Die for Me
Page 19
“Well then, why did he attack me like that?” I was still motionless with shock.
“Hey, do you want to walk down to the river?” she asked, ignoring my question. “I was kind of hoping I’d run across you at some point, seeing we’re neighbors and all. Not that I haven’t seen you around, of course. I just didn’t feel like it was appropriate to run down the street after you.”
“Don’t tell me you were following me,” I said, half joking.
Charlotte didn’t answer, but grinned at me like a cat.
“What? Have you been following me?”
“Don’t worry, Vincent didn’t ask me to. It’s just that following people is what we do, and when we’re doing it nonstop, it’s hard not to follow people who interest us.”
“I interest you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Let’s see. Well, you’re the first girl Vincent has fallen for since becoming a revenant. Which already qualifies you as fascinating to the rest of us.”
“I can’t talk about . . . him,” I began to protest.
“Okay. We will avoid the topic of Vincent completely. Promise.”
“Thanks.”
“You also interest me because . . .” For once she looked much younger than her fifteen-year-old body. “I had kind of been hoping you would be a friend. Before you left, that is. It’s a bit lonely hanging out with guys all the time. Thankfully Jeanne is there, or I’d probably have already lost it.”
My expression must have been quizzical, because she hurriedly went on to explain. “It’s not like I can go out and make friends with just any human. They wouldn’t understand. But since you already know what we are . . .”
I gently cut her off. “Charlotte, I am incredibly flattered that you want to be friends with me. I really like you, too. But I’m still so upset about Vincent that if I hung out with you and we ran into him, it would be too hard on me.”
She looked away and nodded her head nonchalantly, as if already distancing herself from me.
“I thought you hung out with Charles most of the time,” I said.
“Oh, he’s off on his own a lot lately,” she said, trying to sound flippant but not managing very well. Her voice trembled as she continued, “So recently I’ve found myself a bit more on my own than I’m used to.” Her attempt to look brave was ruined by the tear I noticed coursing down her cheek as she turned away.
“Wait!” I said, grabbing her hand, and pulled her back to face me.
Staring at the ground, she brushed away another tear. “I’m sorry. Things have just been kind of . . . hard lately.”
I guess I’m not the only one with problems, I told myself, my resolve crumbling as I saw the sadness on her face. “Okay, yeah. Let’s walk to the river.” Her empty eyes met my own, and she managed a glimmer of a smile as she took my arm and we walked down the street together.
As we neared the water, I pointed out an antique taxidermy shop. “My mom and I used to always go in there,” I said. “It’s like a zoo, except all the animals are dead. Now I can’t even pass by without thinking about Mom. I haven’t dared go in, in case I had a meltdown right there in the middle of all the stuffed squirrels.”
Charlotte laughed—the response I had been hoping for. “That’s how I felt too after my parents died. Everything reminded me of them. Paris felt like a ghost town to me for years after,” she said as we walked down the steps to the quay.
“Your parents died? I mean, before you did?” I asked, the hole in my heart beginning to ache again. We began strolling past a long line of houseboats that were moored to the riverbank.
Charlotte nodded. “It was World War Two. During the Occupation. My parents ran a clandestine press out of our apartment near the Sorbonne, where my father taught. The Germans found it and shot them. Charles and I were at my aunt’s house that night, or they probably would have killed us, too.
“We were proud of our parents and wanted to continue in their footsteps. So when we began hearing about the roundups . . .” She paused, then explained, “When the police rounded the Jews up to send them to the concentration camps.” I nodded to show her I understood, and she continued, “We hid some friends from school and their parents in our apartment, in a room with a false wall, where the printing press had been concealed. We secured enough ration cards to feed and clothe the six of us for over a year before a neighbor caught on and reported us.”
I stopped in place. “Who would ever do such a thing?” I said, aghast.
She shrugged and continued, taking my arm and forcing me to move again. “We were able to get the family safely to another hiding place, but Charles and I were caught the next day and shot.”
“I can barely believe that was happening right here in Paris.”
Charlotte nodded. “They say that thirty thousand of us ‘resisters’ were shot during the course of the Occupation. At least, that’s the official number. Some were actually lawbreakers. But others were innocent bystanders who were taken hostage and killed to revenge their countrymen’s acts of resistance.”
“That was so brave of you and Charles to help that family.”
“Well, wouldn’t you have done the same? How could we have acted differently?”
We neared a stone bench and sat down.
“I don’t know,” I responded finally. “I would hope I would have acted like you did. But there must be very few people who are actually that brave. Maybe that’s why you became one of them. I mean, a revenant,” I said.
“That’s what Jean-Baptiste thinks. That saving lives was preprogrammed into us. That it came naturally. Who knows?” She paused thoughtfully. “What I do know is, now that I can spare others the pain I went through when my parents were killed—by saving lives—it makes the continual trauma of our existence easier to bear.”
I nodded, and watched as she pensively picked at her fingernails. “So what’s up with Charles?” I asked finally.
“It’s all part of the same story,” she said. “He’s had a hard time dealing with his failure to save that little girl’s life in the boat accident. For the last couple of weeks he’s been . . .” She looked like she was weighing how much to tell me and settled for, “. . . obsessing about it.”
“Will he get over it with time?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I finally told Jean-Baptiste about it this morning. He’s going to have a talk with Charles.”
“Maybe that will help,” I offered.
She shook her head, as if unconvinced. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Okay,” I said, grasping for a new topic of conversation. “So what’s so bad about living with a houseful of hot men? Excluding Gaspard and Jean-Baptiste, that is, who I guess could be called ‘hot’ in their own way . . . ,” I trailed off.
She burst out laughing. “Definitely not hot,” she agreed. “There’s so much testosterone packed into that air, I’m surprised I haven’t grown a mustache just from breathing it!”
Now it was my turn to laugh. It felt foreign to me, as if I were suddenly speaking Chinese. It didn’t feel natural, but it didn’t feel bad.
Charlotte shot me a wry grin, proud that she had cracked through my armor. “Honestly,” she conceded, “they’re all like family to me. We’ve lived together for decades.
“The revenants out in the countryside have to constantly relocate so that the locals don’t recognize them once they’ve died saving someone. They’re always on the move from one of Jean-Baptiste’s country homes to another. It suits most of them just fine, but I couldn’t do it. These men are all the family I’ve got, and I could never leave them.”
“Have you ever . . .” I paused, unsure of how probing my questions could be.
“What?” Charlotte asked, intrigued.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Charlotte sighed. “It would be just as hard for me to have a boyfriend as it is to have girl friends. I guess that in the beginning I could make excuses for vanishing three days every month, but that wouldn’t work for long. And then disappearing for a few days every time I died. No, it just couldn’t work. And I can’t do the casual relationships like Jules and Ambrose do. When I fall in love, it sticks.”
“So you’ve been in love before?”
She blushed and looked down at her hands. “Yes. But he doesn’t . . . he didn’t feel the same way.” Her words were almost inaudible.
“Then why not date a revenant?”
She leaned forward, a sad smile forming on her lips as she wrapped her arms around herself and looked out over the water. “There aren’t many of us around, so the choices are rather slim.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I took her hand in mine and gave it an encouraging squeeze. She smiled, and then said, “I better be getting back home. For Charles. Thanks for the chat. I can’t even tell you how nice it is to hang out with a girl.”
I felt the same way. I hadn’t made any friends here in Paris. And even though it meant spending time with someone who was practically a member of Vincent’s family, I had to admit I really enjoyed being with Charlotte. “We’ll do it again,” I promised.
If you are friends with Charlotte, you’re bound to run into Vincent at one point or another, a little voice in my mind nudged me. Oh, shut up, I told it, wondering if the pain in my heart would ever subside. It had to, I decided. The longer I spent away from Vincent, the better I would feel. I was sure of it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
INSTEAD OF IMPROVING, THE NEXT WEEK I FELT worse, and by Friday a creeping despair began to engulf me as I realized the entire weekend stretched ahead with not a single activity planned as a distraction.
At lunch, I turned my phone on to see my daily texts from Georgia:
Have you seen you-know-who’s ho outfit?
Calculus sucks.
Going out tonight, wanna come?
I hesitated, and then forced myself to respond to the last text: Where?
She wrote me back immediately:
Meet you after school.
At four o’clock, Georgia was waiting for me at the gate wearing an expression of sheer amazement. “No way, Katie-Bean . . . you’re really coming out with me tonight?”
“Depends,” I said blithely, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Where are you going?”
“There’s a dance party at this underground club. The owner’s a very good friend of mine.” She flashed me a sly smile. My sister, the incorrigible flirt. “Seriously, it’s a really cool place, in this labyrinth of old wine cellars that runs under a couple of buildings near Oberkampf. It’s always packed with musicians and artists; you’ll love it.”
Although my heart wasn’t into clubbing, this was my only offer for the weekend. Actually, for the month, if I was being realistic. “I’m in,” I said. “What time are you going?”
“Around nine.”
We took the bus into town, and then changed to the Métro. Once on our street I told Georgia, “I don’t feel like going home yet. I think I’ll wander. Don’t leave without me.”
“I’ll pick your outfit,” she said, smiling, and headed up our street. I turned in the other direction and made my way past the busy boulevard Saint-Germain to drift through the small winding streets crisscrossing the area next to the river.
On a busy corner stood a café with a large terrace where my grandmother took me as a child for the delicious tarte tatin, a baked apple tart served upside down with a caramelized glaze. The café was called La Palette, as in an artist’s palette, its name dating back to when it was a hangout for local painters and sculptors. It was too far from home to have chosen as my local café, but totally worth the occasional visit.
A frigid wind gusted through the streets, and the normally teeming terrace was almost deserted. I pushed my way through the front door into the warm, delicious-smelling café. A waiter caught my eye and gestured toward an empty table tucked into an almost hidden niche behind the front door. Perfect. Anonymity was exactly what I wanted today.
I sat down, stowed my book bag under the table, and began to check out the café’s clientele as I waited for the waiter to return. A group of students rowdily chatting in one corner. Several tables of businesspeople with drinks set atop their documents. A striking-looking woman in her late twenties sitting by herself.
I focused on the last of these. Thick blond, almost white, hair flowed down her shoulders, and her high cheekbones and light blue eyes made her look vaguely Scandinavian.
A man with his back to me approached her from the café’s bar. He sat down in front of her, picked up the coffee cup sitting across from hers, and drained the dregs with one quick motion. Then he reached across to hold her hand, which was lying delicately on the tabletop.
He said something to her, and her gaze dropped from him to the table. I saw a tear run down her lovely cheek, and the man’s hand rose automatically to brush it away. He smoothed a loose lock of her platinum hair back behind her ear in a motion that I recognized.
And with a sudden realization, my heart stopped. As an icy chill overtook me, I grabbed for my bag and knocked the glass salt shaker to the floor, where it shattered loudly. The woman’s eyes flew to me as she said something to her companion.
He turned in my direction, and then froze with a look of devastation marring his handsome face. My instincts had not been wrong. It was Vincent.
“Hey, do you want to walk down to the river?” she asked, ignoring my question. “I was kind of hoping I’d run across you at some point, seeing we’re neighbors and all. Not that I haven’t seen you around, of course. I just didn’t feel like it was appropriate to run down the street after you.”
“Don’t tell me you were following me,” I said, half joking.
Charlotte didn’t answer, but grinned at me like a cat.
“What? Have you been following me?”
“Don’t worry, Vincent didn’t ask me to. It’s just that following people is what we do, and when we’re doing it nonstop, it’s hard not to follow people who interest us.”
“I interest you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Let’s see. Well, you’re the first girl Vincent has fallen for since becoming a revenant. Which already qualifies you as fascinating to the rest of us.”
“I can’t talk about . . . him,” I began to protest.
“Okay. We will avoid the topic of Vincent completely. Promise.”
“Thanks.”
“You also interest me because . . .” For once she looked much younger than her fifteen-year-old body. “I had kind of been hoping you would be a friend. Before you left, that is. It’s a bit lonely hanging out with guys all the time. Thankfully Jeanne is there, or I’d probably have already lost it.”
My expression must have been quizzical, because she hurriedly went on to explain. “It’s not like I can go out and make friends with just any human. They wouldn’t understand. But since you already know what we are . . .”
I gently cut her off. “Charlotte, I am incredibly flattered that you want to be friends with me. I really like you, too. But I’m still so upset about Vincent that if I hung out with you and we ran into him, it would be too hard on me.”
She looked away and nodded her head nonchalantly, as if already distancing herself from me.
“I thought you hung out with Charles most of the time,” I said.
“Oh, he’s off on his own a lot lately,” she said, trying to sound flippant but not managing very well. Her voice trembled as she continued, “So recently I’ve found myself a bit more on my own than I’m used to.” Her attempt to look brave was ruined by the tear I noticed coursing down her cheek as she turned away.
“Wait!” I said, grabbing her hand, and pulled her back to face me.
Staring at the ground, she brushed away another tear. “I’m sorry. Things have just been kind of . . . hard lately.”
I guess I’m not the only one with problems, I told myself, my resolve crumbling as I saw the sadness on her face. “Okay, yeah. Let’s walk to the river.” Her empty eyes met my own, and she managed a glimmer of a smile as she took my arm and we walked down the street together.
As we neared the water, I pointed out an antique taxidermy shop. “My mom and I used to always go in there,” I said. “It’s like a zoo, except all the animals are dead. Now I can’t even pass by without thinking about Mom. I haven’t dared go in, in case I had a meltdown right there in the middle of all the stuffed squirrels.”
Charlotte laughed—the response I had been hoping for. “That’s how I felt too after my parents died. Everything reminded me of them. Paris felt like a ghost town to me for years after,” she said as we walked down the steps to the quay.
“Your parents died? I mean, before you did?” I asked, the hole in my heart beginning to ache again. We began strolling past a long line of houseboats that were moored to the riverbank.
Charlotte nodded. “It was World War Two. During the Occupation. My parents ran a clandestine press out of our apartment near the Sorbonne, where my father taught. The Germans found it and shot them. Charles and I were at my aunt’s house that night, or they probably would have killed us, too.
“We were proud of our parents and wanted to continue in their footsteps. So when we began hearing about the roundups . . .” She paused, then explained, “When the police rounded the Jews up to send them to the concentration camps.” I nodded to show her I understood, and she continued, “We hid some friends from school and their parents in our apartment, in a room with a false wall, where the printing press had been concealed. We secured enough ration cards to feed and clothe the six of us for over a year before a neighbor caught on and reported us.”
I stopped in place. “Who would ever do such a thing?” I said, aghast.
She shrugged and continued, taking my arm and forcing me to move again. “We were able to get the family safely to another hiding place, but Charles and I were caught the next day and shot.”
“I can barely believe that was happening right here in Paris.”
Charlotte nodded. “They say that thirty thousand of us ‘resisters’ were shot during the course of the Occupation. At least, that’s the official number. Some were actually lawbreakers. But others were innocent bystanders who were taken hostage and killed to revenge their countrymen’s acts of resistance.”
“That was so brave of you and Charles to help that family.”
“Well, wouldn’t you have done the same? How could we have acted differently?”
We neared a stone bench and sat down.
“I don’t know,” I responded finally. “I would hope I would have acted like you did. But there must be very few people who are actually that brave. Maybe that’s why you became one of them. I mean, a revenant,” I said.
“That’s what Jean-Baptiste thinks. That saving lives was preprogrammed into us. That it came naturally. Who knows?” She paused thoughtfully. “What I do know is, now that I can spare others the pain I went through when my parents were killed—by saving lives—it makes the continual trauma of our existence easier to bear.”
I nodded, and watched as she pensively picked at her fingernails. “So what’s up with Charles?” I asked finally.
“It’s all part of the same story,” she said. “He’s had a hard time dealing with his failure to save that little girl’s life in the boat accident. For the last couple of weeks he’s been . . .” She looked like she was weighing how much to tell me and settled for, “. . . obsessing about it.”
“Will he get over it with time?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I finally told Jean-Baptiste about it this morning. He’s going to have a talk with Charles.”
“Maybe that will help,” I offered.
She shook her head, as if unconvinced. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Okay,” I said, grasping for a new topic of conversation. “So what’s so bad about living with a houseful of hot men? Excluding Gaspard and Jean-Baptiste, that is, who I guess could be called ‘hot’ in their own way . . . ,” I trailed off.
She burst out laughing. “Definitely not hot,” she agreed. “There’s so much testosterone packed into that air, I’m surprised I haven’t grown a mustache just from breathing it!”
Now it was my turn to laugh. It felt foreign to me, as if I were suddenly speaking Chinese. It didn’t feel natural, but it didn’t feel bad.
Charlotte shot me a wry grin, proud that she had cracked through my armor. “Honestly,” she conceded, “they’re all like family to me. We’ve lived together for decades.
“The revenants out in the countryside have to constantly relocate so that the locals don’t recognize them once they’ve died saving someone. They’re always on the move from one of Jean-Baptiste’s country homes to another. It suits most of them just fine, but I couldn’t do it. These men are all the family I’ve got, and I could never leave them.”
“Have you ever . . .” I paused, unsure of how probing my questions could be.
“What?” Charlotte asked, intrigued.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Charlotte sighed. “It would be just as hard for me to have a boyfriend as it is to have girl friends. I guess that in the beginning I could make excuses for vanishing three days every month, but that wouldn’t work for long. And then disappearing for a few days every time I died. No, it just couldn’t work. And I can’t do the casual relationships like Jules and Ambrose do. When I fall in love, it sticks.”
“So you’ve been in love before?”
She blushed and looked down at her hands. “Yes. But he doesn’t . . . he didn’t feel the same way.” Her words were almost inaudible.
“Then why not date a revenant?”
She leaned forward, a sad smile forming on her lips as she wrapped her arms around herself and looked out over the water. “There aren’t many of us around, so the choices are rather slim.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I took her hand in mine and gave it an encouraging squeeze. She smiled, and then said, “I better be getting back home. For Charles. Thanks for the chat. I can’t even tell you how nice it is to hang out with a girl.”
I felt the same way. I hadn’t made any friends here in Paris. And even though it meant spending time with someone who was practically a member of Vincent’s family, I had to admit I really enjoyed being with Charlotte. “We’ll do it again,” I promised.
If you are friends with Charlotte, you’re bound to run into Vincent at one point or another, a little voice in my mind nudged me. Oh, shut up, I told it, wondering if the pain in my heart would ever subside. It had to, I decided. The longer I spent away from Vincent, the better I would feel. I was sure of it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
INSTEAD OF IMPROVING, THE NEXT WEEK I FELT worse, and by Friday a creeping despair began to engulf me as I realized the entire weekend stretched ahead with not a single activity planned as a distraction.
At lunch, I turned my phone on to see my daily texts from Georgia:
Have you seen you-know-who’s ho outfit?
Calculus sucks.
Going out tonight, wanna come?
I hesitated, and then forced myself to respond to the last text: Where?
She wrote me back immediately:
Meet you after school.
At four o’clock, Georgia was waiting for me at the gate wearing an expression of sheer amazement. “No way, Katie-Bean . . . you’re really coming out with me tonight?”
“Depends,” I said blithely, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Where are you going?”
“There’s a dance party at this underground club. The owner’s a very good friend of mine.” She flashed me a sly smile. My sister, the incorrigible flirt. “Seriously, it’s a really cool place, in this labyrinth of old wine cellars that runs under a couple of buildings near Oberkampf. It’s always packed with musicians and artists; you’ll love it.”
Although my heart wasn’t into clubbing, this was my only offer for the weekend. Actually, for the month, if I was being realistic. “I’m in,” I said. “What time are you going?”
“Around nine.”
We took the bus into town, and then changed to the Métro. Once on our street I told Georgia, “I don’t feel like going home yet. I think I’ll wander. Don’t leave without me.”
“I’ll pick your outfit,” she said, smiling, and headed up our street. I turned in the other direction and made my way past the busy boulevard Saint-Germain to drift through the small winding streets crisscrossing the area next to the river.
On a busy corner stood a café with a large terrace where my grandmother took me as a child for the delicious tarte tatin, a baked apple tart served upside down with a caramelized glaze. The café was called La Palette, as in an artist’s palette, its name dating back to when it was a hangout for local painters and sculptors. It was too far from home to have chosen as my local café, but totally worth the occasional visit.
A frigid wind gusted through the streets, and the normally teeming terrace was almost deserted. I pushed my way through the front door into the warm, delicious-smelling café. A waiter caught my eye and gestured toward an empty table tucked into an almost hidden niche behind the front door. Perfect. Anonymity was exactly what I wanted today.
I sat down, stowed my book bag under the table, and began to check out the café’s clientele as I waited for the waiter to return. A group of students rowdily chatting in one corner. Several tables of businesspeople with drinks set atop their documents. A striking-looking woman in her late twenties sitting by herself.
I focused on the last of these. Thick blond, almost white, hair flowed down her shoulders, and her high cheekbones and light blue eyes made her look vaguely Scandinavian.
A man with his back to me approached her from the café’s bar. He sat down in front of her, picked up the coffee cup sitting across from hers, and drained the dregs with one quick motion. Then he reached across to hold her hand, which was lying delicately on the tabletop.
He said something to her, and her gaze dropped from him to the table. I saw a tear run down her lovely cheek, and the man’s hand rose automatically to brush it away. He smoothed a loose lock of her platinum hair back behind her ear in a motion that I recognized.
And with a sudden realization, my heart stopped. As an icy chill overtook me, I grabbed for my bag and knocked the glass salt shaker to the floor, where it shattered loudly. The woman’s eyes flew to me as she said something to her companion.
He turned in my direction, and then froze with a look of devastation marring his handsome face. My instincts had not been wrong. It was Vincent.
