Footsteps tapped closer. I hid myself better when a small boy about six or seven years old with dark hair trimmed in a line above his eyebrows ran up to Patch’s side and flopped down on his lap.

  “I’m bored,” the boy said, his voice carrying to where I hid.

  Patch adjusted his book on top of the boy’s head but didn’t look away. “Five more minutes.”

  “You said we’d go to the park.”

  Patch smiled and put his elbows on the boy’s head. “Ten more minutes.”

  The boy shoved Patch’s arms off him and stood. “But there’s nothing to do.”

  “You have your car.” The boy stomped his foot, and Patch sighed and looked at him. “Fine. Fifteen more minutes, and I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  The boy grabbed Patch’s leg and yanked his ankles down from the window casing. “No, Patch. I’m dying. We’ve been here forever.”

  Patch chuckled, a gentle sound that drew me forward. “Just a few more minutes, bud. She’ll be here.”

  The boy laid his head on Patch’s shoulder, and Patch ran his fingers through his hair. Another book lay spine out from me, partially covering a drawing. A drawing of my face.

  He was waiting for me. But how on earth did he know I’d come here? That I’d be here today?

  My chest tightened. I’ve studied the stars and the planets, I’ve read about tides and undercurrents. I know about forces drawing objects together, but I was not prepared for the way I longed to jump into that boy’s arms.

  I clenched my fists so hard my nails left crescent moons in my palms. I took two steps back. My romantic heart was composing poetry about the softness of his lips, and the quiet secret moments when he must have taken pencil to paper and drawn my likeness with lines so faint they felt like fingers tracing the curve of my cheek, the line of my nose.

  But my brain knew there was only one piece of art that mattered, and it was painted by an eleven-year-old girl.

  Someone must have told him where I’d be. I ducked away on quiet feet. Unseen and unspotted, I slipped down those stairs as silently as I could. Greta waited on the landing in old-age makeup, with gray powder in her hair. Her expression slid into a satisfied smile as she folded her arms across her chest.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Whatever do you mean?” She shrugged, but I wouldn’t let her lie. She was too eager to put me back in my place anyhow. “All I did was tell a mutual friend where you’d be.”

  I grit my teeth. “He’s not your friend.”

  “Oh, are you jealous that I talked to him? Don’t worry; I’d never stoop so below my station. He’s perfect for you, though.”

  “Is this because I saw you at a weak point? Now you need to see me broken as well?”

  She flinched. “After what you did to Bea, your own friend, this can hardly be worse. After all, I don’t even like you.”

  That was so rude. Everyone liked me. I needed them to like me; isn’t that why the society chose me? I lowered my shoulders and said the ugliest thing I could back. “The feeling’s mutual.”

  “Elsie?” Bea climbed up the empty staircase below us. My knees felt weak, and I had to look away. She cleared her throat. “Andrew is downstairs. Near the cookbooks.”

  Her eyes seemed glazed and distant.

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and couldn’t meet Bea’s gaze.

  Greta was right about what I’d done to Bea. Greta’s betrayal hurt, and I didn’t trust her or even like her. I probably should have expected it.

  But smiling at Andrew during Bea’s date was so much worse.

  “Of course Andrew’s by the cookbooks,” I said with a flush of guilt. “He’s perfect for you Bea, I—”

  “—Don’t apologize.”

  “I’m so sorry. I mean it.”

  She gave a little shrug. “Don’t worry about it. Why would Andrew choose me when he could choose one of you?”

  Her eyes were clear. No tears or emotion clogged her vision. She said it like it was a simple truth, like the color of the sky, or the answer to a math problem.

  But she was wrong. She was immensely lovable. Beautiful and kind and brilliant, and I’d made her feel like she was nothing.

  “He’d choose you because you are wonderful,” I said. “You are so worthy of love.”

  She winced a little and glanced down, as though my words had hit their mark.

  I should have raced to find Andrew. I was already so far behind, and this was my chance. But Bea was everything to me. She had to know that.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not.”

  I pulled her in tight. “Oh, Bea,” I said. “If only you knew how easy you are to love.” My heart hurt for her.

  Mira stepped up the landing of the stairs and stopped as she saw us hugging.

  Bea breathed thickly, and her voice turned small. “But men see me as a friend, not as a woman. I hate it so much.”

  I pulled back and looked her right in the eye. “But your husband will love it.” She let out a laugh that might have covered for a cry. I kept going. “I can’t think of a marriage better than a partnership of best friends who like to kiss each other. If it’s not Andrew, and I believe it absolutely could be, then it will be someone better.”

  “Than a priority one?” Greta said behind us.

  I turned my head. “There are many lives better than being a footnote in someone else’s history.”

  “Elsie.” Now it was Bea’s turn to look at me in concern.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Those were thoughts I saved for my storm. I would never have let them out if seeing Patch hadn’t rattled all my thoughts. I knew what my life was going to look like.

  If I could only earn it. “I need to go,” I said as I pulled away. Mira met my eye and gave a nod. I knew she’d take over for me and help Bea.

  I turned and took the stairs quickly, not knowing how to talk to my friends, or how to explain the storming thoughts inside my head. All my researching and preparations flitted in and out of my thoughts like birds picking at seeds. Greta knew exactly which button to push to mess me up.

  I knew why she did it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t still work.

  But I couldn’t think about Patch. I couldn’t be distracted from my mission.

  Damn Greta to bad hair and bad teeth. And wrinkles. And a stomach that grumbled every time she saw a boy she liked. If I were a witch I would curse her with dog’s breath and empty pockets. I passed rows and rows of books that I’d always pictured myself as the heroines of, but now my brain lived in a house with chicken feet.

  Iris and Mira both looked at me quizzically as I crossed shelf after shelf until I saw Andrew.

  My spell of anger broke. He wore tan slacks and a wool vest, his glasses perched low on his nose as he studied a dessert cookbook.

  He was handsome. He was. He was kind and good and safe. This was my mission. He was the one I’d chosen. I could be the damsel for him, I knew it.

  But was love all that we were made for?

  How much of our training was to train us to keep quiet? To keep small?

  Sometimes it felt like we were on an assembly line moving toward a future that was designed to be invisible. We could have power and influence, but then we’d have to keep it secret. Perhaps that was why I loved researching so much; I needed to remember the names of those women.

  Because it was so easy to be forgotten.

  That was the fear that kept me up at night. I tried really hard to do everything right, but still, the closer I’d get to becoming perfect, the more invisible I became. And I worried that my name wouldn’t ever mean anything, that I’ll be just one more person, one more girl left behind in history.

  Would anyone remember me? I passed Andrew and then slipped into the aisle behind his.

  I didn’t know how to proceed here. In all my stories, the heroine didn’t hunt for marriage, didn’t care about her own love story or future until the hero proved themself worthy enough that the reader permitted it. I would dislike a character who chased after love, or who connived and scammed and tricked a man to be hers. Was that because we were taught that to want love was a weakness?

  Or because we were taught that men are smarter and therefore impossible to trick? That love was something we had to earn but couldn’t pursue. A fictional girl like Becky Sharp, who fought for love, was a scheming harlot, because ambition wasn’t for us.

  But why? My heartbeat had begun to race, and there wasn’t any threat or problem to cause it, just me and my thoughts storming inside my own head.

  Maybe it was because most of the fairy tales I’d read were written by men.

  I adjusted my hair clips, sure at this moment that Andrew could hear me. I sat down on the hard wood floors and put both my hands over my face, let my bare shoulders shake as I made soft crying sounds.

  My tears weren’t hard to fake. My heart was still racing, my thoughts still swirling. Andrew turned and peeked through the open shelves. I met his eye and thought the words Help me as loudly as I could.

  Andrew left his table and offered me his handkerchief. “Are you all right?”

  I took the cotton square daintily and dabbed my eyes. “Tell me not all men are like him,” I said with a voice so soft he had to lean closer to hear it.

  Andrew sat next to me as I pressed my face into his handkerchief and pretended to cry. The heat of him warmed my side. While it was a tactic I’d used before, it was not the triumphant first impression I’d imagined giving. Why did I have to be weak in order to draw his interest?

  “Is there anything I can do, miss?” he said, as if he were so much older than I was. Five months and seven days. Yet I was the miss and he was the hero.

  I lowered the handkerchief and studied his face.

  He pushed up his glasses. A nervous tick. I’d made him nervous.

  Good.

  “I could tell you a joke if you like,” he said, glancing over at the books. “My friend Bill was just talking about a pirate who, uh … No, that wouldn’t be appropriate.”

  I examined his embroidered handkerchief. “You’re not helping your case.”

  “I promise I mean nothing untoward. I just can’t abide seeing a pretty girl cry.”

  I fought to keep my face from shifting into a glare. You mean you couldn’t abide seeing a pretty girl not immediately trusting you. And were only pretty girls worthy of your compassion?

  Calm your storm, Elsie. Your anger won’t turn him into Patch. “You don’t have to—”

  He cut me off with a smile. “—I know just what to do.” And then he turned head over heels, hands to the ground, his suit-pant-covered legs sticking straight into the air. “You can trust a man standing on his head.”

  It was so preposterous. So unexpectedly unfashionable that I let out a laugh and he fell over, knocking into the bookshelf with a playful awkwardness I think Bea would have really enjoyed. We both panicked for a moment as the shelf wobbled, but then stood steady.

  I put my hand over my lips to cover the laughter that erupted inside me. It would break the Matron’s heart if he heard me snort. But the unexpected humor had cleared the cobwebs of the dream I’d been caught inside.

  He grinned at me and brushed his hair off his forehead. “There. Now you’re not crying, and you’ve made a friend. Day’s looking up.”

  There was something so earnest about his face.

  I’d vote for him.

  “You look familiar,” I said. “Have I seen you around?”

  “At Hank’s cafeteria,” he said quickly, “and at the bakery yesterday.”

  My breath caught. Andrew turned away quickly, grabbing a book from the shelf, I think perhaps to hide behind.

  Hope fluttered through me. “I’m surprised you remember me.”

  He looked away from his book. “You leave an impression.”

  I smiled smile number three, very bashful, and interested, before ripping my gaze away. “I still don’t know if I should trust you. That boy who made me cry was that soda jerk at Hank’s. You probably know him.”

  “Him? No? Not really.” His voice was gentle.

  I tucked my skirt under my knees and turned. “But you took his drinks.”

  He looked away. “That was … It was my friend’s idea. I swear I didn’t even drink,” he whispered. His voice had dimmed so quiet not even the people on the bookshelf next to us could hear him. “I hate the stuff. Richards dared me to drink a whole bottle of his parent’s gin on my fourteenth birthday, and I vomited the whole thing on his mother’s pear tree. That tree has never recovered fully.”

  I gave a gentle laugh, which turned genuine as his cheeks flushed red.

  “You can tell I’m really good at talking to girls.” He leaned back, like he was planning on bolting.

  I touched his elbow. “You’re doing fine. Most boys don’t bring up vomit until at least the second date.”

  He chuckled with me.

  I held his handkerchief against my chest. “I find it refreshing. Honestly.” He met my eye, and I gave him my very best smile. “I’m Elsie, by the way.”

  “Right.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I should probably tell you my name before I tell you my most embarrassing of stories. I’m Andrew.”

  “Andrew.” I said his name carefully; like it was something I wanted to remember, like something important. “It suits you. You’re not an Andy, or heaven forbid, a Drew. Are you?”

  I asked the question, but I knew the answer. The dossier said he never liked nicknames, and I thought that might be something he felt odd about. Most boys have a childhood name, a Billy or a Sammy. I could just picture a five-year-old Andrew crinkling his nose when someone tried to call him Drew. I believed he might have been born an old man, and there was nothing like being the wrong age for his body to make him feel as though he were an outsider among his peers. My favorite trick was to find a man’s insecurities, and let him know that was my favorite part about him.

  Worked like a charm.

  I moved closer so our knees touched. “Andrew feels like a strong name. Weighty. Important. Like you could see it on a dollar bill one day.”

  I dropped his secret ambitions like a lure. He inhaled quickly, staring at me like he was memorizing my face and this moment. Like I’d mentioned his most secret of dreams, the goals too big to even believe possible, and I believed in them.

  Snap the lure tight and the boy was caught. “You’re going to be a great man one day. I can already tell.”

  “I don’t care about great,” he said softly. “I just want to be a good one.”

  “Don’t you think it’s possible to be both?”

  “I don’t know.” He tossed his hair and looked at the book he’d picked up. The Ladies Guide to Plain Sewing. He put it back on the shelf. “What do they say … Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  “Lord Acton,” I said, naming the quote. “Though I like Shakespeare better. I think the King is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it does to me. The element shows to him as it does me. All his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man.” His cheeks flushed pink as I said the word nakedness. Which was why I included it. “I think power amplifies what is already there, and goodness can be amplified as well as vice depending on what you hold on to the tightest.”

  Then I blushed hard, because nakedness and holding on tight was perhaps too pointed a thing for an innocent girl to say.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. Not teasing me or following the baseness of what I was alluding to like Patch would have.

  I smiled smile number two, the go on smile. “You’re Rebecca’s brother, right?”

  He nodded. “Most people say that the other way around.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” I clamped my lips together and then shifted into a smile. “She certainly made quite the impression on me, sitting at my table unannounced.”

  “Well, you had art supplies.” He huffed out a laugh. “My sister thinks everything artistic belongs to her. She’s colored in nearly every one of my textbooks.”

  I laughed softly and leaned into his shoulder. “I liked her very much.”

  “She really liked you too.” The heat from his arm seeped into mine. “She’ll be excited that I found out your name.”

  Rebecca had told me that Andrew was slow to catch on when a girl liked him, so I knew I had to be direct.

  “Are you glad to know my name?” I pressed my shoulders together and glanced down, my cheeks pinking as I’d trained them to do. I licked my lips and looked up to him.

  His knee began to wag, like he was an excited puppy. “Yeah,” he said softly.

  I smiled, and the rounds of Andrew’s pupils widened.

  “Would you like to help me find some books?” I asked. “What are you reading at the moment?”

  “A great biography about President Hill. Did you know he was sick often as a child?”

  “Really?”

  He stood, and then offered me his hand to help me up. His palm was dry and steady, a little warm. I trusted him with my weight, and every trick I’d used had come from my training, but something was missing here.

  I stood and adjusted my dress.

  There weren’t any sparks from our touch. When Patch grabbed my wrist, it was like my skin tingled.

  But with Andrew, not a nerve lit up.

  Which was fine, and completely to be expected, what with the pressure of this meeting, and with seeing Patch so recently. Feelings didn’t go away that quickly, and they grew over time, so it wasn’t anything worth panicking about.

  It wasn’t.

  I followed Andrew as he spoke about what nonfiction title he was reading, very into biographies lately, and I should have picked up the conversation. I should have. This was my element.

  But as we walked through the shelves, all I could think about was Patch lying in the round casing of a window as he read a book, and the way his hands brushed his brother’s hair so gently as he lay against his chest.

  “—historically, don’t you think?” Andrew asked, and I realized I’d just zoned out completely as he described a book.

  A book.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24