Die for Me by Amy Plum, now you can read online.
Prologue
THE FIRST TIME I HAD SEEN THE STATUE IN THE fountain, I had no idea what Vincent was. Now, when I looked at the ethereal beauty of the two connected figures—the handsome angel, with his hard, darkened features focused on the woman cradled in his outstretched arms, who was all softness and light—I couldn’t miss the symbolism. The angel’s expression seemed desperate. Obsessed, even. But also tender. As if he was looking to her to save him, and not vice versa. And all of a sudden, Vincent’s name for me popped into my mind: mon ange. My angel. I shivered, but not from the cold.
Jeanne had said that meeting me had transformed Vincent. I had given him “new life.” But was he expecting me to save his soul?
Chapter One
MOST SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS I KNOW WOULD DREAM of living in a foreign city. But moving from Brooklyn to Paris after my parents’ death was anything but a dream come true. It was more like a nightmare.
I could have been anywhere, really, and it wouldn’t have mattered—I was blind to my surroundings. I lived in the past, desperately clinging to every scrap of memory from my former life. It was a life I had taken for granted, thinking it would last forever.
My parents had died in a car accident just ten days after I got my driver’s license. A week later, on Christmas Day, my sister, Georgia, decided that the two of us would leave America to live with our father’s parents in France. I was still too shell-shocked to put up a fight.
We moved in January. No one expected us to go back to school right away. So we just passed the days trying to cope in our own desperate ways. My sister frantically blocked her sorrow by going out every night with the friends she had made during our summer visits. I turned into an agoraphobic mess.
Some days I would get as far as walking out of the apartment and down the street. Then I found myself sprinting back to the protection of our home and out of the oppressive outdoors, where it felt like the sky was closing in on me. Other days I would wake up with barely enough energy to walk to the breakfast table and then back to my bed, where I would spend the rest of the day in a stupor of grief.
Finally our grandparents decided we should spend a few months in their country house. “For a change of air,” Mamie said, which made me point out that no difference in air quality could be as dramatic as that between New York and Paris.
But as usual, Mamie was right. Spending the springtime outdoors did us a world of good, and by the end of June we were, if only mere reflections of our previous selves, functional enough to return to Paris and “real life.” That is, if life could ever be called “real” again. At least I was starting over in a place that I love.
There’s nowhere I’d rather be than Paris in June. Even though I’ve spent every summer there since I was a baby, I never fail to get that “Paris buzz” as I walk down its summer streets. The light is different from anywhere else. As if pulled straight out of a fairy tale, the wand-waving brilliance makes you feel like absolutely anything could happen to you at any moment and you wouldn’t even be surprised.
But this time was different. Paris was the same as it had always been, but I had changed. Even the city’s sparkling, glowing air couldn’t penetrate the shroud of darkness that felt superglued to my skin. Paris is called the City of Light. Well, for me it had become the City of Night.
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 dinner, and lie in bed staring at the ceiling, my occasional sleep jam-packed with nightmares. Get up. Repeat.
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.