A warm, salty breeze rustles the leaves of the potted lemon trees around me while I wait for Jada to answer.
I laugh and the noise sends a tiny swallow winging away toward the setting sun. I love Jada’s sense of humor. I love my new life and freedom, and this rooftop garden I found my first night here. No one ever comes up here when I do. Most of the time, the place is mine.
While I breathe in the sweet, fresh air of my garden in the sky, I think about what Jada said. If I tell someone that Mrs. Thackeray is stealing the paintings next door, I’ll have to tell them how I know that. I’ll have to tell Sylvie and Émile that I broke open the door in the wall and ruined their son’s murals.
All around me, green ivy climbs white trellises and flowers are everywhere. Bright blossoms explode color. Fuchsias and blues and sunshine yellows fill my brain. My life is so different now. I lived in an old black-and-white movie where I was the prisoner. I was the bad guy. Now, my life is in technicolor, and I’m the heroine. It has to stay that way.
I’m not saying anything, yet.
“Rosie?” Sylvie calls.
The air leaves my lungs and I can’t fill them again.
I miss you, too, Jada. More than you can imagine because I don’t know when I’ll see you again.
Of course, I don’t tell her that. My thumb hovers over the screen for a second, but then I switch off my phone.
I wish I could tell her everything. I wish I could come clean, but I know it’s impossible. If I confess too soon, my bright, shining new life could blow up in my face.
Sylvie’s head appears as she climbs the last few steps and emerges onto my rooftop garden.
“I thought you were here.” She smiles and I scoot over and pat a spot next to me on the small marble bench. Sylvie sits and breathes out a sigh.
“I wanted to see the garden,” she says, looking around her with wide eyes. “C’est incroyable. I knew I could have a box if I wanted, but, ah, well . . .” She gives that totally French shrug that says so much without any words and smiles at me.
“Then it’s good that I came here to Nice,” I say slowly, in French, still whispering, always struggling to get the sounds to behave as they fight to get out of my mouth. “I help you learn new things.”
“Absolument,” Sylvie says, beaming. She puts her arm around me and squeezes my shoulders. For a few moments, we say nothing else. We simply sit in a companionable silence, only broken by the twitter of birds all around and the muted rush of traffic below.
“Ma chère,” Sylvie begins, pulling her arm away. “I want to talk to you about something.”
Coldness settles into the pit of my stomach and everything around me is devoid of all sound, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting to hear what Sylvie will say. I hold my own breath; terrified I know what her words will be. I remember the way she looked at her phone yesterday. She knows I lied about being an artist, and I have no idea what I can possibly say to her to explain.
“I, eh, ben, I want to say, we, uh,” Sylvie says in English, clearly struggling. Finally, she shrugs and says, “I must speak in French, d’accord?”
I nod, swallowing.
She begins, slowly at first, but speeds up right away. Her face is serious. I listen, my hands twisted together, trying to understand. The exchange students who stay with her are artists who come to study painting as well as to learn the French language. Sylvie was thrilled by the photos of the artwork I’d emailed with my application for the exchange program, but now my work is so different. I am hesitant, not confident as a painter.
“And so, you see, Rosie, why I wonder if something is wrong,” Sylvie concludes, her brow furrowed.
She’s worried? I stare into her face, hardly daring to hope. She doesn’t think I’m lying, but that something is wrong. I can work this.
“I, well . . .” my words trail off as I struggle to form them. Sylvie reaches out to squeeze my arm.
“Problems with your mother?” she asks.
Relief engulfs me. The world that was so silent a moment ago suddenly comes to life. I hear birds chirping and whistling all around; the breeze off the ocean rustling the leaves of the surrounding trees.
I nod, and Sylvie’s furrowed brow smooths.
“I wondered. She calls you so often, sends you messages all the time. She does not want her little girl so far away, I think.” Sylvie rises and walks about the garden, trailing her fingers along a dark green vine. Then, she whirls to face me. “I will call her, and say that you are well, and happy. That’s a good idea, no?” she says hurriedly, her face hopeful.
I leap to my feet and blurt, “No!”
Sylvie’s eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. My mind races. What do I say? Sylvie will need to know why I don’t want to go home at the end of the summer, and I’ve already been trying to figure when and how to tell her everything. I try to come up with the right words, but I’m stuck. I look helplessly into Sylvie’s dark eyes.
“It is not unusual that girls your age do not get along with their parents,” she finally says, slowly, as though she’s thinking about each word. “Things are difficult between you and your mother?”
My mood rises. She’s given me a starting point.
“Things are bad. Very, very bad,” I say.
“What do you mean?” Sylvie asks, her brow once more puckered.
I measure my words carefully. “She never lets me do anything,” I begin, then instantly regret it. I sound like any teenager, whining about parents who won’t let her go to a concert five hundred miles away or stay out late on a school night. It’s not like that at all.
“She worries about you,” Sylvie says, moving closer, “because she loves you.” She brushes a strand of hair off my face and tucks it behind my ear.
“She worries about me all the time,” I begin, desperate to find the right words. “Morning, noon, and night.”
“She is a mother, ma chère,” Sylvie says. “Even when my Ansel was grown, I thought about him all the time. You never stop loving your baby.” She looks down, and the expression on her face is so sad it hurts me. I close my eyes and turn away. How can I explain that my mother’s love for me isn’t like Sylvie’s love for Ansel? Mom’s love is a kind of prison that I have to escape from. My life has always been one of confinement. Locked doors and bars on windows. Ansel’s life was one of freedom. Sylvie and Émile never tried to keep him wrapped in cotton and tucked carefully away. There’s no lock on the outside of his bedroom door.
Before I can say anything else, the muffled notes of the “Imperial March” play from my back pocket.
Sylvie laughs at this. She finds it funny that I use this song as my Mom’s ringtone. Then, she waits, looking expectantly at me. She even makes a little gesture, prompting me to pick up. Trapped, I answer, remembering to whisper.
“Where are you?” Mom shouts. Her voice is cracked and her breathing ragged. “I called the camp again, but some man answered and he had no idea what I was talking about! He said there’s no such thing as the Red Rock Youth Art Camp! Then, some woman got onto the phone and said that there was an art camp and that you couldn’t come to the phone. Something is going on, Rosemary! Where are you?” she shouts.
“Mom, I—” the words catch in my throat. I look at Sylvie, who now looks back at me with worry etched onto her face. I know she can hear Mom’s screaming. The entire building can probably hear it from my phone.
“I’m outside in the desert, painting,” I splutter.
“DON’T LIE!” Mom screams. “That woman said you were asleep!”
A gentle hand rests on my shoulder, and Sylvie sweeps the phone from my fingers. Icy drops of fear trickle into my stomach. I try to grab the phone back, but Sylvie has already moved out of reach.
“You are, eh, Darla, no?” she begins in her halting, strongly accented English. “Do not worry, Rosemary is well. She is . . . happy here.”
Sylvie winces and holds the phone away from her ear. I can hear everything that Mom shouts. Now she wants to know who Sylvie is, and who that guy was, and why he said there was no art camp, and what is going on? I hold my hand out for my phone; feeling like my heart is twisting inside me, feeling my freedom slipping away.
“I am Sylvie, yes? You know my name, of course,” Sylvie says when Mom finally pauses to take a breath. “We are so glad you let Rosie come to us this summer, we love her!”
I try to snatch the phone away. Sylvie darts out of reach, holding her other hand up in a warning gesture, telling me to wait. I bite my lip and draw blood. I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to drop.
“Yes, she paints,” Sylvie says. “She learns to paint very well,” she adds, looking at me with a twinkle in her eye. I have to look away. I turn my back and pull random leaves from a lemon tree and shred them, dropping the torn bits over the side of the building. So close. I was so close.
“No, no, Émile,” Sylvie says, as though she’s correcting something Mom said. “Men do not know everything, you know?” Sylvie laughs softly at something Mom says. I no longer hear my mother’s frantic, screaming voice. I remain where I am, back turned, but my hands fall still as I listen.
“Ah, you were worried about your daughter, I understand. I will tell her she must call you more. She must tell you what she is doing.”
I’m still kind of freaked. I’m scared that I’m about to be discovered, but something has changed. I don’t exactly know what’s being said, since I can no longer hear Mom’s long distance screeching, but Sylvie is still calm, speaking softly.
“Of course. Here she is,” Sylvie finally says, handing me the phone. Her face is smooth, unmarred by worry or concern.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Mom says, her voice rough. “It’s only that you’re too young to be this far away from me! Your art teacher sounds nice, and she said you really were out painting. I guess I panicked, honey. You have to be careful, baby! What if you got lost? No one would be able to understand you,” she says, her voice bubbling with tears.
After I move a few more feet away from Sylvie so she won’t hear how strange I sound when I talk, I mumble a few lame answers and fake promises and get Mom to hang up.
I stare at my now silent phone. She hung up? She still thinks I’m in Arizona? I look at Sylvie, who gazes back at me with a softness in her eyes that gives me hope. How much English does she actually understand? Apparently, not much.
Drawing in a shaky breath, I feel strangely elated. As dangerous as it was, the phone call showed Sylvie some of what I was trying to say, better than I ever could have with my own weak, ineffectual words. I look into Sylvie’s dark eyes.
“I believe that I am beginning to understand. As you said, things are, shall we say, difficult with your mother, no?” she says with a tiny smile.
We stay up on the roof, talking long after the sun goes down. Well, Sylvie talks. I still whisper.
I tell her things I’ve never told anyone, though I don’t spill everything. I don’t mention my nightmares about the weird shadowy images or ordinary things that terrify me. Or that I’m locked in at night. I don’t tell her that Zander helped me come up with a fake art camp so I could come here. But I tell her about my mother. How Mom chooses what I wear. How she schedules every second for me. How I’ve only ever had one friend, chosen for me by my mother. How I’ve never been completely alone.
“Never?” Sylvie breathes out.
“Never.”
I can barely read Sylvie’s face in the moonlight as I say this, but I can tell she’s shocked. I give her a moment to let that sink in. If she weren’t here I’d be shouting with joy right about now.
I don’t hate my mother. It’s just that our relationship is . . . I don’t know. I have no words to describe it. Complicated? That doesn’t even begin to describe it. I mean, there’s that whole thing with Mom locking me in my room at night. Jada doesn’t even know about it. Her wheelchair doesn’t fit in the narrow hall that leads to my bedroom, so she’s never seen the lock outside my door. I’ve never told her about it, and I won’t tell Sylvie about it now, because it’s just weird. Like the kind of oddball thing that causes people to call social services. And I’ve never wanted that.
Anyway, I know my mother loves me. She’s only trying to protect me. I don’t want her to get into any trouble. But I don’t want to stay in her world anymore, either.
Lie Number Five: I am going home in September.
Truth: I don’t plan to go home. Ever.
I just want to get away.
And I think it’s going to work.