“But snow in Russia! That’s the whole point!” Sophie hugged her arms to her chest. “Anyway, I’m used to the cold. Rosemary’s flat is freezing. She thinks central heating is immoral.”
“Itisvery bad for the planet,” Marianne said primly. “But how do you keep warm without any proper clothes?”
“Rosemary gave me an old mink jacket to wear in bed.”
“So, central heating is immoral, but killing innocent animals for their fur is fine?” Marianne said.
“Well, they’re very old furs. The animals would be dead by now anyway. And it feels like wearing something from a different world …”
“That’snot the point!”
“But don’t you ever lie in bed at night and think about being someone else?” Sophie continued.
Delphine raised one perfect eyebrow. “Someone other than me?”
“When I wear that coat,” Sophie rattled on, “I’m not plain old Sophie Smith … I feel like I’m some beautiful countess, running away from an empty life of parties and balls to find my destiny … with the Cossacks … and I am traveling across Russia wrapped in furs on a night train … and under my pillow” — she knew she sounded crazy, but she couldn’t stop — “are a box of sugar mice and foil-wrapped chocolate cats with red sequins for eyes … and … a … p-pistol.” She reached the end of the sentence because she hadn’t known how to stop before saying “pistol.” By the expression on Marianne’s face, she might as well have said “penguin.”
“A pistol?” Delphine’s face creased in incomprehension. “What do you … ?”
Sophie decided to brave her friends’ incredulity. She would just say it. “I need the pistol to shoot the bears and the wolves.”
“Do you really think a bullet from a pistol would stop a bear?” Marianne snorted. “They are seriously vicious creatures when they’re angry. Think Sharman in one of her moods … and then some!”
Delphine went back to applying butter to her toast as if she were giving it a manicure. “I need a pool and blazing sunshine.” She looked thoughtful. “Of course, a yacht is always a bonus.”
“Too much outdoors!” Marianne laughed, heaving her overstuffed rucksack onto her shoulder and draining her glass of water. “Just give me a library and a fire.”
“But shall we go and check the bulletin board anyway? Do we have time?” Sophie said. Maybe it wouldn’t be Saint Petersburg, but she wanted to know where she would be spending Easter. Rosemary would probably make some excuse about not being at home, as usual. When Sophie was young, Rosemary had made the best of it by hiring a series of au pairs and doing the best to ignore the disturbance to her ordered, career-focused life. Boarding school, the minute Sophie was old enough, came as a blessed relief to both of them, but holidays were not on Rosemary’s radar.
“Yes, but we can’t be late for physics. I’ll test you on the anthropic principle on the way, if you like,” Marianne offered.
Delphine and Sophie made a face at each other as they made their way out of the refectory, taking the prohibited shortcut through the library. Neither of them had a clue what Marianne was talking about. That didn’t bode well for the physics test.
Marianne sighed at their blank expressions. “The anthropic principle was posited by Robert Dicke, a cosmological scientist, in 1961 to deal with the presence of incredible coincidence in the universe.”
“It’s not a coincidence that you’re boring me silly,” Delphine muttered. “I don’t remember anything about this from class.”
“She’s going to get an A-plus again,” Sophie sighed. “Marianne must be the only girl in the school to get more than a hundred percent on a physics test.”
“But it’s so interesting!” Marianne burst out. “How else can you explain why we are here?”
“Because we’re taking a shortcut through the library?” Sophie offered.
“No. Here. With a capital H. Everything has been working toward this moment, don’t you see? The precise level of weak nuclear force that allows stars to shine, that allows matter to coalesce and form planets, oxygen, water … Only a slight variation and our whole world would fall apart.”
Sophie and Delphine kept walking.
“Don’t you see?” Marianne was in full flow. “We are here, wherever we are, because we canonlybe here. There is no other place for us.”
Sophie tried to imagine that the whole of the universe had been working toward this one moment — she, Sophie Smith, walking toward the bulletin board — but, as with most of Marianne’s Big Ideas, she gave up.
Delphine breathed, “Fascinating,” and nodded her head as if she were taking it all in, but Sophie could see she was already scanning the far end of the corridor where a group of girls was standing around the bulletin board, laughing and talking excitedly.
Sophie hung back and crossed her fingers.I know it can’t be Saint Petersburg, she said to herself.But just this once, could the office have made a mistake and accidentally put my name down on the wrong list? I won’t eat any more of Marianne’s chocolate-covered cherries or use Delphine’s toothpaste or that lavender shampoo her mother sends from Paris, and I’ll look for a sweater in Lost and Found right now and I’ll be good for the rest of my life…
They got closer to the gaggle of girls. Delphine pushed to the front.
“Oh, typical!” Millie Dresser, a drab girl in the grade above, looked fed up. “I’ve got the battlefields.” She stomped off in a huff.
