Kersti steps into the room and looks around. It’s weird and old-fashioned; nothing matches. There are two single beds side by side, with tall brass headboards and matching comforters in a 1960s gold paisley design. The furniture is of a heavy oak—a bedside table between the beds, two twin desks, a bookcase, two behemoth dressers. There’s a garish carpet with a design of brown, mustard, and rust medallions, faded floral wallpaper in pinks and greens, dingy eyelet curtains in the windows, and a porcelain pedestal sink in the corner that may have been here since the school was built in 1916.
“Is this what forty thousand dollars buys?” Kersti asks, going over to the bed and touching the disgusting comforter. She knows what a year at the Lycée costs because she overheard her father complaining about it. He didn’t want to send Kersti here even on a scholarship, but her mother can be extremely forceful.
“Wait till you sleep under it,” her mother says, unzipping Kersti’s suitcase. “It’s filled with goose down.”
Kersti would be happy with her old polyester quilt from home. She wanted to go to a regular high school in Toronto and have her own room with her own things. She doesn’t need to ski the Alps and sleep under goose down or learn French to make her well-rounded. She opens the large bay windows overlooking the back of the school grounds and here at last is the postcard she’s envisioned—clusters of red-tiled roofs and church spires descending into shimmering, opalescent Lake Geneva, which stretches out toward France and the majestic Alps.
“That’s Evian over there,” her mother says. “Isn’t it breathtaking? I remember the day I arrived. . . .”
Kersti tunes her mother out. The view is nice. It smells good, too. Like clean laundry. But it’s not home.
At lunch they serve thick brown stew and strange noodles that look like fried white worms. Nice warm rolls, hot chocolate, and kiwi. Kersti eats in silence, seated beside a giant German girl with a crude bowl haircut, clothes from the seventies, and a strong body odor that wafts across the table. According to the sticker on her chest, her name is Angela Zumpt. The smell is so pungent Kersti can’t turn her head in that general direction without feeling queasy.
The teacher at the head of Kersti’s table is Mrs. Fithern. She has curly brown hair and slightly buck, overlapping front teeth. She tells them she’s from England and asks them where they’re from, what grade they’re going into, and how they like Switzerland. Kersti is grateful to be halfway down the table so she doesn’t have to answer. She isn’t like the rest of these girls. She’s only here because she got some obscure scholarship.
Her roommate doesn’t turn up for the welcome lunch, nor is she there when Kersti’s mother drops her off after dinner. Curfew is ten. Ten! Kersti hasn’t gone to bed at ten since third grade. She sits by herself in her new room, staring out at the Alps, feeling completely alone. She already misses her mother. How does a mother just drop her child off in another country and leave, she wonders? How did all the mothers of all these orphans do it?
Kersti imagines the kind of mother she’ll be to her own children. Loving, nurturing, fun, present. She will never ship them overseas. She’ll be hands-on, devoted; she’ll want to be with them. And she’ll have them before she’s thirty, too, so she can be full of energy and enthusiasm. Eila will be her first daughter, Elise her second. She doesn’t like anything for a boy yet, but she probably won’t have boys anyway.
Close to ten, Mme. Hamidou sticks her head into the room and interrupts Kersti’s fantasizing. “Cressida will be here tomorrow,” she says. “It gets better, love.”
Hamidou turns out the lights and closes the door behind her. Kersti can hear her running downstairs to the lounge, one floor below. She can smell the smoke from Mme. Hamidou’s cigarettes. She closes her eyes and lies down, succumbing to the jet lag. She sleeps like a baby under the fluffy down duvet with the fresh Swiss air blowing in from the open dormer window.
The next morning, Kersti comes back from the shower to find her roommate, Cressida Strauss, unpacking a box of books. Kersti’s breath catches; she’s never seen anyone like her.
“Hi,” she says, shoving a handful of books in the bookcase.
Kersti is wrapped in a towel, naked except for her flip-flops and a streak of blood on her shin from where she cut herself shaving. Cressida is wearing a chambray Polo button-down tucked into faded Levi’s, with riding boots, completely casual. But on her . . . She looks like she’s just ridden in on her horse, fresh-cheeked and windblown, posing for a Ralph Lauren ad. Her suitcases and a number of boxes are piled on the floor at her feet.
“I’m Cressida,” she says, as ordinary as can be. But she’s far from ordinary. She has a beautiful, unruly mane of hair, spiraling out in all directions. Her head is just slightly too big for her slender body, but she’s dazzling, with pale green eyes, exquisitely long lashes, and a prominent, arched brow. Kersti is literally awestruck by her perfect pink complexion, no doubt from all that good clean Swiss air. Her posture, her height, her long legs—all of it together a masterpiece of teenage magnificence.
Staring at her, practically with her mouth agape, Kersti hates, worships, and wants to be her in one sweeping, exhilarating moment. She feels suddenly dwarfed in her presence, diffused. Cressida is on a whole other level of beauty. She’s in another realm.
“Where are you from?” Cressida asks, shoving books onto the shelf.
“Canada.”
“With a name like Kersti Kuusk?”
“My parents are Estonian but I grew up in Toronto.”
“Great. No language barrier. My last roommate was from Japan. Didn’t speak a word of English.”
Kersti can’t help noticing the books she’s lining up in their communal bookcase: Ulysses, The Wings of the Dove, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury, Tender Is the Night.
“Do you want to go get a chope?” Cressida asks, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in her hand.
“What’s a chope?”
Cressida smiles. Gorgeous teeth, gleaming white, straight.
They go up the street to the Café le Petit Pont Bessières, a fluorescent-lit saloon full of old Swiss men drinking beer for breakfast. Cressida orders two chopes, which are barrel-shaped steins of Cardinal beer. “Welcome to Switzerland,” she says, clanking her mug against Kersti’s. “What do you think so far?”
“The students seem kind of strange,” Kersti says. “Everyone smokes and speaks a bunch of languages and wears shoulder pads in their sweatshirts.”
From what she gathered at yesterday’s luncheon, most of the kids at the Lycée have grown up in European boarding schools. Their parents are princes, princesses, famous designers, actors, oil barons in the Middle East. “I like the name Cressida,” Kersti says. “I’ve never heard it before.”
“My mother is a Shakespeare buff,” Cressida explains. “Of course she had to name me after one of the most obscure and misunderstood of all his plays.”
She waits a beat and, realizing Kersti has no idea what she’s talking about, says, “Cressida was a traitor, the archetype of female duplicity. She betrayed her supposed true love Troilus, a Trojan, and aligned with the Greeks. And then she was basically forgotten.”