Ivy Secrets (9 page)

Viktor examined the locks on the windows, then moved to do the same at the door. “I’ll have to get a dead bolt,” he said.

Marina sighed.

Charlie leaned against the wardrobe and watched them.

“I want you to pull the window shade completely whenever you’re in the room,” Viktor continued. “When you’re going out, raise it one-quarter.”

Marina shook her head. “I am not going to live in a prison. I am not going to shut out perfectly good sunlight when I am here.”

Viktor walked back to the window and looked across the street. “Then raise it halfway when you’re here during the daylight; pull it down one-quarter when you’re going to leave. At night, be sure it’s completely closed.”

Marina put her hands on her hips. “What would you like me to do when I go down the hall to the bathroom?”

Viktor did not turn to face her. “You’re going to be a real pain in the ass, aren’t you?”

Marina tossed back her hair again and looked at the floor. “It is rather tiresome, all this security crap. Novokia has not had any problems in three decades.”

“And I intend to keep it that way.”

Charlie tried to take this all in. She couldn’t imagine
having a bodyguard. She couldn’t imagine having someone follow your every move. It made her crazy enough when her little sister, Sheila, was underfoot, always trying to watch how Charlie did things, always wanting to tag along, to be a part of all she did.

Suddenly Viktor glanced at his watch. “At three o’clock I’m going to pick up the car your father ordered for us.”

“It is not a limo, is it?”

“No. A Mercedes.”

“With black windows?”

“I have no idea.”

“Will you be my chauffeur? Am I to sit in the back?”

“You may sit wherever you like.”

Marina flashed a wicked smile. “On your lap, perhaps.”

Viktor remained stoic. “Perhaps not,” he answered.

Charlie wasn’t sure if she should leave the room. She felt warm, uncomfortable again. She busied herself straightening her bureau drawers, and pretended not to notice when Marina walked to Viktor and stood beside him. The top of her head barely grazed the middle of his chest.

“I have an idea,” Marina said as she put a hand on Viktor’s arm. “Why don’t you crash in your apartment on Green Street and leave me here to my own devices. If I have any problems, I will give you a call in May.”

He smiled down at her. Charlie noted their lingering gaze and wondered what it meant. She quickly rearranged her socks in the drawer.

“No chance,” Viktor answered.

Marina turned and stomped across the room. “Where is that driver with my things?” she said to no one, but the edge in her voice was unmistakable.

Viktor looked at Charlie. “Could you go downstairs and see what’s keeping him?”

Charlie realized he was talking to her. “Oh,” she said. “Sure.” She closed the drawer and left the two of them in the room. No matter what was going on between the princess and her bodyguard, Charlie knew when she wasn’t wanted.

    She awakened at five
A.M.
, took a quick shower, and decided she had plenty of time to jog a couple of miles before her breakfast duties began. Charlie had taken up jogging the
year before when she craved time and privacy to plan her future: here at Smith, the grounds were a little hilly, but her morning run gave her an opportunity to keep her nerves under control, to restrain her excitement at being here. Still there were moments when she couldn’t believe she was actually at Smith College. And that her roommate was actually a princess.

Today was the first day of classes, so Charlie intended to run extra hard.

She zipped her fleece sweatshirt and stepped outside the house. The sun was straining to rise, and there was a chill in the air. Charlie quickly shook loose the muscles in her legs and took off in the direction of Paradise Pond. The paved walkway around the pond was a perfect place to run, and kept her away from the quadrangle—the Quad—where the wealthy girls lived, where the status-seekers stayed. She’d already heard them called Quad Bunnies, and secretly wished she were one. They were the party girls, the pretty girls, the girls who had the dates, the boys, and all the fun. In high school, they would have been called the in-crowd.

Charlie ran along the walkway, past the crew house and the pond on her left, the greenhouses on her right. She thought about Marina, who deserved to be a Quad Bunny, but who was stuck, instead, in one of the old houses so that Viktor could keep a watchful eye on her. As she rounded the bend and looked up to the president’s grand house on the hill, Charlie wasn’t so sure that Marina would like being a bunny. For all her sharp tongue around Viktor, Charlie sensed Marina was a loner, one who wasn’t really happy with her place in life.

God
, Charlie thought,
are any of us satisfied?

For now, though, Charlie knew she was right where she needed to be. And though she wouldn’t admit it to anyone, it had made her feel good last night when she and Marina walked downstairs together and went into the common living area, where Viktor waited to take Marina to dinner. Several girls were seated on large sofas and overstuffed chairs, and as she entered the room with Marina, the girls had stared, obviously mesmerized by the presence of a princess. Charlie had smiled and nodded at them, and realized that she had now risen another rung on the ladder to her goals.

“You’re judged by the company you keep,” Charlie’s
mother had harped when Charlie befriended a girl with a “loose” reputation.
Well, Mom
, Charlie said to herself now as she wiped the perspiration from her face,
the company I’m keeping now would please even you.

She smiled, checked her watch, then headed back to the house. For until Charlie O’Brien had become “someone,” she would still have to wait tables at breakfast.

    English 101, Charlie’s first class as Smith, would, she hoped, be forever etched in her memory. As she sat at the desk in the small auditorium-like room, she tried to focus on the instructor, tried to listen to his course introduction. But Charlie was distracted. There were so many things to take in, so much that seemed more important.

The room itself was rather small. She had chosen a seat on the top tier, in order to get a better view. Behind her the autumn sun poured through the tall windows and warmed her back. Around her—everywhere around her—were new faces. She wondered where these girls came from, how rich their families were, and if they had boyfriends that came from as much money, and if they would wait until after graduation to get married. She glided her palm over the edge of the shiny wood desk and noted that no initials were carved in it, no
suck-my-dick
or
eat-shit
messages had been scrawled in felt-tip marker. Smith College, after all, was not West Central High.

“I’ll hand out the syllabus now,” the instructor was saying. “We’ll go over it in detail. If you miss any classes, there will be no excuses for not getting the work done.”

Charlie watched as he passed a stack of papers to a blond girl in the front row. She’d never heard the word
syllabus
before—she deduced it must be an outline of the course.
Why couldn’t he just say
outline? she wondered, then smiled. In Pittsburgh, the instructor would have said
outline.
At Smith, it was called a
syllabus. Syllabus
was so much more sophisticated.
Syllabus, syllabus, syllabus.
She wasn’t sure how to spell it; she’d have to look it up later, to memorize it, to savor its definition.
Syllabus.
Her first new word at Smith. She might even toss it across the dining room table when she went home for Thanksgiving. It would certainly
impress her parents, and would probably piss off her brothers and sisters.

A sudden tap on Charlie’s right shoulder startled her from her daydream. She turned and smiled at the classmate beside her, a plain-looking brunette in a faded black turtle-neck and a limp expression of boredom on her un-made-up face.

“Take one, pass it on.”

Charlie’s eyes fell to a stack of papers in the girl’s hand. “Oh,” she said quickly. “Sorry.” She plucked a sheet from the top, handed the rest to her left, and hoped she hadn’t turned red with embarrassment.

After class the turtlenecked brunette fell into line behind Charlie.

“Pretty gross, huh?”

Charlie was, once again, surprised. “Gross?” she asked as they walked into the hall.

The girl raised her eyebrows. They were thick and brown and matched the short hair that framed her round face. “A five-hundred-word composition every Friday? Plus all that vocabulary … and grammar? God, I hate grammar.”

Charlie pushed through the outer doors and headed down the stairs. “Me, too,” she lied. There was no reason for her to know that English came easily to Charlie. Learning new words had always made her feel cultured, educated, a step above the blue-collar sidewalks of Pittsburgh. And she loved taking apart sentences, dissecting each phrase and fragment, then neatly rearranging them onto a structured diagram: a place for everything, like her jewelry box with its symmetrical squares for earrings, and the individual zippered plastic bags for her sweaters. Charlie liked order, in her studies and in her life. But, other than Marina, this was the first person who’d started a conversation with her, and even more than all A’s in English or a systematic existence, Charlie wanted friends. Best of all, she didn’t recognize this girl from Morris House—maybe she wouldn’t have to know Charlie was on a scholarship. “Are you going to the bookstore now?” Charlie asked.

“Might as well. I don’t have another class until eleven.”

“I don’t have one until two. U.S. History,” she groaned.

“I’m putting that one off until next year. I want to get started on my art classes.”

“You’re majoring in art?”

“Yeah. My parents are thrilled.”

Charlie smiled and relaxed. The girl—for all her plainness—seemed to be the kind of friend Charlie would like. “My parents are thrilled just by the fact that I’m here.”

The girl slung her bookbag over her shoulder. “I didn’t exactly have a choice. My mother is an alumna.”

“Your mother went to Smith?” Charlie’s mother was considered “educated” in their neighborhood, because she’d not only gone to high school, but had taken a one-year secretarial course as well. She’d worked at an insurance company until the babies started coming, and had never used her “credentials” since. “What’s your name?” Charlie asked, as they started to cross the campus.

“Tess Richards. I’m from San Francisco. What’s yours?”

San Francisco. God
, Charlie thought,
what a glamorous city.
It was on her list of “someday, maybe …”

“Charlie. Charlie O’Brien.” She could not bring herself to say she was from Pittsburgh: the mere thought of the word brought a taste of soot and steel to her lips. “I’m staying at Morris House,” she said. “What about you? Are you living on campus?”

Tess nodded. “Same house as my mother. If my parents had given a few more hundred thousand, I’m sure I could have had the same room.”

Charlie tried to act nonchalant. “Which house is it?”

“Laura Scales.”

“Laura Scales?” Charlie had heard the name briefly.

“Over there.” She pointed between two ivy-covered buildings. “In the Quad.”

Charlie clutched her notebook and the papers from English 101 and felt a disheartening sense of resignation: The girl she thought would be her new friend was a rival, a Quad Bunny. The odd thing was, she didn’t even look like one.

    The next day Charlie had to work the dinner shift. She was exhausted from her classes—three today, plus a Spanish lab. None of the other students had been friendly to her: they all seemed to know each other; they had already established their own groups. Quad Bunnies, Charlie suspected. The “other” girls.

She scraped the remains of steamed fish and rice pilaf from the plates—several dozen in all—stacked them in the dishwasher, and thought about Tess Richards. She had seemed nice. They’d stood in line at the bookstore yesterday and discovered that the only class they were taking together was English 101. Charlie was surprised they had that much in common. Tess’s background bore no similarity to Charlie’s, and Charlie had let her carry the conversation. As much as she wanted to fit in, Charlie had found she simply had nothing to say.

She scooped up a bundle of silverware and stood it in the rack. Just then the door from the dining room swung open and Marina stood there. Until now, Charlie hadn’t seen her in the dining room. She’d deduced that Marina ate her meals with Viktor, probably to avoid being poisoned, she thought, and suppressed a grin.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” Charlie said.

“I got rid of Viktor early. Told him I had to study.” She flopped on a stool beside the metal counter.

Charlie tossed the napkins into the laundry bin, then stacked the pots in the sink and began to scrub. She wasn’t sure what to say to Marina; she didn’t know why the princess had sought her out. Certainly, not to talk about dishpan hands. She wondered if Marina had ever been inside a kitchen, had ever watched anyone with their hands in soapy water. The steel wool pierced her fingers as she tried to think of something to say.

“I think botany is going to be my hardest course,” Charlie said, as she wrung out the steel wool pad and grabbed the linen cloth. “Are you taking botany?”

Marina slid off the stool, stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jeans, and paced the room. “Do you want to do something tonight?” Marina asked.

Charlie set down the dried pot and began wiping the counter, “What do you mean?”

Marina laughed. “You know—
do
something. Do whatever it is that American college girls do on a Thursday night when they do not feel like studying and do not have to worry about bodyguards hovering over them.”

Charlie found herself smiling. Marina’s deep voice and delicate accent sounded almost comical talking about American college girls.

“We could go for a walk, maybe?” Marina asked. “Get a pizza? Isn’t that what everyone else does, get a pizza?”