NEW CLASSIC by FEE.
DISCLAIMER: The characters are so not mine, I'm not that cool. Remy and all of her craziness, however, is. ( For better or for worse, I'll add. )
Remy Ducarme was a lot like a European film. An independent European film. One that hardly anyone had ever seen but they really should have, maybe not because it was an excellent film that was worth seeing, because Remy would be the first to tell you that that wasn't the case, but rather because it was cultured and interesting and something totally different. She'd be the one that critics would love because they over thought movies and she'd be the one that a lot of people would hate because she wouldn't make sense to them because that was Remy's existence. She didn't make sense of anything more than surface level.
Act one would have her in her favorite of her many flapper dresses, both modern – thank you, Balmain! - and vintage, both designer and rescued from the back of her grandmother's closet. But her favorite was white and silver, one that brought out the striking darkness of her features. She'd bend over to shake her loose, black curls so that they fell in perfect disorder down her back, closer to the small of her back than to shoulder blades. And then she'd wrap long strings of pearls around either one of her wrists, overlapping and interlacing them before putting just a simple string or two of either black or white or both around her neck and finish her make up, taking special care about her bluegreengray – basically that entire color spectrum, yeah?- eyes that looked even brighter against her naturally tanned skin.
Act two would be all hazy and fuzzy around the edges, maybe with fake grain layered over it. A flashback, one that isn't too well put together, edited to be made interesting because nothing had ever really happened to Remy growing up. She hadn't spent a lot of time around children her own age and her parents had gotten divorced when she was seven. Her childhood wasn't much more than that. She didn't remember being in the midst of the split, doesn't remember what it was like living in it and she has asked her mother, but she never spoke much on what she considered "unpleasant". It didn't bother her much, though, because her father still had a place in her life and her overseas visits marked the high points of her childhood.
Remy had grown up in a place where there were set in stone rules. The elite rankings of Boston. It had always been more important to her mother than it had been for her and Anais never hesitated to make it clear. She had been the chairperson of just about every high-powered, social dictating board in the city. Everyone had expected Remy to get married and be the perfect society wife, someone who planned parties all day long for her husband's business partners. And when that husband would cheat on her, because they always did, she would just close her eyes and pretend it was a dream because it would have led to scandal and who would have wanted that?
She had taken on a job at a burlesque dancing – she was not a stripper and certainly not a whore – club, a mock speakeasy, when she was sixteen. She had told the operator that she was eighteen and that her name was Elina Brundage. For a while, she had considered changing her name from Remy to Elina once she actually turned eighteen. And then her mother had found out by way of seeing her getting something to eat after working with some friends that were known to have been working there.
As far as teenage rebellion went, it had been a minor one, though her own personal most severe and had been by far severe enough for her mother to want to send her away, as far away from Boston's society and their prying eyes and loose lips.
For the ten years that followed her sudden – but not at all unexpected - departure, because her daddy had lived to make her happy and to do anything but keep her from rebelling again and giving her mother 'no other choice' – or at least that was what she would say - than to send her off to some boarding school, she was raised on a tour of Europe. It consisted of her having the capability to be located in locations like Zürich, Florence, Paris and Vienna at any time during the year while her daddy kept a watchful eye on her from Sweden where he served as the CEO of Wallenius Wihelmsen shipping.
School had never been a constant in Remy's life. She had never understood why she had to go to a certain place at a certain time, so she just wouldn't. And when she was sent to foreign schools, rotating through them as quickly as daddy's jet could get her from country to country, it only got worse. She ended up dropping out when she was seventeen, just a grading period or two short of graduating. Of course, she probably wouldn't have graduated anyway, not with her grades and absences and overall performance factored in.
But it didn't mean that she was unintelligent. Remy had become captivated by the AP Psychology class her mother had made her take when she had still lived in Boston and it was one of the few things that Anais had done right. Once the class had ended, Remy had gone out and bought every book on psychology she could find and had, at one point, wanted to become a psychological analyst for the CIA.
She had come a long way since then.
Because, and when she looks back it seems as if the transformation had happened over night, Remy had suddenly gone from wanting to protect the nation's secrets to wanting to steal them. Okay, not quite, because if that had been what she wanted then she would have for sure applied for the job, but it was the same sort of thing.
Act three would be that part that no one would believe, the part that the audience would sympathize with and the one that girls at parties would make plans to replicate or invite new girls into their groups to use as some sort of hazing ritual, first to see if what she did would actually work before doing it themselves.
The first time she had stolen something, it had been in a shop in Paris. She had switched purses in a hurry and apparently had left daddy's gold card in the other one. The shirt had been pretty but not worth stealing, but it was the principle of the thing. She was Remy ("goddamn") Ducarme and they had no ("fucking") right to deny her anything. So it had been easy enough to figure out how to deactivate the security device on the shirt without having ink spray in her face and put her other clothes on over top of it and walk out of the store without feeling like she had been doing anything wrong.
Her daddy had started wondering, not too long after that and with a hint of worry in his voice, if she was still shopping at "all of those hoity-toity places" that she "loved so much that they should add her to the board of directors because she donated so much money to them". She had laughed and assured him that no, she wasn't slumming, and inquired why he thought she would be. Not fit for the Boston high life? Yes. Willing to throw the life she'd been born into away? No. He had told her that his credit card bills had been getting steadily lower.
She had just laughed again and given him a hug.
It was three days before her twenty sixth birthday that she went back to Boston.
She had paid the plane ticket herself, the transatlantic flight ringing up to something like pocket change after almost eight years of running 'professional' robbery, sometimes with a team and sometimes without one. She had progressed by far, though, having become something like business. She stole and then sold, no longer stole what she wanted but stole what she knew other people wanted or would want and then sold it to them.
Walking back to her apartment (hotel penthouse suite), she had purposely knocked over all of the trash cans she could find along the street outside the extravagant building just to attract some sort of attention as she walked through the courtyard and into the building. It had been three a.m, but the man behind the counter had recognized her instantly and had hurried to open the door for her, even though after one a.m. it was supposed to be entry by key card only.
It had been three twenty when she had fallen into her bed, still fully clothed and nudging her shoes off onto the expensive Egyptian cotton sheets. The rumors had officially started at five twenty, when the phone in her pocket had vibrated and someone who said that they had gone to school with her wanted to know if she was really back. She had waited for a long time before answering.
Ten years had passed since she had last talked to anyone from Boston, and even then she had never been the most social girl. They had no reason to care or to remember her. They were all in their mid-twenties now, probably with families and empires and face-lifts. Remy had the slightest suspicion that she should talk to her mother before anyone else, just to see what Anais had been passing her absence off as.
"Volunteer work in a Cambodian monastery." Remy had never been to Cambodia. She'd never even been in a church before.
A day before her twenty sixth birthday, Remy Ducarme moved to New York City.
"A curator from the Met asked me to send her up. They're working on a new exhibitory room and want her opinion on how to psychologically set it up so that the paintings are all properly appreciated," Anais had said, to the appreciative nods of her society friends in a dinner party in their home.
Remy had already been done up in her scarf and pea coat and matching boots and had been getting progressively warm in the hotel room – candles everywhere she looked, stove and oven on in the extensive kitchen hidden by double French doors – but had put up with it long enough to turn on her heel and walk back over to where her mother stood. "You should come check it out sometime," she enthused. Her mother settled her hand on the small of Remy's back in a way that would be a doting, proud mother if not for the digging of her fake nails into her daughter's back. "They took a bunch of stuff off display for cleaning and revival, and I could totally take you under all of the basement rooms. Up close and personal with some of the most famous paintings on the planet!"
They'd take her up on it. Remy and her mother both knew it. It was a bragging right, something that would make them all more culturally pleasing, or at least they would think it would. And that was why Anais had laughed loudly and told her, in a way that could be a doting mother trying to make sure that her daughter didn't get fired from her new job, "Wouldn't that be overstepping your boundaries, dear?"
Remy had laughed, as well. Really laughed, unlike her mother's fake trills. She had laughed at how seriously her mother was taking everything, how Remy couldn't screw up or just simply exist, even for a minute. She always had to be doing something worthwhile, something that was better than anyone else in Boston. She had recovered from her fit breathily and turned to her mother's friends, the mothers of her 'friends' that had always looked down on her because she had painted a multicolored sky in preschool while their children had all painted square, perfectly identical houses. "If you want to come, just have my mother give you my number, it's no problem at all."
And then she spun on her heel and left.