Instead, she walked over to the bar, grinning in Anton’s direction as she did. There, she ordered the only drink she could think of, one from an old movie, The Thin Man, she’d seen the summer before—a martini.

  The bartender gave it to her.

  She took a sip and nearly spat it out. It smelled like rubbing alcohol and burnt the inside of her mouth.

  Determined, she went to the bathroom and dumped it in the sink, refilling the glass with water. No one questioned her as she sipped it. The bartender even gave her a toothpick with extra olives.

  Lila wondered how many other things she could make people give her.

  If she wanted to be more than the girl on her father’s arm, his good little girl, she’d better start making an impression.

  * * *

  When Lila was twelve, she flew to Paris with her father. They sat in first class, which meant big seats, comfortable headphones, and a little television with dozens and dozens of movies her mother would have said she was too young for. The flight attendants brought out dinner with three separate courses plus a dessert of cookies before they folded the seats into beds.

  Lying in her seat-bed, though, she couldn’t sleep. She was too excited to be on the plane. Too excited about Paris.

  So she’d watched a movie—the one about cheerleaders who are murdered one by one by the nerdy boy whose feelings they hurt. Then, because she still wasn’t tired, she’d watched another movie—the one where three teenage werewolves make a pact to lose their virginity on the same night. And after that, they were so close to landing that there was no reason not to watch the period drama about a lady in fancy dresses who went to masked balls but was really in love with a highwayman.

  The exhaustion didn’t hit her until they landed. She dragged herself through the airport, barely awake enough to pull her luggage in a straight line. She fell asleep in the cab and had to be shaken awake by her father.

  “It’s the middle of the day,” he said as they shuffled up the stairs to their flat in the Latin Quarter. “I told you to sleep on the plane.”

  Her only answer was a yawn.

  The apartment was huge and beautiful with dark wood floors and soaring ceilings covered in beautiful moldings. Her father didn’t seem to notice any of it. He took off his perfectly pressed coat and tossed it onto a slipcovered white sofa. “If you stay up today, you’ll get over the jet lag. Otherwise, your body’s going to have a hell of a time adjusting to the time zone shift.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Can I just take a nap then?”

  “I have to make some calls,” he said. “I’ll get you up in an hour.”

  He went off to do whatever business mob bosses can do in foreign countries over a phone, but when he tried to rouse her, she didn’t budge. She slept through the whole day, getting up sometime after midnight.

  She woke ravenously hungry and disoriented at the darkness outside the big picture window. Padding into the kitchen of the apartment, she opened the refrigerator, but it was empty.

  “Lila?” her father said, coming into the dim room from his bedroom. He looked unusually rumpled, like maybe he’d been sleeping too.

  “Sorry I totally zonked out,” she said, yawning and stretching. Her fingers reached up for the ceiling and curled. She’d slept in her gloves.

  He gave her a slight smile, a corner of his mouth lifting. “You hungry?”

  “Starving,” she said.

  “Go get dressed, then,” he told her. “Paris is beautiful at night.”

  She walked back to her room and opened her suitcase. Her mother had helped her pack it, explaining that she’d better bring only nice things because people in Europe dressed differently. They weren’t slobs like Lila and her friends. They would never wear dresses layered over jeans or big clunky boots. “Don’t embarrass your father,” Mom had said, as if he cared what she wore. Don’t embarrass me was what she meant.

  Lila put on a heavy camel-colored dress. With her pale skin, it made her look completely washed out. She sighed and went into the bathroom to wash her face, brush her teeth, and comb her scraggly shoulder-length blond hair. Then she put on her knee-high black boots—the ones she’d snuck into the front zipped compartment of the suitcase before leaving—and tied the laces.

  Clomping out to the sitting room, she found her father waiting, reading a French paper. He put it down absently and twirled the keys to the flat around his finger. Outside, Paris was lit up and beautiful. Everything seemed familiar—reminding her of some parts of New York—but the details were wrong. It reminded her, too, of the lady in the period drama, rattling past buildings like these in her carriage. Lila looked into the darkened windows of all the shops to see displays of dresses on headless mannequins, paintings, and costume jewelry.

  Each store they passed was closed.

  Finally, Lila saw a cafe with its lights still on. A couple was even sitting at one of the tables, sipping espresso.

  “Dad,” she said, pointing.

  When they got there, the front door was locked and the closing time was listed as midnight. A clock on the door in the lobby showed that it was nearly one.

  Lila’s father knocked on the door. A waiter came over and opened it halfway, speaking with slightly bored irritation. Lila couldn’t understand everything he said—just enough. The restaurant was closed.

  Her father reached into his coat pocket and took out his wallet. As he did, she saw the strap under his arm and the butt of a silvery gun.

  The waiter saw it too.

  Her father grinned like a shark, said a few words she didn’t know, and took five hundred euros from his billfold. The door opened wide.

  The money was exchanged as they were escorted inside.

  “And how old is the lady?” the waiter asked her in accented English as he pulled out her chair.

  “gé de douze ans,” she said.

  Her father laughed and the waiter smiled, but stiffly, as though they were performing parts in a play.

  “Very good,” said the waiter, although she knew it wasn’t. She wasn’t even sure if it was right.

  As he walked off, she opened the menu. Her father leaned across the table.

  “Money will buy you anything in the world,” he said in a low, satisfied voice. “It’s all for sale. People’s time. Their dignity. Whatever. Whenever. And most people’s price is shockingly low.”

  That’s the lesson he thought he taught Lila, but the lesson she learned was different. It wasn’t money that opened that door. It was fear.

  * * *

  Lila’s winter friends were different from her summer friends. Her winter friends were real friends—the ones who came to her apartment after school, who went shopping with her and celebrated her birthdays with candles and sleepovers.

  Jennifer and Lorraine and Margot. They all went to the small exclusive academy for rich curse worker children—where they fought to be the prettiest, the smartest, and the cruelest. They stole boyfriends back and forth. They shared books and clothes and told one another secrets. They danced to music and lied to their parents so they could stay out late.

  Once, Lila tried to explain about her summer friends, about Cassel and his brothers. Jennifer laughed and said they were made up. Lorraine wanted to meet them. Margot looked at the one picture Lila had—a grainy and faded one with a sprinkler in the background where Cassel had his arm thrown over her shoulders and his shirt off—and said that he looked stupid but hot.

  “He’s not a worker,” Lila said, and they all laughed, because a boy who wasn’t a worker couldn’t be anything but a plaything to a girl like Lila.

  Sometimes Cassel felt made-up. If Margot was angry with her and Lorraine was busy or Jennifer was taking Margot’s side, Lila would call him. He could make her laugh. And she didn’t need to be afraid to tell him all the true things that she couldn’t tell anyone else.

  He was her summer friend. He wasn’t part of her real life. Telling him didn’t count.

  * * *

  Three weeks before Lila’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took her shopping. They walked around the upper levels of Saks, where all the grown-up dresses were.

  “Just look around,” her mother told her. “Try on anything you like. It’s your day!”

  Lila didn’t mention that she hated parties. She already knew that her mother only remembered facts she liked. Anything else she instantly forgot and would keep forgetting no matter how many times she was reminded.

  Instead, Lila brushed her gloved fingers over the rack of gowns until she came to one that looked like something heroines wore at the end of movies. It was sacrificial and beautiful.

  “Not white,” her mother said. “You’re not a little girl anymore and this isn’t your wedding.”

  Lila moved her fingers to the straps of a red dress and raised her eyebrows.

  Her mother laughed. “Your father would kill me, but go ahead, try it on.”

  They pulled more—gold dresses and pink dresses, black dresses and dresses as silver as the moon.

  “There’s a language of clothing,” Lila’s mother said as Lila came out of the dressing room and twirled around in midnight blue velvet. “Like the language of flowers… or jewelry. For instance, that makes you look older, but not in a good way. You’re saying ‘I’m stuffy before my time.’ ”

  Lila ran her gloved hand down the bodice. She wondered what it would be like to touch the little beads glittering there like stars, but she knew that if she took off her glove it would upset the sales lady.

  She made a face at her mother and went back into the stall to put on the red dress with the deep vee neck. It clung to her waist, to her breasts—already grown too big for the training bra she’d been wearing, and what a relief to have taken it off—and to the newly formed curve of her hip. She looked like a starlet.

  “Jailbait prostitute,” her mother said, and Lila blushed hotly.

  “I like it,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

  “I just bet you do,” her mother said, waving her back into the dressing room. “Now tell me what you want your party dress to say, because it won’t be that.”

  Since the divorce, her mother and father had fought over Lila by buying her things—the trip to Paris with her father, the party, this dress. And they both wanted not just her love, but her promise of loyalty.

  She wanted the people at the party to see her as her father’s heir. Instead, she was afraid they’d see her as his spoiled daughter. She didn’t know how a dress could change that, when the whole party was one big indulgence she never asked for and still had to act gleeful about. And even if a dress could make people see her that way, she couldn’t tell her mother what she wanted, when her mother would only see it as a betrayal.

  “A force to be reckoned with,” Lila said finally, hoping that was vague enough. “That’s what I’d like.”

  Her mother laughed. “Well, it’s accurate!”

  She sounded so condescending that Lila ground her teeth. She went back to the rack of garments and picked one at random. Then she stood in front of the mirror, looking at her hair: shorter and nearly white after her mother insisted the stylist bleach it back from pink. Everything about her was so pale that she felt like a ghost.

  While she slipped on the silver dress and smoothed the shining paillettes of it over her hips, she imagined turning fourteen. She hoped that it would transform her somehow, change her in some way that would give her the kind of knowledge older girls at her school seemed to have. She hoped it would make her brave. There was a boy—a boy she had no idea what to do about.

  The silver looked darker on her—more iron than the bright tinsel she’d initially thought it was—and the paillettes looked almost like scales. The color made her blue and green eyes stand out against her skin like jewels.

  “This is the one I want,” Lila said, stepping out of the dressing room.

  Her mother looked at her and sighed. “It’s a little short,” she said. “And shiny. Shiny can be vulgar. Maybe you should try on the light pink. Pink is youthful and very elegant when it’s on the beige side.”

  “No,” Lila said. “This is perfect.”

  Lila loved the dress. It said just what she wanted to say. It was the precise color of her father’s favorite gun.

  * * *

  Barron slung his arm over her shoulders casually as they walked down the concrete steps.

  Lila stopped to take her shoes off before she stepped onto the wet sand. He had to let go of her, and she spun away from him, inhaling deeply. The crash of the waves sent up a faint salt spray that dusted her skin.

  “You look really nice tonight,” he said, coming close again. His gloved hand rested at the curve of her back, the swell of her hip.

  She froze for a second, then forced herself to relax. Being nervous was silly.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You do too.”

  She’d known Barron for years, after all. He’d spent his summers in the same little town that she did. She’d even had a hopeless crush on his younger brother, Cassel, but Cassel never asked her out, not even after she’d paraded around in front of him in nothing but a big baggy shirt and underwear, with glittery, smoky eye makeup.

  So there she was with Barron, who had asked her and who had his license. Who was charming. Who was clearly, technically, the better boyfriend. The one her friends would be jealous about.

  And they’d eaten pizza and joked around on the first part of the date, which was fun. And now they were taking a romantic walk on the beach. The moon was hidden behind clouds, but there was enough light to make the breaking waves shimmer as they crashed on the shore.

  “You want to sit on the jetty?” he asked her.

  This was the exact kind of thing people were supposed to do on dates.

  “Okay,” she said and followed him onto the rocks. As she walked out, waves broke higher and higher, in plumes of foam. The surf raged all around them, trickling out through flooded tide pools.

  She turned to say something when he took her chin and kissed her. His lips were soft and for a moment, everything seemed perfect. She wound her arms around his neck. But then he was drawing her down to the rock, his hands running over the sides of her legs. And she felt thrilled and scared all at the same time.

  It happened so fast. His tongue was inside her mouth and their bodies were pressed together, his legs between hers. Her head rocked back against cold stone.

  “Uh,” she said, pulling away slightly.

  He looked at her in bafflement and she felt the shame of not knowing what she was supposed to do, of being so much younger than him, crash over her like one of the waves.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, scrambling to sit up. She tried to think of something else to say, something casual and sophisticated.

  He looked at her for a long moment, then sighed. “We should go back.” Standing, he offered her his hand, helping her to her feet.

  “We don’t have to stop,” she said uncertainly.

  He shook his head. “It’s getting late anyway.”

  Lila was quiet on the way to the car and then on the drive home. He talked the whole way, cheerily, but she couldn’t focus on what he was saying.

  She was wondering if this was what love felt like. She was wondering if he would ask her out again and what they would do on that date. She hoped he would ask her, but she was already dreading it.

  * * *

  Once, Lila Zacharov was in love with a boy with hair as black as spilled ink and eyes as dark as coffee. She would trace his name on her skin, over and over, write it in the condensation of her breath on panes of glass, scrawl it on the bottoms of her feet with the tip of her nail, like she was casting a spell.

  He would come to her mother’s house, and they would lie on the wooden floor of her room, making up games. Once, Lila took out her old book of fairy tales to show him a picture of a dragon that she wanted to draw on his arm like a tattoo.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if bears and foxes could really talk?” he said, half kidding, pushing a lock of hair back from his eyes.

  “I could give you a dream where they did,” she said.

  He looked away from her quickly, like he didn’t want her to see his face. His family was full of workers, but he wasn’t one.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But no thanks.”

  There was a silence between them, a silence that hadn’t been there when they were younger. She wondered if he was afraid. She wondered if he was jealous that she had magic and he didn’t. She wondered if he wanted to kiss her.

  “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it?” he asked her.

  She leaned back. “I don’t know. Maybe get a car. A really fast red one.”

  He laughed. “You couldn’t drive it.”

  “I could buy a fake ID too! I’d have a bajillion dollars. I could bribe everyone.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, but he was still grinning. There was something about the curve of his mouth, something lurking behind his eyes that made her want to touch him, made her want to strip off her glove and feel the warmth of his skin against hers.

  “I’d get out of here,” he said. “Go someplace where no one knew me. Start over. Go to Paris like you did or go to—I don’t know—Prague. Somewhere.” He looked toward the window, like he could already see himself gone.

  “Oh,” she said, because it hurt that he was thinking about that when she was thinking about him. She narrowed her eyes. “What’s stopping you?”

  The boy looked down at the book of fairy tales. “Nothing,” he said.

  Lila wanted to be the one to stop him.

  He reached between them and tucked a strand of her long blond hair behind her ear with one gloved finger. The shiver that started at the base of her spine felt like a warning.

  * * *

  When Lila Zacharov was eight, she dressed up in one of her mother’s long beaded dresses and clasped a diamond necklace around her forehead, like it was a crown. Then she stood in front of the huge gilt mirror in her parents’ bedroom to look at herself. Her hair was a tangle of pale curls, and the dress was so long that it trailed behind her like a train, but if she squinted, she could almost see someone else—a mysterious shadow self—reflected back at her.