A French Girl in New York ( The French Girl Series #1)

Chapter 1

While continuing to move forward, Maude also slowed her pace as she got nearer to her destination, a house on 29, rue du Général de Gaulle. It was a medium-sized, red-bricked, two-storey house. The young girl now stood in front of the door, her eyes fixed on the number 29 as if it would answer her question, the decision she had to make to either stay on the doorsteps, shivering in her drenched, thin raincoat, or dare to enter the seemingly calm, cozy home. Her glance continued towards the window, over which the white linen curtains had been drawn. She could see them in the large living room near the fire. Big and small, the entire Ruchet family was sitting motionless near the fire. The mother, the father, and the two young sons. Then there was her. The intruder. She hadn't entered yet. Maybe she could even stay there until she caught cold and absolutely had to go in.

At that moment, lightning struck, and the bellowing sound shook her to the core. She hurried inside 29, rue du Général de Gaulle.

"Finally you're back," yelled Mrs. Ruchet from the living room once she heard the front door slam. "What took you so long? I hope you brought everything I asked for! Or else you're going back!"

Still in her wet coat, Maude dragged the two bags to the living room and presented the bottles of tomato juice. Mrs. Ruchet instantly noticed that there was no Lipton Iced Tea.

"Where are the Lipton bottles?" she asked in a menacing tone.

"There weren't any left at the store," replied Maude. Probably because Mrs. Ruchet had wiped the store out already, Maude thought sourly.

The two young boys were starting to get agitated, fully enjoying the scene unfolding before them.

"You're a liar. You just hurried in order to come back home and escape the rain."

Mrs. Ruchet was a coward. Although she repeatedly mistreated Maude, she was also afraid of her and could hardly stand what appeared to her as a silent, defiant, proud glare. She couldn't understand how the girl she had crushed since she was able to walk and talk could continue to look at her with a tearless, defiant stare. If Maude had ever once cried in front of her, Mrs. Ruchet thought, she might have relented and acted kindly towards her. Maude had never cried or pleaded. Therefore, this girl was a rebellious and ungrate­ful orphan without a shred of respect for the family that had reluctantly taken her in from her youngest age.

And there she was again, staring at her.

Mrs. Ruchet emptied the bottle of tomato juice, drank greedily from the basin, and looked again at Maude.

"When will they refill their stock?" asked Mrs. Ruchet, still sipping her drink.

"Tomorrow," answered Maude.

Mrs. Ruchet, smiled, her canine teeth steeped in tomato juice. Maude averted her eyes to hide her disgust. Mrs. Ruchet, not knowing her teeth were red, thought Maude was showing a sign of bashful obedience and felt satisfied.

"Go to your room, you're ruining the carpet," she ordered with a smirk.

Relieved, Maude left the room, the two boys' laughter echoing in her ears. Maude headed towards the basement in which she had been living since her earliest memories.

Although there was no light in the base­ment, she had learned to find her way in what was her room, cluttered with useless things. Mrs. Ruchet never threw away a single object but stored everything in the basement along with Maude, the least important object of the house­hold.

When Maude was six, she had shared her space with a broken television and a malfunction­ing radio. Now, ten years later, several more broken televisions and radios had found their way to the basement along with bicycles, sky-high stacks of clothes and magazines, children's costumes of Spiderman and Superman, toys, and other unidentified objects. In the left corner of the basement was the thin mattress on which she slept at night covered in a sheet that never kept her warm during the rough, cold wintery nights that only people in the north of France knew. Under her dust-filled pillow, she hid the flashlight she occasionally used, to scare the rats away when she could get a hold of a battery. However, dreary though the basement was, those four walls represented the only place in the house where Maude found a semblance of solace.

Maude looked out the only window of the basement towards the dark sky and stared dreamily at the stars. Though her parents had been dead for sixteen years, she knew they were somehow watching over her. She wanted to make them proud although the Ruchets had never even mentioned their names to her. The only information she'd received was an involuntary slip at a parent teacher conference in sixth grade. Her English teacher had expressed her concern to the Ruchets about their foster child's poor grades in English. Mrs. Ruchet had snorted, "I guess she doesn't take after her father who was perfectly fluent in English!"

She had abruptly been stopped by Mr. Ruchet's warning glare. She had said too much. Maude, who had never heard Mrs. Ruchet talk about her parents before, treasured this information and dived wholeheartedly into the English language, its literature, its grammar, and history.

Usually, when she entered the basement, she was so tired from her day's work, that she would fall directly asleep, not hearing the rats or the rain sliding through the only window.

This present evening, while the wind howled and rain poured down heavily, sleep eluded the troubled girl.

When Ms. Clement had announced the day trip to Paris, which was a tradition each year for the tenth graders, Maude's desire to see the capital city had been irrevocably stirred, and she couldn't rest until she thought of a way of breaking down the Ruchets' resistance to the idea. The Ruchets, like many other inhabitants of Carvin, hated Paris and refused to ever go there. They thought Parisians were stuck-up and imagined they were the center of the universe. They always gave Mrs. Lavande and her husband as an example. The Parisian couple lived in one of the biggest houses of Carvin but never spoke to anyone—the main reason being they were deaf and mute, and no one in Carvin had ever made an effort to learn sign language.

That wasn't an excuse, Mrs. Ruchet would say. They were arrogant, proud, and held their heads higher than anyone else in town, something she couldn't fathom.

Maude didn't know how she was ever going to get permission to go to Paris.

She just knew she had to do everything in her power to see the most beautiful city in the world, climb the Eiffel Tower, visit the Louvre Museum, and ramble across the Champs-Elysées.

Resolute as ever, Maude fell asleep smiling, not hearing the tiny, frantic squeaks of a rat caught in the trap next to her mattress.

*****

If you liked A French Girl in New York, you'll be happy to know it's going to be published and in bookstores October 15th 2024! That's all thanks to the millions of readers who read, voted, and commented on this story. Thank you all so much!

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