We start walking again and Will smiles at me, quick and cautious. I see it, but I keep my gaze fixed straight ahead.
The next chamber looks like a children’s playroom. Rocking horses. Painted wooden blocks arranged in precarious towers across the carpet. There’s even a miniature stone castle built into one wall, complete with kid-sized portcullis and glass windows. Jules starts telling his story. Something about growing up in small-town Nebraska and being picked on all the way through middle school for being the only kid in town with a Middle Eastern dad, and then being picked on all the way through high school because kids didn’t like kids who stuck out like gangly scarecrows, who had purple hair and weren’t interested in football. He starts talking about how he got expelled for breaking someone’s nose, even though it was seven to one and the person he punched had just pulled a knife. How he ran away to San Diego to art school two years early because if he stayed, he’d end up exactly like his tormentors, flipping burgers at Benny-O’s for all of eternity in his own personal minimum-wage hell. He tries to make it sound funny, like he’s recounting a vignette from a hilarious coming-of-age movie, but it’s not funny. It’s awkward to listen to, and I want someone to take him away and pat his hand or something.
He delivers his clincher in a bitter, irony-dripping newscaster’s voice: “But look at me now, Stainfield, Nebraska. Chilling in a French palace. More gold than I know what to do with. Living the dream.”
He swings around to me. “Anouk. Your turn.”
“I’m not telling you anything. This is stupid. I don’t even know what you want to hear.”
“Just talk to us! Tell us why you came to the airport dressed like a bag lady.”
“No.”
It would be cool to hear Will speak. I would like to listen to his drawly accent, figure out if his house is nice, if his parents do dishes together while listening to Greatest Country Hits of the 70’s, whether he likes William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or if he’s more of a Joyce kind of guy. Except maybe he likes neither. Maybe he likes loud baseball games and corn dogs, in which case he should just continue not-speaking forever and let me live in my delusion.
“Why?” Jules asks.
“Because. I don’t need to give you reasons.”
There aren’t any doors in the north wall. We’re still heading east. I feel like we’re getting more off track by the second.
“Come on, Anouk. Maybe I won’t be next. Maybe you’ll be.”
“Psh. Please . . .” My voice is caustic enough to burn metal. “I’m the Final Girl. Gaze upon my wholesome innocence and despair.”
Will has maneuvered to the front of the pack, either completely oblivious to the jabber or pointedly ignoring it. I hurry after him. I think of the little smile he gave me. Maybe I can talk to him alone, without doing this awful group storytelling thing. He’s moving pretty fast.
“Will?”
He stops in the doorway three steps ahead of me, shoulders tense. I scuffle up behind him.
I freeze. We’re looking into a vestibule. An alabaster vase of red roses, petals thick and velvety, stands on a table in the center. And floating throughout the room, as if paused mid-fall, are dozens of small steel orbs.
“Uh-oh,” Will says.
Palais du Papillon, Chambres Jacinthe—112 feet below, 1790
We went on a journey once, to visit an old duke and a relative of Father’s. It is the custom with noble children, once they have been born, to send them away. An aristocratic child’s life is a parade of wet nurses, governesses, maiden aunts, and gloomy tutors, children’s apartments in the high floors of the family chateau if you were fortunate, convent schools and distant relations if you were not. I was packed off at seven years old. Father accompanied me, though he rode in a different carriage, hiding behind his scented handkerchiefs and brass mask full of herbs for fear of the plague, or fevers, or whatever disease were crawling through the towns and byways that year. When we stopped at inns for dinner or to exchange the horses, he always looked at me nervously when my governess brought me too close, as if I were some feral little lapdog contemplating opportunities to gnaw on his leg.