As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) (25 page)

For the time being.

Lumikki hoped she’d be able to convince her parents over the summer that it was safe for her to live alone in Tampere again.

No one looked at her strangely at school because no one knew. Kasper and Tuukka had been expelled when the news about their drug use and the school break-in had come out. Everything had been handled as quietly as possible. There were rumors around school, of course, but no one knew to connect Lumikki to them. Some of the rumors were pretty wild, but none of them even approached the insanity of the truth.

Terho Väisänen was in prison. Boris Sokolov was in prison. Polar Bear was not. Were not.

Lumikki had kept her mouth shut tight about them in her interviews. She knew that if she talked, she’d only be hurting herself. She didn’t have any proof that the twins were involved in anything illegal. She didn’t actually know anything about them.

And the police didn’t ask. The party venue had been in Boris Sokolov’s name, and everything else was routed through him too. Officially, there was no Polar Bear. No one had ever seen or heard of him, her, or them.

Lumikki idly stroked the edge of the postcard. Strange that Elisa preferred to send cards rather than writing e-mails. That was another flaw in her shiny image, an aberration that, to her own surprise, made Lumikki really value the girl’s friendship. She had thought of Elisa when painting a tiny
pink rose in the bottom corner of her
Girlfriends
painting. You wouldn’t even notice it unless you looked closely.

She put the card with the others. Under the dresser drawer, there was also an envelope she’d received immediately after getting home from the hospital. Inside were two five-hundred-euro bills. A thousand euros. It was such a small part of thirty thousand that no one would miss it. She didn’t know whether Elisa, Tuukka, and Kasper had hidden any more. She didn’t want to know.

A thousand euros was enough of a secret.

Lumikki was used to having secrets. She had always had them, sometimes big, sometimes small. Closing the dresser drawer, she imagined that she was also putting away the other secrets she didn’t have the evidence to prove.

Polar Bear and the fact that she’d met them.

Anna-Sofia and Vanessa and what they had done to her during elementary and middle school.

The important person Mom and Dad had lost, but who she hadn’t been able to work up the courage to ask about. In a house furnished with taboos, you didn’t just start redecorating like it was nothing.

And one more secret. The one whose picture Lumikki was holding now. Of course, a photograph was physical evidence that the person in it was real, but nothing proved that Lumikki had loved him. That he had loved Lumikki. If he had. Lumikki wanted to believe he had.

She stroked the picture carefully with her thumb. Short, light brown hair that shifted from wheat to hazel. A cheek, a shoulder, an arm. Captivated once again by those eyes so
blue they made you think of a purebred husky. Some people thought those eyes were piercing, scornful. Lumikki saw deeper. She saw the warmth, the uncertainty, the joy, the light.

Longing clenched her stomach with astonishing strength. Lumikki thought it had eased by now. She was as wrong as wrong can be.

The name was already tingling on her lips. The name she had whispered and cried aloud. She wasn’t over it yet. She wasn’t ready to move on like that. Not now, maybe not ever.

Lumikki locked the drawer, even though she knew it was safe. She held the small, tarnished key in her hand. It gleamed, but dimly. It was plain and inconspicuous.

Once upon a time, there was a little key that could fit in any lock.

Fairy tales don’t begin that way. That’s how other, brighter stories begin.

Photo © 2012 Karoliina Ek

Winner of the 2013 Topelius Prize, Salla Simukka is an author of young adult fiction and a screenwriter. She has written several novels and one collection of short stories for young readers, and she has translated adult fiction, children’s books, and plays. She writes book reviews for several Finnish newspapers, and she also writes for TV. Simukka lives in Tampere, Finland.

Photo © 2012 Pekka Piri

Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian area studies from Indiana University. He has translated over thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the novels in the Maria Kallio series,
My First Murder, Her Enemy and Copper Heart
(AmazonCrossing), the satire
The Human Part
by Kari Hotakainen (MacLehose Press), the thriller
Cold Courage
by Pekka Hiltunen (Hesperus), and the 1884 classic
The Railroad
by Juhani Aho (Norvik Press). He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, two dogs, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.