ONE
EVERY ALARIE GIRL BEGAN at the Alarie House. Before she ever appeared in the society pages, before her glamorous travels were chronicled in glossy magazine spreads, before she walked down the aisle in a cathedral-length veil to marry some prince fifteenth in line for the throne, she studied grace, charm, and etiquette. And she did so with more dedication than most trust-fund boys applied to their university courses.
For generations, the third most famous finishing school in the world—it would have been both folly and in poor taste to compete with the reputation of the Swiss—had turned out girls whose loveliness was both understated and unforgettable. They were composed but gracious, demure but lively. They laughed at just the correct volume. By instinct, they sat with their chairs exactly the right distance from the table, not so close as to risk jabbing their dining companions with their elbows, not so far that they had to lean over their plates and ruin their posture. They adorned their hair with precisely the right width of satin ribbon, or the right number of summer blossoms (fresh, never faux; any society girl knew that only harlots attended balls with hair dressed in fabric flowers). At tea, they breezily enjoyed the raspberry jam that never touched their white chiffon dresses. At evening dances, they ate madeleines covered in snowdrifts of powdered sugar without ever marring their black velvet gowns.
They learned these enchanted graces at a sprawling white stucco house, roofed with curving ceramic tiles that resembled a waving copper sea when the sun struck them. Many daughters dreamed of enrolling there as they turned the pages of magazines featuring Alarie girls’ engagement soirees and philanthropic galas. Future debutantes feigned boredom at the very prospect of finishing school, while secretly hoping that they would be summoned to none other than the Alarie House. Distinguished families called in favors to secure their daughters’ admission. There were no applications. Direct inquiries were so vulgar as to warrant disqualification. The campus was walled and hidden behind flanks of cypress trees, tall and richly green, and there was no path in except to know the right people, who knew the right people, who could tactfully recommend a name.
The Soler sisters had a grandmother who knew just enough of the right people.
TWO
ISLA AND RENATA SOLER’S grandmother had raised them to be brazen. To speak up if a man had gotten a fact wrong and they knew it. To wear whatever colors they favored even if they were out of fashion, to wear trousers to tea if they liked (provided the pair was tailored and pressed).
But their abuela also knew that two girls born with brown skin and raised by a brash businesswoman would be held to more exacting standards than their paler, more demure counterparts. The Alarie imprimatur could only help them. It could only ease their way in life, she told them. If those women think well of you, no one will dare say a word against you. Whatever they think of a girl, whatever they think of her family, it’s as good as law.
Abuela did not say the rest. She did not need to. If Renata and Isla were Alarie girls, the society ladies could slight them only at their own peril. La plata heredada, the old money families who sneered at Abuela’s fresh green wealth, would have to keep their sneers to themselves.
Their first evening at the Alarie House, older sister Renata was already showing promise. At dinner, she seemed at home among the more experienced girls, all of them cool as a breeze from a lavender field.
But just shy of midnight, younger sister Isla burst into their shared room. She did so without discretion, decorum, or composure. She was frenzied as a small storm.
Her dark hair was disarrayed. Her dark eyes looked freckled with light, as though they reflected, all at once, every jewel set into the walls of the Alarie House.
The damp rasping of Isla’s breathing jostled Renata halfway from sleep. Before she could fall back under, Isla shook her shoulder and whispered, “We have to get out of here.”
Renata sat up in bed, shoulders straight, posture as gently upright as it had been at the dinner table. But groggy confusion twisted her face. “What time is it?”
“Half past time to get up.” Isla threw Renata’s traveling coat onto her bed. The tailored burgundy velvet landed heavy, the slight puff of the upper sleeves deflating on impact. “We’re leaving.”
Renata blinked, her eyes adjusting to the lamp Isla had just turned on. “What are you talking about?”
“The girls here.” Isla put on her own coat, identical to Renata’s but dark blue. So many of Isla’s clothes were slightly different copies of Renata’s.
Isla slipped the coat on over her nightgown, not bothering with a dress. No one would see it anyway once she buttoned the front, and the faster they left, the better. “There’s something”—even searching for the right word made her shudder—“off about them. I don’t know what, but I have a bad feeling.”
“You always have a bad feeling about other girls.” Renata’s dark curls streamed down her shoulders as though she’d been lounging in a wind-brushed field. But her face was a little paler, as it always was in the middle of the night. Even her violet nightgown seemed paler, almost lavender. “Georgette’s one of the few people in the world besides Abuela and me who you can stand to listen to at a stretch. But when you first met her, you thought she was a prude.”
“She always had her head tilted to the side like a statue of la Virgen.” Isla threw things into her bag by the unruly handful. “I didn’t know she does that without realizing it. I thought she was posing.”
“You decided Yvaine was a snob within minutes of meeting her.”
“It was the way she scrunched up her nose.”
“It was spring.” Renata drew her graceful legs out from under the blankets. “She’s allergic to pollen.”
“I know that now.” Isla kicked a pair of shoes toward Renata. If Renata really meant to continue this argument, they’d have to save it for the train. “And anyway, she would’ve been right to be a snob. The dress I was wearing when you first introduced me to her, who would have blamed her? I still can’t believe you let me go out like that.”
Isla thought that would at least earn her a smile.
Renata only pointed her feet and kicked at one of the shoes. It flopped over. “And you told me Rosine wouldn’t know a good comeback if it bit her in the orto.”
“I didn’t know her yet. Her neutral expression just looks confused. Even you have to admit that.”
“Exactly. You didn’t know her yet. You didn’t know any of them when you first met them because, shock of great shocks, you had just met them.” Renata was on her feet now. Good. One step closer to out the door. “But you wrote them off like you’re writing off the girls here, before you know anything about them.”
“These aren’t your friends back home.” Isla slipped her feet into her shoes and fastened the buckles. “The girls here, they’re—” What were they? In their white dresses, fresh and flowing as sunlight, they seemed not quite real. They seemed ghostly, as though Isla might fall through one of them if she didn’t watch where she was going.
None of that sounded convincing enough. And there was no time to explain what had just happened. Isla wasn’t breathing a word of it until they were miles out of earshot.
A match caught in the back of Isla’s brain. She didn’t have to explain it.
She could show Renata.
With an anticipatory shudder, Isla threw the door open.
But there was nothing but darkness in the halls. Nothing but the low sparkle from the dimly lit chandelier.
They had all just been out there, girls lined up in their white nightgowns. Their staring faces had turned as nightmarish as they were dreamlike during the day. They had looked like a flank of dolls advancing. They had looked as though they were about to converge on Isla and do, what? Turn her nightgown white with the sheer bleaching power of their gazes? Tear her open with their perfectly buffed fingernails? Bite into her heart like an apple? Eat handfuls of her veins like the threads of a squash?
But now they had vanished.
Isla shut the door.
The confusion on Renata’s face shifted into annoyance.
Isla clutched for the words to explain herself. “There’s something wrong”—she stumbled even saying this—“really truly wrong, with them.”
“You always think something is wrong with them.” Renata said the word as though she meant every other girl in the world. “Did you ever think that something is wrong with you?”
The words fell slowly, a knife landing in half-time.
Renata’s face instantly registered shock, as though she’d taken the impact of those words instead of saying them.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said.
Renata’s words struck so gradually and with such force it was as though they had knocked into Isla’s shoulder. The impact spun her around toward the door. She caught herself on the knob more than she reached for it.
“Isla,” Renata whispered as loudly as whispers went.
Renata’s words found their mark, deep in Isla’s chest. They became a hot whirl of rage at her sister’s stubbornness, and shame at how well her sister knew her, and knew her secrets.
If Isla didn’t leave this house, that searing whirl would become something solid and permanent. She could feel it turning as hard as her ribs, hard as the jewels set into the Alarie House walls. If Isla didn’t get out of here, it would grow facets and edges sharp enough to cut open her heart.
Isla left the room. She ran down the carpeted staircase. The gem-inlaid walls shimmered by. She threw wide the nearest door and sped down the walk. Her feet flew over the gray stone. She ran across the grounds, her shadow tiny and short compared to the tall, thin knives cast by cypress trees.
As her feet crunched over the gravel, speed filled her nightgown with chilled air. It fanned her coat out behind her like a cape. She didn’t stop when the thin brushstroke of a crescent moon rose, a whisper of light in the dampening blue.
By the time the sun came up, she had already boarded the earliest train.
Isla had meant what she told Renata. There was something wrong with the girls at the Alarie House.
But Renata would find out soon what Isla had done. And no matter what Isla had told her, she would assume this was the true reason that Isla had fled.
THREE
“YOU HAVE A WHOLE room full of books,” Isla told her grandmother. “If I need to learn which shape of glass contains which variety of wine, I’m sure one of them can tell me.”
Isla knew that Abuela could hardly argue. She thought the same thing. Still, Isla could feel her grandmother holding back her questions about why she had returned from the Alarie House after a single day. And Isla kept putting off telling her the truth. She’d have to eventually. The Alarie sisters would call, outraged, after discovering what Isla had done. One of the girls must have told them by now. One of the girls must have told them before Isla had even boarded her train.
The threat was bristling in the air like an electrical storm. Now all Isla could do was wait for it, and hope that the Alarie sisters would place the blame where it belonged, completely on her, not on Renata, not on Abuela. Which was the best strategy to get them all out of this as unscathed as possible? Should Abuela and Renata act utterly shocked? Or should Isla be painted as the rotten one of the Soler sisters, whom Abuela and Renata had so badly hoped could be transformed into a refined young lady?
It would be easy to believe, Renata succeeding where Isla had failed. Renata was the far more stunning Soler sister, tall and striking, with the highly arched eyebrows and slight smile of a girl who kept delicious secrets. Isla was so much less than Renata, in both stature and presence, that she seemed like an afterthought of a younger sister.
Perhaps if Abuela and Renata both acted as though their hopes had been dashed, the Alarie sisters would feel sorry for them, and wouldn’t ruin the Soler name.
That week, an envelope arrived.
Not from the Alarie sisters, but from Renata.
Dear Isla,
I didn’t mean it. You have to know I didn’t mean it.
Please come back. There’s a reason Abuela sent us here. The Alarie name opens doors. And we both know that even if we wear dresses straight from the atelier and read as many newspapers as Abuela, there will still be doors closed to us.
This is our chance, hermana. Let’s take it.
Your sister,
R.
No mention of what Isla had done. Had none of the other girls told Renata? Had the Alarie sisters shown the decency not to hold one sister accountable for the sins of the other?
The next week brought no angry dispatches from the Alarie sisters. Just another letter from Renata.
Dear Isla,
Did you know the Alarie sisters each wear the same color all the time? Luisa, ever in blues, Alba, constantly in tints of purple, and Eduarda, eternally in hues of pale yellow.
It’s not that I don’t admire the statement of it—it’s a bit like fairies in a story, isn’t it? But the thing is that no one ever says anything about it, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world that a woman would wear variations on the same shade day after day. Wearing black every day I might understand, but the same Easter pastel?
As soon as I noticed it, you were the first person I wanted to tell. I wish you were here to see for yourself.
The girls here are nice enough. Really, they are, and I think you’d like them much better than you think you would. I know they’d like you. But not a one of them is you. No matter how much I enjoy their company, none of them take the sting out of not having you here.
None of them is as much fun to tell things to.
Yours,
R.
Copyright © 2024 by Anna-Marie McLemore.
