American Queen

I am sorry for your parents.

It was all I could think of, all I could hear, and when Grandpa Leo tucked me into bed later that night, I burst into tears.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” he asked, thick eyebrows drawn together in concern.

I knew enough to know he wouldn’t believe me when I told him that Merlin was an enchanter, maybe a bad one, or that he could somehow sense my parents’ deaths before they happened. I knew enough to lie and say simply, “I miss Mommy and Daddy.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Grandpa Leo said. “We’ll call them right now, okay?”

He pulled out his phone and dialed, and within a few seconds, I heard Mommy’s light voice and Daddy’s deep one coming through the speaker. They were in Bucharest, getting ready to board a train bound for Warsaw, and they were happy and safe and full of promises for when they returned home. For a short while, I believed them. I believed that they would come back. That there’d be more long forest hikes with my father, more tai chi in the evenings with my mother, more nights when I fell asleep to the sound of them reading poetry to each other with logs crackling in the fireplace nearby. That the warm sunshine and tree-green days of my childhood still stretched out before me, safe in the cozy nest of books and nature that my parents had built.

But that night as I tried to fall asleep, Merlin’s words crept back into my mind along with the fear.

I am sorry about your parents.

I barely slept that night, jolting awake at every honk and siren on the Manhattan streets below Grandpa’s penthouse, shivering at every creak of the wind-buffeted windows. Dreams threaded my sleep, dreams of tree-covered mountains in a place I’d never seen, broad-shouldered men crawling through mud and dead pine needles, my parents dancing in the living room after they thought I was asleep. A train steaming across a bridge, and the bridge collapsing.

My parents danced, the wind blew through the trees, men crawled through mud. The train plunged to the valley floor.

Dance, trees, mud, death.

Over and over again.

Dance, trees, mud, death.

And when I sat up in the weak sunlight of morning to see my grandfather standing in the doorway, his eyes blank with shock and horror, his phone dangling from his hand, I already knew what he was there to tell me.

Like King Hezekiah, I turned my face to the wall and prayed.

I prayed for God to kill me too.

2

Eleven Years Ago

God, as he often does, chose not to answer my prayer. Or at the very least, chose not to answer yes.

Instead, my life went on.

My mother’s parents were aging and frail, and while I had an aunt and uncle in Boston, they already had a daughter my age and they made it quite clear that they weren’t willing to take on another child.

But it hardly mattered. From the moment Grandpa Leo got the phone call, from the very second the reality settled over us, it was never in question that I would live with him. He was only in his fifties, healthy and energetic, with plenty of room in his house for another person. He was a busy man, busy with The Party and his thriving green energy empire, but Grandpa Leo was never the kind of man to say no to anything other than sleep. He moved my things into his penthouse, enrolled me in a small but academically rigorous private school in the Upper West Side, and folded me into his life as best a widowed grandfather could.

I remember crying before and after the funeral, but not during. I remember hiding inside myself at the new school, so different from the airy Montessori classroom back in Oregon. I remember Grandpa Leo buying me stacks of books to cheer me up, and I remember reading late into the night. I remember missing my parents so much it felt like someone had scooped something vital out of my chest with a giant spoon. I remember hearing Merlin’s words about my parents.

Merlin’s prophecy.

If he’d been right about their deaths, was he also right about the other things? He’d told me to keep my kisses to myself—was it a warning I had to follow?

I was certain it was. I was certain now that Merlin could see the future, that he could predict doom, and in my grief and terror, I promised myself at seven years old that, no matter what, I would never kiss a man or woman so long as I lived.

Never, ever, ever.

When I was fourteen, Grandpa Leo asked me whether I’d like to continue going to school in Manhattan or if I’d like to enroll in a boarding school overseas. My cousin Abilene was being sent there in the hopes that she would settle down and focus on her schoolwork, and Grandpa thought I might like to go as well. I was already an excellent student—there were no worries there—but I think Grandpa worried that I was too isolated living alone with him, only going to environmental fundraisers and party events, spending my evenings immersed in gossip and speculation about politicians and businessmen, and spending my weekends as Grandpa’s secret weapon, observing and reporting back to him.

“You’re young,” he said, sitting at the dinner table as he handed me the booklet for the school. The pictures seemed almost calculated to lure me into saying yes—thick fog, old wooden doors, gold and green English summers. “You should see the world. Be around other young people. Get into a little bit of trouble.”

Then he laughed. “Or at the very least, keep your cousin out of trouble.”

And that was how Abilene and I ended up at the Cadbury Academy for Girls the autumn of my fourteenth year.

Cadbury was an impressive place, a large and sprawling complex of stone and stained glass, with towers and multiple libraries and an honest-to-God Iron Age hill fort right in its backyard. I loved it immediately. Abilene loved only its proximity to the boys’ school a mile down the lane. Almost every night, she would crawl out of our ground-floor window and creep across the soft green lawn to the road. Almost every night, I would go with her, not because I wanted to see the boys, but because I felt protective of her. Protective of her safety, of her future at Cadbury, of her reputation.