Another Faust (17 page)

Victoria felt the beginning of a headache. It felt like the moths were getting heavier and heavier over her head. She wanted to swat them away. She still didn’t know Thomas’s idea. None of it helped. It was all just pointless gossip. What she needed was a way to cheat off Thomas — a way to go deep into his mind without interference, without being detected.

What was Lucy doing now? She asked the moths to spy for her, and without hesitation, a handful of them flew out the window. Victoria was surprised at their speed. They brought back information in almost no time, as if they were connected to each other, like a line of children playing telephone all the way from her house to Lucy’s. She could hear Lucy now.

“They’re such freaks! One of them tried to flirt with Thomas right there under my nose! She wasn’t even polite enough to assume we were together.”

“But, Lucy, you’re
not
together. You weren’t even together that much at the play.” The moths carried Charlotte’s voice now.

“But
she
didn’t know that. And he kissed me, so we’re as good as together.”

“Really?” gushed Charlotte. “After the party? I
knew
it.”

“There was some mistletoe.” Lucy giggled, then she went on: “Anyway, that Victoria girl freaks me out. This is going to sound weird. You have to promise not to laugh.”

“OK,” said Charlotte with hesitation.

“I think she’s psychic or something. I swear she was reading my mind.”

“Oh, Lucy . . .”

“No, I’m serious! I tried to be nice. She was asking a million questions about grades and stuff. My mom says they’re all trying to worm their way to the top.”

“Everyone at Marlowe is competitive.”

“Are you taking their side?”

“They’re not all bad. What about Valentin? He’s pretty cute, no?”

“Oh, right, you mean the one with Tourette’s?”

“He doesn’t have Tourette’s. I think he’s hot, and very poetic.”

“You’re just desperate to find another bleeding-heart poet.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Don’t be such a spaz, Charlotte.”

“So, Char,” Lucy started after a few more minutes of random gossip. “Are you going to help me with my campaign?”

“Sure,” Charlotte said in a bored tone.

“No, seriously! This is important. I
have
to be class president! My mom was class president!”

“Fine. I said I’d help.”

“How about, ‘Vote Lucy, She’ll keep Marlowe free of mind-reading, grade-grubbing, boyfriend-pawing orphan freaks’? Can you put that on a hundred posters?”

“Yeah . . . maybe that’s a little too specific, Luce,” Charlotte said, laughing. “I’ll write you a couple of good slogans.”

Victoria stumbled out of the fog with a raging migraine. She put a finger to her upper lip and found a drop of blood from her nose. She had taken in too much. Using the moths was definitely not easy. It hurt. It made her feel ashamed. But still, the room exhilarated Victoria — like the feeling of new friends. Thousands of friends that would always have time for her. Millions of sisters that would help her when she asked. For the first time, Victoria felt her heart filling with love. The others could keep their little clique and exclude her. They could laugh and it wouldn’t matter. Victoria’s new family would always do what she told them, say what she wanted. Victoria could open and shut the door at will. She could control the slightest flap of the smallest creature. And so for the first time, Victoria also felt loved.

Down the hall, a lonely moth flew in zigzags through Madame Vileroy’s cold, unwelcoming home. It followed Valentin into a small bedroom and watched as he tried to entice Christian into conversation. When that failed, it followed Valentin into Belle’s room, where he thought he could catch her changing. He found the room empty, and so he loitered around the living room looking for Victoria — maybe he could bait her into driving herself crazy trying to cheat off of his thousand-version memories. That would be fun. But no luck. He decided to go back to hanging out with Christian. He grabbed his notebook and bounded into the room. But when he opened the door, he found Madame Vileroy waiting there, alone.

She was reclining on a chair, giving him a sidelong glance as though he amused her. She motioned for him to shut the door and said, “It must be fun toying with your brother like that.” She nodded toward the notebook in Valentin’s hand. “Reading to him every day. Making him listen, when you know he’s secretly wishing he were you.”

Valentin didn’t answer. He clutched his notebook, with its perfectly printed poems, the initials
VF
on every page, and held it to his chest.

“I must remind Christian not to waste his time,” she mused, almost to herself.

“What do you mean?” asked Valentin.

“Writing . . . listening to poems. He is here to become strong. To win at sports. That’s what he wanted. Writing is a waste.”

“You should let him do what he wants,” said Valentin, averting his gaze, playing with the spine of his notebook. The sardonic look on Madame Vileroy’s face, the gently mocking purse of her lips, made him falter, but he went on: “He likes to write. Just let him do what he likes.”

On the first day of school, Victoria got up early to print out her to-do list, review the activities she planned to join, reread her Harvard Business School catalog, and spend some time with the moths.

Valentin and the girls were driven to school in Madame Vileroy’s sleek black Town Car. When they arrived, they split up without speaking. They didn’t use a map or stop to ask anyone for directions. They knew exactly where to go, as if they had attended Marlowe for years. They didn’t look around in a curious way; they didn’t even wander around looking for their new lockers. Madame Vileroy had shown it all to them before, in the weeks before school started, when they were just watching. Their casual attitude made them more of a target for gaping eyes and gossip than if they had behaved like new kids are supposed to. Still, it made little difference to them since they were anticipating much worse. At the moment, they were only a strange family that had just moved into town. In a few weeks, they would be the strange family that had taken over the school.

Christian had left for school two hours earlier than everyone else to check out the swim team’s morning practice and talk to the coach about joining late. Buddy had woken him up with a series of reluctant pulls and nudges. He shoved Christian’s shoulder, pushing him to get going. Christian reached out as he shook off the groggy first light of waking up and dropped Buddy to the ground. Then he rolled out of bed and got dressed.

Christian had decided that he would join the golf, swimming, tennis, and martial arts teams this year. Since those were all individual sports for the most part, he wouldn’t have to sort out any complications of teamwork. He could just win and leave it at that. But after a few solitary days of practicing, he thought that maybe one team sport wouldn’t hurt, and he decided to play a bit of basketball too. Five sports in one semester — Christian would have to pick up the slack next year with a few more, but it was better to start off slow. He didn’t really need the physical training, and he was stealing to make things certain. As for handling objections from coaches, well, Madame Vileroy was an expert at that. The martial arts team was an informal club that met on weekends, and she had arranged for Christian to simply show up for the tennis and golf matches. That left swimming, which practiced before school, and basketball, which met after.

From then on, Christian spent his nights locked away in his restoration chamber. More and more, he was absent from meals — so often that the others wondered if he was becoming addicted to it, the way some athletes became addicted to painkillers. Though he never talked about it, it had become obvious that he spent a lot of time practicing and learning to break Buddy by stealing at the right times. Since his arrival over Christmas break, Buddy had started becoming more animated, at first smiling or reacting to pain while they practiced and then perking up with excitement every time Christian walked into his room. Though Christian still found it incredibly hard to use Buddy for practice, his desperation to win left him little choice. Instead, he looked for clever ways to avoid hurting Buddy when he didn’t have to.

Meanwhile, as the children adjusted to Marlowe, Madame Vileroy crept into the lives of Mrs. Wirth and her fellow Marlowe parents. Somehow, no matter what strange things happened, Mrs. Wirth was always ready with an explanation of her own. “The door hit her in the head — hard.” “The mothballs must be getting old.” “That boy just needs a good speech therapist.” None of the children mentioned to their new classmates that they had spent Christmas Day alone in their home. Victoria, Valentin, and Belle, who remembered once celebrating Christmas, were too focused to care. Bicé and Christian, the ones that didn’t remember . . . well, they didn’t remember.