How Not to Spend Your Senior Year (23 page)

At this point in the story, Old Mathilde always does the same thing: She smiles. Not because the circumstances she's relating are particularly happy, but because smiling is what my mother did.

“Call her by whatever name you think best,” she replied. “For you will raise her, not I.”

“Then I will give her your name,” Old Mathilde said. “For she should have more of her mother than just the color of her hair and eyes, and a memory she is too young to know how to hold.”

And so I was named Constanze, after my mother. And no sooner had this been decided, than my mother died. Old Mathilde sat beside the bed, her eyes seeing the two of us together even in the dark, until my mother's lips turned pale, her arms grew cold, and the clouds outside the window parted to reveal a spangle of high night stars. Not once in all that time, so Old Mathilde has always claimed, did I so much as stir or cry.

When the slim and curving sickle of the moon had reached the top of the window, then begun its slide back down the sky, Old Mathilde got up from her chair and lifted me gently from my mother's arms. She carried me downstairs to the great open fireplace in the kitchen. Holding me in the crook of one arm, she took the longest poker she could find and stirred up the coals.

Not even such a storm as had descended upon us that night could altogether put out the kitchen fire—the fire that is the heart of any house. Once the coals were glowing as they should, Old Mathilde wrapped me in a towel of red flannel, took the largest of our soup kettles down from its peg, tucked me inside it, and nestled the pot among the embers so that I might grow warm once more.

As she did, I began to cry for the very first time. And at this, as if the sound of my voice startled them back into existence, all the other fires throughout the great stone house came back to life. Flurries of sparks shot straight up every chimney, scattering into the air like red-hot fireflies.

In this way, I earned a second name that night, the one that people use and remember, in spite of the fact that the name Constanze is a perfectly fine one. Nobody has ever called me that, not even Old Mathilde. Instead, she calls me by the name I was given for the coals that kept me warm, for the fires I brought back to life with the sound of my own voice.

Child of cinders.
Cendrillon
.

About the Author

Cameron Dokey did not play dead during her senior year, though some aspects of this story were inspired by real life. There really is a high school in Seattle with a fast food joint across the street, and in the parking lot of said fast food joint there used to be a car atop a column. Sadly, both have since been taken down. Not only that, the place no longer provides soft-serve ice cream, which is an incredibly big bummer. The name of the school is not Beacon, though it does begin with a B. There's no such place as Royer High. But a guy named Royer did used to be mayor of Seattle.

You get the idea.

Cameron's other titles for Simon & Schuster include
Beauty Sleep; The Storyteller's Daughter; Hindenburg, 1937; Avalanche 1910;
Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Here Be Monsters;
Angel:
The Summoned;
and Charmed:
Truth and Consequences.

Also by Cameron Dokey

Once

Beauty Sleep

The Story Teller's Daughter

The World Above

And look for

Kissed

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Simon Pulse edition January 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Cameron Dokey

SIMON PULSE

An imprint of Simon & Schuster

Children's Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Designed by Ann Sullivan

The text of this book was set in Garamond 3.

Library of Congress Catalog Number 2003111969

ISBN 0-689-86703-4
ISBN 978-1-4391-2063-7 (eBook)