinning just outside the cafeteria, because beyond the obvious that maybe I just imagined the whole thing, who in her right mind tells her mother that she's hearing voices?

Besides, that's the way it works with us these days. Since David. I don't worry her, and she doesn't push for information.

But it's sort of soothing to just stand here helping her while she fiddles with the jewelry, and I try on tiaras, and she gives directions to someone who called on the phone. “Yes, we're on Second Street. Two blocks from Main, next door to the Wrap Hut and across the street from Java Joe's.”

“Where did these come from?” I unclasp the bracelet and then reluctantly lift the tiara off my definitely-not-so-princess-y head and lay them both gently back on the black velvet cloth in the display case where they belong. My mother loves the items' stories too, so I figure it's a good way to draw out this visit a little longer since, ballet or no ballet, I really just don't want to leave.

“Estate sale up in Lake Forest,” my mother says. “Kind of sad, really. This woman, Owena McChesney, lived all over the world, collected all sorts of stuff—art, sculpture, jewelry.” She smiles as I roll my eyes back at the bling-ilicious bracelet and tiara. “Okay, not all of it is your taste. Or mine. But there's some pretty cool stuff. And now her kids are just basically selling it all off.”

There's a small pause, during which I'm absolutely sure that both of us are pondering the knowledge that David's room is exactly as he left it two years ago. Nothing's been moved even an inch, except to dust it. If he'd been a girl with a tiara, it would be right where he—okay, she—had left it.

But as there is nothing either of us can do about that, my mother collects herself and says, “No, really, Anne. There are these Russian boxes she had that Amelia purchased. Lacquer boxes, they're called. We're going to set up a display of them in the front window, I think. Here, I'll show you.”

My mother flits into the back room and emerges about thirty seconds later with a small box. “It's Russian folk art,” she says and slips the small, rectangular, black box into my hand. “Usually they depict fairy tales or folktales. Isn't it beautiful?”

Unlike the rhinestone bracelet, it really is. It's a little bigger than my palm and very smooth. On the cover, there's a painting. The colors are vivid—all bright reds, greens, and golds. A young girl in a long dress stands in the middle of a thick forest. She's got long, black hair wrapped in a scarf she's got tied under her chin. In one hand, she's carrying a torch of some sort. In the other, she's holding a tiny doll dressed in a similar outfit. Behind her ride three horsemen. The horses' legs are painted to give the impression that they're in motion, moving swiftly through the forest. Each one is a different color, both horse and horseman matching—one white, one red, one black.

“So which story is this?” I ask her. “Do you know?”

She nods. “It's called ‘Vasilisa the Brave,'” she tells me. “About a young girl whose wicked stepmother sends her through the forest to get light from a witch. The horsemen are the witch's servants, I think. Each one is a color of a different time of day—red for sunrise, white for morning, black for night.”

Gooseflesh prickles my arms at the word
witch
. In my head, I see the old woman with the metal teeth. That jaw unhinging to swallow me whole.

I shake off the image. “Wicked stepmother, huh? Kind of like Cinderella?” I think of Tess for a second because of the word
wicked
while I peer again at the pretty girl on the box. Then I notice something else.

“What's that?” I point to the small hut behind some of the trees.

Mom shrugs. “I never noticed it before. I guess it must be the witch's house.” She reaches out to take the box from me. Then, as almost an afterthought, she says, “It opens, you know. The inside is pretty too.”

I place my thumb on the front of the box and push, but the lid stays firmly closed. I push again. Clearly, this is the piece that's supposed to lift up, but it doesn't. From the back of the store, I hear the faint sound of a Caribbean-sounding ringtone.

“You know,” I say to my mother. “If you keep your cell phone in your pocket, you don't have to run to your purse every time it rings.”

“Just watch the front for me.”

“Will do,” I tell her. “If someone comes in, I'm going to pawn off that god-awful bracelet on her.”

My mother makes a face, then hustles to the back to answer her cell.

I poke the box one more time with my thumb. The lid gives a sucking sound, as though it's been glued shut or something. I push again. The top lifts up, revealing a glossy, red interior. Painted in the center is a tiny gold key. I trace it with my finger, feel how it's raised slightly from the rest of the box.

I glance at the wall clock. It's almost five. I really need to dash.

“I've got to run,” I say loudly enough that Mom can hear me. I close the lid and plop the box onto the counter.

And then my breath catches in my throat.

Because the hut on the box's front cover—the one I swear had been barely visible behind the thick grove of trees in the painting—is now resting in the clearing.

Even for the weirdness of today, this is absolutely impossible. I blink and rub my eyes, afraid to look down. But I can't help myself. I look again. The hut is back behind the trees, just where it had started.

“Are you okay?” Mom walks back to me. She's looking at me closely, which is never a good thing.

“Fine,” I lie. “Just fine. I, uh—fine. I just—I really have to go. I'm late.” It is almost exactly what I told Ethan right before chemistry—right after the lightning bolt or whatever it was jolted into me.

“Your father and I have that fund-raiser dinner, tonight, remember?” My mother presses a quick kiss to my forehead. “So I'll leave dinner for you.”

I nod at her, which is about all I can manage, words having pretty much dried up in my throat. Then I grab my ballet bag and rush from the Jewel Box and across the street so I can head down the block to Miss Amy's.

I don't look back at the lacquer box. If the hut on the cover makes another move, I just don't want to know.

Nor am I in the mood to realize, as I dash by Java Joe's, that my blue-eyed friend, Ethan Kozninsky, is sitting at a table at the window. Or that although he turns his face when I see him, he's clearly been watching me.

I hesitate for only a second and then let my feet make the decision for the rest of me.

“Hey,” I say once I'm inside Java Joe's and standing next to the table where Ethan's sitting.

“Uh, hey.” He tilts his head and looks up at me as though he's seeing me for the first time.

“So,” I say, “are you following me?”

The question clearly stumps him. He shoves his long fingers through that thick, brown hair.

“No,” he says finally. “Um, no. I'm, uh—waiting for my study group.”

Other than his cup of coffee, I see nothing else on the table. No backpack at his feet.

He shoves his hand through his hair some more. I should walk out of here and not look back. I should yell, “Stranger!” loudly and point at him like they told us to do in elementary school if we thought someone was trying to kidnap us. But I don't do any of that. The look in those blue eyes—part surprise, part amusement, part something I can't identify—holds me there.

Plus, I'm still sort of collecting my freaked-out self after the lacquer-box incident.

I glance at the clock over the coffee bar. I'm officially late for ballet.

“Enjoying your latte?” I ask him. I'm unnerved and kind of pissed, and also feeling like an idiot right now.

“I—sure,” he says. “Are you getting some? Please, sit. I'll get it for you. I know you think I've been rude. Here, really. Sit down. Join me.” These are the most words I've heard him string together.

He reaches up and places one hand lightly on mine.

The tingling sensation flickers up my arm again.

My mouth dries up so the words sort of stick to my tongue as I force them out. “No,” I manage to say. “Absolutely not.”

And before he can say another word, I bolt from Java Joe's.

Tuesday, 6:05 pm

Anne

So spill.” Tess mops her face, then shoves the towel into her oversized, maroon gym bag. We're sitting together on the wooden bench in the changing room at Miss Amy's. It's been a beast of a class, and we're both fairly rank at the moment, but there's no shower here, so all we can do is towel off the surface layer of sweat and make the best of it.

“Spill what?” I rub my aching feet and wonder idly if I can guilt Mom into doing the mother-daughter spa pedicure thing this weekend. My toes look like they've been through a war. And lost.

“Whatever's up with you, that's what. You are seriously knotted up about something. You have been for a couple of days now.” Tess pushes a few sweat-soaked strands of blond hair away from her forehead and slings one long leg over the bench so she can face me. “And don't give me that innocent, ‘Who, me?' look. I've known you since we were practically in diapers.”

I finish wrapping my ballet slippers and tuck them into my bag. I'm not even sure where to begin. “I'd tell you if I knew,” I say. Even as it exits my mouth, it sounds utterly lame. “Really, I would.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Liar,” she says, but she doesn't push me for more. Instead, she zips up her bag, shrugs into her denim jacket, and stands up. “C'mon, my dad is probably waiting in the car.”

Like me, Tess still has just a learner's permit, which means that unless hell freezes over, neither of us can drive without an adult in the car—which also means we have to walk everywhere or bum rides or wait for a parent to pick us up.

I gather my gear, shove my arms through the sleeves of my navy blue hoodie—the one with the Miss Amy's logo and the slogan, “Ballerinas do it better,” on the back—and follow her to the front of the studio and then out into the night air. We both look around. Tess's dad is nowhere in sight.

“Figures,” she mutters and rummages in the pocket of her jacket for her cell phone. She presses three on the speed dial and taps her foot impatiently.

“Where are you?” she asks when her dad answers. I watch as she nods her head to whatever he's saying on the other end.

“Stuck in traffic.” Tess flips the phone closed and shoves it back into her pocket. “He says he should be here in about five minutes.”

“Still better than walking,” I say. Brutal ballet class or not, I'm still so tense from everything that keeps colliding with me lately that I find myself standing there contemplating squeezing in a run after dinner. Probably impossible since I've got an essay to finish for English, approximately a zillion pre-calc problems to solve, and a large number of Latin verbs to commit to memory for tomorrow's test.

“Well,” Tess says now, interrupting my less-than-thrilling mental rundown of the drudgery known as homework, “now that we have a few extra minutes, I say we spend it getting to the bottom of whatever's got your panties in a bunch.”

So what do I tell her? That ever since I bumped into Ethan this morning—ever since we saw him at
Swan Lake
, actually—I've felt like all my nerve endings are standing at attention? Like I'm a gazelle on one of those Animal Planet shows—the one that senses something is about to attack but doesn't know where?

Down the street, I can see a crowd in front of Java Joe's. I wonder if Ethan's still there, and why he seems to keep popping up everywhere I am. The usual stream of SUVs and Volvo sedans whiz by us, along with a few hybrids.

“Ethan,” Tess says loudly enough to make me jump. “It's mystery hot guy, isn't it? Oh. My. God. Anne. I can't believe that he's got you all wired. I mean, he's cute and all, but geez, it's not like you to get so crazy over some guy you've known for all of three seconds. What are you now? Me?”

“I know—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

“Ha! I'm right. It
is
him, isn't it? Well, we need to take care of this right now. We simply can't have you moping around anymore, looking like you've lost your best friend—which is me, by the way. Remember me, your BFF, the one who knows all your nasty little secrets? Or at least who did till now? Where does he live? We've got time. We'll tell my dad to drop us off. Tell him we've got a study group we forgot about. We can stalk old Ethan. We can peek in his windows. Ooh, we can see him naked, and—”

“Enough.” I put my hand over her mouth for emphasis and try my hardest not to laugh. “Enough.” Any more of this, and we'll end up lurking in Ethan's bushes—which is sort of funny, if you think about it, stalking the stalker and all—but still not exactly what I had planned for the rest of tonight's entertainment.

“Party pooper,” Tess says. “Remember, my dear Anne,” she makes a grand gesture with her arms, then executes a full ballerina curtsey in front of me and an elderly woman in a head scarf walking by us, “love has no schedule. And neither,” she wiggles her tongue at me, “does lust.”

I just shake my head. I see what looks like her dad's Avalon coming up the street. And then I realize that the woman in the head scarf has stopped alongside us.

She's so old. That's the first thing that pops into my head when I look at her. Impossibly old looking. Her skin is brown and wrinkled, her hands veined and broad. And suddenly my pulse kicks up hard and fast, like it's sprinting through me. Her gaze fixes on mine. My skin flushes—a burning prickle that rushes its way up my arms, my throat, my face.

“Anne?” Tess sounds like she's a million miles away.

I'm falling, I think, into those two dark eyes that won't leave mine—eyes dark like pools of oil, a tiny skull in the center of each.

She smiles. Her metal teeth gleam in the twilight.

All I want to do is run. But I can't even move, can't even scream. My heart slaps against my ribs so hard that I think they might break.

“You're the one.” Her voice echoes around me, inside me. “You feel us. You know we're there. Now, come to us.”

Unable to even swallow, I close my eyes. The world spins dangerously around me, turning and turning.

“Anne.” I hear Tess again at my side.

I open my eyes.

The woman is gone.

“You okay?” Tess tilts her head a little and peers at me. “You sort of faded away for a second.”

“Did you see? Did you see her?” My voice is tiny and thin, like it's afraid to come out.

“See who? And why are you so pale? Here.” She rummages in her bag and hands me a bottle of water. “I think your electrolytes are screwed up or something.”

I realize that she hasn't seen a thing, hasn't felt the world turn into one giant carnival ride.

Tess places a hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eyes. The connection feels good, solid. Maybe I really am just tired—just imagining that I saw the crazy, metal-tooth witch lady from my dream here on Central Avenue, staring at me with her skull eyes.

Mr. Edwards pulls up to the curb in his maroon Avalon.

“Whatever it is, Anne,” Tess says, one hand on the car door, the look on her face no longer joking, “don't you dare go turning yourself inside out about it. You watched me do that over the summer and you know it wasn't pretty.”

She means her summer romance with Neal Patterson, the guy she'd decided was special enough to let divest her of her virginity, and who, according to Tess had sworn he was also a novice to such activities. Except it turned out that he'd used that line on at least three other girls—which, let me say, did not sit particularly well with Tess. “Thank God I made him wear a condom,” she'd said of the experience, “especially since the whole thing was over so fast, I barely figured out what he was doing down there in the first place.”

“Don't worry,” I whisper as she slides into the front seat of the car. “It's not like that. It's just—” I stop in mid-sentence. My heart jolts into my throat again. I wait for the world to start spinning, but nothing happens. No lady. No voices. And for once, no Ethan.

“What is it?” Tess asks from inside the car.

“Nothing. I guess I'm just jumpy tonight.”

I climb into the back seat. I take one more look out the back window as we pull away from the curb. A dark sedan that might be a Mercedes is turning the corner about a block behind us. I watch it until it disappears.

“Hi, Anne,” Mr. Edwards says from the front seat. “Are we going to pick you up tomorrow morning, as usual?”

“Sure thing,” I tell him. Then I sit back, pretend everything is normal, and listen as Tess and her father banter back and forth about nothing much in particular.

“Thanks, Mr. E.,” I say when we get to my house a little while later. “See you tomorrow.” I slide over to the door and grab my bag. Tess reaches over and gives my free hand one more squeeze. I look at her, and she smiles.

“Be careful, Annie Bananie,” she says, using the name she used to call me when we were eight.

“Will do,” I assure her, although I'm not sure why she's said it. Do I really have something to be careful about?

They drive off down the block, and I let myself into the empty house. Our tabby cat, Buster, races in from wherever he's been hiding and meows hopefully, rubbing himself around my legs.

“In a minute, Buster,” I say to him. “Just let me put my bag down, and I'll feed you.” I reach down and scratch his ears. He allows me a few seconds of petting him and then slips away and pads toward the kitchen. I follow.

There's a note on the fridge from my mother, detailing, in her slightly compulsive way, what's available for dinner and how I should go about preparing it.
The leftover spaghetti is in the blue Tupperware on the second shelf of the fridge.
As though I'd be completely flummoxed if the note simply said,
Spaghetti in fridge.

I pour some Purina in Buster's dish and then snap on the kitchen television to keep me company as I—phew!—manage the task of heating up leftover pasta in the microwave.

A few minutes later, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, scooping the now reheated pasta primavera onto a plate. On the television, E! is showing part three of a special series about celebrity weddings—just the type of mindless distraction I need. Then, as I reach for my fork, I glance idly at my hand—and notice that it seems to be glowing. Yes, glowing—a distinctive, blue and white aura type of glowing. My fork clatters to the table, startling Buster, who runs from his food bowl, an angry look on his little cat face.

I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them, my hand is—well, just a hand again.

So I sit there while the E! reporter gushes over Angela Kurasowa, baker to the stars, and Buster edges cautiously back to his dinner, and my pasta cools and congeals on my plate. Either this is indeed the strangest day ever, or I'm losing my mind.

Maybe a little of both.