“I know,” Mama says with satisfaction. “Which is why if she could get rid of those glasses, she’d look?—”
“As beautiful as she does now,” Freja snaps.
I make puppy dog eyes at my sister, and she narrows hers at my mother and aunt.
I suppress a grin. She’s going to rip them a new one.
“Stop getting me into trouble with Freja,” Mama admonishes me.
“Then stop making comments about her looks,” Freja snaps.
“What she said,” I say in a sing-song voice.
When I was younger, it was hard for me to live in the shadow of my physically beautiful, high-achieving siblings. Now, not so much. We’re different.
I’m an introverted nerd, while my sister is an extrovert. A vivacious journalist, now married to a sexy-as-hell congressman. Freja is who you think of when you think of a Rousseau.
My brother, Aksel, holds a senior position at the World Bank and is often seen on television discussing global policy, possesses pure charisma, is fluent in three languages, is photographed at Davos, is invited to meet heads of state, andso on and so on and so on.
I’m stuck in a lab in Boston working on gravitational wave signatures in black hole mergers involving rogue stars. It’s lessStar Trekand more analyzing faint, chaotic gravitational wave data from potential rogue star collisions with black holes. Extremely rare. Barely detectable events.
I love it!
I mean, what’s not to love about studying unseen forces colliding in silence, and working on the edges of detectable phenomena? And the best part? My work is a mostly solo endeavor.
The only hitch is when I have to come up for air towrite grant proposals or pitch my research to committees who care more about funding optics than theoretical astrophysics.
I spend almost as much time begging for money as I do mapping rogue star collisions. Glamorous, I know. But that’s how my world works. So, if I want time on the telescopes or access to high-performance computing clusters, which I do, I have to play by the rules. Academia runs on prestige and funding. I’m just trying to make enough noise to stay in the room.
Funding of any kind hasn’t been an issue for anyone in my family. Besides the fact that Papa comes from a French aristocratic line (they didn’t lose their heads to the guillotine during the Revolution as they’d escaped to England), his and Mama’s careers have enhanced the family coffers.
Our father, Jean Rousseau, retired as the president of the European Central Bank only a year ago. Since then, he’s been leading a financial think tank and moves through the world with the easy authority of a man who dines with thecrème de la crèmeof society.
Half the people he associates it with are criminals in suits who have won elections (his words), the other half have not bothered with suits.
Our mother, Margot Adams Rousseau, once a supermodel and now a UNHCR ambassador, has cheekbones sharp enough to cut throughanyone. She has a personal network ofclose friendsthat stretches across four continents.
She has a social media following of millions, where she posts filtered glimpses of refugee camps and fashion galas in equal measure. Her captions are always just the right blend of humanitarian concern and effortless glamour.
In contrast, I am the quiet daughter and sister that no one knows about.
Growing up, I spoke in terms of star charts instead of legislations, hid behind books and equations, and never quite learned how to deal with people in general.
I hid during parties. I stayed in my room during the fancy vacations and holidays.
Now, I don’t go to parties, but I do spend a significant amount of time alone during family trips like this one, when we’re in the Rousseau Chalet in Chamonix for our two-week sojourn from before Christmas through to just after New Year’s Eve.
It’s tradition, and friends and family often join us, like Uncle Bob and Aunt Tanya. They’re both retired. Uncle Bob used to manage a hedge fund in New York, and Aunt Tanya was a PR guru who worked exclusively with politicians.
Besides Dr. Ransom Marchand and his lady friend, there are others who are spending the holidays with us. Jonathan, my brother-in-law (the politician at our table this holiday), Freja’s best friend, Gisele, who is a journalist turned talk show host (think Barbara Walters when she was in her thirties), and Gisele’s wife, Heidi, who runs an organization supporting refugees and is inand out of meetings during this two-week vacation because humanitarian crises don’t stop for anyone. It's a good thing the chalet comes with two fully equipped offices and a conference room.
My family lets me be. They know my social battery empties faster than theirs, so when I slip away or go skiing solo, they don’t make a fuss.
“I’m not saying Ember isn’t nice looking—of course, she is, but beauty, like everything else, needs to be taken care of.” Mama can’t imagine a woman who isn’t interested in looking her best, which in her mind, includes wearing makeup, not having glasses, and getting hydro facials at least once every two weeks, as well as a manicure and pedicure every week.
I chew on my nails when nervous, and find the whole act of spending an hour having someone do stuff to my hands and feet that I can do myself when I take a shower, a complete waste of my time.
Unfortunately, Mama and Aunt Tanya thinks my lack of interest in my appearancehas to do with me being single. I think my family would fall off their chairs if I told them that five years ago, Ransom broke my heart, and since then, I’ve submerged said heart under a collapsed star’s worth of gravity—compressed, dense, lightless—because I don’t need to go through thatbig bangof emotional fallout again.
