Sometimes By Moonlight (5 page)

“Locke? Move along.” Mrs. Lemmon beckoned me from the library doorway. “We already have your parents on the line.”

“My dad and stepmom, you mean,” I muttered.

I took a seat at the table in front of the monitor and Honeybun and Dad came up on the screen. I could tell from Dad’s flannel pajamas and stick-uppy hair it was morning there. Honeybun was wearing a thick bathrobe with a lacy collar, but she was in full make-up, of course. They were talking to each other, their expressions very serious.

“Hey,” I said, giving a little wave. “It’s me.”

They looked up, a little startled. “Well, hello!” Honeybun started off, shooting me a dazzling smile via Internet. “How is everything, Shelby dear?”

“Fine,” I said, fully aware that complaining about anything at Steinfelder was totally pointless, and it wasn’t like I was going to tell them about Austin, of course. “It’s, you know, snowing again. It does that a lot here.”

Dad adjusted his little round glasses, staring into the webcam. “Hi,” he said, awkwardly waving. “It’s been, ah, quiet, without you.”

I just nodded.

“Are you making friends?” Honeybun’s voice shifted into its higher register. “Lots of nice girls there, right?”

“Sure.”

Dad cleared his throat. “We, ah, have some news,” he said, staring uncomfortably into the webcam again. “It affects the holidays.”

Oh, god. Christmas break. My mind whirled. They didn’t want to meet up in Antigua after all. We were just going to spend a lame holiday at home. Nice.

“What your father is trying to say is that—” Honeybun suddenly clamped a hand over her own mouth. “Oh, excuse me,” she mumbled, rushing out of the frame.

Dad glanced after Honeybun, then back at the camera. “Ah… Shelby, we were thinking that maybe it would be easier to have you stay at the school over the holidays this year.”

“What? Trapped here in this hell hole?” Blood rushed to my head. “You don’t want to get together? You don’t want to see me for Christmas? You’re just going to abandon me! Dad, this place—-”

“Okay, now. Calm down.”

“Dad! I can’t believe that Honeybun has finally succeeded in brainwashing you!  I can’t believe she’s—”

“Pregnant.”

“What?” The world fell away around me. I stumbled for something to say.

“We’re, ah, going to be welcoming a baby.” There was no mistaking the pride on Dad’s face. “You’re going to be a big sister.”

Big sister. My mind whirled around that factoid.
Big sister to the spawn of Honeybun
.

“So our Caribbean trip is out of the question, unfortunately. It’s a high-risk pregnancy. Priscilla’s probably going to be on bed rest for most of it.”

“I could still come home,” I said. “Maybe I could help.”

“I think,” Dad replied, “that to keep the stress down for everyone, it’s best to have you stay put.”

“But we won’t be together,” I said, surprised by the sadness I was feeling. “It won’t be like a real Christmas.”

“A real Christmas?” Dad shook his head. “Last Christmas you left our family dinner to attend a house party and the police brought you home. And do I have to remind you of your gift to Priscilla?”

I shook my head. I knew the
Plastic Surgery Horrors Photo Book
had scared the crap out of Honeybun and nearly ruined her love of medical self-improvement.

“It’s just this one time,” Dad said, his eyes pleading. “Surely, there will be other students who’ll stay over the holidays with you.”

Wait. Light bulb. I remembered that I actually had a reason to like being at school again. Austin had found me. Maybe, with less staff and fewer students, I’d actually get to spend time with him if he visited again. This baby thing might actually be a blessing in disguise.

Honeybun came back into the frame, a fresh coat of red, shiny lipstick on her lips. “So your dad told you our good news?” she said, her smile too sweet, too… something.

“Yeah,” I said.

Honeybun’s chemically injected forehead was trying to let her frown. “You don’t seem very pleased,” she said, as if she wanted some kind of medal for procreating.

“It’s great,” I replied flatly.

She didn’t notice my tone. “I knew you’d be excited,” she said, her face softening. “Sorry about the travel plans. I assured your dad you’d understand.”

I didn’t care anymore about the going home stuff, but the revelation that the spawn of Honeybun would soon be taking over my spot in our house suddenly irked me. I’d be gone—just one more year of high school after this—and then this kid would be the lone child in our house, in my dad’s life. That, more than the loss of Christmas, hit me hard. It almost eclipsed the hope that I’d finally see Austin.

“Well, thank you for understanding,” Dad said. “We’ll FedEx your Christmas presents.”

Priscilla finger-waved. “Ta-ta for now.”

I stepped away from the computer and out the door. Bolting down the hallway, I ignored the judgmental stares of the Duke’s relatives and the sparkling blade of the evil knight. Ominous he’d been, indeed.

When I got to my room, Marie-Rose was curled up in a ball under her covers.

“Hey,” I said, patting the lump.

When she poked her head out, there were brown crumbs around her lips.

“What—are you snacking on something under there?”

Marie-Rose nodded, her cheeks pinking. “The conversation with
Maman
didn’t go well.”

“The school’s chewy bread can’t be helping much.”

She sat up in bed and held out her hand. “It’s a gingersnap,” she said.

My stomach growled at the sweet smell. How long had it been since I’d caught a whiff of something I actually wanted to eat?

“There’s a new helper in the kitchen,” Marie-Rose said, gesturing for me to take the remaining half of the cookie. “When I passed by the kitchen door, I must have looked awful,” she said slowly. “Frau Blumen pulled me inside and showed me this stash of cookies she’d baked for the staff. I already ate two.”

“You mean to tell me the teachers get cookies while we get watery pudding?”

Marie-Rose nodded.

I bit into the cookie, hoping that it tasted bad, because maybe that would make my irritation fade. But, of course, it was as delicious as it smelled. I chewed it slowly, savoring the spicy flavor.  “This school sucks.”

Marie-Rose sighed. “Yes, but the cookies are good.”

“If we ever got them, they’d be good.”

“How did your video call go?” Marie-Rose asked.

I told her Honeybun’s news and how I’d be stuck at Steinfelder for the holidays.

“
Maman
will be flying to Rio alone this year,” she said, nodding sadly. “I’ll be here with you.”

“Are there any other kids staying behind over the break?”

Marie-Rose licked crumbs from her fingers. “More than you’d expect. But then, that’s what this place is, right? A place to keep us out of the way?”

I didn’t need to agree. I’m sure she saw it written all over my face.

Chapter Four

If I said I wasn’t watching every second for a sign, a secret note, or something from Austin, I’d be lying. A week had gone by since I’d discovered the sketchbook in the well house and had my conversation with Dad and Honeybun. There’d been no further sign of Austin. What was keeping him away?

From my seat in art class, I had a perfect view to Steinfelder’s rear garden, a snow-frosted graveyard of dead stalks and flower bushes. The cold seeped in through the windows, as it did in most places in the old chateau, and Marie-Rose pulled her wide scarf tighter around her arms, feeling the chill more acutely, as skinny girls do.

I’d never been a ballet dancer, and I’d certainly never been skinny. But lately, I’d noticed that my clothes hung a little looser, thanks to Steinfelder’s bland food. Enough mystery meat and you lose your appetite. It was even harder to choke it down now that I knew about Frau Blumen’s forbidden cookies. I was sure I could smell them baking some afternoons, even from all the way up in our dorm room. I wondered how no other students had found out about them. Maybe there was some way to stage a cookie protest, a kitchen sit-in.

“Good afternoon, class.” Miss Kovac, surely the recipient of the aforementioned baked goods, tapped on her board with a chalk holder.

“My fingers are too cold to hold the pencil,” whispered Marie-Rose.

I slipped off my gloves and passed them to her under the table. “Take these.”

Marie-Rose gave me a grateful look and slipped her tiny fingers inside them.

“Class, we will work on shading today. As you must know, nothing looks real if it is drawn one-dimensionally.” Miss Kovac’s thickly accented voice was as raspy as a chain smoker’s, but she was pretty. Her long brunette hair was tied in a girlish side ponytail with a long, red ribbon and her skin was dewy, like she’d spent a fortune on face creams. An old-fashioned artist’s smock hung on her small frame, covering a simple gray dress. Popular with students, she was the youngest teacher at Steinfelder. I’d never found her very warm, but she did know about art.

“You must use dark and light together to show dimension. Here, you see a line drawing of a box. Watch how I shade it to show the dimension.”  Miss Kovac began to sketch furiously, coloring in the sides until it almost looked real.

Most of the girls nodded, understanding the basic technique. Marie-Rose had a puzzled expression on her face.

“You just color in the flat sides, you know, where the light isn’t,” I said.

“Oh.” She slid her pencil behind her ear and the worried smile slipped away.

“If you will direct your attention to the sketches around the room, you will find many examples of shading, which reveals perspective and depth.” Miss Kovac said, with a sweep of her hand. Instantly, I wondered if she’d once worked as a guide of some sort, perhaps the kind that took bored tourists around the castles of her eastern European homeland. “And now, students, please come and get your paper for today’s assignment. You have thirty minutes to draw the still life I have arranged.”

We all glanced over to a small table right next to mine and Marie-Rose’s, where a cow skull, a vase of flowers, a pile of bricks, and a small metal dagger were placed at odd angles to each other. A sheet served as a simple backdrop.