“MY BIG SISTER’S NAME is Daisy Dawn Steward!” said Mia, and crumbs flew out of her mouth with every consonant. “Her hobby is Taylor Lautner, and she talked about him and nothing else all day.”
I could easily trump that. “My big sister is called Persephone Porter-Peregrin. And she didn’t talk to me at all after she’d dragged me off to the first classroom. But I guess that wasn’t so bad, because her hobby seems to be wrinkling up her nose.”
“Funny sort of names, like racehorses,” said Lottie. She didn’t say anything about having Taylor Lautner for a hobby—she’d hung up a poster of him herself the year before last. On the inside of her wardrobe. She said it was because wolves are so cute.
In spite of the tartan curtains with gold thread running through them, and the china ballerinas everywhere, it was quite comfortable in the kitchen of the strange apartment. Late summer rain was beating against the window, and the air was full of the comforting smell of vanilla and chocolate. Lottie had been baking our favorite cookies: vanilla crescents made to her grandmother’s recipe. Along with the vanilla crescents, we were drinking hot cocoa with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles on top. Lottie had also given us towels to rub our hair dry after the rain had drenched it. The full charge of loving care, butter, and sugar really did cheer us up for the time being. Lottie obviously felt sorrier for us than she liked to admit. Normally it was against her principles to bake Christmas cookies before December, and she was very strict about the traditional Christmas stuff. Too bad if anyone so much as hummed “Silent Night” in June. Lottie was having none of that. It brought bad luck, or so she said.
For some time we were happy enough filling our faces with cookies and doing a running commentary on imaginary horse races: “Persephone Porter-Peregrin instantly takes the lead on the inside. She’s won almost all the derbies here at Ascot this year. She leaves her rival Vanilla Crescent behind her right away.… But what’s this? Daisy Dawn, starting number five, comes up to the front—this is thrilling—on the straight she’s neck and neck with Persephone and—yes! You wouldn’t believe it! The outsider Daisy Dawn wins by a nose!”
“It’s not as if vanilla crescents were Christmas biscuits like gingerbread, strictly speaking,” Lottie was muttering in German, more to herself than us. Way back when she first came to us, Papa had insisted on a German au pair so that we’d learn to speak his mother tongue better. That was because when he spoke German to us himself, we were inclined to reply either not at all or in English (well, I was; at the time Mia couldn’t say anything except “dadadada”), and that was not his idea of a proper bilingual upbringing. As Lottie could speak hardly any English at all at that time, we always had to do our best to speak German to her, and Papa was delighted.
“So you can eat them all the year round.” Lottie was still rather afraid that Baby Jesus might bear her a grudge over those vanilla crescents. “But only in exceptional cases, of course.”
“We’re very, very exceptional cases,” Mia assured her. “Two kids in a one-parent family, no home and no hope, totally lost and strangers in this big city.”
I’m afraid she wasn’t exaggerating all that much. We’d found our way home only with the help of some friendly passersby and a nice bus driver. As we didn’t remember the number of the building where we were to live for the time being, and all the buildings around here looked the same, we’d probably still have been wandering around in the pouring rain, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, if Buttercup hadn’t been standing at the first-floor window barking like crazy. Now the clever dog was lying on the corner bench in the kitchen with her head on my lap, hoping that a vanilla crescent would find its way into her mouth by some miraculous means.
“It’s a fact—you two don’t have an easy time,” said Lottie, sighing deeply, and just for a moment I had a guilty conscience. To make Lottie feel better, we could have told her that it really hadn’t been too bad at school. Our first day at school in London had gone a lot better than, for instance, our first day in Berkeley, California, where a girl gang had threatened to force my head into the toilet. (It had only been threats on the first day; on the fifth day they actually did it. That was also the day when I signed up to learn kung fu.) Today’s first day hadn’t been at all like that or like various other memorable first days at assorted new schools. Apart from Persephone and Shaving Fun Ken, none of the Frognal Academy students had struck me as unpleasant, and even the teachers seemed to be okay. I didn’t have the feeling that I wouldn’t be able to keep up in any subject, the French teacher had praised my good accent, the classrooms were bright and pleasant, and even school lunch had been quite good. The girl who sat next to me in French had taken over from Persephone, entirely unasked, in showing me around, took me to the cafeteria at midday, and introduced me to her friends. I learned from them that the mushy peas were better avoided and that the Autumn Ball would be cool because after the stuffy, official part of it there was going to be a band playing that unfortunately I’d never heard of before. Anyway, as first days at a new school go, mine had been pretty good. Mia’s too.
So we really ought to have told Lottie all that, but it was nice to have her so sympathetic and concerned for us—especially as the day wasn’t over yet. The worst still lay ahead of us: dinner at Ernest’s place, when we were going to meet his son and daughter. They were seventeen-year-old twins, and if you believed what Ernest said about them, they were models of talent and virtue. I hated them already.
Lottie seemed to be thinking of this dinner date as well. “I’ve hung up your red velvet skirt and white shirt for this evening, Mia. And I ironed your mother’s blue tea dress for you, Liv.”
“Why not go the whole hog and make it the little black dress with fake gemstones all over it?” I said sarcastically.
“Yes, worn with kid gloves and all,” agreed Mia. “Oh, come on, this is only a stupid dinner. On a perfectly ordinary Monday. I’m wearing my jeans.”
“You’re doing no such thing,” said Lottie. “I want you two showing yourselves in your best light.”
“What, in Mom’s blue tea dress? What are you wearing, then, Lottie—your Sunday-best dirndl?” Mia and I giggled.
Lottie looked majestic. She wasn’t taking jokes about traditional dirndl skirts and dresses any more than she’d have us go against Christmas customs. “I would, because you can never go wrong in a dirndl. But I’m staying here with Buttercup.”
“What? You’re making us go on our own?” cried Mia.
Lottie didn’t say anything.
“Oh, I see—Mr. Spencer hasn’t invited you,” I concluded after working it out, and I suddenly had a sinking feeling inside me.
Mia widened her eyes indignantly. “That stupid, snobby…”
Lottie immediately began defending Ernest. “It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. After all, you don’t take the nanny to a … a family occasion like this.”
“But you’re part of our family!” Mia was crumbling up a vanilla crescent, and Buttercup hopefully raised her head. “Talk about arrogance!”
“No, that’s not it at all,” Lottie contradicted her. “Mr. Spencer’s behavior toward me is always perfectly correct. He’s very nice, a real gentleman, and I’m sure his feelings for your mother are genuine and honorable. He really did his best to find a solution when it turned out that the cottage wouldn’t do. We wouldn’t have found this apartment without his help, and you’d never have been accepted by the Frognal Academy—it’s said to have a waiting list miles long. So you’d better start liking him.” She looked sternly at us. “And you’ll dress properly this evening.”
The trouble was, Lottie couldn’t look stern any more sucessfully than Buttercup could look ferocious. They both had such cute brown eyes. I loved Lottie so much at that moment, I could have burst with it.
“Okay,” I said. “If you’ll lend me your dirndl.”
Mia had a fit of giggles. “Yes, you can never go wrong in Lottie’s dirndl.”
“I didn’t say you can’t go wrong in my dirndl, I said in a dirndl.” Lottie turned up her nose, threw back her brown curly hair (it looked just like Buttercup’s), and went on in her native German. “I don’t want to disillusion you, my loves, but you simply don’t have enough on your hips to look good in a dirndl, understand?”
I wanted to laugh, but somehow it just turned into a funny snort. “Oh, Lottie, I do love you!” I said, much more seriously than I meant to.