Chapter 7 Collecting Myself
Collecting Myself
ELLA
It’s as though my mother is running one of those mouse colony experiments.
She furloughed me for a season and gave me everything I thought I wanted—abundant, nutritious food, modern heating and cooling, all the high-speed internet a girl could ask for, and vast oceans of time. As a result, I’m about to go out of my ever-loving mind.
In the week after the STEM event, I amuse myself by firing off anonymous chirps criticizing the government. I lead virtual campaigns to capture a castle, a relic, a crown... I may be having an existential crisis, but my SquadRun numbers have never been better.
Each day is as smooth as a dish of Pankedruss, until one evening my doorbell sounds. “Dragon, you’re in charge,” I blurt, tossing down the gaming controller. I race to the door rather than buzzing my guest in.
“Clara,” I say, pulling her across the threshold and through to my office with a galloping dance. A person. An actual, flesh-and-blood person.
My little sister’s hair is silky smooth and smells of peaches. She perches on the edge of my gaming chair wearing stilettos and a cocktail dress, looking me up and down, and I can see her swallowing her words. “How much do you love being off the clock?”
I sniff, wadding up an empty Spicy Ostepops package and pushing it deep into the waste bin. The air smells as stale as a sealed crypt after a plague burial. “Living my best life.”
She glances at the monitors, seeing a SquadRun campaign and several ReadHe threads. “Marc nudged me to check in on you. Are you plotting the revolution?”
I perk up. “Where did you see Marc?”
“He came to one of the Ragnar Prize lectures last night.”
He could have texted. We used to text everyday.
I tell myself that I’m off that drug, but my biofeedback loop must be broken, because when I scratch the surface of my thoughts, Marc turns up every time—deep in the soil, impossible to sift out.
There are so few topics I can think of without thinking of him.
With desperate energy, I twist my hair up to fasten it with a claw clip. “I could use some fashion advice, if you have a sec.” I drag her chair around to face the computer screens properly. “Alix and Tom are throwing a party and I have to find a costume.”
“Pull up ThumTac,” she commands.
“There’s no reason to stick with humanoids,” I say when the lifestyle site pops up. I navigate to a board dedicated to the cosplay of my favorite fandoms and tap on the picture of a calico cat in the shape of a bus.
“Um… That’s ambitious,” she says. “You do know that most of the girls will be in lace masks and skimpy outfits. It’s okay to just want to look hot.”
“This isn’t my first Viking raid,” I mutter.
“Okay, well, what do you want to achieve?” she continues. Such a princess thing to ask.
When the event is one of my royal engagements, the answer is easy. I want to defy my mother and move the dial on what constitutes acceptable behavior for a princess of Sondmark.
“I don’t want to steal the spotlight from Alix or anything, but a princess doesn’t get to dress like a cat bus everyday.” I sweep some crumbs off my desk and into the bin.
After the STEM engagement, Marc and I barely made the news. The caption of a single photo on page five read, “Old friends reunite to share science message”. Still, there was some fallout.
“Did you see that Mama is back to checking my wardrobe when I represent the Crown?” I ask, my tone level. “Maybe she won’t freak out when I’m at a private event.”
Clara touches my arm with the same sympathetic gesture we use when we are tasked with managing public grief. “We should do a movie night soon. I know I’ve been busy. We’re about to break ground at St. Leofdag’s for an interactive garden, I’m taking on new patronages, and then there’s—”
“Max,” I finish.
Her lips twist in silent apology.
“Don’t feel guilty for being happy,” I say, putting my hands on her cheeks and forcing her face to the screen. “I’m glad when any of us escapes the spreadsheets.”
Mama’s spreadsheets have been a sword hanging over my head since before I could toddle.
The story goes that because Mama found her match in a marriage carefully arranged by her parents, her children will benefit from her guidance to find theirs, thus avoiding a host of calamities that have befallen other royal houses in modern Europe.
(Here, Mama’s story digresses to go over specific examples of infidelity, treason, and best-selling tell-alls.) Her spreadsheets, they say, are filled with the names and net worth of the only people in Europe worth marrying, and they go on for pages.
Instead of selecting matches from this list, my sisters have chosen an officer, an immigrant, and the heir to a hostile kingdom. All the pressure of upholding tradition and supporting the Crown lands at my feet and Noah’s. I have to break free while it’s still possible.
Clara taps the cat bus again. “I’d very much like you to close your eyes and visualize trying to pee in this. Let’s veto all costumes in the form of a vehicle.”
“Bummer. My backup plan was going as a white box truck with dramatic brake failure. What about this one?” I point to a drama that features a girl wearing a massive red scarf that swallows half her head.
Clara looks heavenward. “I am begging you, with tears in my eyes, to choose something hot. You haven’t dated in so long. Please give me a crumb that says you want to.”
I catch my bottom lip between my teeth. Marc is everywhere and Clara is right. “There’s this drama about an ancient Seongan king and the mermaid who lives in his fish pond, but—”
“Mermaid? Perfect.”
Clara does not care to hear a comprehensive exposition of the characters and plot, instead navigating to a high-end shopping website. Eventually, she lands on a vintage Schiaparelli number on the back of a willowy model. If you squint, there’s something fishy about it.
Reason raps her knuckles on the desk. “I am too short and I have enjoyed too many laminated pastries to make that work. Can you imagine how many fashion historians would release unhinged video essays if I tried to squeeze into that? We’ve only got a week and I have to be realistic.”
“Realism is for people with a mortgage,” Clara counters. “I’m not going to entertain a negative attitude from the same girl who wanted to whip a whole cat bus together with a glue gun and piano wire.”
My eyes gleam. “When it falls apart on the dance floor, it’s going to be hilarious.”
She shakes her head and puts her finger under my nose. “No. No. We’re not going to play this game where you make yourself into a joke just to avoid people seeing there’s something you really want and can’t have.”
Her incisive appraisal lands like a stab in the back. “I don’t—” But I do, so I shut up.
“Caroline will source any fabric you need,” Clara continues.
“Caroline? You mean Vrouw Tiele?”
She nods. “We’ll do the mermaid.”
“I can’t be a mermaid,” I protest.
“Give me one good reason.”
I would pay serious money if she let this drop.
Going through puberty on a global stage teaches you to play the cards you’re dealt, and I’ve got a lot of amazing cards.
I’m cute. I’m playful. I’m clever and approachable.
But it has never occurred to anyone in our nation of 5.
8 million citizens to describe me as sexy.
“Here are two good reasons,” I say, waving my hand over my considerable cleavage. “Look at all this business. My clamshell bra is going to look like it was cultivated downstream from a nuclear power plant.”
Clara’s laugh comes through her nose. “Now you have to do it. Marc would die.”
There he is again. When other girls practiced writing Vrouw [frothy first name] [surname of Global Shipping Dynasty] in their composition notebooks, I was scratching out the Chinese characters of his Seongan name, Jun Hao—handsome, vast—and telling the other girls it meant ‘peach tree fate’ or ‘hot soup’.
“Marc?” I whisper.
“What Marc?” Clara echos, searching images of mermaid costumes.
“You Marc-ed first,” I say. “Why is he going to die?”
She makes a few keystrokes. “Oh. He really likes your…business.”
Time slows like a spaceship failing the jump into light speed. Wooooooom.
Be cool, Ella. Be very cool.
I remember the very minute I tipped from hero worship into love.
It was at Saba Hofstein’s sixteenth birthday party and Marc had come back from Stanford for Christmas.
He was networking with the grown-ups and wearing his hair long enough to tie into a loop.
I kept telling myself that it did not make him look like an ancient poet-warrior.
I told anyone who would listen that it looked dumb.
But by the end of the night, my cheeks were beet red and my gaze refused to lift above his chin stubble.
He tugged on my hair and asked how it was possible to develop a case of crippling shyness when I could parade myself in front of half the county during Queen’s Week without making it a big deal.
I dug my toe into the carpet said that I was still getting over the flu. I’ve been lying ever since.
The shock of finding out that Marc has ever looked at me with anything warmer than brotherly affection must show on my face, because Clara glances at me and her fingers slow to a crawl. “I know what I saw. He was checking you out.”
My mouth is dry. “When?”
Her brow furrows, “Last year? We were at Outingen Huis. You were wearing that striped swimsuit Mama got so mad about, and when you tossed your wrap,” the memory makes her giggle, “Marc looked like he’d been punched in the teeth.”
I fear my face is frozen in a critical error screen—blue and blank—because Clara bumps my arm. “It wasn’t weird. I’m sure he knows Noah really would punch him in the teeth if he made a pass. I just thought it was funny.”
She’s wrong, I think, shaking feeling into cold fingers. If Marc had ever given me the smallest sign that he was interested, wouldn’t I know?