Petrushka the Troublemaker
RECOMMENDED TRACK: Arctic Monkeys – Do I Wanna Know?
The music of the party faded into a distant beat as we stepped into the backyard, sparsely populated. We were lucky that Halloween night, it was maybe 14º—sorry, high fifties. Cool, but not yet cold. Not even American cold. I barely felt it, even with no shirt under my jacket.
But the fairy princess stepped past me to stand by the flames, holding her hands out as if to warm them. I supposed the open shoulders of her dress made even that mild fall chilly, so I shrugged my jacket off and handed it to her, stopping short at draping it over her shoulders. She quirked an eyebrow at me but accepted it, tugging it on like a cape. My lips twitched at how oversized it was on her.
“So, now I ask questions, as promised,” I started, glancing around for a good spot to settle. “And first question is, what is the little fairy’s—”
“Emma?”
My head and the girl’s snapped towards the voice at the same time.
One of the clusters of people a little ways off were two of my Sigma brothers, Elliott Parker and Adrian Calloway, of all people.
They were not brothers I spent time with. Calloway was a business major whose hobby seemed to be looking down his nose at people and locking himself away in his fancy room. He is some big-deal legacy, all name and pride. Some girls thought it fun to chase him—he is good-looking, but it is hard to tell because his head is always up his own ass. And neither his head nor his ass put in appearances at house parties. Parker was also an unexpected sight, though in his case, it was because he was a bookworm who spent most of his time in the library.
Parker was the one who had said the girl’s name, and I stifled a grunt of annoyance at hearing it in his voice before hers.
“Elliott? What are you doing here?” Emma asked, clutching my jacket around her shoulders, which should not have made me feel better, but did anyway.
Parker laughed, rubbing his neck awkwardly. “You forgot I’m a Sigma? Come on, we TA’d together for a whole semester,” he chastised her with a smile. Not a flirty one, just mild. Like everything else about him. Even his costume. A hobbit, I think it was, with the cape. Why would the Texas oil heir want to be a hobbit? I wrote him off. He would not flirt with her. Calloway, either. Calloway hates everyone.
Emma chuckled, folding her arms around her middle as she retorted. “And you may remember I was double-dipping on Dr. Williams’ killer seminars that term. I barely remembered my own name.” Parker glanced from her to me curiously.
“What are you doing at a Sig party?” he asked her as Calloway heaved a long-suffering sigh at the interruption. “Oh, uh, I should introduce—”
“Nyet, Parker,” I interrupted with a mostly theatrical scowl, waving him off. “Both of you. Go find your own fairy princess. I saw this one first. And there are many in your libraries, yes?” I turned back to Emma and gestured for her to take a seat in a semi-functional lawn chair a few steps away, still close to the fire. She did, and I sat on the ground next to her, hoping Parker and Calloway would take the hint.
They didn’t. Parker followed us like a lost puppy and Calloway followed him, eyeing the flowers in her hair, looking grumpy as ever. I ignored them both. “So, how does a fairy princess find herself at a Sigma party instead of in fairyland?”
She frowned, flickering flames reflecting in her eyes as she stared into the fire. “It’s a stupid story,” she said flatly.
“I love stupid stories,” I said, with a wave of my hand.
Her eyebrows lifted in an almost pleading way. “Stupid, like, it’s embarrassing,” she said, looking intently down at her skirt. “And not very interesting.”
“Sokolov embarrasses himself most hours of the day,” Calloway interjected. I turned the gritting of my teeth into something less hostile, but shot him a warning look.
“He is not wrong,” I agreed lightly. “Come on, Miss Fairy, you give me a hard time for not asking questions, now you will not answer them?”
Her eyes flickered to Parker, who shrugged, and Calloway, who glared—or maybe just stared, they looked the same on him—and back at me. I was about to make some dumb joke and move the subject away from her obvious discomfort, but she spoke before I could.
“My friend, Chloe, she…dared me,” she said, rolling her eyes I think to avoid meeting anyone else’s. “I mean, I don’t really care about a dare,” she added hastily. “But she was pushing me to get out more, she said it was a crime that I’d made it to junior year without going to a single frat party.” She fidgeted with an invisible thread in her dress. “So, I promised I would come with her and see what the fuss is all about. It’s…more chaotic than I expected.” I grinned at that. “But then,” she said, issuing a disgruntled little huff towards the uncaring fire. “Then, she ditched me. Hooked up with a mermaid half an hour in. I was getting ready to leave when you showed up.”
I laughed. “Then she is a terrible friend. Bad taste,” I said. “Mermaids have siren songs, but a mermaid that can compete with fairy princess?” I gestured at Emma’s costume. “No. I do not believe it.”
“She’s not a princess.” I couldn’t suppress the twitch of my eye at the dry crackle of Calloway’s voice interrupting again. He stood there swirling a wine glass, because of course he would drink wine at a frat rager. “She’s a queen. Queen Ozma of Oz, to be precise,” he said, raising his glass and inclining his head toward Emma, a ghost of a bow that paired perfectly with his crisp button-down and slacks.
The pretentious mudak did not even wear a costume himself, and wanted to lecture me about someone else’s.
Emma looked up at him with wide eyes. “That’s right,” she said in surprise. “She’s not exactly common knowledge. You’ve read the Oz books?”
“Oz?” I jumped in before Calloway could answer. “Like…Wizard of Oz? Ruby shoes and yellow roads?”
“The movie’s based on a book,” Parker mused. “I haven’t read it myself.”
“Yep,” she answered, turning back to me. “By L. Frank Baum. He wrote a bunch of Oz books, but Ozma isn’t in the first one, or the movie.”
Calloway chuckled. “She was in that horrific sequel in the eighties, though.”
Emma gasped, bringing one hand to her collarbone in mock indignation. “In my house we respect Return to Oz,” she chastised.
“This isn’t your house. And that film is a monstrosity,” Calloway argued, an amused glint in his eyes as he avoided my glare. I kicked at his perfect stupid loafer, which he also ignored. “A crass mash-up of the second and third books. Didn’t even get Mombi right.”
Emma opened her mouth to argue, but the weird name thankfully sparked a memory from some nostalgia movie night I had attended freshman year and I leapt at the opening. “Ohhh, I remember this one. Funny men on wheels? And the hallway full of ladies’ heads.”
“Exactly!” Emma’s eyes sparkled as she turned back to me. “The visuals were incredible.”
“The bare minimum to expect with its budget,” Calloway scoffed, gesturing with his wine glass. “They threw money down the toilet to finish making it.” The words were hostile, but he said them like they were normal small talk. Which, for him, maybe they were.
“Otvali, Calloway,” I snapped, waving a hand like I could send him away. “We are enjoying things here. Go and hate on the fairy queen’s movies somewhere else.”
I was rewarded with a bright laugh from Emma. While her head was tilted back, I tried kicking Parker’s foot instead, gesturing urgently with my head the international gesture of Get. Lost. He responded with a helpless twitch of his shoulders and a pointed glance at Calloway.
“He’s not wrong about the accuracy,” she conceded. “But that’s what adaptation is all about,” she added, gesturing at her skirt. “Like how I ‘adapted’ this dress into an Ozma costume. It’s definitely not faithful, but you recognized it,” she said to Calloway with a look of utter serenity.
Calloway actually paused at that. It was a night full of firsts. “If the only criterion for a good adaptation is recognizability, we live in an age of masterpieces,” he said finally, and his lips twitched. Like he might smile. Calloway does not smile.
Under other circumstances, I would have been giddy with the thought of ribbing him about it later, Mr. Spreadsheets reading children’s books. But these circumstances? No. I opened my mouth to tell him off again, but Emma spoke first.
“And if the only way you judge adaptations is by accuracy, then I’m sorry you’re missing out on so much,” she countered sharply, and his surprise at the snap of her voice was very gratifying. “Adaptations can be ‘inaccurate’ and still have value, and to think otherwise is—it’s so reductive.”
I think I gaped at her for a second before I grinned again, the big kind my father hates because it means mischief. “Well, well. A fairy queen who beats a Calloway at his own wordy game? I am even more impressed.”
Parker looked determinedly down at his phone as Calloway’s jaw tightened. I saw both of them in my peripheral view, but was distracted by the rosy shade Emma’s cheeks were turning.
Calloway recovered after a moment, making a sort of humph sound. “That’s—”
“Oh! Adrian! Uhh, you might wanna hear about this.” Thank fucking god, Parker interrupted, looking at his phone. “I just got a text from Jacob,” he said, tugging on Calloway’s pristinely pressed shirt. “He says someone was trying to get into your room.”
Calloway stiffened. Parker wasn’t a great actor, but Calloway’s room was, what’s the word? Sacred? Sacrosanct. He threw his hands up in defeat. “I hate these things,” he said with a click of his tongue. He turned back to Emma and reached out a hand. “I’m Adrian,” he said. “Adrian Calloway. It was nice to meet you, Emma.” Of course he stressed his last name. This girl likes books, and that name is literally etched into the campus library.
But Emma just shook his hand with a simple smile, and I could not tell if she recognized it. “You too,” she said.
Calloway hesitated and I smirked at him. “Good luck protecting your fancy sheets, Calloway,” I said in a sing-song voice, waving. He glowered at me, but Parker gave him a nudge and the pair walked off. Parker glanced back at me with raised eyebrows that said you owe me.
Yes, I probably did.
But I turned my attention back to Emma. “Who cares about accuracy anyway? Not me.” I reached out to brush my hand over her sleeve, barely touching her shoulder. “The dress is lovely. I thought it was from a pretty painting. Book references are…not my strong suit,” I added, waggling my eyebrows and wishing she’d ask me what was my strong suit. Even though I knew by that point she would not.
Sure enough, she just shrugged. “Like I said, she’s obscure. And I’m sure you know a lot of Russian stories I don’t.” She paused to think about it. “I’ve read the typical ones, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And a couple of folk stories, like The Maiden Wiser than the Tsar, or Petrushka,” she said, listing them like she thought every American grew up with them. I barked out a laugh.
“My grandmother was obsessed with those fairy tales. When I was little, she called me Petrushka. A puppet who comes to life and gets into trouble like I did, see? Still do,” I added with a wink. “But the maiden you speak of, she is called Vasilisa. Always outsmarts powerful men, da?”
“Da,” Emma parroted. “That’s part of what’s great about stories. Even centuries ago when society expected women’s subservience, we all knew a peasant girl could be more clever than the richest, most powerful man around.”
“It is hardly a genius discovery,” I snorted, stretching my legs out in front of me. “But the fire is too pretty for politics. Stories, though? It is perfect for stories.” I searched my brain for one she might like. “Okay, I will gift the fairy queen a Russian story. Marya Morevna. She was a queen, a warrior queen. She defeats Koschei the Deathless, but cannot put the deathless to death, so she chains him in a dungeon, you see?”
I watched Emma’s face as she pulled her knees to her chest, for all the world like she could think of nothing better than story time. The fire flickered beside us and I suddenly felt too warm, even though my jacket was on her shoulders.
“Then a stupid prince comes,” I continued. “While Marya Morevna is away, Koschei the Deathless tricks the prince by begging for water, and the prince frees him. Then the prince must go on an epic quest to defeat Koschei all over again.” I waved my hand in a dismissive circle. “But, I thought you might like this story. Because the clever woman had everything handled, right? It was the stupid man who ruined it with his soft heart.” I sat forward on my knees, reaching for the log pile and throwing another on the fire, watching the flames break apart into tiny motes of light that floated into the air and disappeared.
Emma chuckled again, my jacket bobbing up and down on her small shoulders as she did. “A priceless moral, to be sure,” she said with mock severity. “But there are fairy tales that reward soft hearts, too,” she added, her brow furrowing thoughtfully. “What’s the one…Father Frost, that’s Russian, right? The soft-hearted sister who’s kind to the old man gets gold and jewels, the cold-hearted one is rude to him and he lets her freeze to death.”
Spending my night remembering kooky folktales from the motherland had not been on my Halloween bingo card. “You are full of surprises,” I muttered. “Yes, okay, soft heart sometimes works out. My babushka liked that one too. But I still prefer the warrior queen.”
“Hmm,” she mused, turning back to the fire and resting her chin on her knees. “You might not like Ozma, then. She gets things done, but always with kindness. Then again,” she added, turning to look at me with her cheek resting on her knees. “Baum was trying to seed a feminist agenda. So he wrote an effective, benevolent matriarchy.”
“Mm, I don’t know, I might like putting women in charge,” I offered, suggestive by habit. I ran a hand through my hair and shook it out again. “But ruling with kindness, effective? My father would call this naive. Foolish.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “And I’d tell him it’s a story. It’s not real life, but it’s inspirational. Powerful. The Oz books are obscure now, but they’re still having an impact.” She was relaxed now, warming up to this topic that clearly mattered to her. She picked up speed like a runaway train. “From the book to the movie. The movie was adopted by the underground LGBTQ scene of the mid-20th century. That generation’s work is an inextricable part of modern intersectional feminism.” I did not know this cultural path she was tracing for me, but her passion made it compelling. “So you tell me. Is the man whose books keep motivating us after a hundred years really the naive one?”
My father, naive? I snorted, and she stopped short and sucked in a breath. Her eyebrows knit together as she sat back in her seat, her face shifting from passionate to sheepish as her hand went to her ear, rubbing it nervously. “Er…sorry.”
Normally, I think I would have been bored by this spoken essay. But watching her obvious enthusiasm warmed me more than the fire.
“No, little queen,” I said. “Do not apologize. For what? Seeing value in stories?” I tilted my head back to look up at the stars and felt my smirk turn bitter. “Besides, I have never heard someone suggest my father is naive, and that is worth its weight in gold. He would hate you, I think.” I tilted my head to look at her out of the corner of my eye. “This is a compliment. From Petrushka the troublemaker, but still a compliment.”
Then her eyes did something. Something gentle and a little sad, with a tiny upward angling of the eyebrow. “Let’s call him Petrushka the soft-hearted,” she corrected. “Poor Petrushka. Made to dance like a fool on stage and killed because he started to have feelings like a person.”
I have never believed a heart could truly skip a beat, but mine did then.
She’d said it so gently. The pronunciation was fine, sure, but this time that was not what struck me. It was the way she saw him, Petrushka. It felt like she saw me, and for a moment it was like the mantle of the God of Party slipped from my shoulders and I felt—naked, seen. But by kind eyes. It was a warm feeling I found I liked immensely.
One I could not afford.
I shook it off. Slipped the mantle back into place. Chuckled.
“You know Stravinsky’s ballet? Of course you do,” I said, brushing off the moment. “You are a dangerous woman, Queen Emma.” I sighed, ruffling my own hair again. “My babushka, she called me Petrushka and meant it with love. But, yes, that one is a very sad story.”
“…Sorry,” Emma said again, looking away from me and getting to her feet in a hurry. “I don’t mean to be a downer. Sometimes I don’t know when to stop talking.” She lifted herself to her feet and brushed the dirt off of her with flustered, brisk movements. “I should get going anyway. I’ve stayed long enough to say I beat Chloe’s dare.”
I scrambled to my feet to follow. “I will go with you,” I declared, and she stopped, looking at me with surprise before she opened her mouth to argue. “Nyet, I promise, it’s not flirting. Or not only flirting.” I stretched my arm out in the vague direction of the campus. “It is Halloween. Having a big Russian escort on your walk home will keep drunk zombies away. I would not sleep tonight if I had to wonder whether the little queen made it back to her castle.” I gestured for her to lead the way. “And you would not want to deprive me of beauty sleep, surely.”
She relaxed a little and giggled. It sounded like other girls’ giggles, the ones I coaxed so often and so easily. But hers, it hit different. Another warning sign I should have picked up on, but I was too busy enjoying the glow of the moment that went beyond the fire’s light.
“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any loss of beauty,” she said, starting towards the sidewalk, pulling my jacket around her again. “I’m sure those eyes are a Russian national treasure.”
She froze for just a moment, her cheeks turning pink as I processed that unexpected compliment.
Then she began to walk, fast, and all I could do was fall into step beside her, my grin widening.
Bonus Content:
Sigma Socials
Author’s Note
B-Side Track: Jada Facer – My Strange Addiction
Chapter two! Emma starts to shine! (Don’t worry, she does have her own POV chapters—like the next one! It’s a bit Misha-heavy early on, but Emma’s not one to stay silent.)
FUN FACT:
L. Frank Baum was a feminist, and the son-in-law of famed suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage. It was a feminism of his era, and if you read the books you’ll notice that the powerful characters tend to be women, most notably Glinda and Ozma. The few who vie for the throne of the Emerald City are mostly women, too. His original Oz books are in the public domain, along with Jon R. Neill’s charming illustrations, if you want to read them! But note that Baum’s was not an intersectional feminism; there are several creatures throughout his books that are racial caricatures and he wrote some awful opinion pieces about Native Americans in his newspaper work.
Right, so, next chapter: Emma’s perspective! What do you think she’s thinking right now?