AutumnRain

© 2009 Chewster Castle

AUTUMN RAIN

Written by Ellie Trotta

Edited by Ashley Rovira

CHAPTER ONE

"What happened?"  Slowly rising to sit up, she looked around in bewilderment.  Still with the feeling of having the wind knocked out of her, she looked around her surroundings.  She was on her balcony overlooking a majestic view of the snowcapped mountains and pine trees.  What had once been ordinarily peaceful had now become a vision of terror.

 

The still silence that followed was not only chilling but also alarming.  Her body shaking from fear, she glanced at the still figure lying beside her.  It was not until she looked down at her bloodstained hands and shawl that the realization of what had just happened took full effect.

 

"Buxton?"  She nudged her husband, who was still warm from his young life.

 

"Buxton?  Sweetie, please answer me."

 

But Buxton did not answer, no matter how hard she shook him.

 

"Buxton, please," she sobbed, burying her face into his back.  "Please wake up, don't leave me!"  Tears streaming down her cheeks, she wailed and pleaded with him to answer her, praying that this was only a nightmare.  But she soon realized that this reality was far worse than any nightmare that could have ever manifested.

 

*****

Buxton Alexander Corleone was buried on the family plot in December of 1996, just one month before his eighteenth birthday.  His widow refused to leave his side, even as his casket was about to be placed inside the cold earth.

 

"Emily, please," her father coaxed.  "Let's put him to rest."

 

Emily declined, her head on his casket, in anguish over the loss of her lover.  "It's dark in there," she sniffed.  "And cold.  I don't want him to be cold."

 

Lewis, her eldest brother, had just started his graduate studies in genetics at the Feiler Institute of Technology.  "Actually," he stated, rather matter-of-factly.  "Buxton's dead so he won't know that it's dark or cold..." He stopped short when his father shot him an angry glance. "Sorry," he whispered.

 

"I don't want to leave him," Emily wailed.  "He needs me."

 

"He's gone, sweetheart," Her father soothed, gently rubbing her shoulder.  "He's gone.  Let him go."

 

Emily looked up at him, her face streaked with tears.  "I can't, Daddy!  Why couldn't the bullet have hit me instead?  Why did it take him?"

 

"Emily, don't talk like that!"  Her father scolded her.  "You are lucky to be alive.  Buxton sacrificed himself for you. Don't dishonor him like that.  Remember, greater love hath no man than he who laid down his life for his friends.  That's what Buxton did, because he loves you."

 

"Well, he made a mistake!"  Emily cried as she ran off towards the pine trees.  She ran until she was out of breath and her ribs ached.  Her tears stung her cheeks as they dried into icicles and her breath became puffs of white smoke against the chilly winter morning.  Emily collapsed into the snow, exhausted from neither eating nor sleeping since her Buxton had been murdered.  She clung tightly to her pink shawl, the one that he had just finished wrapping around her when he was brutally shot.  Although it was still freshly stained from his blood, she refused to clean it, as it was the only piece of him that she had left.  She was filled with anguish as she cried herself to sleep in the snow, knowing that at that moment her family was laying her husband's body to rest.  She was glad to not have witnessed it.

 

When she awoke, her fingers were numb from the cold, but her face felt warm from her constant crying.  She tried to stand up, but a sharp pain smacked her head and caused her to stumble.  She shivered from the cold and wrapped her shawl tightly around her shoulders.  Buxton.  Buxton was gone forever, and she was consumed with an overwhelming sense of dread at the realization that she was alone.  I am only sixteen, she told herself.  My whole life is supposed to be ahead of me.  Our whole lives, but mine may just as well be over.

 

The entire police force had exhausted every detective and crime scene investigator but there were no leads.  Nobody could figure out who had murdered Buxton, or even determine a motive.  Emily decided to make her way back to her family's estate on the other side of the lake.  She was surprised that no one had gone after her.  A part of her wanted to curl up next to the fireplace with a big cup of hot cocoa and marshmallows, but she immediately squashed that impulse, attributing it guiltily to her selfishness of seeking comfort while her Buxton lay in a grave.  She felt she must dutifully deprive herself of such pleasures and endure a lifetime of suffering.  After all, Buxton had given up his life so she could be spared. It should be easy for her to give up luxuries such as these. 

 

Wandering back to his grave, her lower lip trembled as she saw the mound of dirt where his coffin was before.  "Oh, sweetie," she moaned.  "Why did this happen?  Please wake up and surprise me."  Her denial of his death was pitiful as she kneeled down beside him.  "Just wake up, and tell me this has just been a bad dream.  Then you can kiss me and laugh at my silliness for having such a dream as this."  Slowly, she placed her shawl over his grave and lay down next to him.

 

****

"Have you seen Emily?"  Margot asked.  She was gravely worried about her stepdaughter, as she had been gone for hours.  She had watched in empathy as Emily ran off, and had pleaded with Elijah to run after her.  However he had instructed everyone to let her be.  The sky turned to dusk as Margot looked anxiously outside the kitchen window.  "Where could she be?  Somebody, please find her."

 

"Poor dear," Lewis' long-time steady girlfriend, Abigail Bouvier, clutched her hand to her chest.  "I couldn't imagine what that must be like, to lose someone you love like that."  She almost choked on her words as she thought of Lewis.  Although he was only her boyfriend, she could not comprehend what a tragic thing like losing your husband would be like.  Lewis smiled and put his arm around her.

 

"She'll be all right. Emily's a practical girl.  She'll get over it."

 

"Oh?"  Abigail turned towards him and cocked an eyebrow.  "Would it be that easy to get over the death of your spouse?  Or girlfriend, for that matter?"

 

Lewis blushed as all eyes were on him.  "What I meant was, well, Oh, I don't know what I meant," he said in frustration.  "It's just that, grief is a process but time heals all wounds."

 

"Please, Elijah," Margot pleaded with her husband.  "Let's try to find her before it gets dark.  She needs to come inside before she gets frostbite."

 

Elijah nodded.  "Yes, I think she's had ample time to be alone with her thoughts.  Wolfgang, please find your sister and bring her back inside."

 

Wolfgang jumped out of his chair and put on his coat.  "Finally," he muttered under his breath.  "With our luck she'll be a popsicle."

 

"What's that?"

 

"Nothing, Papa."

 

Nobody seemed to notice Herta slip silently from the room.  The old woman had put on her winter coat and galoshes and was treading out in the snow, searching for her granddaughter.  She seemed to look for hours, but could not find her anywhere around the lake.  Finally, she decided to search the one place she knew she would have gone to if she were Emily. 

 

"Good God, child, you're freezing."  Herta kneeled down next to her sleeping granddaughter.  Emily was lying across Buxton's fresh grave with her shawl covering both of them.  "Bless your heart."

 

Emily stirred, and her eyelashes fluttered.  She looked up and saw the angelic face before her.  Her heart sank a little when she realized it was only her grandmother.  “Oh Herta,” she sighed.  “I thought I was in heaven.  Unfortunately I’m still alive.”

 

“My dear child,” Herta shook her head.  “Please, don’t torture yourself this way.  Your life is still just beginning.”

 

Emily sat up slowly.  “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t seem that way.  I’m still technically a kid and I’m already a widow.  What do I have left to live for?  Buxton’s gone. He was my life.  Therefore my life isn’t worth living now.”

 

Herta embraced her in a warm hug.  The cold chill that ravaged Emily’s size-four frame began to leave her as she hugged her grandmother. 

 

“Please talk to me,” Herta coaxed.  “Believe me, if anyone understands what you’re going through it’s me.”

 

Emily cried into Herta’s shoulder.  “I know, I’m sorry.  I just keep wishing this was all a bad dream but I can’t wake up.  I can’t get out of it.  It hurts too much.”

 

“There, there,” Herta soothed.  “I felt just how you feel when my Nicky died.  But you’re still so young, my dear.  You have many more years ahead of you than I had.”

 

“But who will want me?” Emily bawled.  “Who wants someone who has already been married once before?  Nobody wants someone with emotional baggage from a past marriage.”

 

“Oh, my darling,” Herta tried to assure her.  “You forget that my Margaret found a wonderful man who had already been married once before, and with four beautiful children.  She had to make a leap of faith and someday you will find someone who is willing to do the same.”

 

“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Emily sniffed as she wiped away an angry tear.  “I don’t care to find anyone else right now.  I’m not looking to replace Buxton.  That’s the last thing I’m thinking about.  I just wish he was still here.” 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Over the next few months, Elijah and the rest of the Chewster family tried desperately to raise Emily’s spirits.  Elijah suggested that the entire family took a trip to London the following summer, and Emily inadvertently encountered the elder son of the Prince of Wales.  Unimpressed, she rejected the heartthrob prince's rather overconfident and desperate advances.  He claimed that he was bored of the usual constant female attention from his many admirers, and was curious as to why Miss Chewster proved uninterested.  In her sweet and polite way, Emily was kind to him but basically ignored him and, once pushed to the edge, finally told him off.

 

The following autumn, at the suggestion of Margot, Elijah enrolled his daughter in Schneidzerhorn, an elite finishing school for young ladies located in the Swiss Alps.  Emily was miserable, as she felt rejected by her own family.  Elijah tried as best as he could to lovingly explain that he had Emily’s best interests at heart.  Margot was a Schneidzerhorn alumnus, and proudly showed her stepdaughter her diploma and various needlepoint projects she had used for her craft classes.  She excitedly dug out her old annuals, laughing at the black and white photos and reminiscing as she flipped the pages.  “Look, there’s Bea when she won first prize for her afghan at the fall festival!”   Emily was beyond boredom, as the domesticated side to life was of little interest to her.  She liked to crochet, but could not see herself only being made into a high-society snooty.  Not that she considered Margot snooty, as she was even more kindhearted than her own birth mother, but Emily did not want to be confined to the life of a haughty aristocrat.  Margot reassured her that although Schneidzerhorn was a top-notch finishing school full of aristocratic girls, Emily would also benefit from a complete and diverse education.  This perked up her spirits a little, as she excitedly began to question Margot on the school’s science program.  Margot was flustered to say the least, as science had not been one of her strong subjects.  She had loved art history and pottery and even etiquette, but struggled with science. 

 

Emily was still grieving over her beloved Buxton as she walked in the pillared doors of Schneidzerhorn’s great hall.  She thought of what she might be doing right now had Buxton still been alive.  They would have been celebrating their first anniversary that next Sunday, and Emily felt more alone now than ever.  To compound matters, Lewis and Abigail’s wedding was scheduled for later that month.  Still a doctoral student at the Feiler Institute of Technology (FIT), he decided that he wanted to marry Abigail before he finished his education.  Elijah and Gerard both agreed to this, since they knew that nothing could keep Lewis from becoming Dr. Lewis Chewster, and Abigail’s trust funds were more than enough to support them while Lewis continued his education.  They opted for a much smaller wedding than Emily’s, which was still on a much larger scale than many could consider being a “small wedding.”  Emily was to be one of Abigail’s bridesmaids, and the whole idea of participating in a wedding mostly furthered her depression.  She missed her husband, and although she liked Abigail and was thrilled to have a sister-in-law, she could not help but feel a tinge of jealousy.  Emily wondered if it would be appropriate to try and catch the bouquet at the reception, as she was now technically single, although still married in her heart. 

 

Her thoughts were interrupted as she walked right into a complete stranger.  “Oh, pardon me,” she shyly excused herself as the girl turned around.  “I’m so sorry.  I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

 

The girl just laughed.  “I’m Aubrey,” she outstretched her hand with such enthusiasm that Emily was taken aback.  “You’re new here, huh?  I could tell.  It’s always the deer in headlights look that the newbies have when they first arrive at Schneidzerhell.”

 

Emily smiled and introduced herself.

 

“Chewster?  As in the beer?”

 

Emily nodded and shrugged slightly.  She was always painfully shy when it came to meeting new people, and the hardest part of all was that everyone associated her name with her family’s fortune.  Most of the time, people had a long list of questions about how the Chewsters make their beer and if any new products were coming out.  Emily hadn’t a clue, and really did not care at all about Chewster beer.  People referred to her as the “Chewster beer heiress”, but Emily felt that she wanted to devote her life to something other than inheriting a company she did not even want.  She prepared herself for Aubrey’s inquisition about the company.

But, to her surprise, Aubrey only grinned.  “That’s so cool.  That’s my favorite beer.  It’s awesome.  So,” she changed the subject and Emily breathed a sigh of relief that she was off the hook.  “What brings you to Schneidzerhell?”

 

Emily could not help but chuckle at Aubrey’s nickname for her school.  “Well,” she stated matter-of-factly. “My stepmother came here back in the early seventies.  She said she loved it, and that it is a fine school.  But honestly,” she lowered her voice to a whisper.  “I’m hoping to do more in my life than just becoming a perfect young lady.  Maybe even become a doctor.”

 

“Really?” Aubrey was impressed.  “Emily, my dear, we are cut from the same mold.  It’s scary.  I want to be a doctor, too.  A pediatrician, actually.  My mother came here in the seventies as well.  What was your stepmother’s name?”

 

“Margot, well, at the time she was Margaret von Bismarck”

 

“Are you serious?”

 

Emily nodded.  “Yeah, why?”

 

“Why!  I can’t wait to tell mother that I’ve met Bizzy’s daughter!”

 

“Bizzy?”

 

Aubrey laughed and put her arm around Emily’s shoulders.  “Why, we’re practically family.  Bizzy, I mean, your stepmother Margot, was my mother’s best friend.  They grew up together.”

 

“Hmmm,” Emily thought for a minute.  She never considered that her stepmother once had a childhood nickname such as Bizzy.  “What is your mother’s name?”

 

“Beatrice Walker, but her maiden name was Wellington.”

 

“Bea!  That must be the Bea that won that prize for her blanket, or whatever.”

 

“Yeah, uh huh,” Aubrey nodded.  “She still crochets, and has entered her projects in fairs and stuff.  But anyway,” Aubrey lowered her voice to a whisper, her eyes cocked in a devious smile.  “Wait until you see some of the boys.  You wouldn’t think these Swiss guys were hot, but they are pretty fine, if you ask me.”

 

Emily was taken aback.  “You mean,” she said.  “There are boys here?  I didn’t know this school was co-ed.”

 

Aubrey explained that although “Schneidzerhell” was an exclusively all-girl school, there were two neighboring all-boys schools nearby.  Emily felt guilty for feeling slightly interested, as she was still pining over her lost love.

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Emily was performing extremely well academically at her boarding school.  She was acing all of her classes without a hint of effort.  Elijah and Margot were pleased, and assumed she was enjoying herself.  However, Emily was beyond miserable.  She hated the school, and begged her parents to let her come home.  However, they refused to heed to her wishes.

 

Emily was at the point of despair when she flew to Paris to participate in Lewis and Abigail’s wedding.  She was one of the bridesmaids, and her brothers were groomsmen.  Lewis’ college buddy from Humboldt, Ben Cooley, stood in as best man.  While

Lewis had decided to pursue his PhD in genetics from FIT, Ben had remained at Humboldt so he could attend their medical school.  Nevertheless, Ben and Lewis remained in contact, and he was honored that Lewis had asked him to be his best man.

 

Emily was gloomy and depressed as she moped to the punch bowl.  They were at the rehearsal dinner in a banquet hall adjacent to Notre Dame Cathedral, where the ceremony was to take place.  She was happy for Lewis and Abigail, but at the same time, completely miserable that she was reminded of Buxton, and also for the fact that her family had given her the impression that they did not want her at home.  She was obviously a burden to them, and she felt completely neglected.

 

“What’s wrong with your sister?”  Ben whispered to Stewart.

 

“Ah, don’t mind Emily,” Stewart shrugged.  “She’s just being a girl.  They’re all emotional.”

 

Stewart knew better than to discuss Buxton’s murder.  Since Emily came from a prominent and famous family, Elijah had done everything possible to keep the story of the murder hushed from the press so things would not be made worse for his daughter.  Although Ben was a trusted friend (and practically considered family) Stewart did not want to overstep his father’s boundaries.  He was trying everything possible to stay in Elijah’s good graces so that one day, being the golden son, he might inherit control of the company.

“Hi Emily,” Hans Freud interrupted her thoughts.  “How are you doing?”

 

“Fine, Hans,” Emily replied without so much as a glance in his direction.  Hans was the son of Elijah’s attorney, and Emily considered him to be a nuisance.  He was constantly trying to converse with her and receive some measure of attention.  Emily thought he was not only desperate but also weird.

 

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered.  “With you being at that boarding school and all.”  He gulped and blushed as he said it, then cringed as if her reaction would have been to hit him.

 

Instead, to his surprise, she returned a warm smile.  “Thanks, Hans.  That’s really nice to hear.  You’re probably the only one.”

 

“I doubt it,” he shrugged nervously, thrilled that she was finally speaking to him.  “I know your family really misses you.”  His voice shook in his lack of confidence.

 

“I don’t think so,” Emily shook her head sadly and glanced up toward her father.  “Daddy won’t let me come home.  I hate my school.”  She was surprised at herself for disclosing so much to Hans.  Glancing up at him, she sighed.  “Do you think they just wanted to get rid of me?”

                                                                                                                  

Hans just stared at her blankly, completely shocked that she was actually having a real conversation with him.

 

“Never mind, forget it,” Emily glanced away and proceeded to leave.

 

“Wait!”  Hans grabbed her wrist in a desperate attempt for her not to go.  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.  What did you say?”  He immediately wanted to smack himself for disclosing this, as what he meant to say completely came out wrong.

 

“Figures,” Emily grumbled.  “Nobody else listens to what I have to say, so it’s pretty stupid of me to think that you actually would.”  She managed to release herself from Hans’ grip and walked back to her seat.

 

Hans turned to Stewart, who had just walked over to them.  “What the hell just happened?”

 

Stewart shrugged and patted him on the back.  “Don’t worry, we’re men.  We always say stupid shit.”

 

“Can’t she see that I care about her?”  A bewildered Hans looked at the back of her head, silently admiring the way her auburn curls tickled her bare shoulders.  She was wearing a dark blue cocktail dress with silver spaghetti straps and silver pumps, and her hair was held away from her face by sparkling diamond-encrusted barrettes.  Hans thought she was beyond beautiful as he admired her long legs and attractive figure. 

 

Stewart shook his head sternly.  “I think it’s probably the wisest thing for you to forget about Emily.”

 

“What?  Are you crazy?  Why should I forget her?”

 

“I can’t discuss it.  But let’s just say that she’s not looking for anyone right now, and leave it at that.”

 

Hans was confused but shrugged it off.  He figured that Stewart was just being a typical protective older brother.  For the remainder of the evening, he tried to approach Emily but to no prevail.  Disgruntled as he went to bed that night, he decided to write her a letter.  He was up for most of the night, pouring out his heart and soul to her.  It was not his intent to sweep her off her feet with romantic words, but he wanted to share his soul with her once and for all.  He expressed himself completely on those eighteen pages, and felt slightly anxious and vulnerable after he slipped it under her door early that morning.  The Chewsters, Freuds, Bouviers, and other guests were staying at the exclusive and ritzy Hotel du Crillon in Paris. 

 

Emily awoke early and went through her normal morning rituals.  The wedding was not until 4 o’clock, so she had plenty of time to really get ready.  After dressing in jeans and a baby blue cashmere sweater, she was surprised to find an envelope addressed to her attention next to the door.

 

When she saw that it was from Hans, she sighed heavily.  She did not intend to be rude to him, but his mere presence irritated her.  She did not think highly of boys who were that desperate for attention.  It displayed a measure of neediness in her mind, and she was not one to be needed right now.  She glanced through the handwritten pages, noting phrases like “I can’t stop thinking about you” and “when I’m around you I feel like I can’t breathe” and she wondered what Hans truly saw in her.  She glanced in the mirror and sighed heavily.  Her chestnut locks were pulled back in a high ponytail, and her green eye shadow enhanced the emerald hue that danced in her hazel eyes.  She never saw herself as beautiful. She was just Emily Chewster.  She knew that it must not have been her sweet angelic nature that attracted him, as she had been nothing but rude and insolent towards him for as long as she had known him. 

 

A knock came to the door.  She hesitated before answering it. 

 

“Hi,” a nervous Hans stood before her, his hands in his pockets. 

 

“Good morning Hans,” Emily rolled her eyes as if to say, what do you want?

 

“So…” Hans tried to glance around her.  “Did you…. read it?”

 

“Read what?”

 

Hans’ jaw dropped in surprise.  “You know,” he coaxed with a hint of impatience in his voice.  “The letter?”

 

“Oh,” Emily tried to play dumb.  “The letter.  Yeah, it was OK.”

 

“OK?” Hans could not believe what he was hearing.  “Just OK?  That’s all you have to say?”

 

“Hans, you know what,” Emily tried to shut the door.  “I’m just not interested in you like that.”

 

Hans held the door open with his fist.  “Emily Chewster, did you even read the letter?”

 

At this she had to pause.  If Hans was not interested in her, then what were all those lovey-dovey pickup lines adorning the pages?  If this letter wasn’t some pathetic attempt to get her to be his girlfriend, she couldn’t imagine another motive, especially coming from him.

 

“You didn’t, did you?” Hans whispered sharply.  “You know, you make things rather difficult for me.”

 

Emily was instantly offended.  “Oh, I make things difficult for you?  What about you?  Always stalking me, making me feel weird.  You make me feel awkward.”

 

Hans gulped.  “I do?”

 

“Yes,” Emily sighed.  “It’s rather annoying.  It’s irritated me since the day I met you.”

 

“Then, can we please start over?”  Hans took a deep breath and extended his hand slowly.  “I’m Hans Freud, the son of your father’s attorney.  Miss Chewster, it is an honor to meet you.”

 

Emily glanced at him skeptically, not sure if there was a hint of sarcasm in his tone.  He looked sincere enough, that is, until he decided to kiss her hand.  Emily was appalled as she slammed the door in his face. 

 

Hans walked away in disbelief.  He took a huge risk in writing the letter to her, as he had poured out so much of himself in that letter.  Now, dejected and humiliated, he decided to mope back to his room with his tail between his legs, and do his best to forget her.

 

Emily, now curious, decided to take a closer look at the letter.  He did not profess bizarre and romantic feelings for her as she initially thought, but was quite sincere in his words, though only mildly eloquent, somewhat rambling, and yet with a sense of innocence.  The tone of the letter had no indication that he wanted more from her than even her brothers.  As he expressed his rather raw emotion, her heart began to swell with a sense of empathy towards her former nuisance. 

 

Emily found herself in near tears as she finished reading his letter.  She had no idea as to what the reason was, but she felt instantly guilty for offending him.  She never knew Hans was such a deep person.  She wanted to know more of this side to him, not the act that he seemed to always put on when he was around her. 

 

As Emily walked gracefully down the aisle as one of Abigail’s bridesmaids, she marveled at the beauteousness of the Notre Dame cathedral and smirked to herself, wondering silently if Quasimodo himself once resided among the enormous and ornate bells that chimed with such splendor. 

 

The aisle seemed a mile long, and Emily caught Hans’ sad eye as he tried not to look at her.  However his attraction to her was enough to keep his gaze as if driven by the strong magnetic force.  Emily found herself smiling ever so slightly at him, which caused him to perk up a little in his surprise. 

 

As the bride and groom said their vows, first in English, then French, then Latin, then German, Emily wondered why her brother opted for such a long and tedious ceremony.  Her feet were killing her, as she had not taken the time to break into her pumps.  She had to mentally force herself not to buckle her knees for fear that she might faint.  Lewis looked as white as a sheet, and his dark curls held onto beads of sweat as he began to perspire in his tux.  Emily wanted to laugh out loud at her older brother with a sure, “I told you so”, as mister-formality-at-any-cost opted for both a vest and a cummerbund.  The cathedral was hot, and in the humid autumn weather, this lovely day in Paris was quite uncomfortable for wedding party and guests alike.  Many people used their wedding programs as makeshift fans in the audience, and even the normally composed Elijah Chewster rolled his eyes in exasperation and glanced repeatedly at his pocket watch.  Abigail was a stunning bride, and even she was suffering under her many layers of tulle and taffeta. 

 

Finally, after a two-hour-long mass ceremony, the priest proclaimed them as husband and wife.  A unanimous sigh of relief rang out among the chapel. 

 

The atmosphere at the reception, however, was quite enjoyable in contrast to the marathon ceremony.  Elijah and Gerard had hired a jazz band, and Lewis amazed everyone with his jitterbug.  Elijah was embarrassed to admit that he had two left feet and thus would be unable to participate in the east coast swing, so Margot was treated to a dance or two with Ben Cooley, the best man. 

 

“You’re like another son to me,” Margot laughed as Ben swung her around with much flair.  “So why didn’t you ever tell us you could dance so well?  You’re practically family and I never knew this about you.”

 

Emily breezed past them and only overheard Margot’s comment about Ben being practically family.  “Great,” she muttered to herself.  “I’m gone for a couple months and they’ve already replaced me for sure.”  The last words were too much to even hear in her own mind, and she immediately felt hot tears beginning to sting her eyes.  She decided that it was suddenly too hot in the reception hall, so she made her way outside. 

 

To her surprise, she found Hans sitting on a rod iron bench in the garden.  His eyes were downcast, and he was drinking directly from a bottle of Cristal champagne that he had apparently swiped from the bartender.

 

“Hi,” Emily greeted him softly.  She felt a little uncomfortable, knowing that she had been the one to offend him and now she was hoping he would talk to her instead of the other way around. 

 

Hans turned around slowly, only to be greeted with Emily’s hopeful smile.  His eyes met hers, and he turned back around.   Uttering a flat, “Hi, Miss Chewster.” and taking another swig of champagne, he could feel his heart sink. He already felt rejected by her, humiliated that he had made himself vulnerable and she had insulted him.  Now what did she want, he wondered.  He felt that she could not make him feel any lower than he did already.

 

“Can I,” Emily could barely bring herself to state the words.  “Can I join you?”

 

Hans looked more than slightly surprised as he slowly nodded his head and inched himself to make room for her.  He glanced remorsefully at her from the corner of his eye.  He noticed a tiny tear trickle down her cheek.  “What’s wrong?”

 

“I miss him,” Emily said flatly as she stared straight ahead. 

 

“Who?”

 

“What do you mean, who?  Who do you think?”  Emily snapped, but instantly relaxed her tone.  “I’m sorry,” she softened.  “I didn’t mean to yell at you like that.  I’m just, depressed, that’s all.”

 

“Who do you miss?  I’m sorry that I don’t know who you’re talking about, Em.  Did that one guy leave you?”

 

“What guy are you talking about?”

 

“That one, button or whatever his name was.  I remember you married him.  Didn’t he leave you or something?”  Hans stopped short and caught himself mid sentence.  “I’m sorry; maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

 

“Buxton,” Emily corrected.  “And yes, he did leave me, but not how you think.  He’s gone, forever, and it’s all my fault.”  She immediately burst into tears.  Hans rubbed her back in a comforting manner and tried to soothe her. 

 

“Emily, I’m sure it’s not your fault.  Personally, I think any guy would be a complete prick to leave you.”

 

“How can you say that?” Emily jumped up, red-faced.  “You’re a prick to even say that about him!”

 

“But…I…” Hans tried to explain his position, but it was to no prevail since miss Chewster was already fleeing from him.  He decided to find out the truth once and for all.  He knew that a secret was being kept from him, for whatever reason and he had to get to the bottom of it.  He decided to go back into the reception hall to seek out Stewart.

 

“Hansie,” his mother intercepted him as he walked into the hall.  Tousling her oldest son’s hair, Frau Freud kissed him on the cheek. 

 

“Mom,” he groaned in exasperation as he immediately tried to scrub off any lipstick traces. 

 

“Do I smell champagne?”  His mother sniffed his breath and scowled.  “Hans, how much did you drink?”

 

Hans merely belched an answer.  “I don’t know, a bottle?”

 

“Hans Erich Freud!” 

 

“What’s the matter?”  His father approached them, his hands on his hips. 

 

“Your son,” Gretchen scolded.  “Was out there, consuming an entire bottle of champagne!”

 

“An entire bottle?”  Erich cocked an eyebrow.  “Son, what is the meaning of this?  Getting drunk at a Chewster family function?  How could you embarrass the family like that?”

 

“Dad,” Hans began to chuckle uncontrollably.  “Would you have felt the same way had I drank a keg of Chewster beer?”

 

“Well now,” Erich tried to think of the most appropriate response.  He decided to change the subject.  “And why were you outside for so long?  What were you doing out there?”

 

“He was with Emily,” Hans’ younger brother Linus piped.  Hans returned to his brother an evil look. 

 

“Emily?  Emily Chewster?”  Erich’s demeanor changed into a pleased smile.  “How nice, are you two, dating?”

 

Hans scowled.  “No, we’re not.  She’s still missing that Buxton guy who left her.  Why can’t she just get over that?  He’s a jerk to have just left her like that.  That’s not how you treat someone like Emily Chewster.”

 

Erich turned white as a sheet. Taking his elder son aside, he glanced around nervously.  “Hans, this is not the appropriate time nor the place to discuss these matters.”

 

“But why?” Hans whined.  “What’s the big secret?  Why won’t anyone tell me?”

 

Erich told Hans to wait in their hotel room.  He knew that in order to confide this grave matter with his son, he would have to ask for permission from his most respected client.  He would have to convince Elijah that Hans was trustworthy enough to maintain confidentiality.

 

Pulling Elijah aside, he whispered.  “I know this is not the most appropriate time to discuss this, Elijah, and I apologize for asking this right now.”

 

“What is it, dear friend?” Elijah smiled reassuringly at his most trusted friend. 

 

“Hans has been asking….”

“Asking what?  Don’t keep it from me.”

 

“Asking about the matters regarding a certain mister Corleone and his untimely departure from the Chewster residence.”

 

“Oh,” Elijah said.  “And you wanted to tell him the details?”

 

“Only because,” Erich lowered his voice even still.  “I think my boy is in love with Emily, and his interpretation of that situation has caused him to state some very insensitive comments about that young man.  I wanted your permission to set the record straight with him.  I can assure you that he will keep this news to himself, and perhaps it will allow him to deal more appropriately with your daughter.”

 

“Wait a minute,” Elijah perked up.  “Your son, is in love with my daughter?  How come I was not made aware of this?  Are the feelings reciprocated?”

 

“I don’t know,” Erich shrugged.  “That is why I wanted to ask if I could just tell him.  If he knew the truth about Buxton.  So long as he believes that Buxton just left her, it will continue to insult her.”

 

“Good point,” Elijah nodded and informed Erich that yes, he could tell Hans, so long as Hans kept it to himself.  Erich was thrilled and the two men began to discuss the eminent relationship that would ensue between Hans and Emily as a result.

 

“I’m glad I already know the parents,” Elijah laughed wholeheartedly.

 

“Same here,” Erich replied as they toasted their glasses of Chewster beer. 

 

As Hans made his way back to his room at the hotel, he wondered what the big secret was regarding Buxton, and why he was not allowed to know.  He thought Emily would agree with him, that Buxton did not know how good he had it when he left her.  He wondered what happened, another woman perhaps.  But what woman would be more perfect than the sweet miss Chewster?  Hans completely worshiped Emily and thought she was flawless and intelligent and that everything about her was the epitome of perfection. 

 

When Erich met his son back at their suite on the top floor of l'Hotel du Crillon, Hans was already bombarding him with a multitude of questions.  “What happened with Buxton?  Why are you keeping secrets from me?  Why did Emily get so upset when I put him down?”

 

Erich put up his hand and sighed.  “Calm down, Hans.  That’s what I am going to talk to you about.  But first, I want you to understand that what I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Hans rolled his eyes in exasperation.  “Come on, dad.  Don’t talk to me like a client.  I’m your son, for Pete’s sake.”

 

“Hans!”  Erich snapped.  “I am being very serious with you right now.  Elijah has entrusted you with this, and I need to know that you will not repeat it, to anyone.”

 

Hans’ eyes widened as he began to wonder at the magnitude of this piece of information that his father was about to bestow upon him.  What was the big secret, anyway?  Now he really wanted to know.

 

“OK dad,” he looked solemnly at his father.  “Mum’s the word.  I promise.”

 

“Because if this gets out to the press, it would completely destroy Emily.  And I will know exactly who said something.”

 

Hans listened intently as Erich told him the details of Buxton’s murder.  He immediately felt guilty, and now knew why Emily had been so cross with him.  However he still had some questions about the entire situation.

 

“So, why wasn’t I ever told of this?  You and mom told me that Emily and Buxton weren’t together anymore.”

 

Erich merely cocked an eyebrow.  “And really, son, was that a lie?”

 

“No, but,” Hans was flustered.  “Why is this confidential?  Wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be made public so Elijah can have the press help in discovering who the perpetrator was behind all of this?”

 

“That’s exactly what I suggested,” Erich nodded, impressed that his son asked such a sophisticated and mature question. He began to wonder if Hans would ever follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer as well.  Better than being a musician, he figured.

 

“And?”

 

“That’s not what Elijah wanted,” Erich tried not to let his irritation show.  “I have to respect his wishes.  Apparently he feels that it’s better to keep it secret from the press, in order to protect his daughter.  After the murder she sank into a depression so low and was nearly suicidal, and Elijah doesn’t want her to be bombarded with questions from the press or requests for interviews.  Maybe after she turns eighteen or so, he’ll allow it to go public at his discretion based on her present state at the time.”

 

“Is that why he sent her away to boarding school?”

 

Erich merely shrugged.  “I don’t know, son. But that could have something to do with it.  All I know is that Elijah must think very highly of you to allow me to share this privileged information with you.  Do you get my meaning?”

 

“Yes dad,” Hans said reverently.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Emily was miserable as she flew back to her boarding school, Schneidzerhell, as Aubrey put it.  To her, it certainly was hell.  She shared a dorm with four other girls, including Aubrey, and their friendship was her sold consolation. 

 

Giselle Montclair was two years her senior, with a snobbish persona and a rather large pocketbook.  Giselle’s grandfather was one of the main contributors to the school, and she did not hesitate to remind everyone constantly of this fact.  Aubrey and Giselle were rivals, and constantly at each other’s throats.  Aubrey took great delight in bringing any of Giselle’s weaknesses to the surface.

 

Janice and Vanessa were the best of friends, and those that knew them well called them “the twins” although there was no physical resemblance.  Janice Oakley was very small for her age, with short black hair and striking green eyes.  Despite her small stature, she was tough as nails.  She was very loud and punched a boy in the throat once for referring to her as “shortie.” 

 

Vanessa Beylotte was rather large for her age, with long brown curly hair and hazel eyes.  She was the gung-ho editor of the school newspaper and very outgoing and popular.  Aubrey often joked that Vanessa and Janice were “connected at the hip”, which caused both of them to protest in unison.

 

When Emily opened the door, she was greeted with a cheer from Vanessa.  “Who’s that train?  That chugga chugga train?”

 

Emily shrugged. She knew that cheerleading tryouts were right around the corner, and the voluptuous Vanessa seemed to make captain every year.  She forced a smile. “Huh? What train?”

 

“I’m talking’ about the chew chew chewwwwwwwster train!  Woo-woooooo!!!!”

 

“You’re a dork!”  Emily chuckled as she threw a pillow but missed Vanessa’s head.  She then ducked as Vanessa tossed it back.

 

“Nice to have you back, Em,” Vanessa gave her a hug.  “It’s so nice to have someone around here whose life isn’t so consumed with drama.”

 

Emily raised an eyebrow.  “Oh?  What makes you so sure that my life isn’t drama-prone?”

 

Vanessa shrugged.  “I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem that way.  You seem so, normal.”

 

“Normal?”  Emily tilted her head back as she laughed out loud.  “Come on, Vanessa, if you only knew….” she stopped short as her mind instantly flashed to Buxton.  Her demeanor changed back to a depressed state.

 

“Knew what?”

 

“Nothing,” Emily tried to change the subject.  “I…really don’t feel well right now.  I need to lie down.”

 

Vanessa decided to have a “meeting” with the other girls.  “I’m very worried about Emily,” she told them.

 

“Worried? Why?”  Up until now, Aubrey had always considered Emily to be her best friend.  She wondered why Vanessa new something about her before she did.

 

“Have you noticed, that since she got back from Paris, all she does is mope around and cry all the time?”

 

“I’d cry too,” Giselle scoffed and flipped back her hair.  “If I had to leave Paris.  The city of love…. c’est l’amour.”

 

“Giselle,” Janice snapped.  “Vanessa’s being serious.  Emily is depressed; I’ve heard her talk in her sleep.  Something about buttons.”

 

“Buttons?”  Aubrey cocked her head in bewilderment.  “Huh?”

 

“Something must have happened to her in Paris,” Vanessa suggested. “But what?”

 

“What do you think?”  Giselle sneered.  “Obviously it was a man.  Some frog must have swept her off her feet and then left her in the dust.”

 

“I’m sure you have plenty of experience with that,” Aubrey interjected.

 

“Oh contraire, don’t be stupid,” Giselle placated.  “I’ve never had a man leave me.  If anything, I’m the one who’s doing the leaving.”

 

“Why don’t you demonstrate that for us now?”

 

“OK then,” Vanessa tried to arbitrate.  “Whatever.  Can you two forget your stupid catfight for a minute and think of Emily?”

 

“She’s right,” Aubrey sneered.  “This is about Emily.”

 

“Of course it is,” Giselle scoffed with another fluff of her hair.

 

The girls agreed that it was best to give their roommate some space while she worked out whatever it was she was going through.  They decided that in due time, Emily would most likely share with them whatever was troubling her. 

 

“I have an idea,” Giselle refused to give up on the topic completely.  “If she is pining over some boy, we should introduce her to another one to get her mind off of him!”

 

Vanessa was about to protest when her lips curled into a sly smile.  “I can’t believe I’m actually saying this,” she shook her head in disbelief.  “But you may be onto something, Giselle.”

 

“Well it’s about time that my ideas were given some credit.”

 

“I don’t know,” Janice interjected.  “I mean, we don’t even know for sure if this is what’s bothering her.”

 

“What about one of the boys at Novotzendorf?”  Giselle piped.  “They would definitely give my spirits a boost if I were depressed.”

 

“Yeah, especially Percival Duckworth…” Vanessa sighed dreamily.

 

“Excuse me, Percival Duckworth?”  Giselle raised her eyebrows angrily and put her hand on her hip.  “Vanessa, you know that Percival only dates the crème de la crème.  You haven’t a chance with him, honey.”

 

“In that case,” Vanessa shot back.  “I guess you don’t have a chance with him either!”

 

Aubrey chuckled.  “Nice, Vanessa. Touché!”

 

It happened to be a mere coincidence that the autumn dance was to take place the following Saturday.  Emily could have cared less, but her dorm mates were excited.  After much coaxing, she finally agreed to go.  Besides, she figured, it would be nice to get away from the depressing humdrum called her life.

 

The dance was held at Novotzendorf College, located several kilometers away from Schneidzerhorn. Emily opted to wear a dark green evening dress with a matching shawl.  It was slightly overcast that evening, and she hoped it would not turn into a downpour.  The girls had insisted that she wear her hair half-up, with the remaining locks flowing down in a cascade of curls.  Emily looked very elegant as she climbed in the school bus and sat next to Aubrey.

 

“Whoa girl, you look hot!”  Aubrey grinned.  “I look like crap next to you.”

 

“You don’t, either,” Emily laughed at her friend.  Aubrey was athletic and her non-school-uniform attire included a very tomboyish wardrobe.  This evening, however, she was dressed in a burgundy a-line dress and black pumps.  Her dark hair was straightened.  “You look great.”

 

“Girls!”  Mrs. Grossman, their dorm mother’s shrill voice rang out as she lectured from the front of the bus.  “Remember, we are to be on our best behavior.  No wandering off to go neck with a boy, understand…. Janice?”

 

Janice blushed.  “Yeah, yeah, Mrs. Grossman.  That happened a long time ago.  Can we drop it?”

 

Emily rolled her eyes at Aubrey.  “No worries here,” she muttered under her breath.

 

“You don’t know that, Em.  What if you meet a really cool guy tonight?”

 

“I don’t care, I’m not really looking.”

 

“So, what if they’re looking for you?”  Aubrey giggled.  “You should see some of those Novotzendorf guys.  Who knows?  Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

 

Emily sighed heavily as the bus continued to make its way down the road.  While the other girls fussed with their makeup and chattered with as much fervor as one would witness in a henhouse, Emily’s thoughts turned to glum.  She had written to her father and Margot, pleading with them to let her go home.  However they refused, and insisted that she attend schneidzerhorn for at least a year.  Emily felt completely neglected and wished that now, perhaps more than ever, she was snuggled in front of a warm fireplace with her beloved husband, not on her way to some goofy childish dance. 

 

The bus screeched and moaned as it halted in front of a large campus.  The buildings were old and austere, and as the autumn rain began to dot the fogged windows, Emily shuddered as she realized she had not brought an umbrella.  Luckily there was a canopy covering the walkway as she stepped off the bus, and she returned Aubrey’s reassuring smile as they followed the convoy to the recreation hall.

 

The music was upbeat and the fireplace crackled as they entered the hall.  Emily suddenly felt very uncomfortable as she realized she had to mingle as a single young lady.  Aubrey spoke the truth; the boys at Novotzendorf were indeed extremely handsome.  Novotzendorf was very reputable in academic standards as well as athletic achievement. 

 

“Aubrey?  Is that you?  I didn’t even recognize you!”  A very tall boy with blonde hair and striking green eyes greeted them with a devilish smile. 

 

“Sven!  I was hoping to see you here!  How have you been?”  Aubrey winked. 

 

“Wow, you sure do clean up nice, Aub.  Look at you, you look like a girl!”

 

Aubrey gave him a murderous look as he quickly apologized.  “No, I didn’t mean it that way.  What I meant was, you…. look beautiful.”

 

“Nice move, ex-lax.”  Aubrey sneered jokingly.  She had a great sense of humor and could let things slide from those she deemed worthy.  “Sven, I’d like you to meet my friend, Emily Chewster.”

 

“No way!  The Emily Chewster?”

 

Emily was taken aback.  “What do you mean, the Emily Chewster?  You know about me?”

 

“Know about you; I’ve known about you for years.  Your father Elijah has been listed in Forbes magazine.  I clipped articles on the Chewster family for as long as I can remember.”

 

“You do?” Emily felt very strange.  “You have kept magazine clippings…. of my family?”

 

“I admire your dad very much,” Sven explained.  “Don’t worry, I’m not some weird stalker or anything.  I just think your dad is cool and I’d like to model my life after his.”

 

“Sven wants to run his own company,” Aubrey explained to a bewildered Emily.  “He’s going to double major in business and economics at the university.”

 

“Give my regards to Lewis and Abigail,” Sven said excitedly, as if he knew them personally.  “Tell them I said congratulations and I wish them a wonderful marriage.”

 

Emily nodded.  “If you’ll excuse me, I think I need some fresh air.  It’s beginning to get stuffy in here.”  What she really wanted to do was get away from Sven, as he was beginning to freak her out. 

 

As Emily made her way towards the back door of the hall, she unknowingly caught the attention of a young man standing next to the punchbowl.  As he slowly took a sip of the over-concentrated beverage, he smiled to himself as he watched her walk past.  He figured she must have been a new student, as he had never laid eyes on her before. 

 

“Who is that?” he whispered to the young man standing to his right.

 

“Who?”

 

“That girl who just walked past us.  I don’t think I’ve seen her before.  Have you, Antonio?”

 

Antonio just shrugged a response.  “I’ve never seen her before either.  She must be new to Schneidzerhell.”

 

“She’s beautiful.  Much prettier than any of the other girls here.  Look at the way she carries herself.”  His gaze followed her as she walked out the door.

 

“Why don’t you ask Sven who she is?” Antonio suggested.  “I just saw her talking to him a moment ago.”

 

“Good idea,” and he sat his punch down on the table and made his way towards Sven and Aubrey.

 

“Sven,” he placed a hand on his shoulder.  Sven whirled around, and beamed at his friend.

 

“What’s up, Percival?”

 

“I need to ask you a question,” he whispered.  Bowing in an exaggerated fashion, he excused himself for interrupting the conversation between Sven and Aubrey.

 

Aubrey rolled her eyes in exasperation.  “Oh, please, Percy.  You really don’t need to act like an ass.”

 

Percival cleared his throat and pulled Sven aside.  “I need to know, who was that girl you were just talking to?”

 

Sven was about to respond when a shrill voice rang out.  “Percy!  Percival Duckworth!”  Percival groaned as he realized who was heading over in his direction. 

 

“There you are, Percy.  I’ve been looking for you!”

 

Percival tried his best to display good manners.  “Hi, Giselle.  Well, look at that, I guess you found me.  Now, if you’ll excuse me,”

 

“Wait,” Giselle grabbed his arm, instantly admiring how muscular his bicep felt through his suit jacket.  “Don’t go.  You owe me a dance.”

 

Percival was completely turned off.  “I beg your pardon, madam?”

 

“You heard me,” she batted her eyelashes and leaned closer to him.  “I am giving you the honor of spending the evening with me as your date.”

 

“Excuse me?  Giving me?”  Percival was annoyed as he gently released Giselle’s death grip from his arm.  “I believe you are mistaken.”

 

“What?”

 

“Yes, I am so sorry, dear sweet Giselle,” he placated in a condescending manner.  “But my evening has already been committed to another young lady.”

 

Giselle was not used to rejection, and she stood with her mouth gaping open.  “Who?”

 

Percival refused to answer. Instead, he excused himself and bowed gracefully at the awestruck Giselle and quickly made his way towards the rear of the hall.

 

Aubrey chuckled when Percival was out of earshot.  “Wow, Giselle.  That was amazing.  I had no idea your mouth could stay open for so long like that.  Are you trying to catch flies?  Or did you just realize you’re not the crème de la crème?”

 

Giselle snapped back to reality.  “Shut up, you.  Percival was obviously too immature to handle a woman like myself.  Besides,” she fluffed her hair dramatically.  “It’s his loss.”

 

Emily was pleased that the rain had ceased and the clouds had opened for the moonlight.  It was still chilly, and the elevation of the Swiss Alps caused the wind chill to bite more ferociously.  She shuddered, and almost jumped out of her skin as she felt an arm slip slowly around her waist.

 

Emily turned, and her eyes met with those of a tall young man with piercing blue eyes.  He had light brown hair that was meticulously combed to one side and was wearing an expensive Armani suit.  His lips curled into a smile.

 

Emily tried desperately to picture Buxton’s face as she admired this complete stranger.  He was undeniably handsome, and Emily felt herself becoming strongly attracted towards him.  She smiled shyly back, and tried to look away but his gaze seemed to pull her.  She remembered Aubrey telling her about how handsome the Novotzendorf boys were, but she never realized it fully until now.

 

“Hello,” he said softly.  He smiled to himself as he noticed Emily blush and glance quickly away. 

 

“Do I…. know you?”  Emily whispered, her voice quivering. She could not tell if her voice was shaking from the cold or the sudden intoxication this complete stranger seemed to have placed upon her.

 

Percival gently placed his hand on her cheek and successfully resumed her gaze.  “Not yet.  But you will.  The name is Percival, but you may call me Percy, or whatever your heart desires.  So long as you call me.”

 

Emily rolled her eyes and let out a laugh.  “Oh, so you’re the infamous mister Duckworth!”

 

Percival beamed.  “So you’ve heard about me?”

 

“Have I?” Emily snickered.  “I know about you, and all of your cheesy pick-up lines.   From what I hear, you are quite the womanizer.”

 

“Cheesy?”  Percival was shocked and caught completely off guard.  “Womanizer?  No, my dear.  You must have me mistaken with someone else.  I can assure you, I am nothing but a complete gentleman.”

 

“Is that so?” Emily raised an eyebrow.  “Well I can assure you that I am one conquest you will never attain.”

 

Percival was stunned.  He was not used to this type of behavior from the opposite sex.  No female had ever dared to reject his advances, and now the one he deemed most worthy to stand in his presence was giving him the cold shoulder.  He watched as she spun around on her heel and walked quickly back inside. 

 

“I don’t even know your name!” he called after her, but she was already lost in the crowd of adolescents. He decided to pursue her, but bumped into Sven and Aubrey, who were slow dancing in the middle of the hall.

 

“Hey, watch it, Perc.”  Aubrey growled at him.  “Look where you’re going next time.”

 

“I’m sorry, Aub.  I have to find her.”

 

“Who?”

 

“That…. girl, the one you were talking to earlier, Sven?”

 

Aubrey stopped dancing immediately.  “Oh my god,” she breathed. 

 

“What?”

 

“Emily?  You like Emily?”

 

“Emily?  Was that her name?”  Percival quickly made a mental note in the little black book in his head.  He liked the way it sounded.  “Emily,” he whispered to himself and smiled dreamily. 

 

“That’s wonderful!”  Aubrey was thrilled.  She had been so worried about her friend’s depressed state for some time, and their roommate’s moronic plan had actually worked.  This was very good news.  She beamed as she watched Percival walk away.

 

“Why is this wonderful?” Sven asked.  “You know how Percy is with women.  Why would you want to subject miss Chewster to that?  What would Elijah say?”

 

As Emily made her way through the crowded hall, she thought angrily of her father and the nerve he had to send her to such a school, where the neighboring boys were beyond attractive and yet completely arrogant.  She quickly decided that begging her father to send her home was getting nowhere; her father and stepmother believed that Schneidzerhorn was the best thing that could have ever happened to her.  But perhaps if she could somehow prove that it was a negative influence, they would bring her home for sure.  Emily would have to undergo a complete personality change.  She would have to become a bad girl and lose her angelic nature. 

 

Opting to spend the remainder of the evening on the bus, she watched as the autumn rain resumed its trickling against the windows.  A plan was concocted in her head, and she was certain that she would be back in Berlin before Christmas.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

The girls at Schneidzerhorn were amazed to discover the instantaneous change in Emily’s persona, and yet they welcomed it.  Emily had gone from being the painfully shy and depressed dorm mate to a full-fledged party animal.  She purchased a pink motorcycle and begged the girls to accompany her into town so she could get a tattoo.  She had first thought about getting Buxton’s name, but then fell in love with the idea of Hello Kitty on her lower back, holding a rose.  She winced in pain as her tattoo was created, but when they arrived back at the school, insisted that Aubrey take a picture of it.  Emily wrote a different type of letter to her parents, along with pictures of her tattoo and hanging out at the hub with her friends, obviously completely wasted and taking shots of vodka while holding steins of beer. 

 

“Isn’t that nice,” Elijah beamed as he shared the letter and pictures with the Chewster household.  “Emily finally is enjoying herself.”

 

“Dad,” Wolfgang interjected.  “Isn’t she too young to drink?”

 

“Hmm,” Elijah gave the pictures a second glance.  “I suppose you’re right son, but she is drinking Chewster beer so I’ll let it slide.  The important thing is that she is finally happy.”

 

“Why did she get a hello kitty tattoo?”  Peter stared at the picture.  “She should have gotten something cool, like a skull on fire.”

 

“A skull?”  Wolfgang scoffed.  “Nah, that’s lame.  She should have gotten a tat of a heart with a knife going right through it and dripping with blood.”

 

“Boys, boys!” Elijah raised his hands.  “Your sister can get a tattoo of whatever she wants!”

 

“Does that mean I can have a tattoo?”  Wolfgang piped.

 

“No!”

 

Emily was devastated when she received a response.  Apparently her newfound love of alcohol and tattoo had done nothing to astound her father.  She decided to take up smoking, but was unable to handle the taste of nicotine.  Instead, she asked Aubrey to take pictures of her holding a cigarette in order to make it look as though she were smoking.  Again, her father said nothing. He only remarked on how happy she looked and was pleased that Schneidzerhorn had lifted her spirits.  Frustrated, Emily tried desperately to think of what would upset her father the most.

 

Glancing at her nightstand, she noticed she had yet another delivery of red roses.  Ever since the autumn dance at Novotzendorf, Percival had constantly pursued her.  Refusing to acknowledge his advances, Emily received flowers almost on a weekly basis, with notes requesting that she call him.  Emily was unmoved, but held the envy of Giselle and Janice and most of the girls at Schneidzerhorn.  She tried to convince them that she had no interest in Percival, and although Janice said she believed her, there was a growing sense of animosity from the other girls at her school. 

 

Emily knew that she would always be her daddy’s little girl.  Although she may smoke, drink, have tattoos, or even become a criminal, she would never lose her father’s approval.  However one thing would most definitely cause her father to enter a state of panic, and that would be a boy. Not just any boy, but a real creep like Percival would ensure her father’s blood pressure to escalate to the point that he would have to pull her out of this school.

 

Emily sighed heavily as she re-read Percival’s latest note.  She wondered why this boy was so smitten by her.  She wished Buxton were still alive, as he would have not tolerated any other guy flirting with his wife.  She missed him now more than ever, and felt guilty for what she was about to do. 

 

“Hello?”

 

“Hi,” she gulped.  “Is Percival there?”

 

“Hold on one second,” the voice on the other end of the phone paused and called rather loudly, “hey!  Percy!  Telephone!”

 

“Who is it?” Emily could hear Percival’s deep voice through the receiver.

 

“I don’t know, some chick.”  Emily rolled her eyes bitterly, as she hated that term.

 

“Hello?” Percival’s voice seemed to deepen as he spoke softly into the phone.  “This is Percival.  Who is this?”

 

Emily suddenly became very nervous.  She knew that as much as she fought it, she was immensely attracted to this jerk.  “Hi Percival, I just called to uh, thank you for the flowers.”

 

There was a long pause on the other end of the line.  Emily imagined that a player like Percival probably sent flowers to many girls, and this clue was not that obvious.  This began to infuriate her and she almost hung up the phone. 

 

“So, it’s about time you’ve called me, Emily.” he finally said.  “I’ve been expecting you.”

 

“Expecting me?”  Emily scoffed.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“Oh, just that I knew it was only a matter of time before you gave into my charm.  Most girls can’t resist me.  I’m surprised you’ve held out this long.”

 

Emily wanted to smack him through the phone.  “Ah, but you just said ‘most’!” she quickly pointed out.  “So I must be in that elite five percent?”

 

“Ha ha, cute,” Percival said sarcastically.  “Emily, you are witty, no doubt about that.”

 

“Yeah, well I’d better go,” Emily said hurriedly. 

 

“No, wait!”  Percival shouted.  But Emily was already hanging up the phone. 

 

“Who was that?”  Aubrey asked as she entered the room. 

 

“Nobody,” Emily crossed her arms over her chest.  “A real nobody.”

 

Aubrey raised her eyebrows and noticed Emily was holding the card from Percival.  Emily quickly shoved the card into her pocket but it was too late.  “Wait a minute,” Aubrey grinned slyly.  “Were you just talking to Percival?”

 

“Maybe,” Emily teased.  “Why?  Does it matter?  He’s a loser.”

 

Aubrey laughed out loud.  “You like him!”

Emily was red-faced.  “No I don’t,” she insisted, although her friend could read her like a book. 

 

“Sure,” Aubrey teased.  “What’s not to like, right?  He’s rich, he’s handsome, and he’s charming….”

“Too charming if you ask me,” Emily crossed her arms.  “That guy is a complete jackass.  He believes that the sun rises and sets on him and that every girl is meant to fawn over him.  He’s so…fake.”

 

“I’d say go for it though,” Aubrey winked as she began to exit the room.  “After all, it may just be enough to shock your father.”

 

Emily nodded, and realized that Aubrey was right in confirming her suspicions.  Although she felt immensely guilty for betraying her commitment to Buxton, she was desperate to go home.  Besides, Percival was a feast to the eyes.  It would not hurt to pretend to like a boy who was that attractive. 

 

Percival continued to pursue the “unattainable Emily Chewster.”  He seemed to enjoy the challenge, and merely suspected she was playing hard to get.  Soon he was knocking on the door to their dorm.

 

“Percival!” Giselle gasped as she swung the door open.  “You naughty boy!  Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to be here?  Now kiss me!” In a dramatic style that resembled a desperate Scarlet O’Hara, she flung herself at him. 

 

Percival put up his hand.  “Don’t be stupid, Giselle.  I’m not here on your account.”

 

“Oh,” Giselle said scornfully and adjusted her blouse.  “Too bad for you.  You’ll never know what you’re missing.”

 

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” he said absentmindedly.  “Now where is your roommate?”

 

Giselle rolled her eyes in exasperation.  “If it’s Emily you’re looking for, she’s not here.  She’s in the science lab.  What a nerd.  Who goes to finishing school to learn about science?”

 

“Oh I don’t know,” Percival felt a sudden urge to defend the newest object of his desire.  “Somebody intelligent, sweet, and immensely beautiful.  But you wouldn’t know anything about that, now, would you?”

 

“Humph,” Giselle frowned and slammed the door in his face. 

 

Percival raced to the science lab and flung open the door.  Everyone gasped, and he was met with the admiring stares of about twelve females wearing white lab coats and goggles. 

 

“Young man,” professor Winslow looked disapprovingly at him.  “I believe you are at the wrong school.”  The girls giggled, and Percival turned red in embarrassment.

 

“Sorry, sir.  I needed to speak to one of your students,” Percival looked among the girls and smiled flirtatiously as he spotted Emily. 

 

“Well, take this outside then.  I can’t have you interrupting my lab.”

 

“Emily,” he stuck out his hand.  “Can I talk to you for a second?  Please?”

 

Emily sighed and took off her goggles.  “This had better be good.”

 

“What is it?” she asked rather sharply as she followed Percival into the courtyard. “I was in the middle of an experiment.”

 

“Oh, I have an experiment for you,” he grinned.  “What happens when you put two hot teenagers together in the back of an expensive car?”

 

Emily was disgusted.  “How dare you?” she wanted to smack him.  “I’ll have you know that you will never find me in the back of any car with you, expensive or not.”

 

“Come on, it’s just a joke.” Percival chuckled.  “But seriously,” he took her hand and looked deeply into her eyes.  Again Emily found herself lost in those icy pools of blue and paralyzed from looking away.  “I really do want to take you out.  Please.  I’ll be nothing but an absolute gentleman.  OK?”

 

“Well,” Emily breathed, unable to control the next words that were about to come out.  “OK, sure, I’ll go out with you.”  She was shocked at herself for what she just committed to.  She quickly added.  “But no kissing, no touching, no nothing.  Capiche?”

 

“Hey, hey,” Percival threw up his hands as if surrendering.  “I promise.  You can trust me.”

The next evening, Percival arrived at the school in a silver Mercedes.  The girls in her dorm house stood at the window in anticipation as the handsome Percival Duckworth parked the car. 

 

“He’s here!” Vanessa cried.  “Oh wow, Percival is here!”

 

“Yay,” Giselle muttered.  “I could just vomit.”

 

“Is somebody jealous?” Aubrey teased knowingly.  “Aw, is the princess bitch envious of queen Emily, who captured Percy’s heart before she even knew who he was?”

 

“Shut up,” Giselle burst into tears and ran upstairs to the room.

 

The doorbell rang and the other girls ran back to their rooms with giggles. 

 

“Percy,” Aubrey greeted him with a smile.  “I see you brought flowers.  How nice.”

 

“Hi Aubrey,” he smiled.  “Is Emily ready yet?”

 

“Oh, she’s coming right down.  She’s finishing the last of her makeup and stuff.  She wants to look her best.”

 

“Really?” Percival grinned.  “Well I don’t think it’s humanly possible for her to look even more beautiful.”

 

“Hey,” Aubrey whispered.  “Be good to her, OK?  She’s a good girl.  Don’t try anything stupid.”

 

“Moi?”

 

“Yeah, you.  All I’m saying is to watch it.”

 

Percival was about to answer when Emily emerged.  “Oh wow,” he breathed.  “You look gorgeous.”

 

Emily half-smiled back and handed her camera to Aubrey.  “Take a picture of us.”

 

Percival was intrigued to discover that Emily was putting her arms around his waist for the picture.  He wondered why she broke away suddenly after Aubrey snapped the picture.  “Let’s go,” she said and walked out the door. 

 

“Have fun, kids!”  Aubrey called after them.

 

“Don’t wait up for us,” Percival winked. 

 

“Watch it.”  Aubrey reminded him as she shut the door.

 

“So,” Percival opened the passenger door for her and admired her makeup.  She was wearing sparkly green eye shadow that enhanced the emerald hue in her eyes.  “What are you doing for the winter holiday?”

 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Emily said absentmindedly.  “Hopefully going back home.”

 

“And where is home?”

 

“Berlin,” she sighed. “Well, I’m really an American citizen.  But my father’s house is in Berlin.”

 

“Really?” Percival grinned.  “My cousin Wyatt lives in New Jersey.  Is that where you’re from?”

 

“Well, no,” Emily did not want to go into great detail about her life, including how her brother completely demolished her town.  “I was born in New York City, but then we moved to California.”

 

“So, did you know any movie stars?”

 

Emily laughed.  “No, not really.  Though I did meet some royalty.”

 

“Wow, you’re just so interesting,” Percival stared at her before turning on the ignition.  “I really would love to learn more about you.  Tell me everything.  I want to know your life story.”

 

“Wait a minute,” Emily smirked.  “Tell me yours first.”

 

Percival went on to explain that he came from an aristocratic family in Wales.  His mother, a well-known socialite, suggested that he enroll at Novotzendorf, following in his father’s and older brothers’ footsteps.  He was the youngest of four boys, and had a lot of pressure to live up to their expectations.  He was planning to enlist in the royal navy after graduation, and was excited to serve his queen. 

 

“The queen is lovely,” Emily smiled.  “We met her last summer when we took a trip to London.  We met the entire Windsor clan.”

 

“Really?” Percival was impressed.  “What is her majesty like?  How did you get to meet her?”

 

“My father was invited personally, and we stayed at Buckingham palace for one week.  The Windsors are avid Chewster beer drinkers, and they were very hospitable and accommodating.”  She left out the part about the queen’s grandson flirting with her, as she considered it to be highly embarrassing.

 

“Emily?” Percival asked as they parked at the restaurant.  “Do you want to spend the winter holiday with me?”

 

“With you?”

 

“Well,” Percival explained.  “With me and the guys.  I mean, you can have your little girlfriends along too, of course.  I reserved a lodge for us in the Alps.  Do you ski?”

 

“Yeah,” Emily smiled.  “I love to ski.  That sounds fun actually.”

 

The dinner was excellent and Emily enjoyed listening to the violinist who went from table to table, entertaining the patrons.  She actually was beginning to enjoy herself, and the handsome Percival Duckworth really was a complete gentleman.  He ordered the rack of lamb for the two of them, and the most expensive wine. 

 

Percival walked her to her door at the end of the evening.  “I had a wonderful time,” he whispered as he leaned in to kiss her goodnight.  Emily slowly placed a finger on his lips.  She shook her head.

 

“I don’t ever kiss on the first date.”

 

“Well then,” Percival smiled sweetly.  “We must have a second one then.”

CHAPTER SIX

 

Elijah was beaming as he read Emily’s newest letter.  “Well now,” he announced to his family and the Freuds, who were over at the Chewster estate that evening for dinner.  “I have wonderful news.  Emily has found someone.”

 

“What?” Hans gulped and dropped his glass of water.  It shattered on the dining room floor.

 

“Hansie!” his mother scolded.  “Pick that up!”

 

As he kneeled down to sweep up the broken glass and mop up the water, he listened in disbelief as Elijah read the letter.  “There are pictures in here as well.  The young man seems to come from a well-to-do family, the Duckworths of Cardiff.  They are Welsh aristocrats.”

 

“Is she getting married again?” Peter asked.  “Do I have to wear a suit to another wedding?”

 

“No,” Elijah laughed.  “I wouldn’t worry about that, my boy.  The important thing is, your sister is happy.”

 

“Are you sure?” Stewart asked.  “I mean, drinking, smoking, getting a tattoo and now this?  Are you sure she’s not just rebelling?”

 

“Nonsense!” Elijah laughed.  “Emily is the perfect daughter.  Rebellion is not in her nature.  What would she have to rebel against?”

 

“Oh I don’t know,” Stewart wondered how his father was so blinded.  “Maybe the fact that you sent her to a school that she hates.  I’m sure she felt neglected.”

 

“That’s ridiculous.  Why just look at how happy your sister is in these pictures.  She’s beaming.” 

 

Hans caught a glimpse of the photos.  Emily was throwing her arms around the same young man in every picture. Yet something did not look right. 

 

“She’s spending the winter holiday at an alpine lodge,” Elijah beamed.  “How wonderful.  Maybe this will be the perfect opportunity to finally get over Buxton.”

 

“You mean,” Hans breathed.  “She’s staying with…that boy?”

 

“Of course not!” Elijah exclaimed wholeheartedly. “She knows I would never allow that!  Surely she’ll be with other people too.”

 

Stewart groaned.  “I’m telling you dad, she’s rebelling.  Who knows what she’ll do?”

 

Hans was more than a little worried as he tossed and turned in his sleep.  He knew that something was definitely wrong, and if Stewart was correct, Emily could be in serious trouble.  He did not want her to be taken advantage of.  He decided to spend his holiday at the same lodge so he could get to the bottom of this curious behavior.

 

Hans searched for her once he arrived at the lodge, but did not have to look far.  He spotted her in a group of people, laughing and heading up the ski slope. 

 

“Emily!” he called.  She whirled around.

 

“Hans?  What are you doing here?” she grinned and gave him a hug.  Hans lingered in her arms for a moment, enjoying the warmth of her body against his.

 

“I, uh, decided to spend my vacation here,” he stammered.  “I like skiing.”

 

Emily looked pleased.  “You do?  I never knew you to ski!  You must join us on the slope.”

 

“Uh, yeah,” Hans gulped.  He realized he was in trouble, as he had never really skied before.  “I’ll be right back.  Let me get my equipment.”  He hurried back to the lodge and prayed that she did not sense his nervousness.

 

“Ooh, he’s cute,” Aubrey whispered as she linked arms with Emily.  “You never told me about him before.”

 

“Oh, that’s just Hans.  He’s the son of daddy’s attorney.”

 

“Well he’s cute,” she admired.  “Set me up with him, OK?”

 

“Uh, OK,” Emily felt strange.  “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

Emily introduced Hans to her friends.  Percival, Sven, Antonio, Wilhelm, Arthur and Giorgio nodded a greeting.  Vanessa, Aubrey, Janice and Eva shook his hand and smiled flirtatiously. 

 

Percival put his arm around Emily’s shoulders.  “Come on, baby.  I really want to try out this slope.”

 

“Baby?” Hans muttered as he raised an eyebrow. 

 

Hans was suspicious as he scornfully watched Percival wrap his arms around her.  It was especially curious when Emily suggested that Aubrey take picture after picture of them.  However, when the camera was put away, she basically ignored him.  Percival followed her up the hill and linked her hand in his.

 

“Baby, you are such a tease.”

 

“I am?” Emily wrinkled her nose at him.

 

“Yes, why do you only act like that when there’s a camera around?  You know the best things are done in private.”

 

Emily only winked flirtatiously at him and continued walking up the hill.  Hans was disgusted at Percival’s remark, and wondered why Emily was putting up with it.  He watched scornfully as Percival attempted to kiss her, but Emily pushed away.

 

“Ooh baby, you really are making me work for that kiss, aren’t you?”

 

Emily giggled.  “I guess you could say that.”

 

Hans felt somewhat sidelined as the group of friends chattered the rest of the way up the slope.  He decided to be the first to ski down the hill.

 

“Careful Hans,” Emily warned her friend. 

 

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” he called.  Muttering under his breath he added, “I’ll show that Percival guy a thing or two.  What’s he got that I haven’t?”

 

Hans took a deep breath and made his way down the slope.  The wind was rushing through his hair, hitting his face like tiny icicles.  He felt a rush of excitement and exuberance as he skied down the tall mountain.  However, at the end he stumbled and smacked his leg against a tree.  The pain was so intense but he did not want to cry for fear of Emily laughing at his misery.

 

“Hans!” Emily cried.  She raced down the slope on her skis and stopped gracefully in front of him.  Releasing her skis from her boots, she rushed over to help him up.

 

“Oh Hans,” she looked gravely worried and gently touched his cheek.  “Are you OK?  Please say something.”

 

Hans could not speak.  He could only moan in pain and thought he was going to pass out.

 

“Is he OK?” a worried Aubrey ran over to them. 

 

“I don’t know,” Emily examined his leg.  “It might be broken.  Go get the lodge medic.”

 

Hans was transported back to the cabin for a medical examination.  Fortunately, he was only diagnosed with a bad sprain, but no bones were broken.  The medic insisted that he elevate his leg and alternate between heat and ice.

 

“Oh Hans,” Emily sniffled.  “I am so sorry.”

 

“I’ll take care of you, Hans,” Aubrey interjected as she sat behind him and began massaging his shoulders.  “Ooh, you’re tense,” she remarked.  “It seems like you’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

 

“Yeah,” Hans sighed as he thought of Emily.  “I guess you could say I have.”  He thought Aubrey was a very nice girl, but would have much rather had Emily massaging his shoulders.

 

“Do you work out?” Aubrey interrupted his thoughts.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Do you…work out,” Aubrey repeated.  “You know, exercise?”

 

“Oh, well, yeah,” Hans said absentmindedly.  “I guess I do, sometimes.”

 

“I can tell,” she beamed.  “You have a very chiseled physique.”

 

Hans was rather disgusted at Aubrey’s forwardness, and glanced up at Emily, who was showing signs of disgust as well.  He smiled to himself, wondering if perhaps Emily was feeling a ping of jealousy. 

 

Percival sauntered over to them.  “Hey sorry, man,” he patted Hans on the head.  “I guess you shouldn’t have attempted the advanced course.  You need to learn to crawl before you can fly.”

 

Hans decided that he really did not like Percival, and now it was personal.  He really began to wonder what a goddess like Emily would see in a snob like Percival.

 

Percival put his arm around Emily’s shoulders.  “Come on, babe.  Let’s go back out to the course.”

 

Emily gently removed his arm.  “No, that’s OK, Percy.  I’d rather stay inside and warm up a bit.”

 

Percival put an arm around her waist and drew her near to him.  “All right, babe.  I think that idea sounds even better.  I can warm you up.”

 

“I think I’ve heard more than enough of that,” Hans muttered under his breath.

 

Aubrey jumped to her feet.  “I’m going to get some hot cocoa,” she announced.  “Would you like some, Hansie?”

 

“Yeah, sure.” Hans smiled at her.  “Thank you.”

 

“Hey Perc,” Giorgio called.  “Come on, let’s go back outside.”

 

“Hold on!” Percival shouted.  He turned a sweet smile on Emily.  “Babe, is that OK with you?  Can I go out to the course again?”

 

“Yeah, I’m not your keeper.”

 

Percival kissed her hand.  “That’s what I love about you, Em.  You’re so lenient.  It will only be a half hour, I promise.”

“Fine.  Go.”  Hans was certain that he could detect some irritability in her tone.

 

“Will you miss me?”

 

“Of course,” she smiled sweetly.  “But go have fun with your friends.  Go on.  You don’t want to keep the guys waiting.”

 

When Percival was out of earshot, Hans looked up at Emily.  “Come here, Emma.  I have to talk to you.”

 

“What’s on your mind, Hansie?” she smirked, enjoying his new nickname.

 

“Hansie, yeah,” he smirked.  “Anyway, what’s gotten into you?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“This isn’t like you,” he began.  “Drinking, smoking, getting tattoos….”

 

“Oh, that,” Emily winced.  “You know about all of that?”

 

“Yeah,” Hans nodded.  “And this Percival guy, what’s going on there?  Who is this guy?”

 

“Oh, he’s just a guy,” Emily shrugged.  “It’s nothing serious, if that’s what you’re asking.”

 

“And he’s constantly calling you baby,” he continued.  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

 

“Well, who says I can’t have a little fun?  Daddy doesn’t seem to mind.  In fact, he’s thrilled.  Nothing I do can disappoint him.  Not even this.”

 

“But Em, this isn’t you,” Hans objected.  “This isn’t you and you know it.  You are the sweet and angelic Emily Chewster, the perfect daughter and…”

 

“And what?’ Emily asked.  “And miserable?  Why do I have to be so perfect all the time?  Why does everyone keep putting that expectation on me?  What’s wrong with imperfect?”

 

“Nothing,” Hans pointed out.  “But when you change your personality like this, well, it bothers me.”

“Bothers you?” Emily’s brow furrowed.  “Why does this bother you so much?”

 

“It bothers me because I’m your friend,” Hans reached for her hand.  “I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

 

“Hurt again?  What are you talking about?”

 

“Emily,” Hans lowered his voice to a whisper.  “I know all about Buxton.”

 

“What?” Emily stood up.  “Don’t talk about him unless you know what you’re talking about!” 

 

“I know he died protecting you,” Hans whispered.  “Emily, it’s OK.  The secret’s safe with me.  I just don’t want you to do all this destructive behavior.”

 

“I want to go home,” she sniffled.  “But daddy won’t have me.  He doesn’t love me; he just wants me to stay at this stupid school so he doesn’t have to deal with me.”

 

“Oh no,” Hans argued.  “I know he loves you.  He just thinks this is the best thing for you.  He only wants you to be happy.”

 

“What will make me happy is to go home,” Emily sighed.  “I hate Schneidzerhell.  I hate the boys at Novotzendorf.  They’re all so good looking but arrogant as hell.  Especially Percy.”

 

“So you’re just using him,” Hans suggested.  “You’re using him to infuriate your father.  Only it’s not working, and your dad thinks you’re going to end up marrying this guy.”

 

“Ha!” Emily laughed.  “Never.  I don’t care for him; he’s just some guy who fit the bill.  I’m not looking for anyone right now.”

 

“If you were,” Hans boldly gulped.  “Looking, I mean.  Would I have a chance?”

 

Emily sighed and looked into Hans’ eyes.  “You’ve changed, Hans.  I think you’ve grown up.  You’re not that annoying boy anymore that was chasing me around at your parents’ Christmas party.”

 

“Is that a yes or a no?”

 

“I don’t know,” Emily shrugged.  “Honestly, I am still grieving over Buxton and these things take time.  I don’t know who I’ll end up with.  Maybe you, maybe someone else, maybe nobody.”

 

“But I do have a chance?  Ever so slight?”

 

“Yeah, there’s always a chance.”

 

“Say no more,” Hans almost leaped off the couch until he remembered his leg.  “That’s good enough for me!”

 

Emily continued attending Schneidzerhorn, and graduated that following spring.  She immediately enrolled at Oxford University, and later Humboldt University’s medical school program.  Hans wrote letters to her every week since the revealing ski trip, and he never gave up the hope that one day they would end up together.  However he considered her to be his best friend first and foremost, and knew that in due time she would be complete in dealing with her grief over Buxton.  He only had to hang in there until then.

FINIS

RisingTensions

© 1996 Gross, Rovira, Trotta, © 2009 Chewster Castle

Rising Tensions

by Garrett Gross, Ashley Rovira, and Ellie Trotta

CHAPTER ONE

The encounter between the
elderly, yet childish fishmonger from Finland and the German
mathematical genius in California was extraordinary. It was
extraordinary for their lives to overlap at all, but the meeting
between them was even more amazing as an event of love at first
sight.

Anne Frances Foyla –
German immigrant to the US, single mother, high school teacher –
was known as Annie to all of her friends and family. Two years living
in New York City colored her native accent and now she taught algebra
and geometry to the teenagers of Burbank, California. Her past life
in Manhattan left her pronouncing “two” as “choo.”
Annie was married for five years to a prominent brewery owner named
Elijah Chewster, who fathered her four children. Annie was happy with
Elijah when he was a local business owner, but the pressures of being
the wife of an international tycoon dashed her hopes for a simplistic
life. In her heart, she felt she was just a humble teacher, albeit a
genius and obsessive one. The thrills of the jet set were for other
people. Annie merely wanted to lead a quiet suburban life with her
kids. Elijah deeply regretted the loss of his family. A severe
depression overtook him and he tried desperately, first to keep his
family together, then to ensure that Annie and his children had every
kind of comfort. Annie, however, was reluctant to accept his charity.
She accepted only moderate financial help and even often returned his
gifts to the children. For example, he wanted to buy a house for them
to live in, but she insisted that a three-bedroom apartment was
sufficient. He wanted to enroll the kids in private schools. She
insisted that the public schools of Burbank were fine. When he sent
an Atari game set for the kids, she donated it to the Salvation Army
because she preferred the kids to use their spare time for extra math
exercises. She only allowed one television to be in the apartment,
with sharp restrictions on its use. Yet for all her endeavors to be
independent of her ex-husband’s bounty, there were times when
she couldn’t deny that her teacher’s salary was stretched
thin and they could greatly benefit from Elijah’s help. This
fact only added to her list of frustrations and she tended to vent
those feelings in hostile tones to her bewildered children. Moreover,
as each of them moved into adolescence, it became more difficult to
deny that they were each especially troubled. Tatiana, the eldest,
was increasingly angered by her lack of royal status. Friedrich’s
obsession with World War II was now a full-blown backing of the wrong
side. Sean seemed to believe he was Luke Skywalker in the flesh,
while Emily, being severely depressed, and often refused to eat for
days at a time. Never one to wallow in self-pity, but finding herself
less able to resist it, Annie needed help beyond the financial kind.
By then, Elijah was living in Germany with his new aristocratic wife
and four adopted sons. Unsure of where to turn and what answers to
seek, Annie was ready to try almost anything to restore what once
felt like a good life for her family.

A few thousand miles
away, across several seas, there was a legend among the Finnish
people that the eccentric old man called Jephthah had been born on a
beach in the middle of a foggy storm in Turku. His mother being a
spinner for the old Duke of Turku, Jephthah had been raised in the
servants’ quarters of the Duke’s castle. Jephthah’s
mother was a deeply religious Catholic, who, every night before bed,
read biblical stories to her son. His namesake, in fact, was a
biblical fishmonger from the Book of Judges. Jephthah was obsessed
with the sea and all of the sea life, especially fish, from an early
age. He and his two friends, Schmidt and Franz, would often leave
school early in order to go fishing. The three obsessed fishermen
were extremely tight knit and grew old together, never marrying, and
actually remaining celibate. Schmidt and Franz were the sons of the
old Duke’s head chef, so the three fishmongers grew old
together at the castle. They divided their time between fishing,
biblical studies, hopscotch, and jumping rope. They walked around the
outskirts of Turku, along the Aura River, wearing faded overalls,
windmill caps, and handspun fish-embroidered moccasins, courtesy of
Jephthah’s mother. Their unconventional ways attracted sneers
from the locals. Some said they were homosexual. Others said they
were just inexplicable freaks of nature. Still others, with bigoted
notions, insisted that to be homosexual and freakish was one and the
same. Yet the three fishermen seemed oblivious to the snide remarks
of passersby. They whistled and hummed folk tunes in the course of
their daily errands. Moreover, they were undeniably talented. Schmidt
could open cans with his fishhook, while Franz was the nationwide
hopscotch champion for several years. For his part, Jephthah was
better at cleaning fish than anyone either the old or latter duke had
ever employed.

Jephthah and his friends
lived during the reigns of two Dukes. They were approximately a
decade older than the latter Duke. By the time the old geezers were
about sixty, the Duke was happily married. The Duke and Duchess badly
wanted children, however, and hoped especially to have a son who
could supplant the succession rights of their errant nephew. They
would naturally have been happy and proud to have a daughter, but the
archaic laws of the dukedom restricted the succession to heirs male.
The problem was that the Duchess seemed unable to carry a child to
full term.

One day, the Duke and
the joyously pregnant Duchess were savoring a favored lunch of
poached salmon and grilled vegetables. It was a particularly fine
day. They were in good spirits, too, on account of the Duke’s
troublesome nephew and heir presumptive, Lord Oskar, being set to
leave country again. Oskar had recently returned to Turku from his
Swiss boarding school, but today he was leaving again in order to
spend the rest of the summer as hedonistically as possible. Oskar was
17, narcissistic, and cruel. Therefore, the Duke and Duchess, and
everyone else who lived at the castle were glad to be rid of him.

In the course of lunch,
the Duchess suddenly gasped and grabbed her throat. She couldn’t
breath and she felt like she would choke. The Duke sprang to his feet
and rushed to her. 

“Ingeborg, my love,” he cried
helplessly as the color drained from her face and she lost
consciousness.

Naturally, for a man who
was no stranger to death threats from loony anti-royalists, the Duke
instinctively suspected that the food was poisoned. A hasty
investigation determined that there was an unknown poison in the
salmon. The Duke approached Jephthah furiously. He could not stay
angry long, however, for he knew deep down that the locally renowned
fishmonger with a heart of gold was incapable of attempted murder.
Jephthah, moreover, was so ashamed for having failed to cleanse the
salmon properly that he offered to assist the Duke in anyway
possible. The Duke, therefore, put Jephthah to the task of traveling
to a laboratory in California, where the Duke’s former Stanford
classmate and friend could analyze the poisonous sample. The American
scientist was the Duke’s last hope toward saving the Duchess as
well as her unborn child.

Accompanied by his
inseparable pals, Schmidt and Franz, Jephthah boarded the Duke’s
Gulfstream jet. Having landed at the airport in Burbank, just north
of Los Angeles, the elderly Finns rented a truck and drove to the
laboratory of Geoffrey Grousseaux, PhD.

Dr Grousseaux was a
world famous biomedical engineer whose laboratory specialized in
genetic engineering. He had been a close friend of the science
enthusiast Duke at Stanford University. He had been expecting the
Finnish trio, but was puzzled, first by their resemblance to the
Three Stooges, then by the poisonous sample. He worked for several
hours until he finally produced an antidote that he promised would
cure the Duchess. 

“I can’t promise to save the child,”
he said grimly as he adjusted his geeky headgear. The headgear
consisted of a mechanical magnifying glass and a strobe light.
Grousseaux poured several liters of antidote into a bottle and handed
it to Jephthah. “It’s a shame Sverre has to be a duke
because, without those duchy duties he has, he would be a great
psychologist. He graduated at the top of the psychology department.”

The Finns nodded, hardly
comprehending any of this rapidly spoken English. Oblivious to their
lack of comprehension, they felt uncomfortable as the American’s
eyes misted over in nostalgic haze. “Sverre and I had some
great times at college,” said Dr. Grousseaux with a sigh.

Awhile later, as the jet
was refueling for the return journey, the Finns found themselves
extremely famished. So they crammed into the yellow truck Jephthah
had rented and headed for the nearest supermarket. Franz walked down
the supermarket aisle, pushing the shopping cart. They were
overwhelmed by the grocery store, which was larger than any market in
their home village. Suddenly, Schmidt yelped for joy. He began
jumping and pointing to a section in the aisle. Jephthah and Franz
saw that he was pointing at huge cans with pictures of fried chicken
on them. The trio bought all six cans. While they were in the
checkout line, they kept grinning at each other. When they arrived at
the hangar, the plane was still refueling, so they sat down on the
floor of the waiting room to open the cans.

After an hour of hard
work opening the cans with their fishhooks, they excitedly peered
inside one, expecting to find chicken. Instead, all they found was
cooking oil! Disappointed, Schmidt and Franz stood up and went
off to board the plane, which was finally finished refueling.
Jephthah, however, was still staring at the cooking oil.

Franz turned back just
before exiting the room. “Are you coming?” he asked.

Jephthah looked up and
shook his head. “No. Take the antidote back for the Duchess.
I’d like to stay and explore America a bit more. Americans
certainly have a weird way of eating chicken.”

After spending the night
in a cheap motel on Olive Avenue, Jephthah awoke feeling homesick. He
hopped into the yellow truck and drove up Olive toward the Burbank
hillside. Gradually ascending into the hills, the old man soon parked
the truck and walked toward the woods. Somewhere deep into those
woods, far from the road, he discovered the ruins of a stone edifice.
Excitedly, he set to work building a replica of the Duke’s
castle at home. Having worked up a voracious appetite, he returned to
the motel to clean up. Then he reemerged from the motel, hopped in
the truck, and drove until he found a ramshackle seafood restaurant.
He parked the truck behind the restaurant and sauntered inside.

Although Jephthah wasn’t
feeling remotely self-conscious, the other patrons of the restaurant
observed his dirty beard and fishy smell with derision and scorn.

“Can I help you,
Sir?” A tall, lanky Chinese boy, about 18, bounced over to the
old man. “My name is Sydney Chong. Are you dining alone today,
Sir?”

“Sure, er, yeah,”
Jephthah replied. The waiter’s excited energy bewildered him.
It didn’t help that Jephthah’s English was not much above
elementary-school level.

Sydney Chong steered
Jephthah to a table and the fishmonger decided to order fresh salmon.
As he waited for the food, he glanced around the restaurant. His blue
eyes almost instantly met with the hazel eyes of a woman in her early
forties. She was pale and had frizzy, curly brown hair. There was a
bald spot on her head that Jephthah found incredibly sexy. He grinned
at her. Her face was nearly split in half by the huge grin she
flashed in response. She got up from her table and briskly walked
over.

“Hi,” she
said, extending her right hand towards him. “I’m Annie
Foyla Chewster.”

Jephthah looked at her
hand with confusion. He shrugged, deciding to ignore the foreign
gesture. “My name is Jephthah.”

“Interesting
name,” Annie commented. “Where are you from?”

“Finland.”

“Ah, Finland,”
she said, hardly knowing why she felt so happy around this eccentric
stranger. “Back in New York, one of my children’s
teachers was Finnish… or….” She trailed off,
doubting herself. “Swedish or
something like that.”

“Are you from New
York?” Jephthah asked. The idea of the Big Apple was both
intriguing and scary to his unsophisticated mind.

Annie flashed her
face-splitting grin. “Yes, kind of,” she said. “I’m
originally from Germany, but I’m now a math teacher at Burbank
High School. What do you do?”

“I fish.”

“For a living?”

“Well, you have to
eat to survive, so that’s what I do.”

Annie was delighted by
his matter-of-fact philosophy. She decided to invite him to dine at
home with her family that evening. Feeling the same inexplicable rush
of euphoria that had overtaken Annie, Jephthah accepted the
invitation.

CHAPTER TWO

Even the Duke of Turku,
with his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology, would have recognized
that, in the final decade of the 20^th century, the Foyla
Chewsters were a prime example of a typical dysfunctional family. Yet
their odd obsessions made them anything but typical. They could not
even be categorized. They weren’t typically “middle-class,”
yet were not “upper-class” at all. Annie was born in
Germany, had a tainted German/New York accent, but lived in Los
Angeles County, California. The ex-wife of a tycoon, she now lived on
a high school teaching salary. The kids sprung from German heritage
on both sides – the elder two, Tatiana and Fred, had been born
in Germany – yet all four spoke American-accented English and
hardly spoke any German. Their father was the wealthy scion of a
world famous beer, but they lived in a three-bedroom apartment, the
two boys in one room with a bunk bed, the two girls in another with
twin beds, and Annie occupying the third room with her triangular
queen-size mattress. Annie discouraged the kids from watching the TV
shows that other 90s teenagers loved. Instead of watching Beavis &
Butthead or My So-Called Life, the Foyla Chewster kids had
to endure their mother’s round-the-clock math lessons. They had
scheduled times for educational shows on public television, but Annie
forbade them to watch “garbage” like MTV and Nickelodeon.
Aged 16, Friedrich (“Fred”) was a calculus whiz. Emily,
at 15, also excelled in their mother’s expertise until the
death f her closest school friend brought on severe depression and
she now had to repeat geometry. Sean and Tatiana, respectively 15 and
17, merely managed to get through math with passing grades. Sean’s
genius and obsession was for computers and mechanics. Tatiana loved
her history lessons. She had an incredible memory for historical
facts, especially if they related to royalty. Sean and Tatiana were
mostly straightforward. Regarded by his siblings as the most immature
among them, even by his younger twin, Emily, Sean compared everything
in life to Star Wars. Tatiana wished more than anything to be
a real, working princess, with a vault full of magnificent jewels and
daily round of charitable engagements.

Fred and Emily were far
more complicated. By now, Fred was a full-blown Nazi, despite his
paternal Jewish heritage. No one in the family understood why this
was so. The warning signs of his childhood – relentless
attachment to his Oscar the Grouch toys, pencil-drawn toothbrush
mustaches on his upper lip, geometrical analysis of the swastika, and
so forth – had been dismissed as childish nonsense or relics of
a disturbing, but passing phase. So it was that Fred immersed himself
in one of the darkest chapters of human history.

Emily was immersed in
another kind of darkness. While Fred subscribed to hatred of certain
ethnic groups, Emily developed an intense self-loathing. She hated
everything about herself – her embarrassingly long string of
nine names, the boredom she felt towards everything, her distinctly
un-Chewster-like appearance and personality. Until her post-traumatic
depression, she excelled in school because it was expected of her,
but she never had a favorite subject. Now her grades were failing,
she lost interest in boys, and she shrank from social situations.

On the day Annie invited
Jephthah to dinner, Emily was in the room she shared with Tatiana,
trying to write down her feelings in a pink satin-bound diary.

Emily Michelle
Gwendolyn Anne Alexandra Marie Autumn Brinley Chewster. How
did I ever wind up with such a name? My brothers and sister have
short, simple names. But not me.

She lay, stomach down, on
her bed. Dropping her pen, she rolled onto her back and looked at the
ceiling. She thought despondently about her life and struggle to deal
with her psychotic family. She often wondered what transpired in the
past to give them their obsessive personalities. Were they always
like this? Was it inherited? She hoped not. She had to think back,
but how? Being the youngest of the four Chewster children, she most
likely wouldn’t be able to think back far enough. Her mother,
Anne Frances Foyla Chewster, was born in Essen, Germany, daughter of
a World War II Luftwaffe veteran. Annie had three brothers: Richard,
now an Oxford professor; Wilhelm, a jet-setting playboy; and Dean, a
widower who lived in Las Vegas with his two sons. Throughout high
school in Essen, Annie was in love with geometry. It was also in
Essen where she met Elijah Chewster.

Elijah Chewster was born
in Warsaw, Poland in 1956. The only child of a German Jewish diplomat
and his Polish Jewish wife, Elijah was orphaned at the age of eleven.
Eventually, he moved to Essen to live with his rich uncle, from whom
he inherited the small family-owned business that he had by now
transformed into a worldwide conglomerate.

At the end of 1976,
Elijah and Annie were married, and in June of the following year,
they had their first-born child, Tatiana Marie Claire Chewster.
Friedrich Siegfried Elijah Chewster came along into the physical
world in April 1978. Early in 1979, when Annie was six months
pregnant, the family relocated to New York, where Elijah was going to
establish the first North American subsidy of Chewster Beer. The
twins, Sean and Emily, were born on April 13. Sean came six minutes
ahead of Emily, but the “age difference” was inversely
proportionate to their maturity levels.

Less than a year after
the twins were born, Annie and Elijah decided to separate. Liking her
new stateside residence, Annie searched for teaching positions around
the US, and a colleague at the school in Brooklyn where she worked
helped her secure a position at Burbank High School in southern
California, teaching geometry and algebra.  Having a
geometry-obsessed mother was among Emily’s many complaints
about her life. Her mother’s round-the-clock lectures disgusted
her. Annie could hardly enter a grocery store or sit down for a meal
without finding something to calculate the circumference of. Emily
craved a loving and strong mother figure, but what she had was a
live-in, robotic, round-the-clock governess.

Sharing a room with
Tatiana, her only sister, might have been a source of comfort to
Emily, something like, if not equal to, doting maternal affection.
But while Tatiana frequently amused Emily, the older sister was no
companion for the younger. Between them, there would never be a silly
sisterly discussion about boys. When Emily happened to mention a boy
she thought was cute, Tatiana expressed the opinion that boys without
royal blood weren’t worthy of being liked by a Chewster.

Likewise, Sean was too
immature and extragalactic-absorbed to be Emily’s shoulder to
cry on. As for Fred, his mere presence terrorized Emily. She never
spoke negatively about him, and she tried to suppress her negative
thoughts about him, for to do otherwise would have been a gross
contradiction of her angelic nature. But Fred was a test of even
Emily’s patience.

On the day of Jephthah
entering their lives, Emily was not the only one of the kids who
wallowed in self-pity. For the past week, Tatiana had been plunging
into the depths of uncharacteristic, but no less painful inadequacy.
Possibly in a turn for the worse of her menstrual cycle, she keenly
felt that she was entirely short of the royal ideal. It broke Emily’s
already ailing heart to see Tatiana in such despondence. The
despondency did not lift until Jephthah arrived. Fred put himself
forward, attired in his best suit and tie, and began to quiz Jephthah
about his knowledge of the Third Reich.

Tatiana ran up to Fred,
put her hand on his zit-cluttered face, and pushed him away. Then she
flashed a smile for Jephthah and drawled sweetly, “So…
Tell us about Finland.”

Jephthah eagerly told
the Chewster kids and Annie about his native country. When he
mentioned that there was a Finnish royal family and his boss was the
Duke of Turku, Tatiana was delighted for the first time after a week
of indulging her disheartened spirits.

Sean, bored to death by
this time, stalked off to his room, which he shared with Fred, to
listen to his Star Wars soundtrack CD.

The following day,
Tatiana checked out a book from the local library. She stepped inside
the overly air-conditioned building and checked out the book
entitled, The Finnish Seat of Power. With a new topic to
obsessively dissect, Tatiana was able to vanquish her feeling of
inadequacy. Emily silently wondered whether her sister’s new
ambition would be to marry into the family of Jephthah’s
employer.

CHAPTER THREE

The city of Burbank
actually paid Jephthah to finish building the castle he had started,
as well as hire professional construction contractors to help him!
After all, how many castles are there in California? When the castle
was finished, Jephthah furnished it with antiques imported from
Turku. The Duke had decided that the newly christened “Museum
of Finnish Culture” would be a good investment. A live-in staff
was hired to maintain the castle and operate the museum. In the
meantime, Jephthah and Annie fell in love, became engaged, and he
invited her and the kids to move in.

The announcement of a
hastily arranged marital engagement to teenage children might weigh
heavily on some parents. Annie was not overly fussed about it,
though. She breezed into the common area of the Foyla Chewster
apartment one Saturday morning to find her kids watching a Road
Runner cartoon on TV. “Oh kids,” she said, too belated
about Jephthah to scold them too harshly.

“Mom,”
protested Sean, who had been enjoying the cartoon more than the
others, “why can’t we watch something entertaining for
once? It’s the weekend!”

Annie shushed her
younger son. “Kids, I have something serious to tell you.”

“Uh oh,”
Tatiana rolled her eyes. “Who has Fred offended now?”

“No one who didn’t
deserve it,” Fred retorted.

“Is it bad news?”
Emily whined. “I can’t deal with anymore bad news.”

Annie sighed from
exasperation. “You kids are depressing! I have wonderful news!
Jephthah and I are… getting married!”

Each kid responded with
stunned surprise.

Tatiana’s jaw
dropped. “What?” she exclaimed.

Fred looked mildly
amused. Sean looked disgusted.

Emily looked to be on
the verge of tears. “What about Daddy?”

“What about him?”
Annie asked dismissively. “We divorced a long time ago.
Besides, he married that other woman.”

Emily’s lip
trembled as she continued: “I guess I just thought… that
one day we’d all be a happy family again.”

Sean recovered his voice
now. “Do we have to call him Dad?”

“That would be
nice,” said Annie.

“Can I refuse?”
Sean persisted.

“Me too,”
said Emily.

“You two should be
the most thrilled,” Annie said to the twins. “After all,
Elijah and I divorced right after you were born. You have no memory
of my former marriage.”

“Why did you
divorce Daddy?” Emily asked, the tears welling up in her eyes
now.

“I don’t
want to talk about it,” Annie snapped.

“Big deal,”
said Tatiana brazenly. “You told me a dozen times. You didn’t
want to be his trophy wife.”

Sean raised his eyebrows
as he looked at Annie. “That’s the reason? That’s a
pretty stupid reason if you ask me.”

“I always
suspected Elijah can’t be my real father,” Fred said in a
bored tone. He was slouching and leaning back into the couch.

“He is your real…
I mean, your biological father. But Jephthah is going to be your new
and improved father. I’d like to see Elijah build a castle!
Ha!”

“Jephthah is not
Jewish, is he?” Fred asked.

“I doubt it.”

“Good. So he is
new and improved then!”

Tatiana stared at Fred
with a scowl. “You’re retarded, Fried-rich!” (When
she wanted to annoy him, which was often, she would pronounce his
name like a dumb American without a clue about how to pronounce
German names.)

Fred had a spiteful
reply on the tip of his tongue, but Emily was quicker. “So, are
we going to be in your wedding?” she quickly asked Annie,
wanting to bypass a potential fiasco between her older siblings.

“I want to wear
periwinkle,” she went on. “That’s a good color for
me. And Ana should wear peach…”

“Sorry, guys,
we’re not doing the whole charade,” Annie cut Emily off.
“We’re going to elope.”

Emily felt as if Annie
had thrown a dagger into her heart. “You mean, you…
don’t even want us there… at your wedding?”

Tatiana shook her head
in disgust. “That’s pretty messed up, Mom.”

Sean nodded. “Yeah,
this whole thing is messed up.”

Fred perked up slightly.
“It’s not that bad. Jephthah might be able to give us the
discipline we so desperately need.”

“Which reminds
me,” Annie began. “We will be moving into the museum!”

Sean looked horrified.
“What? We’re going to live… in a museum?”

Emily brightened up.
“Just like in a book I read once…”

“I remember that
book,” Tatiana said. “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs.
Basil E. Frankweiler, right?”

“That’s it,”
said Emily, feeling pleased.

Annie interrupted, “So
there will be some new responsibilities placed on all of you as far
as overseeing the castle staff.”

“I’ll keep
them in line,” Fred assured her.

“So we’re
going to have jobs?” Tatiana quizzed hopefully. “Like
royal duties?”

“Sort of,”
said Annie with a frown. “We are to pose as Finnish royalty for
the visitors of the museum.”

This idea delighted
Tatiana beyond measure. “Really?”

“Oh brother,”
Emily said, while Sean said, “This is retarded. I don’t
want to be involved in this charade.”

Tatiana was lost in her
reverie. “You mean, I could be like, a princess? Princess
Tatiana of Finland?”

“Yes,” Annie
replied matter-of-factly.  “You and your sister will be
princesses.”

“I’d rather
be an empress,” said Emily.

“Or queen,”
Tatiana suggested.

“Or grand
duchess,” added Emily. “Like your Romanov namesake, Ana.
‘Grand Duchess Emily,’ adorned in periwinkle gown and
glittering tiara…” Emily’s eyes misted over into
dreamland.

“Emmy should be
a princess,” Sean said practically. “Because Luke
Skywalker’s twin sister was Princess Leia, and since Emily is
my twin…”

Annie grew impatient at
this point. “Knock it off, all of you. Emmy and Ana will be
princesses.”

“Does Finland even
have a royal family?” Sean asked.

“Not really,”
began Tatiana, truly in her element, “But Jephthah worked for
the Duke of Turku, who is definitely the senior Finnish noble and the
only one of ducal rank. I’ll have to do more research on it,
but I think they are related to the Swedish royal family…”

“Good work, C3PO,”
Sean said, giving Tatiana a thumbs-up.

“And Fred and Sean
will each be a prince,” continued Annie.

“Like I said,”
returned Sean, “I don’t want to be a part of this stupid
game. Anyway, Fred is Chewy, who was definitely not a member of any
royal family, so it doesn’t work.”

“I don’t
want to be a prince or Chewy,” complained Fred. “Can’t
I be… Führer?”

Annie firmly denied that
request while Fred’s siblings rolled their eyes and groaned.
Tatiana told Fred he was retarded.

“You’re such
a broken record, Tatiana,” said Fred.

“That’s the
pot calling the kettle black,” retorted Tatiana.

“Kids, kids,
kids!” Annie yelled impatiently. “Shut up! Stop
bickering! I’m getting a migraine!”

“I’m going
for a walk,” said Emily, standing up from the love seat where
she and Tatiana sat. 

Sean got up to join her. As Sean and Emily
walked outside, Emily spoke up: “I can’t believe Mom is
getting married and not inviting us.”

“I can’t
believe we have to live in a museum,” said Sean. “Why
can’t Mom marry someone who built a starship?”

“I don’t
want Jephthah to replace Daddy.”

“He won’t,”
assured Sean, placing his arm around his twin. “Not if you
don’t let him.”

Annie was given a
special section of the castle that was situated in the middle of the
inner courtyard. It became her home and refuge, but its main function
was as an evening school for adults to further than understanding of
math. Annie loved her cylindrical tower, the door of which faced the
Great Hall, where her kids lived. Fred’s accommodation was the
most bizarre. Jephthah liked Fred, who was always polite to the old
man, so Fred was indulged in having the subterranean lair of his
dreams. The little Nazi genius (Fred was very short) built an
elaborate and utterly ridiculous security system to guard the
entrance. You had to walk through a secret passage in the library to
even reach it. Visitors never saw this ominous part of the museum. As
for Jephthah, being a devout celibate Roman Catholic, his
accommodation was separate from Annie’s. He made a humble abode
for himself in the Great Hall, but generally fell asleep in his boat,
as it gently rocked in the manmade lake on the grounds.

Olga Polk, the
housekeeper and commander-in-chief of all the housemaids, lived in a
suite under the Great Hall staircase. She was elderly, bony, and had
a head as bloated as a balloon filled with 200 million tons of
oxygen. It was also amazing that her tiny body withstood the colossal
weight of her huge hairdo, which Fred liked to say reminded him of
the Hiroshima bomb! Ironically, however, Miss Polk, as she was always
known, thought her hair was gorgeous. Tatiana said Miss Polk was just
a self-righteous, nosy, opinionated bobble head.

Dr. David (“Call
me Dave”) Sussman was the museum’s historian. He was in
charge of the archives, the collection, and the docent staff. He also
lived in the castle. Three days a week, he would give the visitors a
lecture about Finnish history.

Other staff members
included Suzette, the young Armenian cook who whined about
everything; Julian, the security guard, with his long blonde ponytail
and fond memories of his former job as a grocery-store stacking boy;
and Kermit, the 19-year-old part-time butler who also attended Los
Angeles Valley College.

Jephthah was walking
along Palm Avenue one sunny afternoon, with his hands in the front
pockets of his overalls and whistling an old Finnish folk tune. He
was going to Annie’s old apartment to pick up some last minute
things. He was so distracted with his melody that he failed to notice
the emaciated figure creeping along behind him.

Suddenly, having just
felt a hand touch his pocket, he jumped. The young thief jumped back
in surprise as well, for he had anticipated a successful pickpocket
and was astounded that he had pulled out a plastic orange roughy,
which apparently served as Jephthah’s key chain.

“What are you
doing with my fish, young fella?” Jephthah studied the boy
intently.

“I… I…”
The teenage boy tried to think of an answer suitable for the awkward
situation.

Jephthah looked at him
closely. “Are you… hungry?”

The boy only nodded,
taken aback by his intended victim’s kindness. He buried his
face in his fingerless gloves and sobbed.

“Dear boy, where
are your parents?”

“I… I don’t
know,” the boy replied. “I don’t really have
parents, or a family at all.”

“Well, now,”
Jephthah exclaimed. “Today is your lucky day! For today I will
become your father. Come, I’ll take you to my castle.”

The boy, who soon
introduced himself merely as BM, was flabbergasted when he saw the
magnitude of his new home in the wooded hills. He thanked the old man
generously for taking him into a better life. No longer would he have
to steal to survive. He was even given a job as the castle gardener.

BM quickly became
Emily’s best friend, though he also bonded with Sean through
their mutual liking of Star Wars. Like the twins, BM was 15.
He enjoyed reading books about vampires, shoplifting X-Men comic
books, dreaming of world conquest, and watching violent, bloody
movies. Despite his odd and sometimes psychotic notions, he became
Emily’s best buddy and the only person who showed her true
empathy.

[Extract from Emily’s
diary]

September 15, 1995

Living in a castle is
a sure annoyance. At first, I thought it would be great…
servants to pick up after me, plenty of space to get away from Fred,
and great scenery. Actually, it sucks living in a museum. True to Mom
and Jephthah’s intentions, the weekly visitors are somehow
convinced that Ana and I are Finnish princesses. I guess they think
the only people who could possibly live in a castle in Burbank would
be exiled Scandinavian royalty. With their cameras flashing at me,
and their obnoxious comments, I don’t feel safe in my own home.
Granted, Julian is a great security guard, but he cannot be around me
all the time. Aren’t princesses supposed to have a detail of
bodyguards, so where is mine? I mentioned my fears to Ana and she
chuckled. She thinks it’s all a big joke. She loves the
attention, and she is flattered by her elevation in social status.

Sean does not like
the visitors at all. Because of them, he cannot watch Star Wars
in the screening room during certain hours. During visitors’
hours, the screening room is used solely for Finnish documentaries
chosen mutually by Jephthah and Dr. Sussman, and during those times,
no one in the family is allowed in there. Jephthah is afraid of one
of us ruining his museum. He likes us, but he is always paranoid that
we will break the exquisite antiques the Duke and Duchess have sent
over.

Fred spends most of
his days in his lair. Who knows what he’s doing in there? He
won’t let anyone in and has even installed a security system to
prevent intrusion of his territory. His suite is not anywhere near
the rest of us (thank God). It is located through the library, which
is at the farthest end of the west wing. The visitors aren’t
even allowed to see that part of the castle. Fred built a complex
retina scan system so that only he and those personally invited by
him can gain access. He is such a perfect example of how scary
misapplied genius can be.

One day, I was walking
through the garden when I passed BM while he did his clipping and
snipping on the bushes. He likes to make to gargoyles and things out
of the foliage. We greeted each other in our usual cheerful manner.
He decided to turn on the sprinklers, which reminded me that I had to
pee. Unable to make it back to my suite in time, I decided to use the
public restroom downstairs, even though Mom and Jephthah warned me to
never use it under any circumstances. Running inside as quickly as I
could, I high tailed it to one of the stalls. Before I could open the
door, someone grabbed my hand. Suddenly, about 30 foreign women who
wanted me to pose for pictures surrounded me.

Red faced and furious,
I pushed them away. “Leave me alone!” I screamed at the
top of my lungs. “I have to pee!”

They were shocked,
supposedly because that’s not proper language for a princess to
use, but I couldn’t have cared less. Who were these ladies? I
couldn’t even use the bathroom in my own house!

Later, Jephthah and
Mom sat me down to have a talk. Jephthah was furious at me for
“almost destroying the museum’s reputation as a fine
institute of Finnish art and culture.” Whatever. Mom told me I
was acting very rebellious like a scalene triangle. She said, “It’s
very important to behave in an equilateral manner.” My mom is
weird. She needs to get off her geometry kick.

CHAPTER FOUR

Jephthah felt he had a
lot to be grateful for as he approached his first Thanksgiving Day.
Dr. Sussman explained to him all the traditions of the American
holiday, such as the turkey feast, the Macy’s Day Parade, etc.
Yet Jephthah felt that such things were out of place in a museum
about Finland. Besides, Jephthah found it difficult to accept a
tradition that preferred turkey to fish. By this time, the Chewster
kids were sick of fish, which they had been served everyday since
joining Jephthah’s household. Complaints to their mother
produced no effect, as she was entirely preoccupied with her school
of continuing education for adults.

On the actual day of the
feast, Jephthah led the family and staff in a prayer, and they all
settled down at the dining room table for a meal consisting entirely
of seafood dishes. Tatiana rather distastefully joked that Fred ought
to test the fish before anyone else tucked into it, just in case the
food was poisoned, as in the case of the Duchess of Turku. But
Jephthah muttered something about the idea being ridiculous and Fred
was offended by the sheer mention of a duchess who dared to represent
a non-German city.

“Anyone who would
be a duchess of a Finnish town instead of a German place deserves to
be poisoned,” he complained.

“Speaking of
Germany,” began Annie. She went onto announce that she was
sending the kids to Berlin so they would spend the winter holidays
with their father. This bit of news thrilled all four of the Foyla
Chewster kids. Tatiana was excited to return to her birthplace for
the first time since she left it at the age of two. Fred was already
counting in his head all of the Third Reich points of interest. Sean
and Emily were excited to see their father, though Sean expressed
mild regret that most of his Star Wars toys weren’t travel
size.

Annie’s foremost
motive for sending her kids to Germany was to set the stage for her
honeymoon. She hoped that this time would allow her and Jephthah to
grow closer. Earlier that day, the newlyweds had had their first
serious argument. It had been about religion. Annie reneged on her
promise to convert to Catholicism, insisting that it was
“incongruent” to her upbringing as a Lutheran. Jephthah was bitterly
disappointed. Not only Annie but also
Annie’s kids refused to convert to the religion of his heart.
Tatiana was steadfastly an Atheist and the twins insisted on being
loyal to their father’s Jewish faith. Only Fred seemed mildly
interested in becoming a Roman Catholic. “The Führer was
Catholic,” Fred mused. By the time of the Thanksgiving feast,
Jephthah understood that Fred was seriously considering the
conversion. As the old man gazed at Fred across the long table, tears
filled his eyes. He called Fred over to him and hugged his Nazi
stepson. Much to Annie’s horror, Jephthah then suggested that
Fred might like to transfer to Burbank’s Catholic high school.

“We can’t
afford it,” Annie tried weakly to protest.

Jephthah shook his head.
“I will pay for it!”

Fred was ecstatic and his
siblings were nearly as happy about the idea, for it meant that Fred
would transfer out of Burbank High, the public school where Fred’s
reputation as a Nazi embarrassed them.

“But,” said
Jephthah tepidly. “Fred should finish the school year where he
is.”

Those words were like
ice on the parade, for Fred as well as his siblings. Tatiana
suggested that a better idea might be to ship Fred off to a seminary
in Italy. “I bet they accept short-notice applicants,”
she reasoned. “I mean, I’m sure they don’t have a
waiting list!” Sean and Emily laughed. 

“Why Italy?”
Sean asked humorously. “It’s not quite far enough, if you
ask me. I wonder if there are seminaries in other galaxies far, far
away.”

On the Sunday after
Thanksgiving Day, Tatiana lost her cool and broke Fred’s nose.
As the four kids stepped into the garden, Fred began his
characteristic monologue about World War II. Fed up, Tatiana belted
him with her fist. The Nazi bowled over, covering his nose with his
hands, trying unsuccessfully to stop the bleeding. His screaming led
quickly to hyperventilation as he freaked out from the sight of his
own blood. By the time he was admitted to the emergency room, he lost
an alarming amount of blood. The doctor insisted that he spend the
night at the hospital so that the staff could monitor his vitals and
stabilize him.

Annie and Jephthah were
furious at Tatiana. Annie refused to speak to her and Jephthah made
her go to Confession at the Catholic Church near the hospital.
Tatiana begrudgingly pretended to be sorry for breaking her brother’s
nose. Annie spent most of the day and night at Fred’s bedside
in the hospital. When Jephthah and the kids paid him a visit,
Jephthah peered into Fred’s large black eyes and said: “Now
listen, boy. I consider you as much a Finn as myself, and Finns are
survivors. Finns fight to the death.”

Fred became hysterical
upon being classed as a Finn. The doctor thought the loss of blood
might have caused a permanent psychiatric imbalance. Nevertheless, he
returned home on the next day, and on Tuesday had to endure jokes
from the other students at Burbank High about his nasal bandage,
which he had to wear for nearly a week.

CHAPTER FIVE

At this time, Elijah
Chewster lived in Berlin with his second wife, Margot, and their four
adopted sons: Lewis, Stewart, Wolfgang, and Peter. Elijah was the
only son of a German father and Polish mother. Born in 1956, orphaned
at the age of eleven, he grew up in a Soviet orphanage. In his young
adulthood, he bribed his way into West Germany and settled into the
household of his paternal uncle in Essen, the self-made entrepreneur
Siegfried “Ziggy” Chewster. Uncle Ziggy, as Elijah knew
him, had one son, Clyde, who was near Elijah’s age, but since
Clyde was studying to be a psychiatrist, Ziggy taught his trade, the
beer business, to Elijah. When Ziggy died a few years later, Elijah
inherited the company, hence finding himself a CEO at the age of
twenty. He married his girlfriend, Annie Foyla, and soon set to work
simultaneously building a family and expanding Chewster Beer
worldwide. By the time the twins were born in 1979, Chewster Beer was
a household name and Elijah was a renowned philanthropist and stamp
collector who was chauffeured everywhere in a Bentley. In 1984, he
married the German-Hungarian-Jewish Countess Margaret von Bismarck,
and in the next year, they adopted Lewis. Stewart was literally a
stray boy when Elijah found him and decided to raise him like a son.
Wolfgang and Peter were blood brothers adopted by Elijah and Margot
through the foster care system. Margot was a thousand times more
suited to the role of entrepreneur’s wife than Annie. Margot
was a patroness of charities, a society hostess, and “ideal
trophy wife,” as Annie put it. Lewis, now twenty-one, was a
biology student at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Stewart, 18,
was training to be an officer in the German Army. Wolfgang and Peter
were now respectively thirteen and eleven.

The kids traveling from
Burbank had a three-hour layover at New York’s JFK Airport.
Emily visited as many clothing stores in the airport as she could.
Fred perused the bookstores, searching for “unbiased”
books about his favorite war. Sean, of course, went on the prow for
anything related to his favorite trilogy.

Tatiana recorded her
regal fantasies in an elegant diary fit for a monarch:

The flight here was
horrible. The twins were fine; Sean read a Star Wars book and
a computer magazine and Emily stared miserably at the clouds. But
Fred was his usual nasty self. He snapped at a stewardess for being
“undisciplined.” He refused to eat the “garbage”
the crew served him. He looked absolutely livid when one of the
attendents said apologetically, “But sir, all of our meals are
kosher!”

To distract him, I
blurted: “Hey, Fred, remember Floda had to eat lots of garbage
in Double-U Double-U 1.” My decoy worked. Fred glanced at me,
first angrily, then resignedly. “Yes,” he agreed. “He
was a model of discipline.” And without another word, the idiot
wolfed down the food. Meanwhile, people all around us were caught
between amusement and frustration about Fred’s nonsense. Trying
to forget about it, I began to think about the details of my fantasy
wedding in Westminster Abbey: thirty-foot train, glistening diadem,
and every crowned head of Europe in attendance!

Utterly frustrated in his
attempt to find “unbiased” reading material about the
Third Reich, Fred stalked out of the bookstore and aimlessly wandered
around the airport. When absentmindedly peering through a shop
window, he caught sight of Emily holding a sleeveless halter dress on
a peg.

Something clicked inside
Fred’s brain as he registered the dress’s plunging
neckline. His unreasonable frustration turned to annoyance, which
quickly evolved into anger. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he
marched into the store.

Emily stared wistfully
at the reflection in the wall mirror. She thought the dress was
fabulous, but if she bought it, her traveling allowance from Jephthah
would be blown. Her family sometimes criticized her habit of putting
all the eggs in one basket. She sighed and focused on the things she
loved about the dress, such as the deep purple color. A tap on her
shoulder jolted her. “Excuse me, young lady?” Fred spoke
up from behind her. “Is that appropriate attire for a woman of
Aryan descent?”

Emily wrinkled her nose
in disgust. “What the hell is appropriate for a woman of Aryan
descent? An SS uniform?”

“Well, actually…”
He trailed off, clearly getting ideas.

Elijah and Margot,
accompanied by their four sons, met the Foyla Chewster kids at
Berlin’s Tegel Airport. Thrilled to meet and suddenly have two
daughters, Margot embraced and kissed Emily and Tatiana in the truly
elegant European style. Fred refused to touch her, but 

Sean took her
hand, looked into her eyes, and said, “May the force be with
you.”

“And also with
you,” Elijah said with a smirk. It reminded his half-Foyla
children of their Finnish Catholic stepfather.

Little Peter Chewster
was attired in his Cub Scout uniform. He saluted his American
siblings. Sean bonded immediately with both Peter and Wolfgang. Emily
and Tatiana each blushed when they met Stewart, whose tall, dark, and
handsome appearance was enhanced by a spotless army uniform.

During the drive “home”
in Elijah’s Bentley Arnage RL, the kids drank sparkling cider
from the cocktail cabinet. Tatiana and Lewis intelligently conversed
about Dracula. Sean played with all the car’s buttons and
gadgets. When he opened the sunroof for the umpteenth time, Emily
rebuked him with: “It’s not the Star Ship Enterprise,
Sean! Give it a rest!”

“Home” was
the Chewster penthouse with magnificent views of the Tiergarten,
where Margot’s mother, Herta, also lived. Herta was a countess
both by birth and marriage. Her father died when she was a baby,
leaving her Jewish mother to raise her and her siblings. As a child,
Herta was uprooted to a Nazi labor camp. Somehow she survived the
Holocaust, but she was the sole survivor from her family. Herta’s
tragic past was a forbidden topic, as Elijah and Margot wished to
make her comfortable for the twilight of her life. Most of the
Chewster kids knew the story.

No one dared mention it
to Fred and it was generally agreed that Sean couldn’t be
trusted to fully grasp the seriousness of the subject.

Sleeping arrangements
took a long time to be established. Wolfgang moved onto the lower
bunk of the double-decker bed in Peter’s room, leaving his own
room for Fred and Sean. Emily and Tatiana shared the guest suite. The
apartment was enormous, having four reception rooms, a spacious
kitchen, and eight luxurious bedrooms. Yet with eleven people now
sleeping there, it felt rather crowded.

Peter’s bunk bed
was an exact replica of a British double-decker red bus. He always
slept on the upper bunk, with his teddy bear. 

“What kind of
Eagle Scout will you be,” Wolfgang asked derisively, “with
you cuddly bear?” 

Peter never let his older brothers
intimidate him, as he was always ready with a comeback. Peter simply
stuck his tongue out and said, “You’re going to fit in
perfectly in the officers’ mess. I’m sure all of the army
officers wear Spiderman underpants.”

Peter and Wolfgang were
the first of the family to be awake in the morning. They were
surprised to find Sean in their room, quietly observing Peter's video
collection. 

"Oh hi," Sean greeted them with a grin. "I
noticed you have all the Star Wars movies. Want to watch
them?"

Peter and Wolfgang
brightened up at the idea. "Yeah!" Peter said. "But be
warned because it's in German."

Sean's face fell. "Oh."
He didn't know German too well yet.

"Well," piped
Wolfgang. "Maybe it will be a good way for you to improve your
German.

Since you must know the
movies by heart, you'll know what is going on."

Peter had a television
in his room, but the three boys agreed in preference to watch the
movies on the big screen in the living room. They watched Episode
IV: A New Hope, at first without making much noise. Being boys
between ages eleven and fifteen, they couldn't contain their restless
energy from bursting into fully-fledged imitation of Jedi fighting
sith.

Sean took on the role of
Luke Skywalker battling Wolfgang's Darth Vader. Meanwhile, Peter
delighted in the role-play of Han Solo. The juvenile role game
progressed into a wild chase throughout the apartment. The rest of
the family begrudgingly awoke to the sounds of colliding plastic
light sabers.

Complaining of a
migraine, Tatiana joined a yawning Stewart on the living-room couch,
where he stared mindlessly at the ending credits to the movie. When
Peter came careening into the room, armed with his own green light
saber, which Sean had been using against Wolfgang, Tatiana playfully
scolded him for interrupting her dream. 

Peter suddenly stopped
slashing his imaginary opponent and looked curiously at his eldest
sister. "What was your dream about, Ana?"

"Prince Carl Philip
of Sweden," Tatiana replied with a besotted sigh.

Peter laughed. "We
have cousins in Sweden. Uncle Clyde. He's not really our uncle.
Really, he's our cousin, but he and Papa are like brothers. He's a
psychologist."

"Psychiatrist,"
corrected Elijah, who came gliding into the room, fully dressed in a
suit and tie, and carrying a briefcase.

"Yeah, whatever,"
said Peter. "Mother wants me to be a doctor too, but I'd like to
be a soldier like Wolfgang and Stewart. I can't decide what to do."

"Typical of a Jew,"
came Fred's bitter voice as he entered from the balcony.

"Damn it, Fred!"
Stewart exclaimed without knowing what he did.

"Ignore him,"
Tatiana said bracingly. "He's always making snide remarks like
that."

"What were you
doing out there, son?" Elijah asked Fred. "You must have
been freezing."

Fred walked through the
living room and into the kitchen without answering his father's
inquiry.

As he did so, Tatiana
and Stewart barely managed to stifle fits of laughter at his pajamas:
black open robe over orange boxer briefs, orange wool socks, and
plain white tee shirt with a gloss print of four Aryan goose-stepping
soldiers at right shoulder arms. Only Tatiana knew that this outfit
was merely a toned down version of Fred's usual nightwear. Even Fred
wasn't so dumb as to wear the swastika-knitted robe and boxers in
Elijah's house. With or without the swastika, Stewart felt like
gagging from the sight of Fred in boxer briefs.

Noticing where Stewart's
eyes roamed, Tatiana said, "I know he's disgusting. Just be glad
we're not going swimming because Fred swims in a Speedo that is a
trillion times worse than those briefs."

All this was unperceived
by Elijah, or he did a stellar pretense of being deaf. At last, as he
locked his briefcase, he called for Fred's attention. 

"Friedrich,"
he began, "get dressed. You are coming with me to the office."
Elijah then carried his briefcase off to the kitchen, where Fred
stood still from displeased surprise. He had a carton of orange juice
in his right hand.

"Why?" Fred
asked.

"Because I said so.
I'm your father and I'm telling, not asking you to come with me. I
may be a Jew, but I'm still older and bigger than you are. Now get
dressed, and wear something proper. If you didn't bring a suit and a
tie, ask your brother Stewart loan you something. You look
approximately the same size. We can purchase something for you in the
afternoon." (Stewart looked as though he would rather endure
Chinese water torture than allow any of Fred's hairy body to touch
the inside of his clothing.)

"I have a suit,"
Fred retorted bitterly as he pulled down a glass for his OJ. "And
a tie. I don't need to borrow clothes from anyone, least of all that
person you wrongly call my brother. One, Stewart is adopted, and two,
I'm not your son. Therefore, he and I cannot be brothers."

Lewis came into the
kitchen at that point.

"Actually," he
said before Elijah could utter a reply to Fred. "If you truly
aren't Papa's son," Lewis continued to Fred, "then you
could be Stewart's brother. I mean, the chances are probably slim,
but there is still a chance that your biological father could be the
same person who sired Stewart."

Ignoring Lewis, Fred
retreated to the bedroom he shared with Sean and later emerged from
it dressed in a black suit and bright orange tie. Reluctantly, he
accompanied Elijah, in the Bentley, to the Chewster Beer headquarters
on Friedrichstrasse.

Lewis ate Kellogg's corn
flakes while he sat on the couch between Tatiana and Stewart. He said
he had to hurry in order to attend a class at Humboldt University.

"But it's a
holiday," Tatiana said with surprise.

Lewis scoffed. "Not
for my professor."

Tatiana shrugged.
"You're lucky. I wish I could be in college already. High school
is so boring."

"What do you intend
to study?" Lewis asked interestedly.

"History, of
course."

"Naturally,"
Lewis said with a smirk. "And toward what purpose?"

"Well, I'd like to
work in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. I think I might be able
to obtain a recommendation from the Duke of Turku."

Meanwhile, in the back
seat of the Bentley, Elijah tried to impress on Fred the magnitude of
the beer business. "I am the CEO and Chairman of a worldwide
conglomerate. We mainly produce your grand-uncle Ziggy's homemade
brew, but also finance numerous related ventures."

"So?" snapped
Fred.

"So, you are heir
to one-eighth of the company."

Fred scoffed. "That's
it? Just one-eighth? It's all or nothing for me, Pops."

"Well,"
proceeded Elijah cautiously, "if you come to work for me, and
you prove yourself in capabilities and dedication, the door will be
open for more."

Fred rolled his eyes
contemptuously. "Fat chance. I work for no one."

Elijah heaved a heavy
sigh, hardly knowing how to penetrate his son's thick skull.
Retrieving Perrier water from the cooler cabinet, he asked Fred if he
wanted something to drink.

"Double straight
scotch," Fred replied flatly. Then, catching Elijah's
disapproving eye, he amended his request to lemon water.

Emily joined Margot and
Herta at the Pfeifer Wellness Club, where the ladies were pampered
and massaged. While they had cucumbers on their eyes and mud on their
faces, Herta quizzed Emily about her love life.

"My dear," she
said, "is there a special boy in your life?"

Margot winced. "Oh
Mama, do not embarrass her!"

"What did I say to
embarrass anyone?" Herta protested. "It's a simple
question. She is a pretty young girl. I ask her if she has a special
boy. It would be a shame for such beauty to be wasted. I assure you,
when I was her age, I had a special boy."

"You mean Papa?"

"No, my dear.
Before Papa."

Margot raised her
eyebrows. "Before Papa? Mama, you had a boyfriend before Papa?
Why have you never told me this?"

Herta felt these
questions were too ridiculous to deserve answers. She turned to
Emily. "Who is your special boy, dearest child?"

Emily felt
uncomfortable, like being in the spotlight before an impertinently
curious audience. 

"Erm... well...."

Herta's face broke out
into a gleeful expression as if struck by a burst of memory. "Rolf
Frankensdorf! That was his name! He had such a crush on me, and Nicky
was so jealous!"

Margot sat bolt upright.
The cucumbers on her eyes dropped onto her lap. "Rolf
Frankensdorf! My godfather? Rolf was Papa's best friend!"

Herta chuckled. "They
were not always best friends. But then Rolf fell in love with my
sister and we all became quite cozy together."

For the first time in
her life, Emily felt like a regular daughter, listening to her mother
and grandmother talk about boys. With her actual mother, she had
never had such a frivolous discussion.

****

"I can't believe
you aren't tired of museums. I would have guessed you would be sick
of museums after living in one."

"Oh no, never. I
can never be sick of history. Besides, Jephthah's museum is entirely
different from this one." Tatiana eagerly flipped
through a brochure as she and Stewart waited in a line to enter the
German Historical Museum.

The building's
grandiosity fascinated Tatiana. It made Jephthah's castle seem
cheesy. The Zeughause building, as she learned from her brochure, is
the oldest building on the great pedestrian avenue known as the UNTER
DEN LINDEN, so named because of the overhanging lime trees, for the
name translates literally as "under the limes."

Tatiana and Stewart
arrived at the museum after a walk along the wide and exciting
boulevard in the center of the city. Before, Lewis had driven them to
Humboldt University, which faces the UNTER DEN LINDEN, in his way to
his class. While Lewis went to his class, the other two proceeded on
foot under the limes. It was cold, but not so much as to render coats
and scarves at all useless, and the bright sun cast enticing rays on
the spectacles around them. They had walked through Bebelplatz and
laughed at the ugly St. Hedwig's Cathedral. About the equestrian
statue of Frederick the Great, Tatiana said, with a half-smirk and
roll of her eyes, that she could never admire any "greatness"
in anyone named Fred. When they got to the Palace Bridge, Tatiana's
eyes were immediately drawn to the domineering and baroque Zeughause
building.

Stewart bounced on the
balls of his feet and shivered violently. He adjusted his coat's
collar so that it stood straight up and he wrapped his scarf tightly
around his neck. He did not like their plan of waiting in line to
take a tour of a museum from which he could not expect any novelty.
He glanced longingly in the direction of the Chewster penthouse.

"Come on, Ana,"
he pleaded. "Trust me when I say this museum is boring. I used
to come here as a kid."

"Yeah, but it must
have changed a lot since then," argued Tatiana pleasantly. "When
you were a kid, it must have been under the Soviet influence. It says
here that prior to 1987, it was a Marxist-Leninist museum."

"Whatever,"
Stewart said distractedly with a loud yawn. "Let's go get some
coffee somewhere. We can come back. Maybe the line will be shorter."

Tatiana could make no
objection to such a plan. She was feeling the cold as much as he was,
and moreover, she always relished coffee. So the siblings retraced
their footsteps along the boulevard. They again passed Bebelplatz. 

Meanwhile, at the Chewster company headquarters, Fred found a most
unsuitable occupation. While Elijah listened to a presentation by the
Chief Marketing Officer in the boardroom, Fred wandered through the
hallways and lobbies without knowing where to go or what to do.
Fidgeting with a permanent black marker from Elijah's desk, he amused
himself by drawing tiny swastikas in random places when he thought no
one was looking. Slowly, he made his way downward from the thirtieth
floor, stopping to poke around on each one. On the third floor, he
stepped from the elevator and was accosted by a young man pushing a
mail cart. The man had been pushing it toward the elevators without
watching where he was going. The object of the man's distraction was
a big-bosomed receptionist, wearing stilettos and a short skirt, as
she obliviously passed by. The cart collided into Fred, knocking him
backwards on the floor.

"Dude, I'm so
sorry!" The young man, probably not more than twenty-five, tried
to help the sour-faced Fred stand up. But Fred refused his help.

"Don't touch me!
What are you, retarded or something?"

"Dude, I'm truly
sorry. I was being stupid. I should have been watching...."

"You're damn right
you are stupid," snapped Fred. "Do you know who I am?"

"No, dude."

"Stop calling me
dude! Don't you know who I am?"

"Er...." The
guy was taken aback, trying hard to recognize the angry kid. He
thought Fred must be sixteen or seventeen and that perhaps he was the
son of someone on the board of directors. He quickly dismissed the
thought that the boy was an actor with a Chewster Beer advertising
contract, for it seemed impossible that such an ugly kid could be a
desirable celebrity endorser. "I'm sorry, du-- I mean, I'm
sorry, kid... sir, I don't know your name."

"Fred Chewster! As
in the future owner of this company, and your boss!"

The man was surprised.
"Oh." He was confused. He vaguely remembered that the
company CEO was said to have a large family, but he had never met any
of them. He was just an ambitious mail clerk paying his way through
business school.

"You're fired!"
Fred exclaimed, pointing a long-nailed finger at the man.

"You can't fire
me!" The guy blurted without thinking. Then he took a deep
breath and said in a calmer tone, "Look, you can't just fire me
like that. There's a chain of command."

"The chain of
command works like this: peon, führer!" retorted Fred. "Got
it?"

"Whatever."
The mail clerk took the opportunity of the opened elevator doors to
get away. To a fellow passenger on the elevator, he whispered, "That
guy is a freak. He says his name is Fred Chewster. Does Herr Chewster even
have a son called Fred?"

****

Tatiana and Stewart
fulfilled their craving for hot steaming coffee, but instead of
turning back toward the Zeughause, they proceeded toward
Friedrichstrasse. Tatiana constantly saw things that fascinated her,
such as the beautiful Berlin State Library, the Guggenheim, and the
Opera House. As they rounded a corner onto Friedrichstrasse, they
saw, in the near distance, the impressive headquarters of their
father's company. It was almost directly across the street from the
GALERIES LAFAYETTE. An angry crowd, barely controlled by a handful of
police, had formed in front of the Chewster building.

"What's going on?"
Stewart strained to see the cause of the disturbance. He and Tatiana
were at a standstill on the GALERIES LAFAYETTE side of the street.

"Should we stay
away?" Tatiana asked. "I was hoping to visit Dad, but it
seems like a bad time."

"Yeah, we better
wait and see...."

Two security guards came
out of the Chewster building to help the police. The crowd was so
numerous that Tatiana and Stewart could not notice that one of the
policemen was shoving Fred into the back of a squad car. The other
police formed around a disgruntled old man. "I saw him draw the
mustache!" the old man shouted in baritone fury. "The
nerve! The nerve of the boy to draw the face of that odious
dictator!"

The police officers and
security guards, and some of the nearer spectators, all shook their
heads in disbelief and disgust, as they observed, not for the first
time, the permanent-marker sketch beside the old man's feet. It was
an uncommonly good likeness of Adolf Hitler, considering that it
seemed to be the work of a few minutes.

"All right, this is
enough!" One of the police officers commanded everyone's
attention. "This is not serving any purpose! Everyone, clear
out! We will handle this in an orderly manner!"

As the crowd reluctantly
dispersed, and the old man was adequately calmed, a junior policeman
wrapped yellow police tape around the offensive artwork.

Tatiana and Stewart
judged it wise to stay put. Bewildered and intensely curious, they
nevertheless turned their backs to the scene and stepped inside the
GALERIES LAFAYETTE.

At the police station,
Fred was taken in handcuffs to an interrogation room. A detective,
who specialized in Nazi-related crimes, soon joined him there. "I'm
Detective Rafferstein. State your name, please." He spoke to
Fred without looking up from the open file in his hands.

"Fred Chewster,"
came the bored reply.

The detective closed the
file and placed it on the table. "I read the report of your
crime. It will cost a lot of money to clean up the damage, young man.
You're looking at a heavy fine, and we cannot release you until you have
undergone an extensive evaluation."

Elijah's secretary
interrupted the board meeting to inform her boss of the urgent call
from the police station. She whispered over his shoulder, "Your
son Friedrich is in jail, sir." Elijah jumped to his feet and
incomprehensibly made his apologies to his colleagues. He ran out of
the boardroom, followed closely by the secretary, who informed him
frantically that she had taken the liberty of ordering his Bentley to
the front of the building.

Margot, Herta, and Emily
arrived home to find two phone messages, one from a frantic Elijah in
his way to the police station, and another from his more composed
secretary. Despite his flustered state, however, Elijah was explicit
in his instructions for the whole family, including Margot, to stay
put. He would straighten out the ordeal and be home, he hoped, with
Fred, as soon as possible. "Stay home, Margot. Everyone, stay
home and stay calm," he repeated with emphasis.

"Oh dear,"
said Herta as the ladies sat down for tea. "I knew that boy was
a troublemaker."

"I hope Fred is
OK," said Emily. "Do you think he has done something very
bad?"

Margot shrugged. "I
wish Elijah had given more details. My imagination is running wild!"

Wolfgang, Peter, and
Sean were in the building, but in the other penthouse, which was home
to the Freud family. The Chewster Chief Legal Officer, Erich Freud,
lived there with his wife and three sons between ages ten and
sixteen. Lewis remained at the university after his class in order to
study in the library. Tatiana and Stewart were on the way home. They
had seen the yellow-taped artwork and deduced that the culprit must
be Fred. Tatiana was totally convinced it was so. Stewart felt
disgusted. He could hardly believe he had such a revolting brother.
By the time they had seen the vandalism, a pack of news vans and
reporters were on the scene.

Elijah was refused
permission to see Fred, but he managed to gain access to the chief of
police. In the chief's office, Elijah gained the full intelligence of
the crime. He pleaded with the chief, begging the man to help him keep
Fred's name out of the press. He had already contacted the damage
control lieutenants in his PR department. Whatever happened, Elijah
was determined to keep the Chewsters' good name out of the scandal.
He was quite happy to bribe and bargain with every newspaper editor
in Germany if he had to.

The evaluation took
several hours. After a long session with a psychiatrist, Fred was yet
unfinished with the police evaluation. The doctor couldn't settle on
a diagnosis yet and no judge would hear the case without a full
evaluation. It appeared that Fred would have to spend at least one
night in jail. Elijah left the police station feeling bitterly
disappointed. Powerful tycoon he certainly was, but for once he
couldn't rescue his prodigal son. At home, he found his whole family
waiting for him. They had already eaten dinner and now sat together
in the living room. Emily had been gushing to Tatiana about her
"heavenly" experience at the Pfeifer Wellness Club. Herta
busied herself by sewing new patches onto Peter's Cub Scout uniform.
Lewis and Sean were in the middle of a chess match. Peter, wanting to
see Lewis lose a match for once, kept annoying Sean with his
whispered hints. Wolfgang and Stewart played table tennis nearby.
When Elijah came in, everyone eagerly looked up, expecting news about
Fred. They were surprised to find that Elijah was by himself.

"Where is Fred?"
Emily asked.

"Is he going to get
the death penalty?" Tatiana asked hopefully.

Lewis shot Tatiana a
patronizing look. "We don't have that in Germany."

"I need a drink,"
said Elijah, taking off his coat.

"I'll fix it,
honey," said Margot as she hung his coat in the coat closet.
"Sit down and relax."

Margot soon brought
Elijah his favored gin and tonic. Everyone watched him intently as he
took an immediately effective drink and visibly relaxed. He sighed
and explained to his family how the situation stood. "He will
stay in jail tonight and go before a judge in the morning. Erich is
going to send someone from his firm to represent Fred."

"So it was Fred who
drew Hitler's face in front of your building?" Sean asked,
feeling mixed emotions about it. On the one hand, he wasn't
surprised. But somehow, he couldn't help feeling sorry for his
demented brother.

"Yes," replied
Elijah before taking another drink. "It was he. But don't go
around talking about it. I managed to keep his name out of the news
so far, but if you guys go around talking about it carelessly...."

"We won't, Daddy,"
assured Emily. "We'll be careful."

"Yeah,"
Tatiana consented. "We're not exactly itching to tell people we
are related to that dork."

"Did you see him?"
Lewis asked Elijah.

"Yes, very briefly.
I told him I would take care of it and get him out of this mess."

Herta shook her head and
muttered something in Hungarian, which only Margot understood.

The next day, the
family, even Elijah, stayed clear of the hearing. They didn't want to
risk being detected by the media, who camped outside the courthouse.
Although it seemed unlikely that anyone would recognize them, they
were unwillingly to test that theory. They felt it was risky enough
that Fred's lawyer was an associate from Erich Freud's law firm.

The judicial sentence
included a five-digit fine to be discreetly paid by Elijah and a
period of community service. Fred would also have to see a
psychiatrist on a weekly basis, and the doctor's reports would have
to be submitted to the court at the end of the period.

Elijah and Margot
decided it might be good to take all of the family out of the city
for the day. They hoped to preoccupy their minds with some relaxation
and fun in the countryside. Elijah owned a "little getaway
lodge" (his words) that was actually a three-story stone
mansion. It had a fully stocked bar, a grand piano, a wine cellar,
and a sauna room. Elijah told his secretary to cancel all of his
appointments. He intended to spend the day stocking up on as much
good humor as he could muster. There was a swimming pool, tennis
court, and lake on the property. The lake being frozen over, some of
the kids opted for some ice-skating. Lewis' college buddy, Ben
Cooley, came over, and Wolfgang and Peter brought along the two
younger Freud boys, Frank and Linus. The kids tried to get a hockey
game going. It was an uphill struggle. They had to use a Chewster
Beer bottle as a puck after Lewis' overeager swing sent the proper
puck off into the trees. Sean, unused to ice skating, kept falling on
his butt. Ben kept missing his target because he was continually
being made uncomfortable by the stares of Tatiana.

"Why does your
sister keep staring at me?" Ben asked Lewis in a low voice.

"Who, Emily?"

"No, the other one,
Tatiana."

Lewis shrugged. "I
don't know. Ask her."

Inside the house, Elijah
and Margot relaxed their muscles in the sauna. They opened a bottle
of vintage Cabernet Sauvignon from the cellar and took turns giving
each other massages. Herta spent some time in the sauna as well, but
soon, feeling like a third wheel, went to the kitchen to make deviled
eggs and pumpernickel bread.

After a long shower, and wrapped in a monogrammed terry cloth bathrobe, Elijah entered
the living room as the phone rang. Drying his ears with a towel, he
answered it. It was his secretary informing him of the results of
Fred's hearing. The kids began noisily coming inside, tracking the
floor and rugs with mud and ice. They were all quite ready to fill
their tummies with Herta's delicious cooking and rest their sore feet
and exhausted bodies. Elijah quickly got dressed and prepared to
return to the city in order to bail Fred out of jail. He announced
that he would not return. He proceeded to implore to his disappointed
wife his wish that everyone stay there and eat Herta's dinner without
him. He said that he and Fred would have dinner at the penthouse in
the city. Elijah only took with him the two Freud boys, as they had
to be returned to their parents, but the adult guest, Ben, stayed for
Herta's sumptuous feast.

After the feast, Emily
serenaded the group on the piano. Lewis and Ben argued between
themselves over the finer points of the performance, but the rest of
the group were content to express polite admiration. Emily did have
remarkable talent as a pianist. Tatiana beamed with pride for her
baby sister. Herta, smiling indulgently, said that Emily should
audition for the Royal College of Music in London. "My
daughter... Margot sister Bertha was student at Royal College,"
Herta informed in broken English. Emily was grateful, but felt that
she wanted desperately, at that moment, to disappear under the
floorboards.

Lewis piped up, "Gee,
Em, that truly was an astonishingly performance. I would prefer to
see you study somewhere in Berlin, to be near us... your family...
but in any case, did you ever consider performing in public?"

Emily blushed and began
to play another sonata from memory.

Herta retreated from the
room momentarily. When she reappeared, she carried an alarmingly
large box.

"Granny, let me
help you," Stewart said, gallantly taking the box from the
senior citizen's grip.

"I have some
presents," Herta explained.

Emily stopped playing
the keys at once. "Presents?"

"Gran, you didn't
have to!" Lewis said affectionately.

"I know it's a bit
early," said Herta, mock-apologetically. "We don't start
lighting the menorah until Monday at sunrise. But I doubt you will
mind. I think the presents will lighten the mood among us."

"Thanks, Gran!"
Sean and Wolfgang each enthused in turn. "Yeah, thanks,"
echoed Peter, who approached Herta and hugged her. Margot stood up
from the couch and kissed Herta on the cheek. "Thanks, Mama.
You're too sweet for words."

"Who first?"
asked Lewis, always one to map out the logistics of an activity.

As Herta sat down by
Tatiana, around whom she wrapped an arm, she said, "I think my
grandchildren from California will be first."

Sean leaped up at once
and dug through the box for a present with his name on it. Seizing it
at last, he ripped off the paper. "Wow!" he exclaimed in
amazement. "Gran... how did you know?"

"Just a hunch,"
said Herta in American-slang English, which amazed and amused
everyone.

Sean's gift was a Star Wars special edition Swatch watch.

Tatiana opened her gift
next. It was a massive hardcover coffee-table book with glossy
pictures and information about every castle in Europe. "Herta,
this is brilliant. All my favorite castles are right here! Thank you
so much!" She kissed Herta on the cheek.

Lewis looked curiously
at the book over Tatiana's shoulder. "Is Jephthah's castle in
there?" he teased. Tatiana ignored him.

Emily bashfully and
guiltily approached Herta's goody box. She tentatively searched for
her gift. "Oh," she said, with a tear glistening in her
eye. "Fred's present." She gingerly picked it up.

"You got Fred a
present?" Tatiana asked Herta in amazement. "That was very
charitable of you."

"Well," Herta
said, shrugging good-naturedly. "He is my grandson too. We all
have faults."

Emily delicately placed
Fred's wrapped gift on the walnut coffee table. She returned to the
box to find her own. Finally, she lifted a tiny wrapped box from the
pile. On opening it, she found a pair of sparkling sapphire and
diamond earrings.

"They belonged to
my late husband's mother," explained Herta proudly. "The
Countess Augusta von Bismarck."

Emily looked horrified.
"Herta, no, I can't accept!" She thrust the earrings toward
Herta. Herta simply waved her hands in the air, as if to reject such
a measure.

"Of course you can
accept, my dear, and you will accept, because you are my
granddaughter. I have another granddaughter, beside Tatiana. Her name
is Theodora van Strobenzy. Her mother is Margot sister, Nikola. She
has a piece from the same parure to which those earrings belong. My
daughters -- Nikola, Bertha, and Margaret -- each have many fine
pieces from the entire collection, which is one of the best private
collections of jewels in existence."

Emily could only mouth
the words of gratitude. Tatiana, though truly rapturous about her
castle book, couldn't help feeling left out. Why couldn't she also
have one of the noble heirlooms? As if reading her mind, Herta winked
at her and whispered so only she could hear, 

"There is plenty
more where those earrings come from, my dear, and you have an 18th
birthday in six months."

Peter's gift was a game
for his Playstation.

Sean winced. "You're
so lucky," he said. "Our mom never let us play video
games. Dad once sent us an Atari in the 80s and she made us donate it
to the Salvation Army," he complained bitterly.

"That sucks,"
said Wolfgang. "She won't let you have any fun or what?"

"Wolfgang!"
Margot scolded him. "Do not criticize Annie. I'm sure she has
her reasons and it is none of our business to question her parenting
choices. Now go find your present."

Wolfgang gladly obeyed.
His present practically shocked him into a catatonic state. He
literally could not believe his eyes. "Gr... Granny! How did
you...?"

"What's the big
deal, Wolf?" Stewart asked. "It looks like an ordinary
rugby ball to me!"

Wolfgang shook his head.
"No... it's...."

"Autographed by his
favorite player," Herta finished for him with a satisfied grin.

"Alessandro
Calari!" Peter exclaimed. "Wow, Wolfie, that's incredible!"

"Gran, this is
amazing," Wolfgang said. "How did you get this? Did you
meet him?"

It turned out that
Herta, a keen attendee of auctions, bought the treasure at a sale of
celebrity memorabilia at Sotheby's Berlin.

"Oh dear,"
said Margot. "I hope you didn't have to bid too high."

"Oh not at all,"
said Herta. "In fact, I got quite a deal. It was a morning
auction, so the only people there were ladies of my age, and I seemed
to be the only one who recognized the name. I've heard Wolfgang say
it enough times. Now, Stewart, darling, you have two gifts."

Stewart looked
delighted. "Two? For me? Wow!" He approached the box and
eventually pulled out both of his presents. One of them was a
smallish box, about the size of a typical watch box, and the other
seemed to be a book. Indeed, the items turned out to be precisely
what everyone guessed: a book and a watch. The book was a biography
of George Lucas, whose entrepreneurial success Stewart greatly
admired. The watch was a fabulous, antique-looking Rolex pocket watch
-- pure gold, even the hands, with Roman numerals. There was an
inscription on the back of it: To Nicky, Love Cabbage.

"Wow, Grandpa's
watch!" Stewart marveled over Herta's generosity.

"Who is Cabbage?"
Sean asked as he read the inscription.

Herta blushed. "Oh
that. It was Nicky pet name for me. A private joke."

"That's so sweet!"
Emily exclaimed, tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Get a grip,
Emily," Tatiana said.

Sean eagerly flipped
through the biography of George Lucas while Lewis retrieved his
present.

"Now, Lewis, wait a
moment," said Herta. "Everyone, I don't want you to feel I
have indulged Lewis more than I ought. I got him something very
special, but Elijah and Margot did help me a bit with the expense."

Lewis was bewildered. He
couldn't imagine what kind of gift would require such a preamble. He
looked down at the package in his hands. It was such a small box.
What could it be?

"Lewis, don't keep
us in suspense! Open it!" cried Ben Cooley, who set down his
Chewster Beer in anticipation.

Lewis ripped the paper
off the box and pulled the lid off. He didn't touch the contents.
Instead, he stared at the mysterious item in a more genuinely
catatonic state than the one Wolfgang had experienced. "Oh...
my... god!"

Ben walked over to Lewis
to have a look at it. "Holy crap!"

Herta was appalled.
"Well, that kind of language is unnecessary! I just thought
Lewis might want something more reliable than his old Volkswagen."

"You got him a
car!" Wolfgang exclaimed.

Lewis slowly lifted the
car keys out of the box for everyone to see. Clear as crystal, there
it was, car keys bearing the Porsche crest logo.

Margot walked over and
hugged her oldest son. After kissing him on the cheek, she said, 

"That's for being such a dedicated student and good son. You
have earned it."

"Mom... I'm...
speechless."

"Forget speeches,"
declared Ben. "Where's the car? We have to test drive it!"

"It's in the
garage," Margot said, grinning ear to ear.

Everyone except Margot
and Herta leapt to their feet and ran to gawk at the Porsche.

Margot sighed as she
seated herself on the couch and picked up her glass of red wine. "You
know, Mama, I feel guilty because we don't have a present for Ben to
open."

Fred and Elijah had a
gloomy tête-à-tête dinner at the Chewster
penthouse in the city.

"Friedrich, would
you like to stay in Berlin?" Fred hesitated. Elijah sighed and
continued, "Your mother and I spoke on the phone yesterday. We
agree that a change of environment might be good for you. You can be
enrolled at the military school where Wolfgang is enrolled, the same
in which Stewart was a cadet."

Fred brightened up at
the thought of training for the German Army. "Yeah? You're going
to send me to military school?"

"Yes," Elijah
nodded. "But you will first have to serve your court-ordered
community service."

Fred rolled his eyes.
"Can't I hire a peon to do it for me? Perhaps one of those
idiots who work for you?"

Elijah scolded him.
"They aren't peons... or idiots, Friedrich. And no. You have to
clean up the damage you inflicted."

There were just two
penthouses on the top floor of the Malenberg Building overlooking the
Tiergarten. One belonged the Chewsters. Erich and Gretchen Freud
owned the other. Erich was Jewish like Elijah and Margot, but with
Gretchen being Catholic, the couple opened their home every December
25 to celebrate Christmas with family, colleagues, and friends. The
event was well received for being a curious mix of elegant and
relaxed. Some guests wore eveningwear. Others dressed casually. The
idea was to have fun, so despite the champs and caviar on the menu,
there were no expectations about attire. The entire Chewster clan
attended the party. The host and hostess had already met Sean, who
spent a day playing with their younger sons, Frank and Linus, but
they had not previously met Sean's sisters. For the party, Emily
dressed to the nines and wore her new aristocratic jewelry, though
she had little interest in meeting the Freuds. Tatiana fostered some
resentment toward Erich for helping Fred. On entering the Freuds'
penthouse, Fred merely uttered a flat "tag" and rudely
stalked off to another room to indulge his sulky mood. Elijah was
embarrassed, but tried to excuse his son's behavior, attributing it
to Fred being "tired from his community service" and
"homesick."

Hans, the Freud's
sixteen-year-old son, was smitten with Emily from the moment he laid
eyes on her. He followed her to her seat on the couch. "So, what
do you like to do?" he asked her.

"I don't know,"
she said absentmindedly. She was ill disposed to like the Freuds, for
she shared her sister's resentment toward Erich, though in a milder
way, and she thought Gretchen's fashion sense was vulgar. Now her
dislike extended to Hans, who began irritating her with too much
information about his life story. He was only sixteen, but left
school early to pursue his music career. He was currently trying to
form a rock band. He liked corned beef and hash. He read American
comic books. When he was still unable to pick up on her vibes and
began to tell the long, drawn out story of how his turtle died, Emily
stood up.

"Excuse me,"
she said in her sweet way. "I need to use the loo."

Meanwhile, Tatiana, also
seated on the couch, followed Lewis and Ben with her eyes. The two
friends stood at the bar. When Ben finally caught Tatiana's eye, he
looked at her with bewilderment and shook his head. Tatiana cleared
her throat and tried to put on her most serious aspect when Ben sat
next to her.

"Hi, Tatiana,"
he said politely. "How's it going?"

"Fine,"
Tatiana said stiffly. She averted her eyes.

"Erm, Tatiana?"

"Yes?" she
looked at him with affected nonchalance.

"Is there a reason
you keep staring at me?"

"What do you mean?
No! Of course not!"

"Oh," said
Ben, surprised. "Ok then." He stood up.

"You just remind me
of someone, that's all," she blurted.

He turned back to her
and sat down again. "So you admit you were staring at me?"

"Yes," she
grudgingly admitted. "But not because I think you're attractive
or anything."

Ben smirked. "Of
course not. It's cool. Don't worry about it."

"I won't,"
Tatiana said bluntly. "I just don't want you to get the wrong
idea."

"Right," Ben
nodded solemnly. "So who do I remind you of?"

"Oh just a prince."

"A prince?"

"A prince of
Denmark, OK? Can we forget it now?" Tatiana was sometimes
paranoid about strangers mocking her obsession with royalty.

"Hey!" Ben
said as though he remembered something. "I know who you are
talking about! My dad, when he was an ambassador, once hosted a
banquet for Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik. I remember their sons,
who accompanied them. One of them was practically my twin, but I
can't remember his name."

Tatiana was awestruck.
She stared at Ben with fresh admiration. "Your dad hosted a
banquet for Queen Margrethe? Was he the German ambassador to
Denmark?"

"British actually.
My dad is British. Yes, he was ambassador to Denmark. We lived in
Copenhagen for awhile."

"Wow," said
Tatiana in amazement. "What was Her Majesty like?"

"She was cool,"
said Ben as if, in his opinion, it was really no big deal to have
once met one of the crowned heads of Europe.

"And you met Prince
Frederik too? You actually met Prince Frederik?"

"Is that the one I
look like? Yeah, I met him, and his brother too."

"Prince Joachim.
That's his brother. What other royalty have you met? Your father must
have met many heads of state in his ambassadorial role!"

Ben chuckled. "Yeah
he did. He also served as the UK ambassador to Germany, but I didn't
usually didn't factor into his career. He sent me out of the
way to a Swiss boarding school."

"Oh."
Crestfallen, Tatiana resumed her previous disinterestedness.

He started to walk away
when Tatiana blurted, "What boarding school? Le Rosey?"

"Er, no, I went to
Novotzendorf. Hey listen, it was cool talking to you but I actually
have to pee."

Ben made his way through
the groups of laughing people drinking Cristal. The layout of the
Freud home was exactly like the Chewster penthouse, so he knew
precisely where to go. But as he reached for the doorknob for the
bathroom, Emily emerged and they nearly collided.

"Oops! I'm so
sorry!" Emily blushed.

"It's OK. You don't
need to apologize," Ben reassured her.

"Emily! Where are
you?" Hans' voice was heard somewhere in the crowd.

"Oh no," she
said. She looked worried. She ducked behind Ben to hide from her
stalker.

He laughed. "What
are you doing? Who are you hiding from?"

Emily was about to reply
when she noticed Ben's sweatshirt. It was blue and white and had
crossed hockey sticks near his left armpit. The words NOVOTZENDORF
HOCKEY XI were under the logo.

"What's
Novotzendorf hockey?" she asked.

"Novotzendorf
College," he beamed. "My school. It's in Switzerland. I
played hockey there. I was goalkeeper."

"Oh, no wonder you
played so well at the lake," Emily blurted before she realized
it. She blushed a violent shade of red.

"Thanks," he
said, pretending not to notice her embarrassment.

"So... now you're
at school with Lewis, right?"

"Yes," he
said, wondering when she might step aside and let him enter the
bathroom.

"What's your
major?"

"Major?"

"What do you study?

"Oh, biology. I'm
pre-med," he said happily. "I'm planning on becoming a
neurosurgeon and do cancer research, stuff like that."

"Really? Wow! That
sounds fascinating!" She was genuinely impressed. "There's
nothing more complex than the human brain. I've been reading a lot of
research journals on psychiatry and consciousness and it just
fascinates me."

"You have?" He
jolted his head back in awe. "You mean, you actually read
journal articles? How old are you?"

"Fifteen," she
said, suddenly becoming self-conscious about her youth. "I know
it sounds weird, but it has really sparked my interest." She was
surprised with how much she opened up to a virtual stranger. She
wanted to talk more, but Hans appeared next to her, frowning at Ben.

"Where were you,
Emily?" Hans whined. "I was looking everywhere for you, you
just disappeared...."

Emily rolled her eyes
and smiled at Ben. "Good luck with your major... your studies,"
she said as she walked away with Hans tagging at her heels. "This
one time," he began, "I had a hamster, and I didn't feed
it...."

Lewis' experience at the
Freuds' party was nearly as miserable as Emily's. Feeling abandoned
by his sole intellectual equal, Ben, he wandered onto the balcony. He
didn't expect to find anyone outside. The roaring fires inside
provided the guests with a welcome contrast to the sub-zero
temperature outside. But there was someone else on the balcony. Lewis
instantly decided that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever
laid eyes on. Tall and slender, with soft-looking shoulder-length
brown hair, she wore a red ankle-length dress and matching heels. She
was turned toward the city, but when she turned her head to the right
for an alternative view, he saw the side of her face.

Pheromones, he
silently told himself, trying to control his hormonal urges.
Something about her scent is activating my pheromones.

She turned to face him.
They looked at each other. Perhaps he also triggered her pheromones
because her face broke out into the warmest smile Lewis thought he
had ever beheld. He took in her lovely brown eyes and cute pointed
chin.

"Hi," she
said. Her voice was sweet, perhaps Bavarian accented with a hint of
Parisian.

"Hi," he said,
cursing himself for responding like a parrot.

"I'm Abby Bouvier,
Gretchie's niece."

"Oh. Er, I'm...
Lew... Chews."

"Lew Chews?"
Abby stepped toward him. For the first time, he observed her slightly
freckled face in the reflected light from inside, and inwardly mused that
there was no facial feature more endearing than freckles.

Inside, Emily kept
sneaking up behind Sean in her desperation to evade Hans Freud. At
one point, she seemed to decide that enough was enough, and she stuck
her tongue out at Hans. Bewildered, Hans skulked out of the room to
lick his wounded heart.

On the next day at
sunset, Elijah lighted the menorah to inaugurate the Festival of
Lights. His family sat down to a lavish dinner. Fred cast a sullen
mood over the table, though. Wolfgang broke the silence by reciting a
history lesson from his military school. It was about Field Marshal
Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, who led the British
Army in its defeat of Napoleon's troops at the Battle of Waterloo.

"He is supposed to
have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the Eton playing
fields, because he had been educated at England's prestigious Eton
College."

"Hey, that's where
Prince William is now enrolled," Tatiana injected.

Sean cut in. "Wait
a minute. I'm confused. You mean to tell me that the Battle of
Waterloo was fought on a field at some snobbish college?"

Wolfgang shook his head
patiently. "No, no. Sean, the battle was fought at Waterloo,
hence the name, but Wellesley is supposed to have said that he
learned how to be a great soldier from the war games and sports on
the Eton playing fields."

Fred grunted. "What
is so special about Eton College? Hitler had nothing to do with it."

Tatiana snorted
derisively. "Hitler was born to a dirt poor family that couldn't
afford the tuition at Eton."

Wolfgang smirked.
Stewart and Lewis smiled and winked at Tatiana approvingly. Margot,
as she absentmindedly toyed with the pearls on her neck, was inwardly
fuming from Fred's comment. Herta shook her head and mumbled to
herself in Hungarian. Elijah, determined to keep the peace, changed
the turn of the conversation. "Herta, did Friedrich thank you
for your gift? I gave it to him yesterday. He loves it. He's never
read that book."

"It was my
pleasure," said Herta with a forced smile.

"What is the book?"
Margot asked pleasantly.

"It's called
Hitler’s Mistakes," replied Elijah. "I told
Friedrich it is a widely acclaimed book likely to present to him a
balanced, unbiased perspective of the Third Reich and why it
collapsed."

Margot looked at her
mother with astonishment. "You gave him that, Mama?"

"Well, I had a hint
from Elijah...."

"I read it,"
announced Tatiana boastfully. "Good choice, Dad."

"Is Fred going to
stay here from now on? He won't return with us to California?"
Emily seemed on the verge of tears as she meekly spoke.

"Actually,"
began Elijah sadly. "I spoke on the phone yesterday with your
mother. She changed her mind about letting Friedrich stay. So I'm
going to speak with the judge and try to arrange something. Erich
told me last night that Friedrich might be able to fulfill his
community service at the German Consulate in Los Angeles."

Happy were those who
lived in Berlin (except Elijah) and unhappy were those who had to
return with Fred to Burbank (except Emily)!

As it transpired, Fred
would not return to California with his three siblings. Instead, he
would return alone a month later in order to clean up his vandalism
on the sidewalk in front of Chewster HQ. The night before the return
of Tatiana, Sean, and Emily to California was New Year's Eve. Elijah
and Margot hosted a party for their most intimate family and friends.
These included Lewis' buddy, Ben Cooley, and Lewis' new girlfriend, Abigail
"Abby" Bouvier. Besides being Gretchen Freud's niece, Abby
was also the pretty brunette daughter of Gerard Bouvier, who was
chairman of the Paris-based Chewster subsidiary. His wife, Abby's
mother, Laverne, was a hypochondriac whose phantom ailments kept her homebound. Abby's sensible nature appealed to Lewis. Her major at HU was
psychology, which intrigued Emily.

Like the Freuds'
Christmas party, this party was as casual or dressy as the guests
preferred. The Chewsters were dressed rather more formally than
everyone else, whose attire varied from dressy-casual to downright
relaxed. Berlin's finest catering service bustled around serving
beverages from the full bar -- sparkling cider or soda for the kids
and champagne for the adults. For the four Americans (except Fred)
1995 closed pleasantly enough to make it regrettable that they would
leave their father's charming hearth on the morrow. Even Emily was
happy enough to endure, with tolerable politeness, Hans Freud's
misty-eyed looks.

CHAPTER SIX

One day in February,
Jephthah was fishing in his beloved lake. He was singing an old
Finnish folk tune, trying to clear his mind of an argument with Annie
over the children's academic curriculum. Annie wanted to give her
kids extra math lessons, but Jephthah felt that they knew enough math
and they should spend their free time studying Finland so that one
day they would be prepared to assist Dr. Sussman as docents in the
museum.

Meanwhile, Annie and the
kids were sitting down for breakfast in the main parlor overlooking
BM's mythical garden. Kermit the butler came over carrying a tray
with beverages. Kermit handed Annie a glass of tomato juice, then
handed Fred his usual wheat grass. As Tatiana sipped her Shirley
Temple, she watched Kermit give Sean his typical glass of red Kool
Aid, and said with a look of disapproval, "Sean, why do you
still drink that stuff? You're fifteen! Grow up!"

"You should talk,
Shirley," Sean said without bothering to glance in her
direction. He picked up his Star Wars comic book and entered into an
internal fantasy about life in another galaxy, far, far away from the
pseudo-royal life that he was forced to lead.

Emily decided to turn
the conversation on a more relevant track. She took a sip of her
vanilla-flavored Italian soda and turned to look at her mother. "Mom,
what was your fight with Jephthah about?"

"Adult stuff,
honey. You wouldn't understand."

Tatiana shot Emily a
bemused look. "Ha, that's right, Em. You're only fifteen. You
wouldn't understand."

Sean snapped out of his
galactic fantasy. "Hey," he said to Tatiana in protest.
"There's nothing stupid about being fifteen. Em and I are almost
sixteen anyway. Besides, I know what Mom and Jephthah fought about.
They had an argument about stupid Finland. Jephthah wants us to be
Finnish. He's trying to brainwash us. He's sick."

Fred almost spit out his
wheat grass in anger. "And what's wrong with that? Brainwashing
is a very effective tool for controlling the weak-minded."

Tatiana perked up. Her
eyes glazed over with the joy that always filled her when opportunity
rang to insult Fred. “I never thought I’d say this, Fred,
but you’re right! Brainwashing worked wonders on you!”

Fred glared at her,
obviously tempted to punch her, but Annie suddenly stood up and
commanded her kids’ attention. The kids were astonished to see
that she was crying. “I’m sorry, kids. I have to be
alone. I need fresh air!” Annie walked out of the room to seek
the refreshment of the outdoors. Stepping into BM’s labyrinth
of mythical shrubberies and foliage, she proceeded to walk around to
the forecourt of the castle. With tears streaming down her cheeks,
she absentmindedly walked across the gravel forecourt and approached
the main gate. As she moved closer to the wrought-iron gate, she was
whacked on the head by a rolled-up newspaper. 

"Ouch! That hurt!
Where did that come from?”

In her distress, she had
failed to notice the ugly paperboy riding by on a scooter. He stopped
and climbed off the scooter, oblivious to the fact that because he
let go of it, it now rolled into Julian’s sentry box, situated
as it was just outside the main gateway. The resultant crash jolted
Julian from his slumber. He watched in befuddlement as the paperboy
approached the gates.

Still in shock from being
smacked on the head by a random flying newspaper, Annie observed the
boy as he stepped up to the gate to apologize. She could tell that he
was a teenager because, besides his boyish looks, he had terrible
acne. He also had blond hair, a rather prominent nose, and a gangly
figure. “Who are you?” Annie asked, unsure why she felt
her pulse quicken.

“Who, me? I’m
the paperboy. This is my first day on the job.”

“A paperboy? Why
aren’t you in school?” She remembered it was Saturday and
she had just left her own kids breakfasting in the parlor. “Why
are you working?” she continued. “You should be studying
geometry instead of doing menial labor! Knowledge is a lot more
useful than money!”

“Money? I
volunteered for this.”

Annie looked at the
stranger with rising respect and admiration. “You volunteered?
You should volunteer to work for us.”

“Us?”

“My family! We run
the Museum of Finnish Culture.” She gestured at the castle
behind her.

The boy stared at her in
confusion, hearing ‘Finnish’ as ‘Finish.’
“That’s a museum? For Finish culture? Well… where
did you start culture? What about the museum for starting culture?”

Annie didn’t know
how to reply to that. Instead, she smiled and shook her head
bemusedly. “You’re a comedian! Haha, that was a good one!
Come on, I’ll show you the castle. What is your name, by the
way?”

“Otto DaMike.”
Then, trying to make conversation, he added, “I used to be a
used car salesman, but I couldn’t sell enough cars. Well, the
truth is I couldn’t sell any cars. So here I am.”

“So you became a
paperboy who isn’t paid?”

“Well, my boss said
they might pay me, maybe even minimum wage,” he said, his eyes
suddenly bright with hope. “But only if I do a good job.”

Annie shook her head
again, but this time there was pity instead of amusement in her eyes. 

“Oh you poor boy. You must come work for us. We will pay you.
Plus, you can live here if you would like.”

She opened the gate and
offered him her hand. But Otto just stared at her hand and stepped
backwards in fear. He looked at her with a skeptical expression.
Finally, after a few minutes of contemplation, he perked up and
reached into his shoulder bag. He pulled out one of the many copies
of the Burbank newspaper and thrust it into her outstretched hand.

Annie was confused but,
taking the paper, said, “Thanks. Now come inside. Follow me.”
She tossed the newspaper to the ground. She led him up the drive
and across the forecourt, but instead of going up the hundred steps
to the front door, she made a detour, moving in the direction of the
gift shop. They entered the castle through the public entrance, which
was on the east side.

“Wow, this place is
big,” said Otto in an awestruck voice as they stepped into the
low-ceilinged side lobby. “Is this a real castle?”

“Nah, it’s a
fake one,” Annie replied in her the sarcastic New York tone
that had become a part of her. She instantly felt a pang of guilt for
being so rude. “I’m sorry,” she said, laying a
gentle hand on his arm and caressing it softly. “Of course this
is a real castle. My husband built it –“ she stopped
short. The mention of Jephthah caused her grin to fade into a
dejected expression. Her lower lip quivered and a small lump appeared
in her throat. She decided to change the subject. “Come on,
let’s go into the gift shop. I want to show you where you will
be working.”

She showed him how to run
the gift store, how to operate the cash register, make coffee, and
perform the various daily tasks. Otto was fascinated with the
merchandise, all of which celebrated a country he had never heard of
before. “So where is Finland?” he finally gained the
courage to ask.

Annie turned around. She
had been restocking the section for the I-heart-Finland shot glasses.
Now she stared in wonder at Otto, who was covered in clothing bearing
the same logo. He had donned a fisherman’s hat, a scarf,
oversized sunglasses, an XXL tee shirt, a baggy pair of boxers, and
an apron that said KISS THE FINN. Initially shocked, she burst into
giggles. Otto began laughing as well, although he didn’t
understand what was funny.

Annie abruptly stopped
laughing at the sound of the East Wing door slamming shut. “Annie!”
Jephthah’s voice called over Otto’s laughter. “I
saw you enter this way from the lake! We have to talk!”

Jephthah was talking a
million miles per minute as he stepped into the gift shop, unaware of
Otto, even though Otto was still laughing. Carrying a dripping wet
fishnet over one shoulder, Jephthah was dressed in his usual overalls
and he brought with him the usual fishy stench.

“I have an idea
about the chil—“ he stopped short and stared at the
laughing idiot. “Who are you?”

Annie tried to act as if
everything was great with her marriage. “Jephthah, darling,
this is Otto DaMike, the new gift store manager.”

Jephthah stared in
disbelief at this new employee, who was clad in more eccentric attire
than that which Jephthah had worn everyday of his life. He gave Otto
a phony smile and said, “Nice to meet you.” Then he
turned his gaze back to Annie and said, “Darling, do you think
we could speak privately?”

Annie suggested that Otto
should walk around the castle to familiarize himself with his new
home. “I’ll show you to your quarters later.”

“My quarters? You
mean you’re going to pay me?”

“Of course we are,
sweetie. Now go on, walk around the castle.” She waved him off. 

As
Otto brushed past Jephthah, the old man scowled at Annie’s
reference to Otto as ‘sweetie.’ What’s next?
Jephthah wondered. Sweetie pie? Honey bunny?

Still covered in
merchandise, Otto strolled through the grandiose corridors, past the
ancient Finnish art and tapestries. Aimlessly, he found himself
wandering through a door built into the staircase, down some stairs,
and into the basement. Just outside the kitchen, he bumped into Dr.
Sussman, who was downing the last drops of his daily cup of Paulig
Juhla coffee, imported from Finland. The coffee dribbled down Dr.
Sussman’s chin and he coughed hysterically. Otto pounded on his
back and apologized. But Dr. Sussman only laughed gaily and said,
“Don’t be silly, bud. History is filled with people
bumping into each other.”

“Huh?” Otto
uttered.

But Dr. Sussman was
already breezing away.

It wasn’t long
before Otto adjusted to his new life as a member of the museum staff.
He was enthusiastic about everything he did and eager to learn new
ways of helping out. The visitors were always impressed by his
enthusiasm, even though he could never answer their questions about
Finland in a knowledgeable fashion. It was obvious that he was making
up the answers. For example, one lady wanted to know if one of the
paintings by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela was an original
or a copy, and Otto, after telling the lady that it was, indeed, an
original, asked her if she’d like to buy it. Jephthah,
happening to overhear the attempted sale of an original work of art
for pocket change, was disgusted and decided that enough was enough.
Without even saying goodbye to Annie and the kids, he packed his few
belongings, climbed into his yellow pickup truck, drove to the
airport like he was driving on the autobahn, and returned to his
homeland.

Nobody noticed Jephthah
was gone until two weeks later when Emily spoke up in her meek way.
“Hey,” she said, looking around. “Where is
Jephthah? The castle no longer smells like fish.”

Annie shrugged it off.
“Oh, Jephthah sent me a letter a couple of days ago. He missed
his buddies, Shit and Fonzie. I’m sorry I forgot to tell you
guys.”

The Chewster kids all
looked at each other in stunned silence and with raised eyebrows.
Fred was the most disappointed. “I guess that means I won’t
be attending Catholic school next semester,” he said sulkily.

“Oh honey, get over
it. Catholicism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The
congruency of the church pews is highly overrated and, besides, the
shapes in their stained glass windows are always so scalene. I mean,
what’s wrong with equilateral triangles? For crying out loud,
an isosceles triangle would be better for decoration than a scalene
triangle!” As Annie redirected her full attention to chewing
her mashed potatoes, Fred stared at her in disgust while his siblings
shook their heads in befuddlement. Only their mother, they thought,
could make such a ludicrous comparison between Catholicism and
geometry.

Grief over the loss of
Jephthah was short-lived among the Chewster kids. Soon they
discovered how easy it was to get Otto to do whatever they wanted.
Emily had Otto polishing her Mary Jane shoes in no time, and Sean
loved having someone to do his chores for him at an hourly rate of a
quarter. Tatiana made Otto polish her tiara (a controversial
pawn-shop purchase that Fred insisted was fake despite Tatiana’s
assurances of its authenticity). But it wasn’t only the
Chewster kids whom Otto wanted to please.

One day he sauntered into
the garden and tripped over a pair of hedge clippers that were left
lying on the ground. He remembered seeing BM use the hedge clippers
to make funny figures and shapes in the bushes, so he picked them up
and tried to make something. He ended up creating a bunch of bunnies.
Always enthusiastic for no logical reason, Otto turned the entire
garden into a rabbit farm. BM was devastated when he saw it. Emily
thought the bunnies were cute, but BM said their cuteness made him
nauseous. 

Fred stated that the bunnies were every bit as ugly as the
crap BM created. The Nazi took the clippers from Otto and said, “I’ll
show you how it should be done.” He proceeded to behead all of
the bunnies and reshape one of the largest bushes into a gigantic,
proud, Aryan soldier, complete with swastika armband.

“Oh how cute!”
Otto exclaimed. “You made an octopus on his arm!”

But Fred wasn’t
paying attention. He was busy making a second Nazi symbol out of
another bush-bunny.

That was when Tatiana
emerged from the castle. “Hey, Otto!” she called. “Did
you forget to wear the gloves when you polished my tiara today? It
has fingerprints all over it!”

Fred rolled his eyes in
disgust. He put the hedge clippers down and addressed Otto. “Mein
Herr, you should not allow everyone to push you around like that. You
have to take initiative for yourself. Which is what I do. That’s
why I admire Adolf Hitler so much. He is the perfect example, in
fact. He did not permit others to discourage or persuade him from his
course. He stayed focused and strong!”

“Oh stuff a sock in
it, Fred,” Tatiana snapped. “You sound like one of those
idiotic Nazi propaganda films the SS used to play for the Hitler
Youth.”

“First of all,
Tatiana,” Fred began as he shot her an irritated, snobbish
look. “I really wish you would stop using the term ‘Nazi.’
It’s very offensive. It’s a derogatory term and we don’t
like it.”

Tatiana looked at Fred as
though uncomprehending of how he could imagine that she cared whether
or not she offended him. But all she said was, with a roll of her
eyes, “Whatever, Fred,” and with that, she turned on her
heel and reentered the castle. Fred chased her, demanding an apology.
For several years, Tatiana had become increasingly disgusted and
saddened by the mere sight of Fred. They had once been very close
friends. He used to teasingly call her ‘Satan’ because
she was a bossy big sister, and she would call him ‘Grouchy’
after his childhood icon, Oscar the Grouch. Nowadays, he never did
anything without pissing her off or publicly humiliating her. Of
course, Fred was generally the common denominator of all the Chewster
kids’ complaints. Otto was the only member of the family who
was never irked by Fred, for he was too clueless to be offended or
embarrassed by the resident Nazi. In Otto’s imagination, World
War II was a war between two planets and he couldn’t imagine
what a Nazi was, let alone recognize one.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The
Chewster kids considered Dr. Sussman, the museum’s resident
historian, as being a walking, talking Encyclopedia of Historical
Appendage. There was one subject, however, that fascinated him to a
higher degree than any other, and that topic was the prehistoric
discovery of fire. Actually, he was obsessed by the sheer word
‘discovery.’ ‘Discovery’ was Dr. Sussman’s
middle name. Sean once expressed a curiosity about whether Dr.
Sussman ever applied for a Discover credit card. Dr. Sussman
frequently bored people to tears with his ramblings about the
discovery of wind power, of the 1849 gold rush, of the moon, or of
the wheel. “Discovery is cool,” he would marvel. “People
throughout history have discovered so many awesome things.” But
for some reason, the discovery of fire held a special fascination for
him. For Dr. Sussman, that was the most “awesome”
discovery of all. Second to fire, wind power was the discovery that
made his eyes mist over.

“The Native
American tribal group known as the Aztecs did not discover wind power
as early as the Europeans did,” he once told the Chewster kids
during the daily extracurricular history lesson he never failed to
subject them to. Besides his history class at Burbank High, the kids
had to endure this special private session, held after school in the
parlor of the castle.

Tatiana tried to listen,
for she loved history, but was too easily distracted by the revolting
sight of Fred as he read the latest issue of Biography of Hitler.
Fred obtained this magazine, as well as a lot of other
controversial propaganda, from an underground organization in the
Middle East. Fred was not remotely interested in what he viewed as
Dr. Sussman’s “poorly focused” perspective on human
history. Neither Native American history nor prehistoric discoveries
interested Fred. The only discovery that intrigued Fred was the
discovery and heist of the swastika by the Nazis. Sean was falling
asleep, despite his polite attempt to register Dr. Sussman’s
words. His twin faked rapt attention as best as she could while
applying glitter nail polish to her toes.

“For instance,”
Dr. Sussman continued, “the Aztecs thought a canoe was
maneuvered solely by means of manpower. The Aztecs did not have the
concept of wind. How could they have? I mean, it’s wind. What
can you see in wind?”

“You can’t
see it,” Fred sniggered, not bothering to remove his blank
stare from his magazine.

“Exactly!”
Dr. Sussman exclaimed, getting excited. His face and ears reddened in
a matter of seconds. “You can’t see it! You can’t
see wind! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! How can you
have a concept of something you can’t even see?”

No one knew and no one
cared. The kids had other issues on their minds.

Especially Fred. The
magazine he was reading contained a code that he was determined to
decipher. Encoded was a personal message from his Middle Eastern
contact. All he could tell so far was that the message was written in
German and it said something about Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubel.
Fred knew he needed help deciphering the message, but he didn’t
know who he could trust. There was no way of approaching anyone who
lived in the castle with a problem like this. Tatiana would just
laugh at him and no one else would care about a covert message room a
terrorist group. Goody-two-shoes Emily would probably suggest
reporting it to the CIA! Fred took his problem to bed that night. As
he lay under his swastika-embroidered blanket, inside the sanctuary
of his swastika-embroidered canopy, he thought about his friends. He
only had three friends, for everyone else at Burbank High despised
him. None of his friends had any special talent for code breaking,
but they seemed to be his only hope. Maybe they could help him do
research about Geli Raubel and help him master the German language.
Yes! Fred thought, as a light bulb clicked to life in his
brain. We’ll form a club! We’ll have meetings and
we’ll study the German language and constantly rebuff our
knowledge of the Third Reich! Maybe there’s some clue to
unlocking the code in a book somewhere!

The next day at school,
Fred rounded up his friends: Lemouse, Adidas, and Augustus. He
explained his ideas to them. They all thought it was great. They
decided to begin immediately and held their first meeting during
lunch period.

Lemouse’s real name
was Matthew Lamouz, but everyone called him ‘Lemouse’
partly because of his surname and partly because he was obsessed with
cheese. The only thing Lemouse liked more than cheese was baseball.

Adidas was the laughing
stock of the school. Fred was friendly to him merely because Adidas
was a first-generation German-American (like Fred) and he was a
tag-along who did whatever Fred commanded. One time, Fred and Lemouse
dared Adidas to masturbate in the boys’ locker room, so he did,
and got caught, and thus, became everyone’s favorite joke. To
make matters more pathetic, Adidas recently shaved his head until he
was totally bald. He also ran like a chicken.

Augustus was fat and shy.
He rarely spoke, but Fred appreciated his meekness. Augustus made
Fred feel superior.

The four Nazis began
their lunch period as they always did, with a game of “KICK THE
CAN” in front of the girls’ gym.

“OK, Lemouse,”
Fred said as he kicked a soda can to him. “Pretend that this
can represents Jews. Now what do you do?”

Lemouse grinned and
smashed the can with his foot as hard as he could. Fred beamed with
pride. “OK,” he said as his followers gathered around
him. “Basically, I feel that as your Führer, I should
appoint you to positions in the Nazi History Club’s inner
committee. Augustus, since August Kubizek was the Führer’s
best friend, I appoint you as Vice President.”

“Hey, no fair!”
Lemouse cried. “I’m your best friend.”

“All right then,”
Fred said impatiently. “You shall be my treasurer.”

“Treasurer? What
the hell? I don’t see any money!”

“We’ll raise
money then.”

“How?”

Fred beamed and reached
inside his pants’ pocket. He held up an orange lollipop with a
white circle and a black swastika in the middle. “These,”
he said, grinning.

“Wow, where’d
you get those?” Augustus asked. All three of Fred’s
buddies were impressed.

Fred grinned proudly. “I
have contacts,” he said vaguely. “They send me
merchandise in exchange for my support.”

Fred knew that he
couldn’t simply come out and tell them about the code without
compromising his Middle Eastern contact. His friends would help him
organize the Nazi History Club and he would eventually manipulate
them into doing his dirty work.

The end of lunch period
was near when they decided to adjourn the meeting. When Fred noticed
that Lemouse began to lead the way to their next class, Fred
immediately rushed ahead of Lemouse and began to walk down the steps.
Suddenly, Fred stopped.

“Lemouse!” he
cried. “Someone might try to assassinate me. Go ahead of me.”

“Oh do I have to?”
Lemouse whined.

“Now!” Fred
commanded.

So Lemouse reluctantly
went down the steps first. The rest of the Nazi party followed. Fred
immensely enjoyed role-playing as the Führer!

Over the next week, the
Nazis sold their lollipops at fifty cents a pop. At first, business
didn’t go too well. But soon, swastika lollipops became a big
fad at Burbank High.

When the week was over
and Friday had come at last, Fred happily counted $250.00 in lollipop
sales. He handed the hefty stack of Alexander Hamilton and Andrew
Jackson bills, with two George Washington coins. “Take good
care of it,” Fred instructed as Lemouse stuffed the wad of cash
in his pockets.

And Lemouse did take care
of it… until Sunday afternoon. While walking along San
Fernando Road, something in one of the shop windows caught his eye.
Cheese.

As Lemouse walked inside
the deli, a sweet and heavenly aroma of lean meats and cheeses
tickled his nose. He impulsively purchased $250.00 worth of cheese.
After nearly buying out the entire store, he ate in all in less than
an hour as he walked home. He didn’t think of it again until
Monday during lunch when Fred asked him for the money. Lemouse
reached into his pockets expecting the money to be there, but when he
found that his pockets were empty, he froze. His face turned white.

“Lemouse!”
Fred shrieked. “Where’s the money?”

Lemouse didn’t say
anything. He just hung his head in shame. Fred slugged him. Then the
two friends started to box. It was a ridiculous sight.

Augustus, the only member
of Fred’s gang with a measurable amount of sense, suggested
that they try to raise money another way. He also mentioned that he
heard that the swastika lollipops were offending numerous people.

Lemouse suggested that
they form a band. So that’s what they did. Fred, naturally,
named the band ‘Führer and Friends.’ Fred was the
lead singer, though he sounded like a cat whose tail has been sawed
off. Augustus played the guitar with respectable results, but Adidas
was terrible as the keyboardist. Lemouse, however, was excellent at
banging on the drums. Unsurprisingly, Fred’s favorite song to
perform was “Springtime for Hitler” from the 1968 film,
The Producers.

Everyday after school,
‘Führer and Friends’ practiced at the castle. One
day, Tatiana’s best friend, Christiana Nottingham, was over at
the castle at the same time that the Nazi History Club was practicing
in the Outer Bailey. Christiana was an obsessive disciple of the late
John Lennon, so when she heard Fred’s band warping Lennon’s
masterpiece, “Imagine,” she went berserk. ‘Führer
and Friends’ ruined the song by revising the lyrics into things
like, “Imagine there are no Jews,” and “Imagine all
the people living without Jews.”

The next day at school
Christiana had her revenge. She marched up to Fred, who was standing
with his hands shoved down into his pockets.

“Hey Friedrich,”
Christiana said deviously, pronouncing his Germanic name Yankie
style, ‘Fried’ like ‘fried chicken,’ etc.
“Someone told me you were Jewish,” she went on regardless
of his insulted look.

“No!” he
cried, forgetting entirely about the abuse of his name. “It
isn’t true!”

“Lemouse told me,”
Christiana lied.

Fred stomped away with
tears streaming down his face.

A couple of days later,
Christiana was at the castle again, watching documentaries in
Tatiana’s suite, when Fred burst in. The two best friends
glared at him, horrified by the audacity of his intrusion.

“You know that
thing you said that Lemouse said about me,” he yelled angrily
at Christiana. “Well, I didn’t enjoy that too much.”

“I’m sorry,”
Christiana said instinctively. She was so taken aback by Fred’s
entrance and his anger that she momentarily forget to hate the Nazi
freak.

Fred’s face
softened and returned to its normal color immediately. “Oh,
don’t worry,” he reassured her in an eerily kind tone.
“I’m not mad. Everything is cool.” And with that,
he left the room.

Christiana and Tatiana
exchanged wide-eyed looks. Tatiana shook her head. “He is so
bipolar sometimes,” she said as she took their documentary off
pause mode.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Annie’s younger
brother, Dean Foyla, and his two teenage sons lived in Las Vegas, as
that was the only logical place where Dean could make a living as an
Elvis Presley Impersonator. His sons, Ike and Eric, were fraternal
twins, sixteen years old, and starkly contrasted in almost everyway.
Eric was rebellious, with long hippie hair and shoes that were
“holier” than the Bible. Ike was a military guy. As a
member of his school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training
Corps (JROTC), he dressed and behaved with military precision and
rigidity. He typically wore an aviator jacket and camouflage slacks.
Everyone called him “Goose” because when he walked his
entire body bounced like a goose’s neck and his goofy persona
reminded people of Tom Cruise’s geeky best friend in Top
Gun.

Ike and Eric were a
handful for their single dad. Always punching and kicking each other,
they were obnoxious and argumentative. As Easter break approached,
Dean decided to temporarily separate them. He sent Ike to visit
Auntie Annie in Burbank and, hoping to divert Eric’s
troublesome energy, he enrolled Eric in an Outward Bound expedition.

Ike’s visit
coincided with the arrival at “MOFC” – the Museum
of Finnish Culture – (pronounced “Mof-see”) of Lord
Oscar Magnus Mäenpää. Oskar was the nephew and heir
presumptive of Lord Sverre XVI Magnus, the reigning Duke of Turku.
Enrolled in the terminal year of an elite Swiss boarding school, he
had hoped to idle away the Easter break by skiing in Klosters. But
Uncle Sverre intervened with a more productive plan. Oskar was
commissioned as auditor of “Operation MOFC.”
Unfortunately for the Duke’s American investments, Oskar
intended to spend more time auditing American women than the daily
operations of a boring museum. Oskar traveled a lot and his wild
oats were definitely sowed, but he had zero experience with American
women. He hadn’t been to the USA since a brief visit to New
York at the age of nine. So he jumped at the chance to escape the
morose atmosphere in Turku, where the only thing anyone seemed
interested in was the ongoing investigation into the assassination
attempt on the Duchess. The Duke and Duchess were devastated over
the loss of their unborn child, the more so because the Duchess
wasn’t young and there was scarcely hope she might become
pregnant again.

The Duke hoped that Oskar
might give him a full report on the museum’s status quo.
Without Jephthah there to oversee things, the Duke worried about the
future of his investment. Annie and her children were overstrained in
trying to maintain their appearance as American cousins of Finnish
nobility. The idea had been invented in the imaginations of the
Burbank public, but the officials of the museum encouraged its
continuance because it was good for business. In the beginning,
people had come from all over to see the Finnish castle and museum in
California, home to a supposedly Finnish-American “royal”
family. However, Jephthah’s departure put a dent in the
illusion. If Annie and the Chewster kids wanted to continue the
charade, they would have to increase their knowledge of everything
Finnish and start behaving in a more “royal” fashion. The
Duke sent Oskar to Burbank with a small entourage of aides who were
assigned to help Annie and the kids establish a royal diary of
engagements and adapt to their faux titles. “Princess Anne”
was said to be a “distant relation” of the Duke of Turku.
“Lady Tatiana” relished her new status, but the other
kids, especially Sean, thought it was stupid and Sean even refused to
cooperate with the charade.

Tatiana tried to research
Oskar on the web. She didn’t find much, but what she did learn
was that he was a recent graduate of the elite “Le Rosey”
boarding school in Switzerland. There was a page commemorating the
school’s recent “snow polo” victory against a rival
school and several pictures showed Oskar partying with his teammates.
Tatiana was at once smitten with his preppy good looks. The
additional knowledge she had of his pedigree made him quite perfect
in her eyes. I will marry him, she thought decisively. And
one day, unless the present Duke has a son, which is very unlikely at
this point, I will be the Duchess of Turku!

The day that Ike Foyla
arrived from Vegas, the family and staff were in a frenzy to prepare
for Lord Oskar’s arrival. In the Outer Bailey, the kids and a
few of the staff members rehearsed royal bows and curtsies in
anticipation for the aristocrat’s entrance.

“Do we have to
bow?” Kermit asked, feeling disgusted at the thought of bowing
to a bratty teenager. Kermit himself was barely older than Oskar, but
as a working-class college student, he felt he was entitled to some
dignity.

As Emily practiced her
curtsy, Ike came up behind her, grabbed her around the neck, and
said, “Hey, cuz!”

Emily whirled around and
stood face-to-face with her cousin. Ike was about three heads taller
than she. He had closely cropped blond hair, dancing brown eyes, and
a large crooked grin. He wore an aviator jacket with squadron patches
all over it, but it was the rest of his attire that sent Emily into a
fit of laughter.

“What’s so
funny?” Ike demanded.

“Oh, nothing. It’s
just that you… look so… so… er….”

“Sophisticated?”
Ike guessed.

“Er, yeah, sure.”
Emily didn’t know how to describe her cousin’s goofy
attire. He wore a baggy pair of camouflage slacks that reminded her
of a parachute, army boots with countless scratches and scuff marks,
and a maroon military beret.

Meanwhile, Fred had only
one concern regarding their cousin. “Where is your swastika
armband?” he demanded of Ike.

“Swastika armband?”
Ike hadn’t seen Fred in several years, so he was yet unaware of
Fred’s finely tuned Nazi obsession.

Fred’s black eyes
burned with anger. “Yes, basically, that’s what I said!
Now how can you possibly be a National Socialist soldier without your
armband?”

“Wait a minute….”
Ike said, thinking, which looked like a difficult task for him.
“National Socialist? What the hell?” Ike made a gesture
with his hands. “I don’t think so!”

“You traitor!”
Fred screamed. “How dare you betray the Führer’s
cause?”

Suzette came outside,
whining about whether Lord Oskar would like her cooking. “How
am I supposed to know to cook for a Finnish prince?”

Ike was horrified. He
looked incredulously at Emily, then at Tatiana. “Is this girl
your cook?”

“Yeah,”
Tatiana said, as though speaking to someone grossly inferior to her
genius intellect.

Ike ignored Tatiana’s
tone and turned back to Suzette. “Excuse me?”

Suzette didn’t seem
to hear him.

“Excuse me!”
Ike repeated in a loud, commanding voice.

Suzette jumped. Ike’s
looming figure and intimidating voice had nearly caused her to jump
out of her skin, and she stepped back in alarm. “What’s
your problem?” she asked.

Ike was unsympathetic.
“You’re a servant here! Unless you are on some sort of
scheduled break, I suggest you assume a more appropriate manner and
return to your duties!”

Suzette was dumbfounded.
No one had ever spoken to her like that. Annie and the kids always
treated her like anyone of their friends. Overcome with emotion, she
burst into tears.

That was when Lord Oskar
stepped out of the shadows. He had been spying on the scene for
several minutes. “If anyone should assume amore appropriate
manner,” he began coldly to Ike, “it is you!”

The Viking aristocrat’s
sudden appearance made everyone gasp. Tatiana and Emily recognized
him instantly from the internet pictures they had been drooling over
for weeks, but even without the pictures, they must have guessed his
identity. Dressed in a J Crew shirt and pressed jeans, he was tall,
with a preppy blond haircut and a sexy Scandinavian accent. He
looked too much like a model on a polo club brochure to be mistaken
for a museum staffer, tourist, or Burbank High student.

He introduced himself was
plain Oskar Mäenpää. Totally flustered, all the girls
present went into deep curtsies. Oskar laughed. “Ladies,
please! I am not a stuffy British royal. Please do not treat me like
one.” Trying to laugh off their humiliation, the girls returned
to standing.

After she regained
self-command, Tatiana breezed up to Oskar. “I’m Tatiana
Chewster… I mean, Lady Tatiana of Turku,” she
corrected herself and offered him a handshake. She blushed furiously
and her kneecaps turned to mush as Oskar took her hand in his, bowed
slightly, and kissed her hand.

Tatiana was in love at
that moment. Unfortunately, the feeling was not mutual, for she
wasn’t Oskar’s type at all. Oskar was a fast-living
playboy who liked to see women wear only two types of attire:
miniskirts and bikinis. However, he had come to America hoping to
meet a shy and simply American girl. Tatiana, being neither a slut
nor “shy and simple,” didn’t have good prospects.
But when Oskar noticed Emily, he saw all the sweetness he had come in
search of.

CHAPTER NINE

One morning Emily woke up
before dawn. She was still tired for she hadn’t slept well.
After giving up the uphill effort of falling asleep again, she
crawled across her four-poster bed and reached for her lamp. The
sudden coming of light was no shock; her lamp gave off a dim light
through a lavender lamp shade. Her bedroom was sumptuous and regal.
Unlike Sean’s bedroom, with its STAR WARS paraphernalia, or
Tatiana’s, with her drawings of royalty affixed to the walls,
or Fred’s restricted lair, Emily’s room was pampered with
deep purple satin and burgundy velvet.

Stepping down from the
bed and slipping her feet into pink bunny slippers, she moved toward
one of the two sets of 11-foot-tall double doors. Through the doors,
she hurried across the dim corridor to one of the windows. She gently
pushed back the curtains and slipped behind them, allowing them to
shield her from the nakedness of the lonely corridor. She was
protected and felt perfectly at ease within the privacy and
homeliness of her spot behind the thick curtains. Feeling content,
she peered down the two levels below her and saw, with a pang of
disgust, Fred doing jumping jacks on the Grand Terrace.

Fred had this bizarre
fantasy that he was training for the Hitler Youth Revival and,
therefore, it was his ambition to achieve total physical fitness in
accordance with the Third Reich’s army regulations. As his
philosophy stated, “Arbeit macht frei,” which was German
for “Work makes you free,” a slogan used by the Nazi
forced labor camps.

Fred wanted to excel in
the army, but never surpass the rank of corporal. Hitler was a
corporal when he was discharged from active service in 1921,
following his imprisonment under charges of high treason. Fred did
not feel worthy to obtain higher than Hitler’s rank. Such an
audacity would have made Hitler Fred’s military inferior and
that, to Fred, would have been a travesty justifiably punishable by
suicide.

Nothing in the universe
terrified Emily as much as Fred did. The sight of him doing jumping
jacks on the Grand Terrace sent chills along her spine.

Lord Oskar suddenly
emerged into her line of vision. He came out of the castle, moving
away from her and toward Fred. Fred ceased his jumping jacks and
nervously eyed Oskar, who was pacing circles around him. Emily
thought Oskar was looking at Fred rather smugly.

Then Fred caught sight of
her in the window. He grinned and raised his right arm, outstretching
it in a Nazi salute, and by reading his lips, she knew he was
uttering the Nazi mantra, “Heil Hitler.” Scared and
nauseous, Emily slipped back through the curtains before Oskar had a
chance to follow Fred’s upward gaze. She hoped Oskar had not
noticed her too. Ever since Oskar had arrived at the castle, he had
taken a fancy to her, following her around and presenting her with
flowers roughly picked from the gardens. Initially, she had been
flattered. But now she sensed something devious in Oskar’s
intentions. His attentions to her simultaneously irritated and
alarmed her.

She was on the point of
returning to her bedroom when suddenly a door nearby swung open. Sean
appeared, carrying a small black box. “Hello, Princess Leia,”
he greeted his twin.

“What do you want,
Sean?” she asked, being in no mood to play games.

“I want you to
guess what I have here,” he said, indicating his black shoe
box.

“What, Sean? What
do you have?”

“Guess.”

Sean, I don’t want
to guess. Just tell me”

Sean handed her the box
and she lifted the lid. She found it contained an exact replica of
the Death Star. With an exasperated sigh, she recapped the lid,
handed the box back to Sean, and returned to the safety of her
bedroom.

She quickly slipped on a
velvet burgundy body suit and jeans. Curling up on the couch near the
window, she tried to a book for school, but her mind was cluttered.
For one thing, she was disgusted with Miss Polk from an event of the
previous day. Her siblings and she, plus Oskar, had all been sitting
in the Conservatory doing homework. O course didn’t have
homework, but he enjoyed watching Emily do hers.

Fred suddenly slammed his
textbook closed and, as if thinking out loud, said, “This book
is so biased! Why can’t anyone understand that Hitler should
have won the war?”

Miss Polk, who had just
come into the room, gave Fred a look of disdain and said, “Oh,
do you think so?”

Fred stared at her,
genuinely amazed and disgusted by the servant’s audacity. “Was
I speaking to you?” he demanded. “I have nothing to say
to you, Weibstück, so stop looking at me. And yes, I do think
Hitler should have won the war. Do you have a problem with that? Not
that you know anything about it.”

Miss Polk didn’t
need to know that “Weibstück” is German for “bitch”
to be furious at Fred. “I happen to know a great deal about
Adolf Hitler, you little jerk. I certainly know more than you know. I
know all about the kinds of career options he made.” That was a
typical kind of remark from the Careers teacher at Burbank High who
earned pocket change as the museum’s live-in housekeeper. “If
you knew half the stuff I know about Hitler, you wouldn’t wish
that he had won the war, believe me!”

“Oh god!”
Fred rolled his eyes defiantly and gazed at the ceiling. “You
don’t know more than I do about Hitler. I know everything about
him from sources completely unknown to most people!”

“Oh do you?”

Fred ended up provoking
Miss Polk so much that she chased him around the Conservatory, waving
her broom at him, and screaming, “I’ll hit you with this
broom, you little brat!”

“Oh yeah?”
Fred challenged her as he ducked her swing. “Sure you will.
I’ll just pray to the Führer and he will put a spell on
you!”

Miss Polk was infuriated.
“Why bother praying to him when you can talk to him yourself
after I kill you? The two of you can discuss your racist views
together as you burn side-by-side in hell!”

Emily detested Miss Polk
because the old lady was an impertinent and judgmental know-it-all.
It didn’t help matters that Miss Polk considered the generally
depressed Emily to be “just a lazy brat.” Naturally,
Emily didn’t care about Fred or Hitler being judged, but sadly
Miss Polk’s prejudice extended elsewhere. In short, Miss Polk’s
hatred of Nazis, in unison with most people’s, including
Emily’s, was irrelevant, as it failed to make her any less of
an insufferable “Weibstück.”

Long after Emily gave up
trying to concentrate on her assigned reading, BM came into her
bedroom, pushing a cart with steaming, delicious-smelling breakfast.
Normally, Suzette the cook or Kermit the butler brought breakfast to
the family’s rooms, but Emily wasn’t complaining. She ran
over to BM and threw her arms around him in a bear hug. In addition
to being her best friend and the only person, it seemed, who truly
understood her. He was like a brother, being the foster son of Annie
and Jephthah.

As they sat down to eat
scrambled eggs and turkey bacon, they suddenly burst into giggles at
the sight of Fred running across the vast lawn outside. Unlike most
people, Fred always ran sideways.

“What a dork!”
Emily muttered.

“Well,” BM
joked in a mock-diplomatic tone. “Nazis will be Nazis.”

Before Emily knew it, it
was time for the kids – Tatiana, Fred, Sean, BM, and Emily –
to go to school. They had one more day of school before the Easter
break.

Fred hustled in front of
the group, with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. With
Oskar almost jogging to keep up, the two were engrossed in a
whispered conversation.

Emily looked at her
sister. “Why is Oskar going to school with us?”

Tatiana shrugged. “I
don’t know, but I’m not complaining.” Since Oskar
had come onto the scene, he had hardly uttered a syllable to Tatiana.
She was jealous of Emily for being Oskar’s apparent favorite.
Emily tried repeatedly to convince Tatiana that she didn’t like
Oskar, that he scared her, but Tatiana was blinded by bitterness.
Even the sight of Oskar conversing with Fred failed to break the
spell he had on her.

Suddenly, the Good Year
blimp flew over Burbank. “Zeppelin!” Fred cried. “Graf
von Zeppelin! I’m here! Save your Führer!” But the
blimp just flew on by. Fred found it quite offensive. He started
kicking a brick wall.

The others stared at him
while he enacted his temper tantrum. BM glanced over at Emily, who
merely shrugged. Tatiana looked as though she wanted to die. Her face
was as red as a beet. Sean covered his face with his hands.

Suddenly, Emily caught
sight of a boy off in the distance. The light from the sun reflected
the morning dew off his glasses. He was eating a sandwich. He was
about twenty yards away, standing outside a house as if waiting for
someone. As the boy’s and Emily’s eyes met, Fred’s
friend Lemouse came bounding out of the house, saying, “Come
on, Bux, sorry for the wait!” But the boy seemed totally
oblivious of Lemouse. He sprang towards Emily as if there was a
magnetic charge between them. A few feet from where she stood, he
tripped on a crack in the ground and went careening to the cement.
His glasses flew off his head, sailed through the air, and landed on
Emily’s head. She stood there, rooted in shock, wearing the
boy’s glasses like a crown. Baffled – firstly by the boy
himself, then by his clumsiness – she slowly removed the
glasses from her head and outstretched them for the boy to take.

He stood up shyly.
Putting his glasses back on, he began to look at her all over, sizing
her up. He dusted himself off and thanked her, then scratched his
head and twitched his ears.

“Er, hi. My name is
Buxton. Buxton Alessandro Corleone.”

Her face flushed and she
giggled. “Wow. That’s quite a name. Let me guess, you’re
Italian?”

“Why yes, how did
you guess?” he chided.

“Well,” she
said. “I remember the name ‘Corleone’ from a movie,
or book, or something.”

Buxton grinned. “I
think you mean The Godfather!”

“Yeah.” She
brightened up.

Buxton stared at her
intently. She silently prayed that there wasn’t a huge zit on
her face or anything gross. Why did he keep staring at her? “Er,
what’s your name?” he finally asked.

“Emily Michelle
Gwendolyn Anne Alexandra Marie Autumn Brinley Chewster.”

With a shake of his head,
Buxton said, “Whoa! And you tell me that my name is jacked up!”

At this point, Fred
interfered. He marched over to Emily and Buxton, putting his face
close to Buxton’s. Buxton was shocked by the proximity of
Fred’s gargantuan nose.

Fred glared at the boy
and snapped, “You there. I know you’re Italian and I
admire that because the Italians were on the good side, but don’t
flirt with my sister. I wouldn’t even let the Führer flirt
with my precious Geli.”

“Huh?”
Tatiana became attentive. “Wait a minute. Hitler did flirt with
Geli. He did more than that.”

Buxton was bewildered. He
jolted his head back. “What the hell?”

Tatiana jerked her head
at him. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand. It’s
a Chewster thing.”

Emily turned several
shades of red in embarrassment. Sean, on the other hand, seemed to
find the whole thing funny. The only one who perceived Emily’s
agony was BM. He bent over and picked up a pebble from the sidewalk.
He threw it at Fred. It hit Fred smack in the center of his forehead.

Fred, consumed with
anger, turned to BM. BM ran down the hill toward school, with Fred
chasing after him. Sean and Tatiana took off after Fred, and Lemouse
followed them, leaving Emily alone with Buxton and Oskar.

Emily hid her face in her
hands. Buxton gently took hold of her hands and placed them away from
her face. “Interesting people,” he said. She just
groaned.

Buxton noticed that she
was carrying a French textbook. He smiled. “I’m in AP
French.”

“AP French!”
She was impressed. “I’m only in French I and I’m
getting a ‘D.’ Je deteste French.”

“I know Swahili,”
said Oskar, rather pathetically, but neither Buxton nor Emily made
any show of interest.

“Well,” said
Buxton, scratching his head. “I could tutor you. As a matter of
fact, I could come over to your house today and….”

“No!” Emily
cried. “You can’t! You can’t meet my family!”

“Oh come on!”
Buxton tried to sooth her. “They can’t be that bad.”
He patted her shoulder.

She sighed and
reluctantly wrote down her address on the palm of his hand.

“You live in that
weird castle!” Buxton exclaimed.

“Cool! I’ll
be there tonight around six,” he said. Before she had a chance
to respond, he suddenly lunged forward and kissed her forehead. She
was shocked. He blushed, and ran off.

She almost fainted. She
smiled as she watched him run off into the distance, not even
noticing Oskar adjusting his Rayban sunglasses as he mock-casually
put his arm around her. “What kind of name is Buxton?” he
asked sneeringly.

This seemed to snap Emily
somewhat back to Earth. She pulled away from Oskar and retorted,
“It’s a nice name. I like it. Anyway, you’re one to
talk, Oskar Meyer.”

As she and Oskar walked
to school, she felt as though she was walking on air. She felt light
enough to handle anything, even Oskar’s flirtatious remarks.

She recalled something
that her mom had once told her: “Emily, there’s something
you need to know about life. Women, good. Men, bad.”

When Emily stared at her
blankly, Annie tried a different tactic – in other words, the
geometry approach. “Women, equilateral. Men, scalene,”
Annie explained, making the shapes in the air for demonstrative
purposes. This rather sent her obsession for geometric theorems into
overdrive. “Remember, the square of the hypotenuse of a right
triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”
And that was the extent of Annie’s boy talk with her youngest
child.

Tatiana had once told
Emily that men were self-absorbed, sex-dominated, chauvinistic pigs.
In other words, they were complete scum. She was, of course, using
Fred as her principal reference point, which made perfect sense to
Emily because Fred was definitely scum -- actually, he was scum to
the second power – and Oskar was living up to that assessment.
But Emily couldn’t imagine that Buxton was cut from the same
cloth. From the moment he kissed her forehead, she knew that her
views about romance and boys would never be the same.

CHAPTER TEN

In those days, Burbank
High School had a dirty and crumbling campus. Academically, it had
been rated as one of the best schools in Los Angeles County, second
only to the schools in other independent districts such as Beverly
Hills and San Marino, although the students and faculty didn’t
appreciate it much. The school was founded in 1908, and one teacher,
who was also a former student in the 1950s, often chided his
students: “This place hasn’t changed a bit since I was a
student here. Literally. I’m not exaggerating a bit.” He
wasn’t. He went on to say that the trash under the bleachers in
the coed gym was probably the same trash left behind by his own
classmates. Indeed, there was a lot of trash lying around the campus,
and the buildings desperately needed fresh coats of paint. Miss Polk
bitterly complained that the school was a “dump” and Dr.
Sussman once insinuated that the school district should set the place
on fire -- “fire” being the keyword that excited him
-- and start from scratch.

Emily was a sophomore at
this “dump.” Sean and BM were also sophomores. Fred was a
junior and Tatiana was a senior. Annie taught both geometry and
algebra, but of course the former was her specialty. She had a
master’s degree in geometry. Sean, BM, Tatiana and Emily were
all in Annie’s geometry class. Although she was a senior,
Tatiana struggled with math in general and so had not progressed far.
Fred thought it was hilarious that, while he was in pre-calculus,
Tatiana was lagging behind in tenth-grade level math.

In a way, Fred felt
guilty. By being enrolled in pre-calculus, he had surpassed his
“Führer” in academic achievement. Hitler was noted
to have been a poor math student, despite having passable grades in
geometry, but never rose beyond it. Fred begged his mother to let him
drop out of pre-cal – and indeed, out of high school
altogether, just like Hitler had done, but for once, Annie put her
foot down. She slapped him across the face. “Stop trying to be
like Hitler all the time! You are not Adolf Hitler. You are Friedrich
Siegfried Foyla!” (Fred appreciated that his mother eliminated
his Jewish father’s name and replaced it with her own.) She
continued, “All this talk about Hitler… it is giving me
a headache! Act normal! Cut your nails and stop saying, ‘basically,’
and in the name of Pythagoras, stop running sideways! Can’t you
run equilaterally? It drives me crazy to see my own flesh and blood
running in such a skewed manner! You’re as bad as the Catholics
with their scalene triangles!”

Under Annie’s
strict watchfulness, Fred aced all of his pre-cal exams. However, he
refused to cut his hideous nails, act ‘normal,’ or stop
using his favorite word in the English language. Annie was almost
ready to dispatch him to that military school Elijah had suggested.
Or if it proved too hard for her to admit that Elijah was right about
something, she might consider sending Fred to live with Jephthah in
Finland.

BM and Emily had the
misfortune to be in a speech class with Fred. Every speech Fred
delivered was about World War II. He would walk up to the front of
the classroom, set up his maps of 1940s Europe, pick up the teacher’s
yardstick and say things like, “The thing is, basically, I feel
that Hitler should have won the war. He conquered many countries. He
became the leader of Germany in 1933, basically committed suicide in
1945…. Basically, he led Germany to one triumphant victory
after another in a matter of about twelve years. The first country he
basically took over was Austria. Austria was a fairly new country,
having previously been united with Hungary, hence Austro-Hungary,
which was basically Hitler’s birthplace. He was born April
20^th, 1889, basically on the German-Austro-Hungarian
border. His father was basically a retired civil servant and his
mother was his father’s second cousin, which is why a lot of
retarded idiots like to say Hitler was screwed up genetically. It’s
a lie, of course, because Hitler was a genius. He had one sister, one
half brother, and one half sister. He also had a brother who died
when Hitler was about eleven. The Hitler family basically moved
around Austro-Hungary a lot….”

Fred was a never-ending,
redundant, pointless encyclopedia. Before he was into Hitler’s
teen years, BM and Emily, and most of the class, even the teacher
would be asleep.

On this particular day,
for some reason, as Emily dozed off during Fred’s speech, she
dreamed that her whole family was in a concentration camp. Fred,
attired in SS uniform, was seated at a desk and signaled his family
toward him. “You guys are worthless Jews,” he told them
in the dream. “To the gas chamber with all of you!”

“But Fred,”
Annie pleaded with him. “I’m not Jewish, and none of us
are. Your father and his other family are Jewish, but they’re
not here.” But Fred didn’t listen. He stood up, clicked
his boots, and commanded for his own family to be sent off for
execution.

On her way to the gas
chamber, Emily cried, “No, Fred, no! Don’t execute us!”

Suddenly, Emily found
herself back in Speech class, with the whole class staring at her.
Fred glanced at her. “Excuse me, Geli. I wasn’t finished
with my lecture.”

“Sorry, Fred.”
Emily blushed and sat down. She hated it when Fred used his Nazi
nicknames for his family in public.

Her friend and classmate
Amelia Ulloa raised her hand.

Not one for being
interrupted, Fred ignored Amelia and resumed his speech.

“Ahem,”
Amelia cleared her throat in order to force Fred’s attention
her way.

With a look of disgust,
Fred turned to face her. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Fred,”
Amelia began. “Isn’t there anything you know other than
World War II? I mean, nobody cares what the hell you know about Adolf
Hitler. I think Adolf Hitler was a loser.”

Not surprisingly, Fred
was seriously offended by this remark. He glared at Amelia. “Excuse
me?”

“You heard me,”
she said. “Adolf Hitler was a loser!”

“You take that
back!” A look of fury burned in Fred’s eyes as though he
was about to explode.

“No, he was a
loser. You know it, I know it, and everybody else knows it.”

Fred refused to be beaten
by her insinuations about his idol. “Why do you keep insulting
him? What are you, retarded or something?”

“Idiot! I’m
not the one who’s retarded. Do you see me giving all these
stupid lectures about a deceased, brainless, cowardly, suicidal
dictator?”

Fred started to cry at
this point and was about to retort, but the bell rang, signaling the
end of the period. Gathering up his belongings, he furiously glared
at Amelia through his teary eyes and marched out of the room.

BM and Emily walked over
to Amelia. “Way to go!” Emily gave her a high-five. BM
also high-fived her, saying, “You go, girl!”

Emily thought she had it
bad, but Tatiana was Fred’s lab partner in chemistry. The
teacher of the chemistry class, was a thirty-something man, muscular
and handsome, in spite of his grey roots and receding hairline. He
had a distinguished look and charming personality that was
irresistible to his female students – that is, the ones who,
unlike Tatiana, weren’t preoccupied with monarchial ambitions.
The teacher, Mr. Margolis, liked Fred because he didn’t have a
clue about Fred’s extremist political views. The fact was that
Fred was the top student in Mr. Margolis’ class. The teacher
liked to say that Fred had “a bright future as a chemist.”
Mr. Margolis also thought Fred was a hoot. Fred raised his hand to
ask questions more than anyone in the class. His questions annoyed
his classmates, as it distracted them from the lesson, but Mr.
Margolis found Fred’s enthusiasm amusing. But the one with most
cause for frustration was Fred’s lab partner, Tatiana. One
time, when the siblings were burning magnesium oxide on the Bunsen
burner, Fred poked fun at Tatiana about her latest “C”
grade.

“Listen up, douche
bag,” Tatiana snapped. “If you keep messing with me, I’m
going to shove this white powder stuff up your gargantuan, ugly,
hairy, hooked nose!”

The classmates who heard
this retort burst into applause and laughter. Fred was silenced.

Dr. Sussman taught all
the Foyla Chewster kids, plus BM, in the same World History class.
His antennae rapidly detected Fred’s fascination with all the
tyrannical giants, such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar,
Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIIII,
Napoleon Bonaparte, and above all, Adolf Hitler. When the topic of
World War II reared its infested head, the Great Doctor of Discovery
found himself inundated with Fred’s arguments against the
syllabus. One time, the doctor veered away from the syllabus himself
by jumping onto his favorite topic: the cavemen’s discovery of
fire! Excited by a comparison that occurred to him, Fred interjected
with, “Hitler used fire to burn books.”

“Ah-ha!” Dr.
Sussman pointed at Fred, who was sketching a 3D swastika on his desk.

Startled, Fred stopped
his handiwork and asked, “What did I do?”

“You have just
touched on an interesting point, Mr. Chewster! Hitler did burn books,
but without the prehistoric discovery of fire, unless he discovered
it himself, or one of his scientists discovered it….”

“Well, that’s
true,” Fred admitted. “I mean, I never thought about it,
but I guess Hitler, though not the discoverer, was the first person
to use fire for a truly good cause. I mean, some books have to be
burnt. At least, that’s how I feel.”

Sean piped up here. “Hey,
what kinds of books did Hitler burn?”

“What’s it to
you?” Fred snapped as he returned to his evil graffiti job.

The entire day was long
and tedious, but Emily had one thing to look forward to. Buxton
Corleone was going to tutor her in French (maybe even French kissing)
at the castle after school. The event was exciting to her, but the
prospect of Buxton seeing where she lived and meeting her family
filled her with dread.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Buxton was in a sunny
mood as he walked briskly up the winding, hilly street that led up to
the castle. When he reached the wrought iron gates in front of it,
the first person he encountered was Julian, who emerged from the
sentry box and greeted Buxton with a flat monologue: “Hell-O,
my name is Julian. I’m the head of security. My job is to
protect this castle and its inhabitants, but I secretly want to blow
it to smithereens. I used to be a stacking boy at VONS, and I loved
it. I like stacking. It’s cool.”

Buxton raised his
eyebrows.

Julian opened the gates
for him.

He headed up the dirt
road, advancing toward the moat, which was filled with viscous
alligators. He wondered if this could really be Emily’s home
and, if so, how he should enter it. Then the drawbridge came
screeching downward. As it thudded onto the ground on Buxton’s
side of the moat, the boy saw the teacher he instantly recognized as
Miss Polk. He was in her “Careers” class. She came racing
across the drawbridge, grabbed him, and pushed him along with her
back into the castle. With her broom, she jammed a button on the wall
by the doorway, and the drawbridge screeched upwards.

Buxton stared
apprehensively at the enormous staircase; there must have been a
hundred stairs! Miss Polk seemed to forget Buxton was there, because
she walked around to one side of the staircase and entered it by a
door. Not knowing what to do, Buxton decided he had little choice but
to start trudging up those 100 stairs. Reaching the top, and with
sweat dripping down his back and off his brow, he found himself in
the barracks. Of course, he didn’t know what the room was
called, but he knew he didn’t like the looks of it. It was a
dreary place, with rows of cots and footlockers, and chains on the
ceiling to hold the iron chandeliers. The atmosphere gave Buxton the
creeps and he wondered if somehow he had crossed over into a medieval
time warp.

A computerized “ching”
noise snapped him back to the 1990s. Startled, Buxton gasped as
elevator doors slid open and Miss Polk dashed towards him.

“Er,” Buxton
muttered as she pushed him along. “I wish I had known about
that elevator.”

“Hush,” Miss
Polk snapped as she threw him outside and shut the barracks door in
his face.

Turning around, he found
himself in the inner courtyard of the castle, known as the Outer
Bailey.

Kermit was across the
courtyard, on the terrace in front of the open doors of the Great
Hall. “You must be Buxton!” Kermit shouted.

“Yeah, I am!”
Buxton replied.

“Well, come on
then! Hurry! Everyone is waiting for you and dinner will be served
soon!”

Buxton groaned. He was
tired of exercise. The wearisome uphill journey to the castle had
been followed by a climb worse than a stairmaster. Nevertheless, he
managed to do a light jog up the terrace steps. Kermit grinned and
led him into the Great Hall. “Everyone is waiting for you in
the parlor,” Kermit explained cheerfully.

“Whoa,”
Buxton shook his head. “I never would have guessed that a house
… er… castle in Burbank has a parlor!”

Kermit laughed as he
pushed the doors to the parlor open. “Meet the Royal Family of
Finland!”

Before Buxton could
process that bizarre imperative statement, Dr. Sussman, recognizing
him from school, waved and exclaimed, “Hi Buxton!”

“We’re not
royal and we’re not from Finland,” Sean complained. “I
wish Kermit would stop introducing us like that.”

“Don’t
listen to him!” Annie linked arms with Buxton.

“Sean likes to make
jokes. He’s a real comedian.”

“What?” Sean
protested. “I’m not a prince of Finland. I’m Sean
Chewster.”

Annie let go of Buxton
and wagged a finger at Sean. “Well, remember you’re only
half Chewster! The other half is Foyla, young man!”

Tatiana tried to make
conversation with Buxton by asking him what he knew about royalty.

“Er, a lot,”
Buxton said, laughing. “My ancestors are Italian, and Italy
used to have a royal family.”

“Yes, I know about
King Umberto, the last king before Italy became a republic,”
Tatiana said in a bored tone.

“Were you born in
Italy? Did you live there? Do you know any members of the Italian
nobility?”

“Er…”
Buxton clearly felt overwhelmed. “Well, no, I was born here. I
don’t think I know any royal people… er… besides
you. Did I hear right; you’re from Finland?”

Oskar seized the moment
to try impressing Emily at Buxton’s expense. “I’m
the nephew and heir presumptive of the Duke of Turku, the wealthiest
and highest noble in Finland.”

Emily hid her flushed
face in her hands while Tatiana gazed dreamily at Oskar.

The bell above the doors
tolled. From an armchair, Otto sat upright and cried, “The
bell! Last one seated is a rotten egg!” He eagerly ran to the
dining room.

Everyone rolled their
eyes as they filed around the dining table. The mahogany table was
fit to seat twelve people. Otto proudly sat at the head of the table
in front of a roaring fire. Annie sat at the opposite end. Buxton and
Emily respectively sat on each side of Otto. Sean sat beside Buxton,
and BM sat next to Emily. Oskar sat between Fred and BM. Tatiana
contrived to sit across from Oskar. Dr. Sussman sat next to Miss
Polk, who sat opposite from Kermit. As for Suzette, she preferred to
eat in the kitchen, the better to keep watch over the lowly
housemaids. Julian, the security guard, never ate with the family;
usually he and Kermit (if Kermit wasn’t on duty) took fast-food
breaks together.

Everyone was silent for a
long time and wondered where was the food. “Where the hell is
Suzette?” BM demanded, making Emily, Sean, and Kermit laugh.
Finally, Suzette rolled in the cart, complaining that she was
expected to do everything. BM sniggered, “Well, you are
an employee!”

Fred looked at BM, who
was separated from him only by Oskar. “You are an
employee also. Don’t you have a garden to vandalize?”

“That’s
enough,” Annie spoke up. “BM is Jephthah’s foster
son.”

“And technically,
you’re still Jephthah’s wife,” Tatiana reminded her
mother.

Meanwhile, Suzette placed
too enormous silver platters on the table, one for each end.

“If I were you,”
Miss Polk began, nodding to Annie and speaking in her usual phony
nonchalant way. “I’d file for an annulment. After all, he
just abandoned you at the drop of his fishhooks.”

Miss Polk was silenced by
Suzette’s arm nearly hitting her in the face, for Suzette at
that moment lifted the lid off the platter nearest Annie.

“What is that?”
Oskar asked.

“It’s yogurt,
lordship,” Suzette whined.

“Why’s it
so…?”

“Plain?” Sean
finished.

Buxton took it upon
himself to find out what delicious treat lay under Platter #2. “I’m
starving,” he said as he uncovered twelve crispy slices of
toast.

Everyone was shocked by
the … blandness of the meal. Dr. Sussman, ever the ray of
sunshine, tried to inject some life into the party by saying, with a
wink: “It looks like we’ll be having ‘dessert’
at El Pollo Loco!”

Buxton, trying to be
polite, decided to start serving the toast on people’s plates.
But Suzette stopped him with a look. She went on pouring something
into everyone’s goblets. Buxton tried to be cheerful as he took
a sip of the beverage. Otto copied him.

“Ew,” Otto
said, making a face. “What is this stuff?”

“Escargot juice,”
Suzette said bluntly as she poured some into Emily’s goblet.
Buxton spat out his juice into the fireplace.

“What’s
s-car-go?” Otto asked.

Suzette flew into a
temper tantrum. She whined, “It’s escargot juice, Otto!
Why don’t you listen? It’s snail juice!”

Otto grinned and
chuckled. “Snail juice?” He gobbled up his toast and
gulped down his juice like it was all going out of style. Everyone
felt sick from watching him do it.

“This is cool,”
said Sean, who was alone in his raptures. “This is just like
the party in STAR WARS, when Luke told Princess Leia that they were
brother and sister, and Darth Vader was their father.”

BM perked up immediately.
He had been anxious on Emily’s behalf, as he understood that
she must be in the agony of humiliation due to Buxton’s
presence amid her psychotic family. But now he focused intently on
Sean’s face. “Wasn’t that the part when they showed
Darth Vader’s head? And it was all blue and horrible looking?”
He looked quite pleased as he said this.

“No,” Sean
replied curtly. He thought BM must be an idiot for confusing two very
distinct scenes of the Star Wars trilogy. “That part was
in the third movie,” Sean explained as if talking to a child.
“It was in The Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader was
dying.”

“Remind me how he
died!” BM was on the edge of his seat, hungry for all the gory
details of cinematic violence. “Was it gruesome and bloody?”

Ignoring BM, Sean nibbled
on a slice of toast.

Meanwhile, Buxton decided
to taste the yogurt. He spit it out immediately. “I can’t
take this anyone!” he shouted, rising from his seat. “What
kind of freaks are you guys anyway?”

Emily was on the verge of
a nervous breakdown.

“All I wanted to
do,” continued Buxton, “was help Emily get a better grade
in French!”

Otto snorted and laughed.
“French? You mean, like, French Fries?”

“Hitler invaded
France on June 6, 1940.” Fred said this mostly to himself while
he stabbed his toast with a fork. Clearly depressed about something,
he absentmindedly played with his toast and yogurt. One side of his
face rested on his right hand and he didn’t seem to notice that
everyone stared at him.

Dr. Sussman and Otto were
the only ones not staring in a negative way. Otto had a kind of
glazed look, like a deer in a headlight, while Dr. Sussman had a look
of affectionate pride in his eyes. He touched his left hand to his
heart and looked as though he wanted to cry. “This boy is in my
World History class,” the doctor said, sniffing tears of joy.
“We haven’t gotten past the Prussian-Danish war yet.
Isn’t it amazing how much he knows about World War II?”

“Amazing,”
Tatiana retorted, rolling her eyes and angrily stabbing her toast in
a manner not unlike Fred. “All he does is memorize facts. He’s
not smart. He’s an automaton. He doesn’t know jack about
World War II. The only reason he’s a Nazi is that he likes
those Brownshirt uniforms.”