Page 5 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

I stand and button the coat over her photograph.

“I want what she carries. The wife is the crate it travels in.”

2

Vasilisa

“Miss Plaksin, my tooth came out in the applesauce.”

I know that sentence is going to define my Tuesday before Louis even finishes it. He’s holding the tooth out on his palm like a jeweler showing me a diamond, applesauce sliding off his wrist onto the reading rug, and he’s got the face of a kid who’s ninety percent thrilled and ten percent worried he broke a law.

“Show me the damage.” I roll over before the drip reaches the puzzle bin, because in this room everything is a spill in progress and I’ve learned to intercept. “Okay. That’s a molar, that’s a big-league tooth. You didn’t swallow it, which means you’re smarter than half the adults I know.”

“Is that bad? That it was in the applesauce?”

“It’s not bad, it’s a story. When you’re forty you’ll tell people at a party about the time your tooth escaped into breakfast, and they’ll think you’re fascinating.” I pluck a paper towel off the stack I keep in my lap, because a first-grade room runs on paper towels and low expectations. “We are, however, not telling your mother it happened during eating. We’re going to say it happened at recess, like a gentleman’s tooth.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Louis. Sweetheart. We contain the chaos; we don’t report it.”

Amelia materializes at my armrest, up on her toes, vibrating. “Miss Plaksin, is the tooth fairy real?”

“Real, licensed, and she pays market rate.”

“What’s market rate?”

“It means she asks around and doesn’t cheap out on you.” I wheel to the sink, run the tooth under the tap, and tuck it into the plastic treasure chest in my desk drawer, which exists solely because a wet tooth loose in a backpack is a genuine tragedy, and I found that out the hard way in October. “Everyone back to journals. The tooth is safe. It’s in the vault.”

I get about ninety seconds of peace before the gold glitter goes off.

I never catch the culprit. It’s like lightning; you only see the aftermath. Somebody digs through the craft bin for the gold glitter to jazz up a show-and-tell rock, and the thing about gold glitter is that it isn’t a supply, it’s a lifestyle I didn’t consent to. It’s on my knuckles. It’s in the wheel spokes. It clings to the sunflower rims I painted myself last spring, sitting on my apartment floor with a bottle of enamel and a stubborn refusal to own one more thing in hospital colors. I’ll be picking flecks out of my hairline at dinner. I’ll find it in my bra tonight. That’s not a guess, that’s experience.

“Amelia.” I roll into the glitter zone. “The gold. What did we agree about the gold?”

“That it’s forever,” she says, grief-stricken, accurate.

“That it’s forever.” I put the dented dustpan in her hands, the one she can barely close her fingers around, because the point was never a clean floor. The point is you sweep up your own weather system. She goes at it like she’s defusing a bomb, and I let the others do show-and-tell around her, the rock, a beetle somebody’s keeping in a jar against my explicit rules, a photograph of a dog named Biscuit who died before any of these children drew breath but who is spoken of, in Ana’s family, in the hushed tones of a saint. I love this so much I’m a little embarrassed about it.

Poppy appears in my doorway at lunch, takes one look at me, and doesn’t so much as flinch.

“You’ve been attacked by a Christmas ornament.” She folds herself into the tiny chair by the door, knees somewhere near her chin, and holds a coffee out to me like she’s offering a treat to a nervous horse. “The good one. Ramirez drank the last of the sludge from the teachers’ lounge, and I confronted him.”

“You confronted him?”

“I exhaled loudly in his direction. It was devastating. He’ll think about it for weeks.” She helps herself to a carrot off my desk. “You’ve got the PT tonight.”

“Yeah, I’m on the bars.”

“Send me the update after. Don’t make me chase you for it.” She points the carrot at me. “You always send it late when it’s a good one, like you’re worried I’ll jinx it.”

“I am worried you’ll jinx it. You’re a known jinx.”

“I have never jinxed anything in my life.” She bites the carrot in half. “Except the Ramirez thing. That one’s on me.”

The bell scatters them out into the hall, tracking gold into the wider world like tiny saboteurs, and I stay behind twenty minutes scraping the carpet with the flat of a ruler. It is, God help me, one of the better parts of my day.

Natasha’s already at the clinic when I get there, arms crossed, radiating her general disapproval of the concept of lateness.