Die for Me

I spent the summer pretty much alone, falling quickly into a solitary routine: eat breakfast in Papy and Mamie’s dark, antique-filled apartment and spend the morning entrenched in one of the small dark Parisian cinemas that project classic films round-the-clock, or haunt one of my favorite museums. Then return home and read the rest of the day, eat di

The only intrusions on my solitude were emails from my friends back home. “How’s life in France?” they all started.

What could I say? Depressing? Empty? I want my parents back? Instead I lied. I told them I was really happy living in Paris. That it was a good thing Georgia’s and my French was fluent because we were meeting so many people. That I couldn’t wait to start my new school.

My lies weren’t meant to impress them. I knew they felt sorry for me, and I only wanted to reassure them that I was okay. But each time I pressed send and then read back over my email, I realized how vast the gulf was between my real life and the fictional one I created for them. And that made me even more depressed.

Finally I realized that I didn’t actually want to talk to anyone. One night I sat for fifteen minutes with my hands poised above the keyboard, searching desperately for something even slightly positive to say to my friend Claudia. I clicked out of the message and, after taking a deep breath, completely deleted my email address from the internet. Gmail asked me if I was sure. “Oh yeah,” I said as I clicked the red button. A huge burden lifted from my shoulders. After that I shoved my laptop into a drawer and didn’t open it again until school started.

Mamie and Georgia encouraged me to get out and meet people. My sister invited me along with her and her group of friends to sunbathe on the artificial beach set up next to the river, or to bars to hear live music, or to the clubs where they danced the weekend nights away. After a while they gave up asking.

“How can you dance, after what happened?” I finally asked Georgia one night as she sat on her bedroom floor, putting on makeup before a gilt rococo mirror she had pulled off her wall and propped up against a bookcase.

My sister was painfully beautiful. Her strawberry blond hair was in a short pixie cut that only a face with her strikingly high cheekbones could carry off. Her peaches-and-cream skin was sprinkled with tiny freckles. And like me, she was tall. Unlike me, she had a knockout figure. I would kill for her curves. She looked twenty-one instead of a few weeks shy of eighteen.

She turned to face me. “It helps me forget,” she said, applying a fresh coat of mascara. “It helps me feel alive. I’m just as sad as you are, Katie-Bean. But this is the only way I know of dealing with it.”

I knew she was being honest. I heard her in her bedroom the nights she stayed in, sobbing like her heart had been shattered to bits.

“It doesn’t do you any good to mope,” she continued softly. “You should spend more time with people. To distract you. Look at you,” she said, putting her mascara down and pulling me toward her. She turned my head to face the mirror next to hers.

To see us together, you would never guess we were sisters. My long brown hair was lifeless; my skin, which thanks to my mother’s genes never tans, was paler than usual.

And my blue-green eyes were so unlike my sister’s sultry, heavy-lidded “bedroom eyes.” “Almond eyes” my mom called mine, much to my chagrin. I would rather have an eye shape that evoked steamy encounters than one described by a nut.

“You’re gorgeous,” Georgia concluded. My sister . . . my only fan.

“Yeah, tell that to the crowd of boys lined up outside the door,” I said with a grimace, pulling away from her.

“Well, you’re not going to find a boyfriend by spending all your time alone. And if you don’t stop hanging out in museums and cinemas, you’re going to start looking like one of those nineteenth-century women in your books who were always dying of consumption or dropsy or whatever.” She turned to me. “Listen. I won’t bug you about going out with me if you will grant me one wish.”

“Just call me Fairy Godmother,” I said, trying to grin.

“Take your frickin’ books and go outside and sit at a café. In the sunlight. Or the moonlight, I don’t care which. Just get outdoors and suck some good pollution-ridden air into those wasted, consumptive, nineteenth-century lungs of yours. Surround yourself with people, for God’s sake.”

“But I do see people,” I began.

“Leonardo da Vinci and Quentin Tarantino don’t count,” she interrupted.

I shut up.

Georgia got up and laced the strap to her tiny, chic handbag over her arm. “It’s not you who is dead,” she said. “Mom and Dad are. And they would want you to live.”

Chapter Two

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” MAMIE ASKED, STICKING her head out of the kitchen as I unlocked the front door.

“Georgia said my lungs were in need of Paris pollution,” I responded, slinging my bag across my shoulder.

“She’s right,” she said, coming to stand in front of me. Her forehead barely reached my chin, but her perfect posture and regulation three-inch heels made her seem much taller. Only a couple of years from seventy, Mamie’s youthful appearance subtracted at least a decade from her age.

When she was an art student, she had met my grandfather, a successful antiques dealer who fawned over her like she was one of his priceless ancient statues. Now she spent her days restoring old paintings in her glass-roofed studio on the top floor of their apartment building.

“Allez, file!” she said, standing before me in all her compactly packaged glory. “Get going. This town could use a little Katya to brighten it up.”

I gave my grandmother a kiss on her soft, rose-scented cheek and, grabbing my set of keys off the hall table, made my way through the heavy wooden doors and down the spiral marble staircase, to the street below.

Paris is divided into twenty neighborhoods, or arrondissements, and each one is called by its number. Ours, the seventh, is an old, wealthy neighborhood. If you wanted to live in the trendiest part of Paris, you would not move to the seventh. But since my grandparents live within walking distance of the boulevard Saint-Germain, which is packed with cafés and shops, and only a fifteen-minute wander to the river Seine’s edge, I was certainly not complaining.

I stepped out the door into the bright sunlight and skirted past the park in front of my grandparents’ building. It is filled with ancient trees and scattered with green wooden park benches, giving the impression, for the couple of seconds it takes to pass it, that Paris is a small town instead of France’s capital city.

Walking down the rue du Bac, I passed a handful of way-too-expensive clothes, interior decor, and antiques stores. I didn’t even pause as I walked past Papy’s café: the one he had taken us to since we were babies, where we sat and drank mint-flavored water while Papy chatted with anything that moved. Sitting next to a group of his friends, or even across the terrace from Papy himself, was the last thing I wanted. I was forced to find my own café.

I had been weighing the idea of two other local spots. The first was on a corner, with a dark interior and a row of tables wrapped around the outside of the building on the sidewalk. It was probably quieter than my other option. But when I stepped inside I saw a line of old men sitting silently on their stools along the bar counter with glasses of red wine in front of them. Their heads slowly pivoted to check out the newcomer, and when they saw me they looked as shocked as if I were wearing a giant chicken costume. They might as well have an “Old Men Only” sign on the door, I thought, and hurried on to my second option: a bustling café a few blocks farther down the rue.