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In hindsight, perhaps he should have been paying closer attention to the guns.
Here, now, Bastien and Mother continue to turn the television volume up too high. Blocking out memories, perhaps? Or more likely just habit. Now it only serves the purpose of blocking out the sound of the neighbor in the apartment next door— a cranky old woman living alone who beats against the wall with a broom, or maybe a cane. Something that makes a faint, rhythmic bang bang bang sound that is no competition for the sound of bullets flying. No one else in our apartment seems to even hear it.
I turn down the volume when they aren't paying attention, and try to smile in apology when I see the old woman outside. It's not their fault, I want to say. But isn't it? What else do they ignore simply because it suits them? What else have we all ignored?
The old woman just glares at me. All she wants is peace and quiet in her shabby apartment, and I can't give it to her. In her eyes, I am useless.
CHOICES
Now we live in not-quite- Washington, D.C. Our home is twenty-five miles away from a capital where we have no status, in a suburb that feels so distant from either past or future that it might as well be on the moon. An exile within an exile.
Nothing is familiar. Nothing is easy. Not even for a King of Nowhere or an Invisible Queen.
At first, the differences between Old Life and New Life were most obvious in the small and the unimportant.
The grocery store, for example. An entire aisle of cereal. Hundreds of boxes. Hundreds of choices. Of course I had eaten cereal before. I'm not a savage. Mother's shopping trips in Europe were always followed a few weeks later by the arrival of wooden crates full of her carefully selected treasures from abroad. Bastien and I would tear at the contents, racing each other for the discovery of the small luxuries Mother had picked out for us, nestled among the bottles of liquor, perfume, and other adult delicacies that didn't interest us in the least. For us there were metal tins of fancy chocolates, giant tubs of peanut butter, comic books, DVDs, and always, always our favorite cereals, which we ate from Grandmother's delicate teacups rather than bowls in order to make each box last one or two more precious mornings.
Cereal was a small, affordable luxury— one we knew well. But it was still a luxury. An effort. A point of pride. Something special, chosen and imported just for us. Father's position meant that rules were broken so we might have things that others in our country could not. Those crates of cereal meant that we deserved what others did not.
Here, the choices that stand before me in the store aisles seem to exist only to mock me.
Cereal isn't a luxury, you stupid fool, the boxes laugh at me. You were really impressed by a couple of jars of peanut butter? Two aisles down I count twenty-seven different kinds of that too. And mustard. Dozens of varieties of mustard.
Is it really necessary?
It makes me angry, all of that mustard. Those taunting boxes of cereal, so overvalued in my memory.
Bastien sees things differently. He squealed and whirled and grabbed the first time he saw that aisle of temptation. He lost himself in the choices, filling our shopping cart until Mother told him, smiling, that that was enough cereal for the moment. He ate himself sick that evening, mixing enormous bowlfuls of cocoa nuggets with marshmallow crisps with honey puffs. I pulled my pillow over my head as the exiled king vomited Lucky Charms all through the night.
STANDARDS
The king and I start school.
It's not our choice. Mother didn't like it—none of us were ready for it— but something came in the mail that shook her up enough to change her mind. I only managed to read a few phrases before she snatched the letter away. "Condition of legal immigrant status." "Violation of terms." "Deportation."
Excerpted from The Tyrant's Daughter by J.C. Carleson. Copyright © 2014 by J.C. Carleson. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Children's Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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