“Who?”
“Someone from the Lycée. She had cancer.”
“Shit. That’s young.”
Not as young as seventeen, Kersti thinks, remembering something Mme. Hamidou once told her about Cressida. “Cressida is too brilliant to waste her talents on an ordinary life,” she’d said in a portentous voice. “She has a great destiny, which someday she’ll share with the world.”
Kersti had always believed that to be true. Everyone did. And Cressida was destined for something far bigger and more unimaginable than the rest of them. Her great destiny turned out to be tragedy.
“I might go back to Lausanne in the spring,” she tells Jay. “For that hundredth birthday thing.”
Chapter 2
LAUSANNE—September 1994
Kersti and her mother arrive at the train station in Lausanne on a brilliant September morning. The air is muggy when they step out of the Gare. Most of her luggage was shipped to the school ahead of time so she only has one suitcase to manage. Facing the McDonald’s across the street, Kersti’s first impression of Switzerland is that it looks just like Toronto. It’s nothing like all those pictures of green valleys and pristine lakes and snowcapped mountains. It’s traffic, fast food, sour faces rushing to work. It could be any generic city, which bothers Kersti because what’s the point of coming all this way?
Her mother hails a taxi. Kersti gets in and slumps against the window while her mother drones on about the fondue she used to have at some café in Place St. Fran?ois. Her mother went to school at the Lycée when she was young and always wanted her daughters to have the same experience. The “privilege” has fallen to Kersti because her sisters didn’t have the grades to earn the Legacy Scholarship. Kersti had the grades, though not the inclination; but being her mother’s last hope, she didn’t have much say in the matter. Everyone thinks it’s some marvelous gift but the truth, Kersti knows, is that her parents are sending her away because they’re exhausted.
Kersti’s mother was forty-five when she had Kersti, which makes her the age of most kids’ grandmothers. She’s got faded blue eyes and her pale blond hair has yellowed over the years, like discolored paper. She’s still slim, but her angles and lines are softening into old age. Kersti has always resented having older parents. From an early age, it was obvious to her that their energy and enthusiasm had been used up raising her three older sisters; she could sense they were tired and a little disinterested. Shipping her off to boarding school feels more like they’re giving up than bestowing a privilege.
“After you settle in,” her mother chirps, her Estonian accent even more grating than usual, “we’ll walk down to Place St. Fran?ois for a hot chocolate and a ramequin. You haven’t had hot chocolate until you’ve had one here.”
Kersti continues to stare out the window, remembering bits and pieces from the dozens of Lausanne brochures her mother gave her before they left. The city is built on the southern slope of the Swiss plateau, she recalls, rising up from the lakeshore at Ouchy. As the taxi climbs the steep cobblestone streets, a dramatic panorama of the Alps comes into view and the city begins to look distinctly more European than it did down by the train station.
Her new school is in a suburban section of Lausanne, set back from the street, enclosed by a black wrought-iron gate and hidden behind a fortress of leafy trees. Kersti notices the black bars on the windows and can’t help comparing the school to an eighteenth-century women’s prison. She can’t believe this is where she will be for the next four years.
There are half a dozen buildings that make up the campus, the two largest connected by an enclosed footbridge. All the buildings are white with carved green dormer windows and red-tile roofs. A sign at the entrance announces lycée internationale suisse. bienvenue.
Kersti hauls her suitcase inside Huber House, which her mother tells her is the main building that houses both the dining room on the first floor and the dorms on the second, third, and fourth. The other houses are Frei, Chateau, and Lashwood.
Inside Huber House, it’s dark and drafty, shabby. It reminds Kersti of the Estonian House back home. Everywhere is dark wood—the long dining tables, the chairs, the floors and ceilings, the crown moldings, the stairwell and banister. The drapes are dark green velvet, puddled on the floor. A carved plaque in the foyer proclaims the school’s founding mission statement: Preparing Young Women to Become Citizens of the World since 1915. The corridor smells of beef stew and cigarette smoke.
“Ah, the smoking,” her mother says, with a nostalgic sigh. “I miss Europe.” Her big complaint about Canada is that no one smokes anymore.
A small, dark-haired woman wearing a red blazer with dwarfing shoulder pads, a matching red pencil skirt, and bright white Reeboks greets them in the foyer. She looks somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five, but it’s hard to tell. She isn’t very attractive—her hair is cut in a blunt, mannish style, very unflattering, as though she did it herself with kitchen scissors—but there’s something warm about her brown eyes. Or maybe it’s the way she smiles, like she’s absolutely thrilled to see you.
“I’m Madame Hamidou,” she says, giving Kersti a hard handshake. “Welcome to the Lycée and to Huber House. I’m your housemother.”
She has a wiry, athletic body that she propels up the stairs, taking two at a time in her pristine running shoes. “You’ll be in good shape by the end of the year,” she calls down to them. Kersti can’t figure out her accent. She speaks perfect English with only the faintest trace of something European—possibly French or German. “Here’s your room,” she announces, throwing open the door. “Your roommate is Cressida. She’s a returning student so she can show you the ropes.”
“When did she start?” Kersti’s mother wants to know. “I was here from fourth grade until I graduated.”
“Cressida’s been here since second grade.”
Second grade? Kersti looks at her mother in a new light of gratitude for not having shipped her overseas at the age of seven.
“The welcome luncheon is at twelve fifteen,” Hamidou says. “Students only.”