Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






Kiss in Time 2 page

“What would you wish for, Your Highness? I know you must have wishes, trapped as you are in this castle, longing to marry if only to get out, not daring to hope for freedom.” Her voice is very nearly hypnotic. “Be not afraid.

What do you wish for?”

My freedom. Or love. Or . . . travel. I wish to travel the world, to be not a princess trapped in a protected existence, but a human girl. Silly thought. I cannot do that.

“I think . . .” I say, “I will try it.” She nods and moves aside to make room for me on the bench. Her movement is less labored than before.

She pats the space beside her. “Sit, Princess.” She hands me the object, stick first. “This in your right hand. Then 23

 

take the thread in your left, and spin it clockwise. When the thread has begun to spin, you make your wish.” I take the stick. I am distracted, thinking of my wish, my freedom, of seeing the world. As I reach for the thread, I feel a stab of pain in my finger. The hook at the end has punctured my left ring finger. When I glance down, I see a drop of crimson upon my skirt. Blood.

It is only then that I realize what the object is.

A spindle. The princess shall prick her finger on a spindle.

I hear the old woman’s laughter as I begin to sink down.

Malvolia!

My last thought as I hit the ground is, I should have listened to Lady Brooke.

 

G

G

Part II

j

Jack

= G

 

G

 

 

Chapter 1

j

What they don’t tell you about Europe is how completely lame it is.

I should have guessed, though. It was my parents’ idea.

They’re not exactly renowned for their coolness. They sent me on this tour of Europe, supposedly for my education but really to get me out of their hair for a month, while simultaneously being able to brag to their friends that “Jack is on tour in Europe, getting something interesting to write about on college essays.”

Painful admission here: I didn’t totally mind because my girlfriend, Amber, dumped me like last year’s cat litter when some college guy asked her out. At least being here keeps me from seeing her with the new guy, and also forces me to appear like I have some pride and not call her. And who knows? Maybe I’ll meet someone.

 

I was picturing clubs with Eurotrash nobility, riding on Vespas, lounging in French cafés and Greek tavernas, and, of course, the occasional topless beach (although it is a well-known fact that European women aren’t big on shav-ing their, um, pitular area—I planned to look elsewhere).

I thought at least there’d be some cool gardens, something outdoors. I never imagined the suckitude I was about to experience—one big bus tour to every museum that offers a group rate. In Miami, where I’m from, we have maybe five museums, if you count the zoo. Here in Europe, every podunk town has ten or twenty. The bus pulls up in front of a museum and lets us out. Our tour guide, Mindy, has this little blue-and-white flag with a picture of a bird on it, which makes walking behind her the ultimate in humiliation. She walks backward to whichever great work of art the museum’s famous for. The assembled peasants gawk for a full two minutes. Then it’s off to the gift shop to spend our Euros on stuff we wouldn’t pay two cents for if it was in the Walgreens back home.



It’s not doing a thing to get my mind off Amber.

At least my friend Travis is here. Guess his parents wanted to get rid of him, too. I don’t even know what country we’re in now. One of those lame ones you don’t learn much about in geography, like Belgium, or maybe one of the “L” ones. I don’t pay much attention to Mindy, but yesterday I heard her say the magic word: coast. We’re near the beach. That’s when I started formulating my plan.

I shake Travis awake.

 

“What the . . . what time is it?”

“Five thirty, man.”

“In the morning?”

“No, at night. It’s almost time for dinner.” That gets him up. But when he sees how dark it is, he slumps back on the bed.

“It’s still dark.”

Can’t put anything over on Travis, at least not where food or sleep are concerned.

“Okay, I lied. But I need to get out of this Tour of the Damned and have some fun. That’s not going to happen unless we can beat the seven o’clock meet-up time.”

“Know what would be fun?”

“What, Trav?” I’m hoping maybe he has some ideas, since I know his parents roped him into this tour, same as mine.

“Sleeping.”

“It’s not like they’re going to let you sleep in, anyway.

Soon they’ll be banging on the door, telling us to get ready.

This way, you can sleep when we hit the beach.”

“Beach?”

Back home in Miami, Travis is a serious sun god. Now he’s the color of marshmallows.

“Sure, the beach. Think of it, Travis. Topless French chicks.”

“We’re not in France.”

“Okay, topless German chicks. Does it make a difference?”

 

“Will there be food?”

“Sure. There’s a café across the street. We’ll get breakfast and some sandwiches, but first we have to get out of here.”

Finally, I manage to get him out of bed. I’d actually sort of wanted to go look at this National Botanic Garden of Belgium (Belgium! That’s where we are!) we passed yesterday on the way to Museum Number Three. I could see this huge giant sequoia from the road. Of course, we didn’t have time to look at it. But I knew that Travis was way more likely to go along with me to the beach. At least it’s not another dusty art museum, and maybe we can hit the garden on the way back.

I drag Travis to the concierge desk to ask for directions.

“You couldn’t have done that while I was getting ready?” Travis asks.

“You’d have gone back to sleep.”

“You know, sometimes it’s like you work at being a slacker.”

“I prefer to spend my summer not working at anything.”

We have to stand there for a while, while the concierge guy makes time with the desk clerk. If he doesn’t get over here soon, Mindy might catch us.

“Hey, little help here . . .” I look at his nameplate.

“Jacks?”

He ignores us.

 

“Hey! Don’t want to take time from your busy schedule.”

When he finally figures out that we’re not leaving, he comes over.

“Which way to the beach, Jacks?” I ask.

“It is Jacques.” He gives me that special glare hotel concierges always give you when they figure out you’re American or that you don’t speak the language, like he ate a bad niçoise salad. Like I’m supposed to speak every language in Europe. I took Spanish in school. Of course, we haven’t been to Spain yet. At least, I don’t think we have.

“The beach?” I repeat. “La playa?”

“Le plage,” Travis tries.

“Ah, oui. La plage. ” We’ve pushed a magic button, and suddenly the concierge is our best friend and now speaks perfect English. “The autobus leaves at nine thirty.”

“We can’t wait until nine thirty, Jacks.” Jacques shrugs. “That is when it goes.” If we have to wait until nine thirty, we’re going to get caught, and I’m going to get stuck in another museum. My girlfriend dumped me, my summer vacation is ruined, and this guy can’t even help me have one decent day? Isn’t it, like, his job to be helpful? “Is there another bus, maybe? Is this, like, the completely lamest country in Europe?” Travis nudges me. “Jack, you’re gonna get him mad.”

“Who cares? He doesn’t understand me, anyway. Everyone in this country is—”

“Ah, you are correct, monsieur,” Jacques interrupts, 31

 

“and I am wrong. I have just remembered there is another autobus, a different route. A different beach.” I give Trav a look like, see?

“Would you write it down for us?” Travis asks. “Please?”

“But of course.”

The concierge hands us a bus schedule with the routes and times circled. “You want to get off here and then walk to the east.” He sketches a map. It looks pretty complicated, but at least the bus leaves in twenty minutes.

“Thanks,” Travis says. “Listen, is there a place to get sandwiches?”

My cell phone rings. I check the caller ID: Mindy, looking for us. I grab Travis’s arm. “We’ve got to go.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Later.” I drag him away.

“Thanks,” he yells to Jacques. “See you later.” Jacques waves, and he’s actually smiling. He says something that sounds like “I doubt it” but is probably just some weird French phrase. I pull Travis out the door just as I spot Mindy stepping out of the elevator.

Luckily, she’s already walking backward and doesn’t see us.

 

Chapter 2

j

“Good thing we got food first,” Travis says on the bus.

“Yeah, you mentioned that.”

Actually, Travis has mentioned that seven times, once every ten minutes that we’ve been on this bus ride.

“But it is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be starving.

In fact, I’m thinking about breaking out one of the sandwiches now.”

Travis brought enough sandwiches and beer (the legal drinking age here is sixteen!) for a family of four for a week.

He also ate a four-egg omelet, a stack of pancakes, and ten strips of bacon (the waitress called it the “American breakfast”). Plus, since he got it to go, he actually just finished eating about twenty minutes ago.

“Forget food for a minute. Doesn’t this bus ride seem a little long to you? I mean, this is a small country. I brought 33

 

my passport, but I wasn’t planning on using it.”

“It’s long,” Travis agrees, eyeing the bag with the sandwiches.

I pick it up and hold it shut so he has to listen to me.

“And isn’t it going—I don’t know—sort of in the opposite direction of the way you’d think the beach would be?”

“The guy said it was a different beach, but maybe he lied.”

“I think that guy messed us up on purpose.”

“You did say his country was lame.”

“It is lame. So you think we’re going the wrong way, too?”

“Maybe.” Trav’s looking at the bag with the sandwiches.

“It’s hard to think straight when you’re hungry.” I’m about to give him a sandwich just so I can think when the bus driver announces that we’ve reached Jacques’s stop.

“Finally. Time to get off.”

“Does that mean I can’t have a sandwich?”

“Think how good it will taste when we’re sitting on the beach.”

Twenty minutes later, not only have we not found the beach, we haven’t even found the first street Jacques wrote on his map.

“It says go three blocks, then turn on St. Germain,” Travis says. “But it’s been more than three blocks. It’s been, 34

 

like, six. Maybe we should turn back.” I’m about to agree when I see a street called St. Germain.

“This must be it.”

But the next street isn’t where it’s supposed to be, either, even when we’ve walked three times as far as the map says.

“Maybe you’re right,” I say.

When we turn back, nothing looks the way it did the first time. The first time, there were houses and stores and bicycles. Now there’s nothing but trees and, well . . . nature everywhere I look. “What happened?” I say.

“To what?” Travis is munching on a sandwich.

“To everything—the town, the people?” Travis wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “I didn’t notice.” I see a little dirt road I hadn’t seen before. I turn down it, gesturing to Travis to follow me. “Come on.” But this isn’t where we were before, either. It’s like everything just disappeared into a fog. Travis isn’t noticing, since he’s in a fog of his own, created by the sandwich. But then we run into something he can’t ignore.

It’s a solid wall of brambles.

“Now what?” I say.

“Go back.”

“Back where? We’re lost. This isn’t where we were before.

Besides, look.” I gesture around me. “All this natural stuff.

Back in Miami, if you had all this nature around, you’d definitely be near the beach.”

In fact, the hedge looks a lot like bramble bushes in Miami. It has fuchsia flowers a little like the bougainvillea 35

 

that grows there. The weird thing is that it must be three or four stories high.

“So where’s the beach?” Travis asks.

I shrug. “Not back there.”

“But this road’s a dead end.”

“I know. But listen.” I cup my hand to my ear. “What do you hear?”

“Chewing,” Travis says.

“Well, stop chewing.”

Travis finishes the last bite. “Okay.”

“Now, what do you hear?”

Travis listens real carefully. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly. Which means there must be nothing on the other side of that hedge—no city, no cars, just nothing.

The beach.”

“So you’re saying you want to go through the hedge?”

“What have we got to lose?”

“How about blood? Those bushes look prickly.” It’s true. But I say, “Don’t be a wuss.”

“Can I have another sandwich at least?” I grab the bag from him. “After the hedge.” Fifteen minutes later, there’s nothing on any side of us except brambles.

“I bet I look like the victim in a slasher movie,” Travis says. “What’s the French word for ‘chain saw’?”

“It’s not that bad. The flowers sort of smell nice.” I inhale.

 

“Right. You stay and smell the flowers. I’m going back.”

I grab his wrist. “Please, Trav. I want to go to the beach.

I can’t handle another day of the tour.” He pulls away. “What’s the big deal? My parents are going to ask me what I did today.”

“That’s the thing. My parents won’t. They won’t ask me what I did the past week. They don’t care what I’m doing.

And I hate going to all those stupid museums. Looking at all that boring art makes my mind wander, and when my mind wanders, all I can think of is Amber kissing that frat boy.”

Travis stops pulling. “Wow. That really hit you hard, huh?”

“Yeah.” I thought I was just making stuff up to get Trav to do what I want, but I have this sort of sick feeling in my stomach. I’m telling the truth. My parents haven’t called in two weeks, except once to ask me if I signed up for AP

Government next year for school, and this trip is doing nothing to make me forget about Amber. I see her face in every painting in every museum—especially that Degas guy, who painted girls with no faces at all. I can’t get away from her. “Yeah. I just want to go to the beach for one day.

I need to be outside.”

“Okay, buddy. Only you go in front.”

So I go up front, taking the full scratchy brunt of the brambles for another twenty minutes—twenty minutes during which I don’t think about my parents or Amber but 37

 

only about the fact that if I lose too much blood, there’ll be no one here to help. When we finally reach the other side, I stop.

“Wow,” I say.

“What is it?” Travis is still behind me.

“Definitely not the beach.”

 

Chapter 3

j

When I was a kid, back when my family was still pretending to like one another, we took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. It’s this place where everything’s like Colonial times—horses and buggies on unpaved streets. There’s stuff like blacksmith shops, too. My sister, Meryl, and I had fun with the employees because if you ask them stuff like which way to Starbucks, they act like they don’t know what you’re talking about. But it got weird after a while. You wondered if they seriously didn’t know it was the twenty-first century. I was ready to go home at the end of the day.

The place on the other side of the hedge is sort of like that. I mean, not just old. Pretty much everything in Europe is old and falling apart and important, but this place takes historic preservation to a whole new level.

“Do you think it’s, like, a theme park?” I say to Travis.

 

“No one here.”

“Maybe it’s just not open yet. Or closed. Is today Sunday?”

The streets are unpaved, and even if they were, they’re barely wide enough to get one of those little European cars down. But the transportation here is horses, judg-ing from how many are tied to hitching posts, sleeping.

There’s not a McDonald’s or a Gap anywhere, only one building with ALEHOUSE painted on it in peeling, old-fashioned lettering. And the plants look bad. Some are overgrown, but a lot of stuff is bare, like the grass died years ago.

“Definitely not the beach.” Travis starts pushing through the brambles.

The brambles have settled into the same shape they were before we went through them. I do not want to go through those bushes again.

Travis must think the same thing because he steps back.

“Maybe we should eat lunch first.”

Something about this place is really weirding me out.

“Let’s wait for a while. Who knows how long it will take to get back to civilization . . . and sandwiches.” Travis thinks about it and gets this worried look on his face. “Okay. Then we should get out of here.” He starts pushing through the brambles again.

“Wait! Maybe we should start looking for a different way out or at least see if anyone around here has a chain saw.”

 

“You see any people here?”

“There’s horses. And they’re tied up. That means there are people somewhere.” The weird thing is, I sort of want to look around a little bit. This place is cooler than anything else we’ve seen on this trip. At least it’s outside, and Mindy’s not here telling us what to think. “We should look for them.”

Travis glances around. “If there’s people here, they’re really not into mowing and weeding. But if you say so. . . .”

“I do.”

He shrugs but follows me. We walk down the street, which is really more of a pathway with weeds and stuff growing on both sides. I point to the alehouse . “Let’s try in there.”

He nods. “It doesn’t look like the type of place where they’d card.”

The alehouse has steps in front of it. When I put my foot on one, it squeaks and moves under me. I step on a better, less rotted part, but even so, it quivers and shakes.

“This is really weird, Jack. You think maybe the whole town died or something, and there’s nothing but a bunch of dead bodies?”

I remember when we went to Colonial Williamsburg, they told us about all the diseases people got in those days, like yellow fever, black plague, and scarlet fever. Meryl and I joked that all the diseases back then sounded really colorful. But now it’s kind of freaky thinking about some sickness taking out the whole town. Maybe Travis is right, 41

 

not necessarily that everyone died, but maybe a lot did and the rest decided to get out of Dodge.

But I say, “That’s stupid. There’s no abandoned town in Europe. If there were, someone would turn it into a museum. They’d widen the streets and bring people here by the busload and torture kids on tours.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Of course I am.”

And to prove how right I am, I walk to the door.

But I still can’t bring myself to go in, so I look through the window. It’s easy because there’s no glass in it, and I remember that a lot of places didn’t have glass windows in the old days, only shutters to pull down at night or if it got cold. I can’t see much. There’s no light inside and nothing moving. We stand there so long that I’m almost expecting someone—possibly a ghost—to come up behind us and ask what we’re doing here. So when Travis says, “Come on!” I jump about three feet.

He laughs. “Not afraid of dead bodies, huh?”

“Nope.” I push open the door.

The room is dark. There are lanterns, but none are lit. It takes my eyes a minute to get used to it. Even so, I see there are people there, sitting on barstools, but they’re really quiet. No music, no laughter, no talking, and when my pupils finally dilate, I realize the people aren’t moving at all, like they’re dead.

But they can’t be dead. If they died long ago in some plague or massacre, their horses wouldn’t still be tied 42

 

outside, and they’d be reduced to skeletons.

Unless they got mummified. I saw this movie once where this guy killed someone. He mummified her body and sat her in an upstairs window. You couldn’t tell the difference unless you saw her face.

I take a deep breath and let it out real slow, prepping myself to walk around and look at their faces. That’s when it happens.

One of them snores.

“What was that?” Travis says. He’s hugging the door.

“It sounded like a snore.”

“A snore? Like they’re sleeping? All of them?”

“I think so.” I walk over to the side of one guy. He snores, and I see his stomach moving in and out. He’s alive.

He’s definitely alive. I’m saved! I don’t have to touch a mummified corpse!

I tap his shoulder. “Hey, bud.”

He doesn’t answer. I shake him harder and yell louder.

“Hey! Dude! Hey, you!”

Now that it’s that obvious they’re not zombies or anything, Travis steps forward and starts shaking a different guy. “We’re sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for directions.”

Nothing.

There are five guys on stools and the bartender asleep on the floor. Trav and I spend five minutes shaking, yelling, pulling, and practically dancing with them. They’re definitely alive, but they’re totally asleep.

 

“I think we need to try another place,” I tell Trav.

There’s only one person at the next shop, an old lady asleep with a bunch of falling-apart hats on stands. We shake her, but she doesn’t wake.

We try three more places, and they’re all the same.

“Freaky,” Travis says when we step out of the greengro-cer’s. There was nothing in the bins, not a single grape or carrot. The grocer was napping on the floor. “Can we leave now? A grocer without groceries is just . . . wrong.” I sigh. “I guess so.”

But when I turn the corner, I stop.

“Whoa!”

 

Chapter 4

j

It’s a castle. Not a modern-looking one like Buckingham Palace, with electricity and toilets (when we visited it, the plumber was there—his truck said THE DIPLOMAT OF DRAIN

AND SEWER CLEANING and Trav and I had fun joking about what the queen had done to stop up the drains), but a real castle, the kind that comes in a set with a bunch of plastic knights and horses. It could even have a dungeon.

“Check it out.” I start toward it.

“Hey, wrong way. I want to go back.”

“Suit yourself.” I walk faster. “But I have the sandwiches.”

“Hey!” Travis starts running after me, but he’s got on flip-flops. I have sneakers, and I was on the track team at school, so I can outrun him.

The castle is farther than I thought because it’s bigger 45

 

than I thought. It’s big enough to put a whole city in. I finally reach it about ten minutes later. There’s a moat around it full of brown, sludgy water.

“Oops. Can’t go in,” Trav yells from way back.

I walk around the perimeter until I see where the draw-bridge is. It’s open, and there’s a castle door at the end of it. I start across.

“Are you sure you should do that? Someone might behead you.”

“Come on, Travis. What are we going to do, go crawling back to Mindy? This is the first interesting thing we’ve seen in the past three weeks. I just want to look around.” At the door, I see two guards. Surprise—they’re sleeping. I grasp the handle and pull on it. It opens with a loud squeal. I step inside.

We’re in this huge room with three-story ceilings.

“Wow, it’s like the ballroom in Shrek 2,” Travis says.

I nod and hand him a sandwich. It lightens the load, and we’ve still got six or seven more. To be safe, I hold on to the beer.

“Hey, look.” I point at a suit of armor standing in a corner. “Let’s try it on.”

“There could be someone in it.”

I jump back. I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t think the sleeping people around here look like they date back to medieval times, but better safe than sorry. I slowly, gingerly lift the bill of the knight’s face mask.

It’s empty.

 

I breathe out. “Maybe this place won’t be as freaky as the rest.”

This is so cool. All the castles and towers we’ve been to, you’re either not allowed to look around inside at all, or if you are, you just get to stand behind velvet ropes and see stuff in climate-controlled boxes. This place is real, even if it is a little dusty. I start down a hallway that goes out to the side. I look in the first room. “Hey.”

“What is it? The kitchen?”

“Better.”

It’s an actual throne room like in the movies, and there are people in it, peasants maybe, waiting to see the king or something. The king isn’t there, though.

“They’re asleep like everyone else in this town,” Travis says.

“But look.”

Two guards sleep off to one side. Each has a pillow in his lap. On each pillow is a crown encrusted with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. It’s just like the stuff we saw in the Tower of London, only it’s out where we can touch it.

“I’m trying one on,” I say.

“Are you sure you should? What if they wake up?”

“We’ve practically stomped on these people, and they haven’t woken up.”

Still, when I take the crown off its velvet pillow, I almost expect an alarm to go off or something. None does, and I place the crown on my head. “How do I look?” Travis laughs. “Kind of stupid.”

 

“You’re just jealous. Try the other.”

“It’s a girl’s crown.” Still, he puts it on. We fool around, sitting on the thrones and patting the peasants on the heads.

After a while, Travis says, “We should take them.” I shake my head. I don’t like the idea of stealing anything. “Let’s look around first and see what else there is.” We put the crowns back and go into more rooms. On the third floor, there’s a bunch of rooms with nothing in them but dresses.

“Wouldn’t you think this stuff would get eaten by rats and bugs?” Travis says.

“You see any rats and bugs? Maybe they’re sleeping, too.”

When we reach maybe the tenth room of dresses, Travis says, “This is boring. Let’s try on the armor.” I’m about to say okay when I notice this weird little staircase going off to the side. I saw a turret when we were outside. I wonder if this goes up to it.

“Let’s go there first,” I say.

Before Travis can protest, I start upstairs. I didn’t think the staircase was very tall, but it curves around and goes higher. Then it curves again and again.

When we finally reach the top, the door is closed. I open it and find a room with nothing but a girl, sleeping on the floor.

She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

 

Chapter 5

j

Istare at her. I’ve never seen a human being who looks like her, and I’m from Miami, where good-looking people go to spawn. But this girl isn’t just beautiful. She’s perfect in a way that’s unreal, like one of Meryl’s Barbie dolls.

What I’m saying is, this girl is . . .

“Wow, she’s hot,” Travis says when he finally reaches the door.

Yeah. That. She’s lying on the floor with these golden curls all around her, like someone arranged them that way.

Her body, I can tell even in her long dress, is totally perfect.

She’s taller than almost everyone else here, and thin in all the right places with these great . . .

“Would you look at her?” Travis interrupts my thoughts again.

 

I am. I stare at the top of her dress, which she’s really filling out, let me tell you. I feel this incredible urge to touch her, but I know it’s wrong because she’s asleep.

But the weird thing is, it’s not her body I notice the most. It’s her face.

Her skin is the color of milk with just the tiniest bit of strawberry Nesquik mixed in. Her eyes are closed, but I can tell they’re huge, with long eyelashes that curve upward.

And her mouth. It’s full and red, and her lips definitely don’t look like lips that haven’t been moistened in hundreds of years.

For some reason, looking at her makes me think of Amber. Not that she looks like Amber, because she doesn’t.

Amber’s beautiful in a normal, human way. But, compared to this girl, Amber’s total chopped liver.

And somehow, just looking at her, I know she isn’t like Amber. She wouldn’t dump someone for a guy with a cooler car.

“What are you, in love with her?” Travis says. “You’re staring like an idiot.”

The weird thing is, I think I am.

Stupid.

“She’s asleep. You could . . .” Travis looks at the door.

“. . . do anything.”

“That’s sick.”

“You know you were thinking about it.”

“No, I wasn’t. That would be wrong.”

“Right and wrong’s getting kind of fuzzy for me. Was it 50

 

wrong to ditch the tour? Was it wrong to lie to Mindy? Was it wrong to sneak in here?”

“I guess.” I keep looking at the girl. I can’t stop looking at her.


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 602


<== previous page | next page ==>
Kiss in Time 1 page | Kiss in Time 3 page
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.024 sec.)