As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) Page 2

  Lumikki thought about what to wear to school for precisely three seconds. She decided to stick with the gray sweater and pull on some jeans. Combat boots, black wool jacket, green scarf and mittens, gray knit hat. Fjällräven backpack. Done.

  Hunger gnawed at her stomach. Not even a light had greeted her in the empty refrigerator. The bulb had been broken for a couple of weeks, and she hadn’t felt like changing it. She’d have to buy a sandwich from the snack bar at school. Maybe two. And definitely more coffee.

  A familiar hectic clamor washed over her at the doors to the school. Everyone was in a hurry and needed to shout about what a hurry they were in. High school students were oh so articulate, so scintillating and creative in their modes of expression. Lumikki knew she was being mean, but some mornings, tolerating the colorful clothing and dramatic gestures was tough. And then there was the unspoken agreement everyone seemed to have about the lines they would stay inside so they could all be “different” and “unique” in the same damn way.

  Underneath her irritation, Lumikki was thankful, though. Going to this school was a privilege. It meant she didn’t have to be in Riihimäki anymore. Getting away from there had been the reason for applying here. Her parents might have had a hard time letting her move so far away to such a big city otherwise, but landing a prestigious spot in an elite magnet school for the arts was a good enough excuse. And during her first few semesters, Lumikki felt like she had died and gone to heaven. That feeling had faded gradually, though, as she got used to the place and began to see how much jealousy, affectation, pretense, self-aggrandizement, and insecurity hid behind all the happy smiles.

  Fortunately, the school wasn’t just noisy, it was also warm, and gradually Lumikki’s stiff limbs began waking up. She knew the unbearable tingling was imminent, as the blood started circulating to her toes and fingers again. She should have put on two pairs of wool socks and crammed her feet into her boots like that. Tossing her coat onto a hook, Lumikki ran downstairs to the lunchroom and snack bar.

  “Veggies today, or just plain?” the cook asked when she saw Lumikki.

  “One of each, please,” she replied. “And a large coffee.”

  “With no room for milk,” the cook said with a laugh as she filled the paper cup to the brim.

  Lumikki sat down at a table and let the warmth slowly sink into her body. Gah! The awful sensation was like a billion little needle pricks, but it was unavoidable in this weather. For a second, she thawed her hands against the coffee cup, and then took a bite of her sandwich. The roll was big and tasty, the tomato was ripe, and the bell pepper was crisp. Lumikki was a financial vegetarian. She didn’t buy meat with her own money, but if someone else was buying and cooking some, then she was happy to eat it. Maybe that made her a hypocrite, but it worked.

  Three girls assailed her eardrums from the next table. Blond hair was swung. Dark, short hair was twirled. Red split ends were inspected. YSL Baby Doll, Britney Spears Fantasy, and Miss Dior Cherie wafted through the air.

  “My head’s going to explode if he treats me like I’m invisible today. If he thinks he can fool around with me at parties and then ignore me at school, he needs to think again. I can’t believe he’s already eighteen.”

  “My head feels like it’s going to explode anyway. I should not have had those last few drinks. I don’t even know what was in them!”

  “Well. At least we were only drinking.”

  Feigned expressions of shock. Wide eyes.

  “Oh my God, who?”

  “Oh, come on. You would’ve had to be blind not to notice Elisa’s pupils, dumbass. And she was totally jittery.”

  “She’s always like that.”

  “This was like to the hundredth power.”

  Furtive glances. Three heads together, whispering. Lumikki drained her coffee cup and looked at the clock. Still ten minutes before first period. Standing, she took her plain roll and left. She couldn’t deal with listening to the perfume mafia at the next table, and the smell was making her nauseated.

  The school’s social structure was pretty simple.

  There were the shallow girls who mostly cared about looks and wanted to get into law or business school. They came to the arts school because they had high GPAs and because they were, “you know, really creative and stuff.”

  There were the great Artists and even greater Intellectuals who saw school as a way to show off.

  There were the math geniuses who always looked a little lost.

  Then there were the normal, average kids who filled the halls, jammed the stairwells, formed endless lines in the cafeteria, and all looked, sounded, and smelled the same. No one would remember their names in a few years. No one even remembered them now.

  There were also some smart kids who were actually nice, though. And usually, Lumikki didn’t look down on the other kids either. She knew that the roles a lot of people played were just masks they put on at the beginning of each school day so that finding their place in the crowd would be easier. She didn’t blame anyone for that. But on her very first day of high school, she’d decided that she wasn’t going to let herself be forced into any category. She wasn’t going to let anyone bundle her in with some reference group so people could make easy assumptions about her.

  Lumikki had watched the formation of the divisions, the groupings, and the cliques with slight interest and mild amusement. She had stayed on the sidelines, on the outside. But she wasn’t a loner freak either, sneaking along the walls dressed all in black. People remembered her name.

  Lumikki Andersson. The Swedish-Finnish girl from Riihimäki. The one who had a carefully considered opinion about everything. The one who got perfect grades in physics and philosophy.

  The one who had played Ophelia so well that two teachers got mad and the rest got all choked up.

  The one who didn’t participate in any of the school’s pranks or parties.

  The one who always ate alone, but never looked lonely.

  She was the puzzle piece that didn’t have its own place, but could suddenly fill in almost any hole you needed it to.

  She wasn’t like the others.

  She was exactly like the others.

  Lumikki approached the darkroom’s outer door and glanced both ways down the hall. No one around. Stepping inside the little vestibule, she pulled the door shut behind her. Darkness. Automatically, without fumbling, she reached forward and opened the inner door. Her hand knew the distance from memory. Impenetrable darkness. Silence. Peace. A moment to herself before the school day began. Meditating. Recharging. A daily ritual no one else knew about. A habit that was both an echo of the past and an integral part of the present. For so many years, Lumikki had needed to find hiding places because she was afraid. Finding secret nooks and safe havens was a lifeline. These days, it wasn’t so much about fear as a desire to find some room just for her in a place that was shared by everyone. The darkroom was a refuge where she could collect herself for a few seconds before stepping out again into the middle of all those other people’s talking and sounds and opinions and feelings.

  Lumikki leaned against the wall and stared into the darkness with closed eyes, emptying her mind thought by thought. The easiest part was getting rid of the day-to-day, mostly trivial stuff that revolved around the coming math class, or maybe going to the grocery store after school, maybe going to Body Combat later. But today, for some reason, she couldn’t even get past the surface noise. Something pushed back. Something intruded.

  A smell.

  The darkroom smelled different than usual. But she couldn’t quite place it. She took a step forward. Something gently brushed against her cheek and she jumped back, turning on the red safelight.

  A five-hundred-euro bill.

  Dozens of five-hundred-euro bills hanging in the darkroom to dry. Were they real? Lumikki touched the surface of the nearest one with her hand. The paper felt real, at least. She looked to make sure no photographs were developing in the processing trays and then turned on
the normal light.

  She squinted at the banknotes against the light. The watermarks were there, as were the see-through numbers. The security threads and holograms seemed to be in place. If the bills weren’t genuine, they were extremely well-made forgeries.

  The liquid in the processing trays was orange-brown. Lumikki tested it with a finger. Water.

  Looking down at the darkroom floor, she saw that it was covered with reddish brown smudges. She stared in confusion at the corner of one fifty, which had the same russet tint. Then she knew what had disturbed her in the darkness.

  The stench of old, dry blood.

  Lumikki stared out the classroom window at the sparkling, frosted trees and the old, small gravestones. But the white postcard landscape held no interest for her. Resting her eyes there was just easier than staring at the integral on the chalkboard since her mind wanted to work on something besides math.

  She had left the cash in the darkroom. She had walked out, closed the door, and come straight to class. She hadn’t said a word about it to anyone. One period to consider what to do.

  The easiest way to get along in life is to meddle as little as possible.

  That had been Lumikki’s motto for years. No meddling, no messes, no sticking her nose in other people’s business. If you were quiet and only spoke when you had something well-thought-out to say, you got to live in peace. Even now, she wanted simply to forget the whole business. Forget the banknotes washed clean of blood. Unfortunately, she knew that wasn’t an option. The bills were already stuck in her mind just as firmly as the smell that clung to them. She knew they wouldn’t leave her in peace until she did something to clear up the mystery.

  She should probably tell the principal. That way, Lumikki could make it someone else’s problem, put it out of her own thoughts. Maybe the money had something to do with some art project. But in that case, it couldn’t be real. But why would someone have gone to so much trouble making play money? The bills looked so real that the police would be sure to consider them forgeries, and forgery was a crime.

  Or maybe the bills were real.

  Lumikki couldn’t think of a single good reason why someone would have decided to clean that much money in the darkroom of the high school. And what’s more, leave it there behind an unlocked door. It was ridiculous. Her brain churned, trying to find a logical explanation, but without success. She closed her eyes and saw the bills hanging from the drying lines. Some critical, decisive detail that would reveal the answer seemed to be missing from the picture in her mind. And it wasn’t like she was some Sherlock Holmes who could take one look and then instantly reconstruct the convoluted chain of events that led up to tons of cash hanging in a school darkroom.

  Lumikki had to talk to the principal. She should go and get the money and take it to the principal. Or should she not touch it?

  The sun beat down on the branches of the trees, which responded with a defiant glitter so dazzling it was painful to look at. Even in the warm classroom, Lumikki could hear the shrieking of the cold outside. She shivered. The stagnant air in the room was mind-numbing, and her thoughts plodded forward as if wading through thick goo.

  Then she made a decision.

  Lumikki walked toward the darkroom, wanting to confirm what she had seen. The whole scene had been so absurd that maybe she had imagined it. Or misunderstood. What if only one of the banknotes was real and the rest were just Monopoly money?

  Never jump to conclusions. That was Lumikki’s second motto.

  Well, maybe calling them mottoes was too pretentious. They were more like principles or thoughts that had been useful or beneficial at some point.

  Lumikki jumped when a boy walked around the corner. Tuukka. Eighteen years old, the son of the principal, a wannabe actor who thought he could play God’s understudy if the call ever came. The teachers were amusingly adept at tolerating Tuukka’s swaggering, arrogant manner of speaking and his chronic tardiness. Tuukka seemed to be in a hurry now though. He probably would have shoved Lumikki with his elbow or backpack if she hadn’t discreetly dodged him.

  She had learned to sidestep without people noticing her sidestepping. You had to time it just right, and it had to be slight enough that it looked natural instead of like you were reacting to someone else. Lumikki had learned to be neither irritating nor obsequious.

  Tuukka continued walking, speeding up almost to a run. He barely even noticed Lumikki. Still, best to wait until he disappeared before heading to the darkroom. Once she was sure he was really gone, Lumikki opened the outer door, closed it, opened the darkroom door, and turned on the red light.

  Then she blinked two times.

  The scene remained the same. The money was gone.

  Lumikki cursed silently. This was what she got for not acting immediately. What was she going to do now? Go tell the principal that she had seen thousands of euros hanging in the darkroom without any way to prove it? Wait until someone asked her about it, and then describe what she’d seen? Forget the whole thing and chalk it up to a hallucination brought on by too little sleep and too much caffeine?

  She leaned against the darkroom wall and closed her eyes. Something was bothering her again. Something out of place, something off. Her brain had recorded something, and now it was trying to figure out what didn’t belong. Lumikki opened her eyes and realized what it was.

  The backpack.

  Tuukka never wore a backpack. He had a black leather Marimekko shoulder bag that could barely fit the books he needed on any given day. And when they didn’t fit, he left some of them at home. Colorful fabric Marimekko bags were part of the standard uniform for high school girls, but Lumikki had never seen anyone with a leather one except Tuukka. As an accessory, it landed perfectly in the gray zone between conformity and individuality, a carefully considered movement in step with the herd, but with a subtle twist thrown in. But now Tuukka had been carrying a dingy gray backpack, frayed at the seams and stained at the corners, slung over one of his shoulders. Definitely not in keeping with the image of a demigod descended from on high to grace mere mortals with his presence. And it had been stuffed full without looking heavy.

  Lumikki could solve this equation instantly.

  The usual morning crowd was gathered at the Central Square Coffee House: mothers with their babies and mush and conversations about sleep schedules, college girls drinking lattes that gnawed gaping holes in their monthly budgets and pretending to study for exams while really daydreaming about the future, and a couple of men in suits with laptops playing Angry Birds or checking Facebook instead of working on their PowerPoints. Coffee machines whirring and gurgling. The scent of cappuccino and hazelnut syrup hanging in the air. Pastries that looked far more delicious than they really were. The sweat that came over you instantly when you walked in the door wearing a winter coat.

  Lumikki sat at a corner table with her back to the rest of the café as she flipped through a magazine and drank her tea. At a nearby table sat Tuukka, Elisa, and Kasper.

  Once Lumikki had realized that the cash was in Tuukka’s backpack, she rushed after him immediately. She had snatched her coat, mittens, scarf, and knit hat from the coatrack. Running out of the school, she slipped and slid past the smoking spot and came to the churchyard, where she stopped and looked around for the boy. At the end of the park path, almost at Häme Street, she spotted the gray backpack swinging from his shoulder. Ignoring the cold air tearing at her lungs, Lumikki continued running, eventually slowing to a light jog and then a brisk walk to keep an appropriate distance. See but don’t be seen. Maintain line of sight.

  Her breathing, more like panting, went directly from vapor to icy glitter that stuck to her eyelashes and the locks of hair protruding from under her hat. In temperatures this far below zero, everyone’s hair looked prematurely gray.

  Lumikki had seen Tuukka enter the Coffee House, and she waited a few minutes before following him inside. By then, the boy was already deep in conversation with Elisa and Kasper.

 
Now Lumikki was doing her best to remain invisible. Inconspicuous. Fortunately, she knew how to be someone else. Immediately upon entering, Lumikki had gone to the restroom, peeled off her outerwear and sweater, let down her hair, and arranged it in a side braid—a style she never normally wore. Instead of coffee, she ordered tea. She was browsing a women’s magazine, although normally she’d have grabbed the sports pages or Image magazine. She sat in a different way, held her hands in a different position, tilted her head like someone else.

  People thought they recognized each other from a distance based on clothing or hair. Superficially, that may have been true, but Lumikki knew that, in reality, recognizing another person was a much more complicated process influenced by hundreds or even thousands of different factors like height, posture, walk, bearing, body and face proportions, expressions, and even microexpressions that flitted by so fast they almost never registered consciously. That was why disguising yourself as someone else was so difficult. According to some people, it was actually impossible without significant plastic surgery and years of practice.

  Still, surprisingly small changes could trim away your most recognizable characteristics if you knew what to do. If someone had been consciously looking for Lumikki, knowing that she was in there, of course they would have recognized her. But if you just scanned the room expecting a crowd of strangers, Lumikki was just another slightly hippie-looking poet girl drinking chamomile tea. A girl with nothing conspicuously familiar about her.

  So Tuukka, Elisa, and Kasper took no notice of Lumikki, even though they were sitting almost right next to her. After all, they had more important concerns. They had a problem.

  “What should we do with it?” Elisa asked the boys.

  As soon as she’d entered the coffee shop, Lumikki had noticed how terrible Elisa looked. Her skin was normally fair, but now it looked almost gray. She had dark rings under her eyes and had been careless when she washed or wiped off her last layer of makeup. Her bleached blond hair clung unwashed to her head. Instead of being stylish and coordinated, her clothing looked like she’d thrown on whatever her hand happened to land on first. Elisa would never have been caught dead looking like this at school. The fact that she had the nerve even to come to the coffee shop in such a state was startling.