Revolution Read online

  ALSO BY JENNIFER DONNELLY

  A Northern Light

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Donnelly

  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.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments to reprint previously published material can be found on this page.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donnelly, Jennifer.

  Revolution / Jennifer Donnelly. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: An angry, grieving seventeen-year-old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school travels to Paris to complete a school assignment and uncovers a diary written during the French revolution by a young actress attempting to help a tortured, imprisoned little boy—Louis Charles, the lost king of France.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89760-3 — [1. Grief—Fiction. 2. Emotional problems—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Musicians—Fiction. 5. Diaries—Fiction. 6. Paris (France)—Fiction. 7. France—Fiction. 8. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Fiction. 9. Louis XVII, of France, 1785–1795—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D7194Re 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010008993

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

  v3.1

  For Daisy,

  who kicked out the walls of my heart

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1 - Hell

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Part 2 - Purgatory

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Part 3 - PARADISE

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  I found myself within a forest dark,

  For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say,

  What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

  Which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more….

  —DANTE The Divine Comedy

  HELL

  And to a place I come where nothing shines.

  —DANTE

  1

  Those who can, do.

  Those who can’t, deejay.

  Like Cooper van Epp. Standing in his room—the entire fifth floor of a Hicks Street brownstone—trying to beat-match John Lee Hooker with some piece of trip-hop horror. On twenty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment he doesn’t know how to use.

  “This is the blues, man!” he crows. “It’s Memphis mod.” He pauses to pour himself his second scotch of the morning. “It’s like then and now. Brooklyn and Beale Street all at once. It’s like hanging at a house party with John Lee. Smoking Kents and drinking bourbon for breakfast. All that’s missing, all we need—”

  “—are hunger, disease, and a total lack of economic opportunity,” I say.

  Cooper pushes his porkpie back on his head and brays laughter. He’s wearing a wifebeater and an old suit vest. He’s seventeen, white as cream and twice as rich, trying to look like a bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. He doesn’t. He looks like Norton from The Honeymooners.

  “Poverty, Coop,” I add. “That’s what you need. That’s where the blues come from. But that’s going to be hard for you. I mean, son of a hedge fund god and all.”

  His idiot grin fades. “Man, Andi, why you always harshing me? Why you always so—”

  Simone Canovas, a diplomat’s daughter, cuts him off. “Oh, don’t bother, Cooper. You know why.”

  “We all do. It’s getting boring,” says Arden Tode, a movie star’s kid.

  “And one last thing,” I say, ignoring them, “talent. You need talent. Because John Lee Hooker had boatloads of it. Do you actually write any music, Coop? Do you play any? Or do you just stick other people’s stuff together and call the resulting calamity your own?”

  Cooper’s eyes harden. His mouth twitches. “You’re battery acid. You know that?”

  “I do.”

  I am. No doubt about it. I like humiliating Cooper. I like causing him pain. It feels good. It feels better than his dad’s whiskey, better than his mom’s weed. Because for just a few seconds, someone else hurts, too. For just a few seconds, I’m not alone.

  I pick up my guitar and play the first notes of Hooker’s “Boom Boom.” Badly, but it does the trick. Cooper swears at me and storms off.

  Simone glares. “That was brutal, Andi. He’s a fragile soul,” she says; then she
takes off after him. Arden takes off after her.

  Simone doesn’t give a rat’s about Cooper or his soul. She’s only worried he’ll pull the plug on our Friday-morning breakfast party. She never faces school without a buzz. Nobody does. We need to have something, some kind of substance-fueled force field to fend off the heavy hand of expectation that threatens to crush us like beer cans the minute we set foot in the place.

  I quit playing “Boom Boom” and ease into “Tupelo.” No one pays any attention. Not Cooper’s parents, who are in Cabo for the holidays. Not the maid, who’s running around opening windows to let the smoke out. And not my classmates, who are busy trading iPods back and forth, listening to one song after another. No Billboard Hot 100 fare for us. We’re better than that. Those tunes are for kids at P.S. Whatever-the-hell. We attend St. Anselm’s, Brooklyn’s most prestigious private school. We’re special. Exceptional. We’re supernovas, every single one of us. That’s what our teachers say, and what our parents pay thirty thousand dollars a year to hear.

  This year, senior year, it’s all about the blues. And William Burroughs, Balkan soul, German countertenors, Japanese girl bands, and New Wave. It’s calculated, the mix. Like everything else we do. The more obscure our tastes, the greater the proof of our genius.

  As I sit here mangling “Tupelo,” I catch broken-off bits of conversation going on around me.

  “But really, you can’t even approach Flock of Seagulls without getting caught up in the metafictive paradigm,” somebody says.

  And “Plastic Bertrand can, I think, best be understood as a postironic nihilist referentialist.”

  And “But, like, New Wave derived meaning from its own meaninglessness. Dude, the tautology was so intended.”

  And then, “Wasn’t that a mighty time, wasn’t that a mighty time …”

  I look up. The kid singing lines from “Tupelo,” a notorious horndog from Slater, another Heights school, is suddenly sitting on the far end of the sofa I’m sitting on. He smirks his way over until our knees are touching.

  “You’re good,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  “You in a band?”

  I keep playing, head down, so he takes a bolder tack.

  “What’s this?” he says, leaning over to tug on the red ribbon I wear around my neck. At the end of it is a silver key. “Key to your heart?”

  I want to kill him for touching it. I want to say words that will slice him to bits, but I have none. They dry up in my throat. I can’t speak, so I hold up my hand, the one covered in skull rings, and clench it into a fist.

  He drops the key. “Hey, sorry.”

  “Don’t do that,” I tell him, tucking it back inside my shirt. “Ever.”

  “Okay, okay. Take it easy, psycho,” he says, backing off.

  I put the guitar into its case and head for an exit. Front door. Back door. Window. Anything. When I’m halfway across the living room, I feel a hand close on my arm.

  “Come on. It’s eight-fifteen.”

  It’s Vijay Gupta. President of the Honor Society, the debate team, the Chess Club, and the Model United Nations. Volunteer at a soup kitchen, a literacy center, and the ASPCA. Davidson Fellow, Presidential Scholar candidate, winner of a Princeton University poetry prize, but, alas, not a cancer survivor.

  Orla McBride is a cancer survivor, and she wrote about it for her college apps and got into Harvard early admission. Chemo and hair loss and throwing up pieces of your stomach beat the usual extracurriculars hands down. Vijay only got wait-listed, so he still has to go to class.

  “I’m not going,” I tell him.

  “Why not?”

  I shake my head.

  “What is it?”

  Vijay is my best friend. My only friend, at this stage. I have no idea why he’s still around. I think he sees me as some kind of rehabilitation project, like the loser dogs he cares for at the shelter.

  “Andi, come on,” he says. “You’ve got to. You’ve got to get your outline in. Beezie’ll throw you out if you don’t. She threw two seniors out last year for not turning it in.”

  “I know. But I’m not.”

  Vijay gives me a worried look. “You take your meds today?” he asks.

  “I did.”

  He sighs. “Catch you later.”

  “Yeah, V. Later.”

  I head out of the Castle van Epp, down to the Promenade. It’s snowing. I take a seat high above the BQE, stare at Manhattan for a bit, and then I play. For hours. I play until my fingertips are raw. Until I rip a nail and bleed on the strings. Until my hands hurt so bad I forget my heart does.

  2

  “When I was a kid I believed everything they told me,” Jimmy Shoes says as we watch a little boy toddle past clutching a Grinch. “Every damn thing. I believed in Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The bogeyman. And Eisenhower.” He takes a slug from a beer bottle in a paper bag. “How ’bout you?”

  “I still am a kid, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy’s an old Italian guy. He sits with me on the Promenade sometimes. He’s not all there. He thinks LaGuardia’s still mayor and that the Dodgers never left Brooklyn. He wears these old shoes. That’s how he got his name. They’re hepcat shoes from the fifties, all shiny and red.

  “How ’bout God? You believe in God?” he asks me.

  “Whose?”

  “Don’t be so smart.”

  “Sorry. Too late.”

  “You go to St. Anselm’s, right? Don’t they teach you no religion there?”

  “It’s just a name. They sent the saint packing, but they kept his name.”

  “They did that to Betty Crocker, too, the sonsabitches. So what do they teach you there?”

  I lean back on the bench and think for a minute. “They start out with Greek mythology—Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, those guys,” I say. “I still have the first thing I ever wrote. In preschool. I was four. It was on Polyphemus. He was a shepherd. And a Cyclops. And a cannibal. He was going to eat Odysseus but Odysseus escaped. He poked Polyphemus’s eye out with a stick.”

  Jimmy gives me a look of utter disbelief. “They teach you that crap in nursery school? Get outta here.”

  “I swear. After that, we learned Roman mythology. Then the Norse myths. Native American deities. Pagan pantheistic traditions. Celtic gods. Buddhism. Judeo-Christian backgrounds. And foundations of Islam.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Because they want you to know. It’s important to them that you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That it’s a myth.”

  “What’s a myth?”

  “All of it, Jimmy. Everything.”

  Jimmy goes quiet for a bit; then he says, “So you get out of that fancy school and you got nothin’? Nothin’ to hold on to? Nothin’ to believe in?”

  “Well, one thing, maybe …”

  “What?”

  “The transformative power of art.”

  Jimmy shakes his head. “That’s a crime. They shouldn’t do that to a kid. It’s child abuse. You want I should report ’em?”

  “Could you?”

  “It’s taken care of. I got friends in the police department,” he says with a meaningful nod.

  Yeah, I think. Dick Tracy’ll get right on it.

  I pack up my stuff. My feet are frozen. I’ve been out here for hours. It’s two-thirty now. Half an hour until my lesson. There’s one thing and one thing only that can get me into my school: Nathan Goldfarb, head of St. Anselm’s music department.

  “Hey, kid,” Jimmy says as I stand up to leave.

  “What?”

  He fishes a quarter out of his pocket. “Get an egg cream. One for you and one for your fella.”