Free Petal's Problems by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page A

and the Left Bank.
    On Wednesday we saw something called the Tuileries gardens. They were pretty enough, if you like that sort of thing.
    On Thursday we went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa. We'd never been big on art before, but we did find the woman in the painting's smile interesting, although Rebecca did get a funny look from the museum guard when she wondered aloud what the woman would look like with a dark mustache inked under her nose. It probably didn't help when Rebecca started asking if anyone had a pen.
    On Friday we saw the Eiffel Tower, but even though Uncle George offered to take us up in it, none of us wanted to go. Looking up at it—how high it was! how narrow at the top!—all of us, even Annie, began to feel dizzy. We'd never suffered from vertigo before, the fear of heights, but we suspected such a thing could come upon a person suddenly and with no warning.
    Those were the days. As for the nights and all those parties, although we saw different sights each day, the nights were all the same: Rebecca cornering Crazy Serena, us hearing fragments of Rebecca's questions and accusations—"Frank Freud ... the Wicket"—and then hearing Crazy Serena call Rebecca "wretched child."
    We admired Rebecca for choosing a goal and sticking to it—something other than suggesting our parents might be dead each time one of us mentioned their disappearance—but it didn't look to us like she was getting anywhere in the getting-the-truth-out-of-Crazy-Serena program.
    Sometimes we wondered if we'd ever get the truth

    about anything, or if there even were any great truths to be had.
    One other thing that was the same about those nights: Petal under the bed.
    Some bad things, we realized, never changed.
    ***
    And then it was Saturday, the day of the wedding of Aunt Martha to Uncle George.
    It was a gorgeous day, the kind of day we imagined every bride dreamed of, even though we couldn't imagine ourselves dreaming of a wedding day. The sky was a blue crystal with little puffy white clouds, and the very air smelled like every flower in the world, only not too strong, which would have been annoying.
    Aunt Martha looked gorgeous in her gown and veil when she came by to ask us to wish her luck before the ceremony. It was to take place in one of the chateau's two ballrooms, and the reception afterward would take place in the other.
    As for us, we may not have been wearing floor-length gowns with huge trains trailing behind us, but in our party dresses and accompanied by our cats, we thought we looked pretty spiffy too.
    It would all have been so perfect, if only...
    "Please come out from under there," Aunt Martha begged, getting down on the floor, gown and all.
    We realized it then: for a relative, she was a genuinely nice woman.
    "I don't want to get married without you there," Aunt Martha went on.
    "You barely knew us before this week," the muffled voice said.
    "I know," Aunt Martha admitted, "but now I can't imagine my life without you. And I certainly can't imagine getting married without you, without all of you there. It must be so awful for George. I don't mean about marrying me, but doing so without Queen and Lucy by his side. I mean, I think we can all acknowledge that Serena is hardly a consolation prize."
    She had a point there, although we were still confused. Who was Queen, and what did she have to do with everyone else?
    "C'mon," Annie said to Petal. "Don't disappoint Aunt Martha."
    "We can't afford to get a nice relative mad at us," Durinda said.
    "Keep doing that—" Georgia started.
    "—and we won't have anyone left," Jackie finished.
    "Does anyone else ever think," Marcia commented, "that the only purpose we all serve in the others' life stories is to help the person who's in the spotlight at the moment become the best version of herself she can be?"
    "No." Rebecca rolled her eyes. "No one thinks that. No one in the whole world thinks that."
    "You have to come, Petal," Zinnia said. "I think I'm going to have a