Dreaming Anastasia Read Online Free PDF Page B

occurring to me that this type of truth is not something I’ve explored for a while—I must admit that there is more to this tale—a tale that is mine and real, not something from a child’s storybook.
    How will I tell Anne that I should have wondered more at what Viktor told me? That I should have questioned, even as I was afraid? But I was young, and I did not know the things I do now. I had little idea about history and still less about destiny. Even now, I’m not sure that I know enough.
    I only know that back then, I was willing to pledge my life. Anastasia Romanov is not the only one who is trapped.
    But all that seems about to change. I’ve found the girl who can reverse what happened that July day so many years ago—the day the Romanovs fell in a rain of bullets and blood. The day I watched as the air stirred and darkened and Baba Yaga’s enormous hands—the hands I believed were just part of a child’s fairy tale—reached down and closed around the tsar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, and swept her away. The day the world believed she died.
    Through my sleeve, I touch the mark on my arm once more. I think again of Anastasia, held captive for so long. We will come for you, I tell her, even though I know she cannot hear me. Anne and I. We will be there soon.
    But only if I can stop being such a zalupa.

Tuesday, 11:55 am
    Anne
    What’s with your sweater?” Tess asks me, then takes a swig of her bottle of green tea. “Do you know it’s crooked?”
    I just shake my head. “I so don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “Although it’s been a big conversation starter, let me tell you.”
    Tess squinches up her forehead, shoves a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear, and, when I don’t choose to say anything further about the sweater, grabs the plastic fork that’s sitting next to her and digs into her salad.
    She’s got the fork to her mouth when she looks at me again.
    â€œYou okay?” she asks. “Honestly, Annie, you’re kind of pale. You feeling sick or something? Maybe it’s the smell of this cheese.” She pokes her fork at the hunks of feta she’s extracted from her salad before my arrival. Tess loves to eat, but she’s notoriously picky about what crosses her lips. “’Cause it is seriously stinky.”
    â€œNot sure,” I tell her as I flop down into a chair, unzip my backpack, and pull out my lunch sack. “About me, I mean. Not the cheese.”
    An hour of chemistry has come and gone, and now it’s lunchtime. I’ve managed to make my way to the cafeteria, where everyone else seems to be ticking along just like always. Tess has picked all the feta cheese out of the Greek salad her mother has packed for her because it’s Tuesday and Tess’s mother—who lived in Athens her junior year at Brown because she was a Classics major—makes Greek salads on Tuesday. Our friend Sarah, who’s sitting across from me, is alternately texting her boyfriend and sipping a strawberry smoothie.
    I, on the other hand, am a mess.
    My arm no longer aches, but I’m pretty sure the only other time I’ve ever felt a buzz like the one that shot up my arm when I bumped into Ethan occurred when I was three and David convinced me to stick a My Little Pony barrette into a light socket.
    Only that time wasn’t accompanied by a full Technicolor flashback of the girl and the creepy metal-teeth lady from my recurring dream. Or a feeling that everything was about to somehow shift in some way that I wasn’t sure was good and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it when it came.
    Before my brother got sick, whenever something would go wrong, my mother would always tell us, “It will be okay.” No matter what the problem was—the time in Little League baseball that David struck out five games in a row; my unrequited crush on Jared Pierce in the