Forever Now (Forever - Book 1) (15 page)

Swagger.

His eyes shifted to me, and his right eyebrow shot up. “Blue?” he asked me. “That’s a lovely name.” He spoke with a slightly lighter accent than the Bergers, but he oozed French out of every pore.

“No, I mean, that’s not my name,” I said.

“Zees iz Tess,” Madame Berger told him.

“Another writer, Pierre,” Monsieur Berger explained.

“Is that so?” He sat on the chair next to the couch and crossed his legs. “Blue, a beautiful, young writer. My favorite genre of writer.”

I couldn’t speak. I was in way over my head. I was no good at small talk, not that I had any idea what small talk was for rich French people.

“Tell me what iz it that you write?” he asked me.

“Uh—“

“Let me guess,” he said. “I sense a deep intellect in your lovely head. Perhaps you have amazing powers of deductive reasoning. So…a mystery writer?”

He had a way of speaking that made me blush up and down my body. He gave me all of his attention, as if the rest of the world was inconsequential or nonexistent.

I shook my head. I still couldn’t find words.

“Ah, I see,” he said, smiling and raising his eyebrow again. “You want to make this difficult for me. Very good. Very good. Could you be perhaps a romantic? A woman with such a face could only be a romantic. So, you write the romance?”

I didn’t know how to answer him. I didn’t actually write anything outside of my notebooks, and in them I wrote little stories…my dreams, my desires, my emotions, and my despair. What genre was that? I wished they hadn’t told him I was a writer. I didn’t want him to find out that I was just a teenage girl who wrote about her boring life in a 99-cent store notebook.

“I see,” he said. “La belle est timide. You are shy.” He snapped his fingers, and a server came over with a tray of champagne flutes. He took one and handed it to me. Then he took one for himself. “A toast to writers,” he said and clinked his glass against mine.

I had never drunk alcohol before, let alone champagne. I had seen how ugly my mother and her friends got when they were drunk, and I never wanted to become like them. But there was something about Pierre that made me do whatever he said without thinking twice.

I took a sip. It was sweet and not sweet at the same time. It was sharp and not sharp at the same time. It was delicious.

“So, this is what we are going to do,” Pierre continued. “I will tell you about my writing because I can see that you are humble, and unfortunately, I am not.”

“But surely you have heard of Pierre Ollivier,” Monsieur Berger said to me. “He is France’s greatest living ecrivain.”

I hadn’t heard of him. I had only read dead French writers, and not much of those.

“Yes,” I managed to say. “Of course, I’ve heard of him. I love your work.”

Pierre leaned his head back and roared with laughter. “Zis girl is perfection! She lies with such charm.”

“I didn’t lie,” I lied. I was a terrible liar. I had never learned the art of it. I wasn’t used to speaking to people in general, and to bend the truth, I would sputter and turn bright red.

Pierre leaned over and touched my arm. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I thought my eyes would bulge out of my head.

“My beautiful young Blue,” he called me. “I am touched that you lied to me. Emu. Do you know what this word means? Do you speak French?”

“Emu? A big, Australian bird?”

“Eh? No. I think I will enjoy teaching you French. In any case, I am a boring, stuffy writer. An intellectual. It takes me ten years to write a book.”

“Masterpieces,” Madame Berger said.

“Masterpieces,” Monsieur Berger agreed.

“I would love to read them,” I said, this time telling the truth. He was mesmerizing. A real author close up, who was actually talking to me.

“Too bad we do not have more time,” he said. “I would love to talk to you about writing. So often, I lack intellectual company.”

“Perhaps in June when she come to Paris,” Madame Berger said.

I almost dropped my drink. “Excuse me?” I asked.

“You can show her the Sorbonne when you are there,” she continued.

“Ah, you are a student in my home?” Pierre asked me.

I didn’t know what to say. Had Dahlia told them about my dream to go to the Sorbonne in France? Did she tell them that I wanted to be a writer?

“Well, not exactly. I mean, not yet,” I said.

“In June,” Madame Berger said. “She is staying in our chambre de bonne for one year. We are delighted to host a writer!”

***

I didn’t exactly pass out. Okay, maybe I did. I mean, I did drop the glass of champagne and sort of melt off the couch and onto the floor, like a cartoon character.

Like I had no bones.

Like a de-boned chicken or a really, really drunk girl with no bones.

No, I had no idea what a chamber de bonne was—I really had to learn French—but I knew what “staying” meant. Ditto “host” and “one year.” Could it be true? Could these rich people be hosting me for a full year in Paris?

There’s a saying that goes like this: Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it. In my experience, I never got a single thing I wished for. So, I never actually worried about the saying.

So, why did I sort of pass out?

Why did I wind up catatonic, lying under the coffee table with my dress hiked up to my blue polka dotted panties? The answer was simple. I was in shock that something good was going to happen to me.

Shock.

I was dimly aware of the music stopping, and a large group of people surrounding me.

“Is she drunk?” I heard one person say.

“She only had one sip of champagne.” I recognized that voice as Pierre’s. He was so dreamy. Rich and successful in a beautiful suit and fabulous swagger. And he called me Blue.

Blue. My very first nickname in my whole life.

Everyone around me had a theory about why I passed out. They had a running debate about my health.

“She’s in a coma.”

“Shut up, Doris. Her eyes are open. You close your eyes if you’re in a coma.”

“Shut up, Philip. You’re an imbecile.”

“I’ve seen this before in Ghana: Typhoid.”

I heard gasps and some shifting around, as some of the people obviously decided to stand a safe distance away from a possible Ebola victim.

“I’m a doctor, and I can tell you this is not typhoid.”

“What the hell!” I recognized that voice, too. It was Dahlia’s father. He had a very commanding, militaristic voice. “Stand back!” he ordered, and the guests all dutifully complied.

He lifted the coffee table off me.

“In France, zis iz what we do,” Madame Berger announced and spilled her glass of champagne on my face. I sputtered and coughed and sat up straight.

“I told you it wasn’t typhoid,” someone said from the crowd. The musicians started playing again, and most of the guests milled about the room, bored with me since I wasn’t in a coma and I didn’t have a catastrophic disease.

“What happened?” Dahlia’s father asked me, helping me to my feet.

“What’s a chamber de bonne?” I asked.

“She’s talking gibberish,” he said and sat me on the couch. “Perhaps she should go upstairs and lie down.”

But I didn’t want to lie down. I wanted to know all about the good thing that was going to happen to me. I wanted to know every detail to make sure it was real. I asked Madame Berger to explain exactly what she was talking about, and after she did, I asked her to repeat it.

Luckily, Madame Berger didn’t get impatient with me. Instead, she seemed to enjoy my enthusiasm for her offer.

“A small room,” she explained. “You know at the very top of our building. How do you say in English? Garret. Clean with ze bathroom down the hall. In a good quartier, of course. Neighborhood, you understand.”

I nodded and gulped. “The thing is—“ I started. I didn’t know how to broach the subject of money. It seemed that they were offering me a gift of a year in an apartment they owned, but what if I was mistaken? What if they wanted to rent me the room for a huge amount of money that I could never possibly come up with?

“I think Blue is worried about the rent, Madame,” Pierre said, making me blush. I looked down and picked an invisible piece of lint off my dress.

“Rent?” Madame Berger asked. “No rent. No loyer. Zis iz a gift. We are patrons of the arts. We are your host, ma belle. One year in the chamber de bonne while you study at the Sorbonne and write your fabulous book.”

She stuck her finger in the air. One. One year to stay for free in Paris.

Could it be that everything I had always wanted was really going to happen?

“I will give our coordinates to Dahlia. It will be all arranged,” Madame Berger said. “Ah, there iz Miss Dahlia.”

Dahlia skipped over to us. She was flushed, and there were beads of sweat on her forehead. “They’re about to gong the gong. I hope you like lamb,” she said to me.

It turned out that I loved lamb. In fact, everything tasted amazing, now that I was the happiest person on the planet. The dining room was as big as our school’s gym. The walls were made out of a deep cherry wood, and a long table was laid out in the center. The entire room was lit in candlelight, and a harpist and two violinists played soft music in the corner.

Dahlia and I were seated far away from Pierre and the Bergers. From my seat, I couldn’t speak to them anymore about the apartment in Paris, but Dahlia was more than happy to give me more details. In fact, she couldn’t seem to stop talking.

“I’ve been to their place. Huge! A palace right in the heart of the city overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. You know, the museum that used to be the king’s crib.”

I nodded.

“The maid’s room was empty. So, they were thrilled to give it to you, especially when I told them you were the next Gertrude Stein. You know, except prettier of course. More mashed potatoes?”

She scooped potatoes from a server’s dish and plopped them onto my plate. She had done that with the lamb, salad, and carrots, too. My plate was piled high, and I was on second helpings. I could never eat that much, and I was kicking myself for not bringing Ziplocs to sneak the leftovers back home. I had enough for a week, if I could figure out a way to get it out of there.

“Oh, look who’s here!” she yelled. “Jonathon!”

Dahlia dropped the dish of potatoes back on the table, jumped up, and ran around to the other side of the table. She gave the man a big hug, which was hard to do since he was sitting down, and she wound up elbowing the woman sitting next to him right in her face.

Dahlia’s father saw the whole debacle from his seat at the head of the table. He threw his napkin down and stormed over to her. I noticed her mother was still drinking instead of eating. She sort of rocked in place as if she couldn’t find her balance in her chair. I became transfixed, not daring to look away because I was sure she was going to fall face first into her dinner.

“Dahlia!” her father shouted and pushed her away from Jonathon and the woman who now had a big shiner. “That’s enough,” he said. “You two can finish upstairs. I’ll have your suppers sent to you.”

“But Daddy,” Dahlia wailed. “I want to dance!” She pirouetted and kicked the air. Her father shot me a pleading look.

I ran over and wrapped my arm around Dahlia’s waist. “Let’s have a slumber party,” I said in her ear. That seemed to mollify her, and she took my hand and ran gleefully upstairs, tugging me behind her.

***

Dahlia’s room was huge, beautiful, and surprisingly old school. She had a king sized canopy bed, a large wood desk, two couches, and a big armchair. But no electronics. No big screen TV.

Her room was chill. You know, in a richer-than-Madonna’s-daughter kind of way. I loved it. I felt completely relaxed there. Calm. My heartbreak and fears of survival faded away in her bedroom. It was a fortress of Zen. A sanctuary. But not for Dahlia. She couldn’t relax or even stop singing. Her eyes were wild, and her body was in a constant state of movement.

“Happy!” she sang while dancing on her desk.

I held up my bag. “Do you mind if I put on my pajamas?”

“Dance with me! Dance with me!”

“I sort of have to pee.”

“Pee on the desk!” I didn’t think she was totally kidding. She was in some kind of loopy, hyper zone. She was Dahlia times ten with way more energy than I had ever had.

“I would rather pee in the bathroom,” I said, feeling like a big party pooper. What did I know about slumber parties? Maybe I was supposed to dance and pee on the desk. Maybe that was the cool thing to do.

Dahlia’s father walked into the room, carrying a glass of water in one hand, and a bottle of pills in the other. “The bathroom is over there,” he said, pointing to a door. “Feel free to take a long shower. This is going to take a while.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was the kind of man who was used to having his orders obeyed. Just before I opened the bathroom door, I turned to see him giving Dahlia two pills. She swallowed them while dancing on her desk.

***

If Dahlia’s bedroom was a sanctuary, her bathroom was nirvana. I never wanted to leave. It was huge and gorgeous and stocked with every beauty product ever invented. If I were Dahlia, I would be the world’s cleanest person.

The only problem was choosing between her sunken bathtub and her four shower-headed shower. They both had pros and absolutely no cons. But something in me knew I would never leave the bathtub, and Dahlia might someday really need to pee in an actual toilet instead of on her desk. So, I went for the shower.

I turned it on and let the water hit me from every direction. They say money can’t buy happiness, but those people never took a shower in Dahlia’s super luxury bathroom.

As I soaped myself up with her aromatherapy beauty bar, the events of the evening replayed in my head like an announcer giving the rundown at the beginning of a television show.

“Last time on Tess Parker’s life, we saw Tess fighting with the boy of her dreams,” the announcer in my brain said, as I shampooed my hair. “Despondent, she went to her best friend’s party and met a famous handsome author and a filthy rich French couple, who gave her an apartment in Paris for an entire year. Even though she refused to pee on her friend’s desk, she was looking forward to dessert and using her friend’s thick towels to dry off. But questions remain: Would Tess make up with Cruz? Would she survive in her house without money for the next six months? Would she be able to buy a ticket to Paris and get into the Sorbonne? And what were the pills that her friend’s father gave her? Stay tuned for another episode of Tess Parker’s Life.”