The Ruby Notebook Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Laura Resau

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Coleman Barks for permission to reprint Rumi excerpts from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, copyright © 1995 by Coleman Barks (HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Les Éditions José Corti: Translated excerpt from “Prendre Corps” from Paralipomenès by Ghérasim Luca, published by Les Éditions José Corti.

  Spirit One Music: Lyrics from “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” written by Lou Reed, copyright © Oakfield Avenue Music, Ltd. US and Canadian Rights for Oakfield Avenue Music, Ltd. Administered and Controlled by Spirit One Music (BMI) World excluding US and Canadian Rights Administered and Controlled by EMI Music Publishing, Ltd. International Copyright Secured.

  Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Resau, Laura.

  The ruby notebook / by Laura Resau. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When sixteen-year-old Zeeta and her itinerant mother move to Aix-en-Provence, France, Zeeta is haunted by a mysterious admirer who keeps leaving mementoes for her, and when her Ecuadorian boyfriend comes to visit, their relationship seems to have changed.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89761-0

  [1. Secrets—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Single-parent families—Fiction. 5. Aix-en-Provence (France)—Fiction. 6. France—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R2978Ru 2010

  [Fic]—dc22 2009051965

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Pour Annie et Alain Thille

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Glimmers of ideas for this book appeared fifteen years ago, while I was living in Aix-en-Provence with Annie and Alain Thille, my fun-spirited and generous host parents. Merci mille fois to you and your family for sharing your love, your home, and your amazing meals with me both when I was a college student and on recent visits. Conversations with the Aixois artist Juan Carlos Gallo in his exquisite gallery-courtyard gave me endless inspiration. Grâce à vous, Juan Carlos, this book (and my life) are infused with a bit more magic and mystery. A big merci to my hyper cool friends Jean-Christophe Prin and Megan Daily for their help with French language details.

  Once again, my editor, Stephanie Lane Elliott, and her assistant, Krista Vitola, were instrumental in shaping and shining this manuscript. I’m deeply grateful for their patience and confidence in me, and for all the dedicated behind-the-scenes support everyone at Delacorte Press has given to my books. My energetic agent, Erin Murphy, deserves heaps of thanks for bringing the Notebooks series from an idea to a reality. Old Town Writers’ Group has kept me sane and smiling—thank you, Carrie Visintainer, Kimberly Srock Fields, Leslie Patterson, Molly Reid, and Sarah Ryan. Special thanks to Coleman Barks, phenomenal Rumi translator, for his generosity in letting me quote so much from The Essential Rumi.

  Most of all, I thank my mother, who—when I felt overwhelmed and lost with this manuscript—showed me the way again, step by step. I suspect that you do have a magic wand after all, Mom. Dad and Ian, thanks for picking up our slack when Mom and I dropped everything in a scramble to finish this book. And Bran, thanks for your toddler joie de vivre in Aix-en-Provence as we rode the carousel and danced to street music and splashed in fountains!

  It’s true. There’s something about the light here. It’s hazy golden, as if it’s moving through honey. I’ve seen all kinds of light. Wet green glow in the Amazonian jungle, squid luminescence in the Pacific, indigo dawns through a waterfall in the Andes. But this particular light—this southern French light glinting off my tiny espresso cup—this is something else.

  It hits me now, the familiar urge to e-mail Wendell. It’s a hunger that needs to be satisfied every three or four hours. A split second later, the rational part of my brain kicks in, and I remember he’ll be here in a week. June twenty-fifth, the day filled with unabashedly giddy hearts and exclamation points on my calendar. He’ll be here, in Aix-en-Provence, in this square, and we’ll actually be touching, and this light will be settling on his skin. He’ll be hopping up to snap pictures through the fountain spray, catching the cloud of pigeons alighting on an old man’s shoulders, a miniature dog nonchalantly making a large pile of merde as the owner, unaware, studies a dress in a shop window.

  Across the café table, Layla picks up her little bowl of lemon glâce and tilts her head back to pour the last melted drops in her mouth. Not the kind of thing the well-mannered French people surrounding us would even think of doing. I know my mother so well, I can guess why she does it. It’s not just because everything’s so expensive in Aix—although that drop of glâce is probably worth ten centimes. That’s just Layla, savoring the tiniest droplets, sucking every bit of sweetness from life. Which is maybe why we move to a different country every year. Sixteen countries in my sixteen years on earth. It doesn’t take her long to lick a place clean.

  She gazes over my head. “Doesn’t everything here look edible, Zeeta?”

  “Edible how?” I can’t help smiling. We’ve been here a week, already over the jet lag but still marveling at every novel detail. It’s amazing; not a single sarcastic comment has emerged from my lips all week. Layla and I have been like sisters adventuring together, probably because I’m insanely happy about Wendell coming.

  Best of all, he’ll be staying in our apartment. I’ll see him every day for two months, enough to make up for nine whole months apart. While I was getting his room ready this morning, I had a goofy smile on my face, just imagining breakfast together at our sunny kitchen table, dinner on our roof patio. Almost too good to be true.

  “Look at th
ose buildings, love.” Layla waves her arm, her bracelets clinking. “They’re like sugary, buttery desserts.”

  I nod. “Crème brûlée.” All the buildings—shops, cafés, bakeries, post office, town hall—are painted in the same dessert palette. This honey haze has oozed into everything, even the people. They’re draped in pale creams and lemons and silvers. They even talk in milky hues, their lips pursed and cheeks sucked in to form sexy French vowels.

  Layla leans in. “Don’t you love that we’re living in a place pronounced ‘X’? Like X marks the spot. Like there’s a hidden treasure here! Like it can be whatever we want it to be! C’est magnifique!” She blows a kiss at the sky.

  “He’ll like it here,” I say. Layla knows the he I’m talking about. For nine months, she’s heard me find roundabout ways to work Wendell into every conversation.

  “Is his room ready?” she asks.

  “Clean sheets, empty chest drawers, space in the wardrobe, a shelf in the medicine cabinet. All set.” He’ll be moving into my room, and I’ll sleep on the sofa bed in the living room.

  “Hyper cool,” she says, pronouncing it the French way. “Eep-air” cool. A few months ago in Ecuador when I told her my plan to have Wendell stay with us this summer, she just said, “¡Que pleno!”—“Cool” in Spanish. The idea of my boyfriend sharing our apartment didn’t faze her one bit. She’s more like a sister than a mother, young-looking enough that people often ask if we’re doing our junior year abroad together, pretty enough that random college backpackers turn to ogle. Even on windless days, her blond hair flies wild behind her, trailing along like a comet’s tail. “It’ll be good to have him around again,” she says. “Other artists inspire me.”

  Just what kind of artist Layla considers herself is hard to get a handle on. Life is her canvas, each country a brushstroke of a different color. Wendell’s another type of artist—a photographer, slow and thoughtful with his craft. But what I love most about him is just him. His presence. How it feels to be near him. I imagine kissing him goodbye as he leaves for classes, and meeting him in the afternoons to wander the town together, meandering through the markets, hanging out at cafés.

  Still, there’s a piece of me that’s wary, sure that this is too good to be true, a piece of me prepared to have my heart torn apart. My heart has been torn apart, over and over, every year, every time we say goodbye to our home. Still, somehow, over the course of a year in the new home, my heart heals and hopes and loves … only to be torn apart again.

  One afternoon when I was eight years old, in the highlands of Guatemala, I spent hours playing with my best friend, Paloma, at our magical waterfall fort in the woods. As we headed home I remember feeling at the pinnacle of happiness, flying through the door with her, rosy-cheeked and breathless and laughing. Layla gave us both big hugs and said, “Oh, love, I have good news! We’re going to Morocco next week!”

  And with those words, Paloma and my magical waterfall fort were snatched away. It was a heavy, falling, crushing feeling. A giant tree smashing to the ground.

  The worst part of leaving Guatemala was saying goodbye to Paloma’s father, who I’d come to think of as my own, even calling him Papá. He doted on me, telling Paloma and me how much we looked alike. And we did. My skin was just a shade lighter than hers. Our eyes were wide and brown, our hair black and straight and long, and our cheekbones high. We fantasized that we really were sisters.…

  Saying goodbye to Paloma’s father made my lack of a father grow into a huge, empty void. That’s when I first started bugging Layla about my own father, when I learned that I was the product of a one-night stand on a Greek beach. She didn’t even know his name, only the initials J.C. And that’s when she told me that my chances of meeting my father were zero.

  Over the years I searched for his face in every crowd. I had no idea what he looked like, but I assumed I’d magically recognize him. Little by little, with each face that wasn’t his, I realized Layla was right. I’d never know him. I’d have to accept it.

  And I have. Except for a tiny piece of me, a piece located not in my mind but in my stubborn heart, the piece that skips a beat whenever I meet a J.C., the piece willing to risk being torn apart once again.

  Across the café table from me, Layla tilts back her head, letting her blond hair cascade down the back of her chair, closing her eyes like a cat, relishing the warmth. She knows how to be happy. Her happiness isn’t clouded by the sense of impending doom that mine is. No, she dives into the moment, forgets the past, doesn’t worry about the future. Which is what she appears to be doing now, bathing in sunlight, full of lemon glâce.

  “Beauty constantly wells up,” she murmurs, “a noise of springwater in my ear and in my inner being.” It’s Rumi, her favorite thirteenth-century mystic. She quotes him so often I feel as if he’s part of our family—adored by her, tolerated by me.

  And then, as though she’s conjured it up, a sound bursts forth like springwater, like a fountain suddenly turned on. Music, a rushing, churning, chaos of music, spurting out from under a tree next to us. It’s like a carousel song that flew away and crashed into a gypsy caravan and burst into flames of polka. There’s a whirlwind of accordion, trumpet, and bongos, each one shooting out notes like squiggly fireworks. The melody swirls around slowly at first, gathering momentum, and then explodes.

  The musicians’ clothes, all in shades of red, are patchworks of satin, corduroy, velvet, and silk, sewn with an odd assortment of items—feathers and beads and little plastic dolls and tiny cars and bottle caps and paper clips and shells. These people do not match the milky-smooth surroundings. Not by a long shot.

  They seem to be around my age, maybe a little older. One girl is spinning, her long scarlet skirt swirling, her hips and arms undulating, her dark hair flying. Gazing at her, a lanky guy in a crimson top hat plays the trumpet, with a tuba at his feet. A redheaded girl dressed in a leotard and tights and a short skirt, the deep reds of cherries, sways cross-legged on the ground, beating bongos. Sunlight catches the brass buttons and sequins randomly sewn on her clothes.

  Beside the band, a mime in a puffy white shirt, loose white pants, and a black skullcap is leaning against a tree. He holds so motionless it’s as though he’s part of the tree. His face is painted white, with black diamonds around his eyes and a black teardrop on his cheek. I can’t tell if he’s part of their group. Probably not, since he’s not playing any instrument and he’s not in red.

  And then there’s a guy playing accordion. You’d think it would be hard to look hot playing an instrument associated with dancing monkeys, but he pulls it off. The muscles of his arms ripple as he squeezes and releases the accordion. His hair is a mass of loose black curls that fall over his eyes, grazing his thick lashes.

  “Vâchement cool!” Layla says. Literally, “Cow-ly cool.”

  I nod. “Super cool!” We’ve been using French slang for a week now, so it comes quickly to our lips.

  Layla’s eyes widen. “Hyper super cool!”

  Already, a crowd is gathering and kids are clapping and coins are flying into the open tuba case lined with a pooled-up raspberry red scarf. After a few songs, the group takes a break, passing one another a carafe of water. The redheaded girl dances around the crowd holding out a top hat. In her other hand, she holds cherries. One-handed, she pops one after another into her mouth, spitting the pits over her shoulder with abandon.

  She whizzes by our table, doing a backflip just a meter from us, and holds out the hat. I drop in a few coins. Then, with a smile, she’s skipping on to the next table. Once she’s finished her round, she announces, in a musical voice much bigger than her elfin body, “We! Are! Illusion!”

  It takes me a moment to realize that Illusion must be the name of the group. They do seem too bright and eccentric and red to be real, like something my mind has conjured up. One thing I’m sure of: I want to be friends with these people. As much as I complain to Layla about our gypsy lifestyle, I always find kindred spirits in people who exist
on the fringes.

  From Café Cerise, I head toward Cybercafé Nirvana, since it’s been a few hours since I last e-mailed Wendell. On the way, I swing by the bookstore to buy my first notebook in France. Since I was eight, in each country we’ve lived in, I’ve written in a different-colored notebook. I started with a purple notebook in Guatemala, filling only half of it with big, awkward letters, a jumble of English and Spanish. More recently, I’ve filled four or five notebooks per country, mostly in English with a smattering of words in the local languages. Ecuador was indigo, Thailand was white, Brazil red, India yellow, Laos green, Chile blue, and Morocco orange.

  My notebooks—enough to make a small suitcase bulge—are the only sentimental things I bring from one country to another. They’re brimming with interviews, musings, observations, questions, and the occasional rant. When you’re constantly moving to a new place, adapting to new ways of life, it takes extra work to make sense of it all. Thus my rainbow of notebooks.

  As I stand in front of the shelves, one notebook leaps out at me, practically does a flip, and lands in my hand. It’s ruby red with bits of golden sparkles that make my heart race. If it had a sound track, it would be the wild, soul-sparking music of Illusion.

  The sun’s setting as I walk to Cybercafé Nirvana. The sign on the door advertises air-conditioning, which is why the door and windows stay shut, but that just makes it stuffier. Inside, it feels like a dimly lit oven filled with whirring, humming machines and grunge rock. There’s a stale cigarette smell from years of smoking before it was outlawed indoors. A few flickering fluorescent lights give the room a dull gray pallor.

  As the door swings shut, jangling a bell, I silently curse Layla for rejecting technology like cell phones or laptops, for making it such an ordeal to communicate with Wendell.

  “Essalam alikoum,” Ahmed says with a wave. His eyes flicker away from the game on his computer screen. Apparently he’s internationally notorious in the online-gaming realm of KnightQuest.