by Sara Wolf
By the time we land in Geneva, I am the Pillow King. I won Game of Thrones and I am the Pillow King sitting on my Pillow Throne. I’ve built a pillow fort. Let them come, I have pillow moats! There’s a pillow party, and no one is invited but me and my own huge ass, and maybe a dragon, because those things are fuckin’ rad. No breathing, dragon - only looking - else you destroy my glorious Fort Feather.
I extricate myself from the plush embrace of Fort Feather as the doors to the plane finally, finally, open. The little girl waves her hand as security comes down first to escort her out, and I wave back. She conked out somewhere around the time the plane was reloaded in New York, and only woke up when we landed. She gave me back the notebook, and she tried to give me back the pencils, but I insisted she keep those. May they keep her company like her parents apparently can’t be bothered to.
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. But seriously? She’s like, eleven max. No one should be flying so far all alone when they’re that young.
I guess when I was younger than her, I was at the bottom of a staircase. Crying. Clutching the splintered bone coming out of my leg.
I shake my head. Not the time, Lilith. Not in a plane, in public. These thoughts are for home, for bed, with a pillow so not even Mom can hear you.
I stand up to stretch my legs, and drop the last pillow I’m clutching back on the seat. As the first-classers in the plane queue up to leave impatiently, I flip through the notebook to distract myself. The girl’s drawings are just as adorable as she was, with their bright colors and charming stick-figures. She likes pink and yellow, and a lot of it. She sketched a much cooler dog than mine - with spikes and breathing fire. I laugh and turn the page. This picture is dramatically different, and it makes my stomach flip.
There’s a figure with glowing red eyes.
Just red.
It’s been a month and a half, but it reminds me exactly of that handsome guy’s gaze at the restaurant, the way it flashed briefly into crimson. But nothing about this particular figure is handsome. Something about the way she drew it sends shivers down my spine. Its hands are too long, and it has teeth - thousands of thin, sharp teeth like a piranha. I tear my vision away to see the whole picture; she’s drawn a dark green field with a few large buildings and dozens of windows, all of them shining square and gold into a moonless night. The sky is black and blue, punctuated by weird streaks of green and purple. Shooting stars, maybe? And the unsettling cherry on top, tucked away in the left corner by some trees, is the terrifying red-eyed figure. I squint down at its feet - it’s standing in a perfect ring of many small white things, like a well, or a portal made of pebbles -
“..iss? Miss?” I shake back to reality, where there’s a flight attendant smiling at me. “Did you need help with your bags?”
“N-No,” I snap the notebook shut and pull my backpack from the overhead container. “I got it. Thanks.”
It’s just some scribbles. Just some rich kid’s imagination. Strange things are just strange things. Coincidences are just coincidences.
Monsters aren’t real. They’re human. They have names. And sometimes, they raise you.
Walking up the runway after twelve hours sitting feels like heaven, my converse beating hard up the incline until I’m finally free. I feel like a fuckin’ zombie. The airport looms huge, noontime sun filtering over the crowds of half-rushing, half-waiting people. The yawning emptiness of the high glass ceiling hits hard all of a sudden; I’m like, seven thousand miles away from home. Away from Mom, who’s God-knows-where by now. Away from Ruby. Away from shitty cafeteria pizza and street-corner mercados and dusty fan palms and smog-rose sunsets and everything I’ve ever known.
I’m alone as hell. But this is only the starting line. The first day of seven-ish months.
Breathe in, out.
Be mature about this.
Go.
I follow the trail of weary people from my gate to the baggage claim, because even though most of the signs are in French with English below it, the glasses I require to see anything beyond fuzzy blobs are in my other bag. I figured, mistakenly, that twelve hours on a plane meant I wouldn’t need ‘em. This explains why, when someone taps me on the shoulder, I very calmly eject my entire nervous system from my skeleton.
“Miss Pierce?” A youngish-man in a driver’s cap and uniform smiles at me, his accent lightly French. “I’m Lionel. William sent me. I’m here to bring you to the Institut Le Silvere.”
He knows my name, and Will’s, and my school’s name. Good signs. I wheeze a nervous laugh. “Okay, cool. My bags -”
“They’ll be sent along,” he assures me. “Please, this way.”
Like any sane person with a working rationale who just flew half-a-day to a strange new country, I follow him. It’s weird - or not weird I guess, just surreal - to see that an airport in Europe looks pretty much exactly the same as one back home. Same little shops selling gifts and candy, same bustling coffee spots. It’s comforting, in a way.
Lionel leads me to the familiar florescent wasteland of a concrete parking area.
“Same parking garages!” I say, a little too happily. Lionel looks charitably amused.
“Yes. Very similar.” He motions for me to get into a sleek black car, and I go for the front seat.
“Miss - ” Lionel starts. I drop my fingers from playing with the delicate little potpourri pillow hanging from the rearview mirror. “Are you sure you’re okay there?”
“Yup!” I sling my backpack off and cradle it in my lap. “I promise I won’t fiddle with the radio. Much. Unless there’s a bop on. In which case I can’t guarantee your ear-safety.” His face doesn’t lighten.“Something wrong with that?”
“No.” He says. “It’s just, I'm a professional chauffeur. Most of my clients prefer to sit in the back. That’s the usual etiquette.”
I make a face. “Yeah, well. That’s not my vibe. You’re driving me. Least I can do is keep you company, or, like, talk to you. Is that weird?”
“No, not at all.” Lionel slides into the driver’s seat next to me, smiling. The car starts up with a whispering purr, and he taps in an address entirely in French into the GPS. “The Institut isn’t far, but it’s quite high up in the mountains. It shouldn’t take us more than a hour. You can sleep if you like.”
“Sleep is for the weak,” I wave my phone. “And for people without worried Moms.”
And for people who don’t have nightmare monsters drawn in their notebooks by little girls, but I don’t say that. Lionel smiles around his hooked nose. His eyes are blue, pale blue like stunning ice, and his hair is coppery and wiry and pulled back in a bun. He reminds me a of a scarecrow, if said scarecrow made a wish to become the guy on Mom’s technicolor romance paperbacks that I’ve definitely never stolen and read under the covers, I swear. He slows the car at the garage exit, rolls the window down, and blurts a stream of perfect French to the attendant before handing him what looks like a holographic dollar bill - a euro? No, franc. I looked that up, at least.
“So,” I say once I’ve hurled the obligatory ‘Landed safe’ text to Mom into the ether. “How do you know Will?”
“William’s my employer,” Lionel turns out of the airport and into a bustling road. “We met when I was very young.”
“Where?” I nose. “In Europe? Or America?”
“Montreal. I was thirteen and I had just, well.” He taps the steering wheel. “I had just run away from home.”
“Whoa,” I stare at him bug-eyed. “The guts!”
Lionel chuckles and shakes his head. “I was desperate, not brave.”
“Sometimes they’re the same thing.”
His ice eyes glitter under his cap. “That’s true. You’re quite smart.”
“If I was really smart, I wouldn’t have gotten into the car with the first guy who approached me,” I correct. Lionel looks alarmed.
“William didn’t tell you about me?”
I scroll through my texts, a bunch of them coming in all at
once. “Oh. He totally did. ‘At baggage claim, be on the lookout for a handsome young man with good manners and a sign for you’.” I look Lionel up and down. “Okay, so one of those things checks out.”
Lionel chuckles. “Which one?”
“The sign.”
Maybe it’s because he’s so young - twenty-four, tops. Or maybe it’s because he gives off chill vibes. Whatever it is, he’s way easier to talk to than Will. Suddenly, twelve whole hours of flying whomps me on the side of the skull like a sledgehammer, and my zombified body just gives up on functioning completely. I lean my forehead against the window, watching as the car pulls onto a quieter two-lane highway surrounded on both sides by lush trees and farmland. Gentle hills roll in the distance. Everything is alive, fall leaves painting fire and gold across the skyline.
“Wow,” I murmur sleepily. “This place is really beautiful, huh?”
“Yes. In February it can be a bit dreary, but Switzerland as a whole is really very gorgeous.”
“Dunno what Will told you, but I’m from LA. So all this ‘grass’ and ‘leaves changing’ and ‘below 50 degrees’ shit? Totally new to me.” I watch the grass flash by some more with heavy eyelids. “I didn’t even know the ground could be this green.”
“What color is it in LA?”
“Gray. And browner gray. Unless you get a fake lawn to save on water. And then it’s scary-green.”
For a second it’s just the quiet purr of the engine and the clink of the keys in the ignition.
“Do you…do you ever miss home?” I ask. Lionel responds instantly;
“No. My home is where Will sends me.”
“What about your family? Do you miss ‘em?”
His ice blue eyes get all hard on the edges, sharp like crystal. “No.”
“I get that,” I mutter. “Well, half of that. My Dad can suck an egg in whatever corner of the world he’s in now, but I miss Mom like crazy.” I pause.“Sorry. That makes me sound like a toddler with zero coping skills, doesn’t it?”
“It’s alright to miss people,” Lionel says.
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m just a baby. I don’t speak anything but English. I can’t do this metric shit. I say ‘Fahrenheit’ and ‘dope’. They’re all gonna hate me at this fancy school.”
“In my experience, most teenagers just hate themselves,” Lionel says wisely. I try to form words to agree with him, to tell him he’s so right it hurts, but the heavy darkness of sleep gets me first.
5
The School (Or, How you’ve always felt older than everyone, older than time, and in every crowd you look for someone like you)
So, peep this shit.
There are, like, places, right? Big impressive old places that old dead people built (probably slaves, shout-out to Ms. Grier’s eighth-grade Social Studies), and other people rebuilt, and then people did stuff in them like live and eat and poop and bang, probably. Can you freakin’ imagine pooping in one of those dresses with huge skirts? Did you just, like, squat mega-hard? Did you have to pull the whole skirt over your head? Or did you just take it off like a big detachable ballon? Most people want to go back in time to stop evil from happening, and I do too, but like, inquiring minds want to know about ye olden pooping. Desperately.
What I’m trying to say, is that if you think about it, a ton of people have lived and died in these super old places. The US of A - in all its colonizing genocidal glory - is a country that’s three hundred years old, but Europe is, well. Ancient. And buildings in places like the Middle East and China are even older! If the U.S. is in baby-mode, Europe is cryptkeeper status. I mean, we haven’t even figured out guns are bad yet! Or that free healthcare and paid maternity leave should be a thing! Or that racism sucks hot shit! We’re more than a little behind the times. Our oldest western colonial buildings are probably churches built by four hundred year old Spanish missionaries at best. And I mean, let’s be real; the ginormous chateau in front of me in was probably also built by slaves, and Europe probably also hasn’t figured out racism sucks hot shit any more than the U.S. or the world has, but standing here, in the shadow of this immaculate cream-colored building with its hundreds of huge windows surrounded by rose bushes and a gorgeous view of the blue mountains and green valleys behind it, I almost forget that. Keyword here being ‘almost’.
Okay, so it’s not Hogwarts. But it could definitely still be Beauxbatons.
“This…” I blink the sleep out of my eyes as I look up at the chateau’s gigaton polished wood front doors. “This is a school for rich white country club kids, isn’t it?”
Behind me locking the car, Lionel nods. “Used to be. These days they make a concerted effort. They have quotas and such.”
“Quotas,” I mutter. “Like -”
“Accepting international applications. Worldwide scholarships for the academically gifted.”
“And I’m not one of those,” I lead.
“No. Your ride has been paid in full by William.”
“Oh. Oh god. I’m the spoiled white rich kid!”
Lionel chuckles. “A bit of self-awareness never hurt anyone. Come on. Let’s get you to the headmistress’s office.”
I chase after him as he glides across the perfectly green lawn towards another, less pants-wettingly huge chateau. A gardener planting violets waves at him, and he waves back. A pair of girls my age in blue and white uniforms watch as we pass, and I catch half their words - a low mix of English and what sounds like French.
“Did she sit in the front seat?”
“Who sits in the front seat? With their chauffeur?”
“ - no self respect,” One of the girls says, and they both giggle and disappear behind a row of columns.
“Is the front seat a bad thing?” I chirp at Lionel.
“No. But it’s decorum,” Lionel says smoothly. “If you employ your own driver, it’s more in custom to sit in the back.”
“Oh.” I stare at my shoes and think on this. It’s a very long think, involving me and being born an idiot. Except how would I even know something like that unless I’d grown up being driven around? Excuuuse me.
“Welcome, Lilith,” Lionel stops in front of a sparkly marble fountain and makes a crinkle-eye smile, motioning around him. “To the Institut Le Silvere.”
He hands me a brochure, and I flip through it as I follow him. The front page announces it’s been around since 1260 A.D, when it was a convent for nuns. So, this isn’t just a school. It’s a piece of history. The second page lists all the alumni, and my eyes widen - a shit ton of people I don’t know, but the few I do are like, mega-famous. I’m talking, like, those geniuses you see winning chess competitions and inventing robots and plastic-eating mushrooms and shit. The third page shows statistics; ninety percent of people who go here go on to an American Ivy League, or an European equivalent. Ninety. Percent.
Ho-lee-shit.
“I’m not smart!” I yelp a stress-induced confession, avoiding a near miss with a trellis dripping with purple wisteria. “Are clothes from the sale rack even legal here? Can I fall asleep in class without being arrested?”
“I’m sure you’ll only get a minor reprimand,” Lionel nods.
“What about drooling on my textbook?” I clutch his arm frantically. “Can I still drool?”
He laughs and opens the front door to the smaller chateau, the elaborately carved darkwood walls and the expensive-looking vases filled with flowers giving me insta-hives. The smell of fresh, clean, non-LA air is practically suffocating. Everything’s edged in gold - the windows, the curtains, even the enamel fuckin’ tissue boxes. A secretary in a silk blouse and perfect bun waves us through into a smaller office when she sees Lionel. He pushes open the big doors for me, and I trail after him. The walls are absolutely coated in expensive paintings and silk tapestries and a particularly terrifying row of kabuki masks. The one on the end’s completely out of place, though - bright gold and beaked, like a western plague doctor mask.
“Hey, uh, quick thought; I don’t
belong here,” I hiss.
“What makes you think that?” Lionel indulges me.
“Oh, I dunno; the flagrant abuse of gold foil? The paintings of old dead dudes in riding coats staring down at us like we’re trash?”
“Where do you belong, then?” Lionel asks as he turns the corner of a long, sunlit hall sharply.
“In, like, an apartment next to the freeway with maybe-bedbugs and constantly rising rent.”
“Nonsense.”
“Okay, fine. A Taco Bell bathroom learning my lesson about the chalupa supreme one digestive upset at a time. But that’s my final offer.”
Lionel chuckles, but I don’t, because my eyes fall on the giant desk in front of us. Or, to be more specific, the black glass deer statue on it. It’s incredible - a stag standing on a rock and proudly displaying his horns, all made out of black glass. Volcanic, maybe? It’s got little ruby eyes. There’s a bunch of other stuff on her desk, but for some reason I can’t tear my gaze away from the deer.
It’s mesmerizing. And…familiar. It feels familiar, somehow. But that can’t be right. I’ve never seen it in my life.
“Lionel!” A husky woman’s voice, and in a curl of tasteful gardenia perfume we’re descended upon by the most beautiful grandma I’ve ever seen. Her steel-gray hair is piled up in a prim bun, her dress suit fitting her slender limbs down to the last waifish collarbone. Her olive skin glows and her eyes…okay, I don’t wax poetic about eyeballs. I try not to, anyway. Eyes are just eyes. But this woman’s eyes…they have a life of their own. They’re fox-like, turned up at the edges, clever and quick and bright and shining like they have some inner light. There’s a pale, spring green starburst around her pupil, and it bleeds softly into rich evergreen. It’s hypnotizing.
