I knew I couldn’t go home to Manhattan and stay in that apartment.
The wheels in my head were turning. People never gave me much credit for being smart, but I could be when I wanted to be. Or rather, when I had to be. All night long as I stared up hopelessly at my ceiling, I kept thinking about Taylor. Taylor was sixteen and had just lost her mom in June. She barely even knew her dad, who was the lead singer of our dad’s band, but she had to leave her whole life behind in Hollywood to go on tour with Pound.
That’s what I wanted, I slowly realized.
I wanted to leave my whole life behind, too. But there was another reason why Taylor was on my mind. Taylor went to a fancy boarding school in Massachusetts. She never had to deal with parents much because she spent nine months out of the year in a private dorm with all the freedom she wanted. I envied her that, for sure. I also envied her in general, because even though she was kind of a goody-two-shoes, she was super pretty and was the kind of girl who was going to grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer or something. If I told my mom or Bijoux that I wanted to be a powerful lawyer when I grew up, they would have totally laughed at me. But no one would have ever laughed at Taylor. I didn’t think my sister and I had made a very good impression on her, but maybe if I could find a way to get accepted into her boarding school, things would be different.
Until the early morning light, I imagined what my life could be. I could go to boarding school in New England. I could wear a uniform with a plaid skirt and learn Latin and do all kinds of scholarly stuff like join the theater club. Taylor could be like a big sister to me, a nicer big sister than the one I actually had. Instead of coming home for Christmas and Spring Break, I could insist on going to Dad’s in New Jersey so that Taylor and I could hang out, because we would have become such good friends. No one would ever suspect that I was avoiding my own family because I was terrified of finding myself home alone with Danko.
Yeah, everyone thought I was so dumb. Dumb Betsey. But I had a plan. I’d show them.
CHAPTER 4
I became invisible that summer. My eyes never met anyone else’s. I lingered in my bedroom with the door locked as much as possible for the next week, only leaving the house if I could still hear the adults rumbling around downstairs, signifying their plans to work from home all day. If Danko was going to be in the house instead of driving into Split to check in at his office or run errands, I rode my bike to the beach, but far further than where Bijoux, Jadranka and Mili would usually hang out. I pedaled until my back hurt to a much more crowded public area of the beach, where it was unlikely anyone would ever look for me. A hat was always on my head, and sunglasses were always over my face so that I was as unrecognizable as possible from a distance. Every single day, I wore my ugliest bathing suit underneath a t-shirt my dad had bought for me in Virginia Beach. For the first time since I was twelve years old, I neglected to line my eyes with bright purple eyeliner and wear a ton of mascara to make my small eyes look larger.
I couldn’t stop thinking that I had brought this all on myself. In addition to the two weird incidents that had happened in Croatia when I was twelve, the third time Danko had freaked me out had been the summer before, when I was thirteen. He had caught me in my bedroom in Croatia alone while I was changing to go to the beach. I had been outside on a hot morning with Kristijan and Magda, and had forgotten to lock my door when I ran inside to quickly put on my bathing suit before we all went swimming. I don’t know how long Danko’d been standing behind me in my room. But when I turned to go back outside, I almost jumped out of my skin to find him standing there. He’d entered my room without making a sound, and had closed the door.
“There are some things I’d like to discuss with you, Elisabeth,” Danko had said, walking toward me slowly.
He told me there were some things he wanted to teach me for my own benefit, so that I could find them out from him before any of the local boys tried to show me. The worst thing about Danko was that he was really handsome. I mean, of course he was, or my mother wouldn’t have married him. He was super tall and looked like a movie star, but that made all of my interactions with him even more gross. He had just started unbuckling his belt when the door to my room opened and one of our housekeepers, Valerija, walked in carrying fresh sheets.
It was a terrible, nightmarish moment, that moment. She knew she had witnessed the beginning of something horrible, and the expression on her face provided me with the assurance I needed to know that Danko was doing something really, really inexcusable. Something unacceptable in any culture. Prior to that moment, I wasn’t completely sure that he was being inappropriate; I mean had thought so, but would have been mortified if I had told anyone and they had informed me that I was overreacting. I used Valerija’s interruption to push past Danko and run. I ran as fast as I could outside and to the beach without saying a word to Kristijan and Magda. That night, and every night for the rest of last summer, I slept on the floor of my bedroom with my body pressed up against the door so that no one could enter my room without waking me up. I was like a human obstacle, preventing passage.
Poor Valerija. She had glaucoma and an elderly husband to support by cleaning Danko’s big house. Before we left Croatia for New York last summer, she had been fired.
And again, a year had passed without Danko doing anything to me in New York. I’m not sure why; he had ample opportunity with my mother’s busy travel schedule. But in our apartment in New York, he mostly ignored me unless I had committed some kind of punishable offense. I had spent much of that last year grounded for one thing or another, but it’s kind of hard to abide by the rules of being grounded when your mother and stepfather step out for cocktail parties almost every single night. No one was ever around to see if I was at home by curfew, or in bed by any specific time. I saw so little of Danko during the school year that I had ruled out telling Bijoux or my mom about those three weird encounters we had together. I kept telling myself that the worst was over, and I wouldn’t let it happen again.
Mostly, it made me ashamed to admit to myself, I never said anything to Mom or Bijoux because I was really afraid that either they would be angry I hadn’t said anything right after it had happened, or that they would think that I was lying, or worst of all… that they would tell me that I was being childish and I had obviously misunderstood some kind of cultural difference.
At that point, since almost a year had passed since the snooping incident in my room resulting in Valerija’s firing, if I told Mom, it would have been my word against Danko’s. Just like what had happened in the car this summer.
And unfortunately, my word didn’t hold much value, since I had been repeatedly in trouble at school for doing stupid crap like lying about homework, cutting classes to go shopping with my sister, misplacing my expensive watch in the locker room and erroneously blaming a girl I didn’t like for taking it... It would have been a piece of cake for Danko to have said I was lying about everything.
“What’s wrong?” Kristijan asked me almost every day. “Your smile is gone.”
We had been such close friends in previous summers, scaling fences and trespassing on private beaches, that I felt like I was kind of giving him the slip by not telling him that it wasn’t his fault I didn’t want to spend time together any more.
“I just got in trouble because of school, that’s all,” I mumbled. “I have to focus on my reading list.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of Kristijan finding out what his uncle had done to me the night I’d been pulled away from the beach. He was the only one who had looked afraid for me when Danko had appeared. Kristijan might have been the only person on earth who would have believed me if I had told him what had happened, but unfortunately for us both, he was just a fourteen-year-old boy. My confession would probably have been just as embarrassing for him to hear as it would have been for me to tell. So I said nothing. The distance I put between us was comforting.
Hours after I heard the scraping of chairs on the cement near our poo
l cease one night after a dinner party, I sat straight up in bed. The door knob to my room was jiggling. Without even fully waking up, I dashed from my bed to the door and lay down on the floor, blocking the door— which opened inward—with my body, just in case the lock broke.
“Get away from my door,” I whispered, too terrified to say the words aloud. Hearing my own voice was just a jarring reminder that I was there and it was all real. So I whispered, so that he couldn’t hear me, and so that I didn’t have to hear myself. I was too afraid to even get up from that position to rush back over to my bed and grab my pillow. I barely slept, afraid that I’d roll away from the door in my sleep. It was just like the summer before, only I had forgotten how uncomfortable it was to lie on the ground.
At breakfast the next day on a rare morning when all of us, including Viktor and Maria, were in the kitchen, Danko casually said, “You kids shouldn’t lock your doors at night. This is an old house with a wooden foundation. If there were a fire, we’d never get you all out alive.”
I stared at him in disbelief. Not only was he so gross as to try to get into my room at night after Mom was asleep, but he was basically admitting to it in a kitchen full of family members and hired help, practically daring me to call him out on his predatory behavior.
“I don’t lock my door,” I challenged him, curious to see his response.
“You did last night,” he corrected me. “You left your beach towel on the couch and you know how your mother hates wet towels lying around.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kristijan and Magda trade frowns. It hadn’t escaped Kristijan that Danko picked on me far more than he did on Bijoux. Bijoux… who none of us had even seen for two days.
I glared at him. Mom absent-mindedly stirred her coffee and barely lifted her eyes up from the New York Times, which she paid to have delivered to our house from downtown Split, always one day after it was printed and shipped to Croatia. “Honestly, Betsey. I don’t want mildew on the furniture. Please try to be more considerate.”
I followed Kristijan and Magda to the beach, forcing myself to be bubbly and fun all day. It was such an effort to seem happy that I seriously wondered how it was possible that I had ever been genuinely happy before.
“Let’s get a boat,” Kristijan suggested.
I was really not in the mood to row under the hot sun, but I was determined to do anything to embed myself between Kristijan and Magda, so I agreed. We handed Viktor’s credit card over to the guy running the boat rental shack and like absolute amateurs, fumbled with our life vests at the water’s edge until we were somewhat sure we wouldn’t drown. Magda scrambled into the middle of the long, narrow plastic yellow boat, and Kristijan and I took the oars. It took us a good fifteen minutes to figure out what we were doing as we drifted further and further away from shore. Magda squealed with delight at the prospect of us being unable to control the boat and floating out into deeper and deeper water.
The thought of falling out of the boat so far from shore made my heart race, and it beat even faster at the idea of us being unable to recover the boat and steer it in any intended direction. This was Europe, not Malibu; there were no lifeguards to keep an eye on the horizon for kids who couldn’t figure out the physics of rowing a boat. Totally different from Virginia Beach, where there had been so many lifeguards and Coast Guard boats patrolling the water when Bijoux, Taylor, and I had gone out motor-boating with a bunch of college guys that we had to hide the bottles of alcohol we were illegally drinking. But the more we struggled, the more I began to enjoy the idea of being carried away by the tide. The waves could consume us, the beach would shrink out of sight, the sky would darken and the moon would illuminate the water, allowing us to see just how isolated we were in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. No one would be able to find us. The fantasy of us being irrecoverably lost and washing up on some distant shore was oddly satisfying.
Kristijan also seemed undaunted by the prospect of the shoreline disappearing from view. He was somewhat fearless when it came to getting in trouble or breaking rules, but I realized that afternoon that his courage extended to challenging nature, as well. I assumed he got that from his father, who was huge in every way: tall, with a booming voice. I’d even seen Viktor flip burning hot hamburgers on the grill with his bare fingers before.
We eventually figured out the oars and returned the boat to the rental shack two and a half hours later, even before it was due back because Magda had to go to the bathroom. Somehow, Kristijan had become the very proud owner of a gold Sharpie marker during his time visiting us, and he was making a point of signing everything he encountered. I think he was attempting some kind of graffiti tag, but it looked more just like he was signing his name in very sloppy penmanship. He had signed all three of our life vests, both plastic oars and the kayak itself on the underside of his seat. The permanence of the ink seemed to fascinate him and I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had a set of Sharpies at home in New York in every color of the rainbow.
At a café, Kristijan ordered sardines and I declared that he was disgusting. He smacked his lips as he ate, proclaiming the foul-smelling fish to be delicious just to annoy me.
“You want to try some,” he taunted me, dangling one in front of my face. The smell made me wince.
“Aren’t they gross, Magda?” I asked, trying to get her on my side.
It was futile; Magda was Croatian, too, and was not at all sickened by salty canned fish. She did, however, keep sneaking bites of spicy ham off my plate. In New York, it would have felt totally weird to be out eating at restaurants with friends my own age instead of with Bijoux, even casual outdoor restaurants like the ones on the beach. But during the summer we always had our parents’ credit cards with us, and by August most of the waiters knew us and were aware that we were hardly going to eat and run off without paying.
That afternoon, as we all lamented the sunburns we had acquired while out on the boat, I braided Magda’s hair and asked her which boys at school she had crushes on. Magda struggled with English in trying to describe her crushes to me, so Kristijan, half-heartedly listening, chimed in with a falsetto voice.
“Bojan is so hot,” Kristijan crooned. “He has really big muscles and it’s so sexy when he rides on his skateboard.”
Magda blushed furiously and swatted at him, unable to reach him because I was still tightly braiding her hair. She yelled at him in phrases I couldn’t understand, but could guess to mean shut up or something similar. He snickered, and turned his back on us to sign his wooden beach chair with his gold Sharpie.
All day, I laid the foundation for my plan, which was to announce that I’d be sleeping over in Magda’s room that night. It was infuriating that it had taken me so long to come to the realization that I’d be safer a foot away from her in a room that Danko would not dare to enter at night, while the rest of the household slept.
But of course, Kristijan and Magda weren’t spending the whole summer with us. Their upcoming departure felt like a giant cliff that someone was pushing me toward. The game plan for safety that I had developed could only be in play while they were around to serve basically as my human shields. Once they were gone, I was back at square one with figuring out how to hide myself.
The night before they were scheduled to leave, Kristijan and I walked to the beach after dinner, leaving our bikes behind at the house. We walked mostly in silence, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jean shorts. When we got to the beach, we bought ice cream cones and I led the way across the sand to the racks of kayaks that could be rented, most of which had already been returned for the evening. I wanted to sit underneath them, with our backs to the main road, so that if anyone were to come to the beach looking for us, they wouldn’t find us in the expected place on the wooden chairs among the people still sunning themselves even at the late hour. It was a surprisingly cozy spot, the sand below our bottoms cool from having been shadowed throughout the hot day. Having lost one of my flip flops the night Danko attacked m
e, I was wearing canvas slip-on shoes that inevitably became filled with sand as soon as I stepped onto the beach every day, and I squished my toes inside of them, enjoying the gritty feeling.
“I have a secret,” Kristijan said solemnly to me after we sat for a while watching the tide roll in and back out again.
“What kind of secret?” I asked, in a bored tone. I hoped he wasn’t trying to bait my secret with one of his own.
He squinted out over the water, licking his ice cream cone, cursing when a chocolaty drip hit his white polo shirt. He had gotten enviably tan during his two weeks at Okrug Gornji, so tan that it was kind of impossible to remember just how ghostly pale his skin was during the rest of the year. The hairs on his long arms were platinum, as were his long eyelashes. He looked like a hollow-cheeked sun god, admirably handsome, especially in profile as I watched him.
“I like someone,” he said matter-of-factly.
I popped the rest of my sugar cone into my mouth and chewed slowly. “Big whoop,” I told him, hoping he understood the expression in English. I had taught him a lesson in “big whoops” and “whoop dee doo’s” the summer before, but I doubted he remembered it any more than I remembered any of the Croatian slang he had earnestly tried to bestow upon me. The previous summer, when Bijoux had been our ring leader, we had stayed out much later every night, splashing in the water until the moon was high in the night sky. Those wild nights felt like they had happened to someone else, in some other life. The memories of them replayed in my head like a trailer from a movie in which someone other than me had played a starring role.
“I like lots of people,” I countered his comment. This wasn’t a lie. There was a boy in our apartment building in New York whose name I didn’t know, with whom I was basically in love. All I knew about him was that he lived on the seventh floor and walked a golden Cocker Spaniel at strange hours of the day and night. It was also fair to say that I was in love with my friend Christie’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Ryan, because he was so, so cute and played on a soccer team we sometimes watched in Central Park. But naturally I was hardly going to chase after Christie’s boyfriend when they were happy together. And then there was my colossal, all-consuming crush on Nigel O’Hallihan, one of the singers of the Irish boy band All or Nothing. Usually my taste in music was rock & roll all the way. My dad raised me strictly on classic rock. But all of the boys in All or Nothing were really cute. I didn’t let Bijoux borrow my iPod for fear that she’d torment me about having all their songs. Even the remixes.
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