Now I’m pulling dirty clothes out of my backpack and piling them onto my seat. The woman sitting next to me, who somehow still looks just as fresh and put together in hour thirteen of this train ride as she did at hour one, glares.
Everyone’s glaring, but I don’t care, because I need my passport.
Finally the bag is empty, and I peer into the entrance. My heart’s hammering, because not only is it very bad form to leave your passport god-knows-where, my mom might actually kill me if she has to bail me out of this.
She’d be justified, though.
“No passport?” the man says. His facial expression doesn’t change at all, but I smile at him desperately, my best I’m irresponsible, not a terrorist smile.
“It’s here somewhere!” I say brightly.
My fingertips brush over a small cylinder at the bottom of the bag, and my smile gets even tighter. I look in the bag, praying that it’s a cigarette that wandered in there somehow.
Nope. That’s a joint.
I guess I did lose that one in Amsterdam, I think as my fingers go cold with fear.
I have no idea what the drug laws are like in Sveloria. Lax, I hope.
The man waiting at the door shifts, crossing his arms in front of him, and I pretty much stick my entire head into my bag.
At last, I see a corner of something that looks very passport-like poking out of a hole. I jam my hand into it and pull out the little blue book, nearly collapsing to the floor with relief.
I turn around, holding it out, but the guy is crouching on the floor, looking at the papers I spilled everywhere. Very carefully, he picks up a photo of Sveloria’s royal family — king, queen, and crown prince — by the edges.
Then he picks up a stack of papers, thumbing through them slowly. Finally, he turns over the folder with the seal embossed on the front.
“What’s this?” he says without looking at me.
The train rolls from side to side just a little. I grab onto the luggage rack to keep my balance while I try to think of the simplest explanation for this very official-looking file with photos of the royal family and a surprising number of charts.
“I’m visiting Sveloria for the first time, so I was reading a brief on the country,” I say. “I like to be prepared.”
A couple people in the compartment glance at me then, and it’s dead obvious no one believes that.
The man starts gathering my documents back into the folder, and I kneel on the floor, trying to help, but he cuts me off.
“No,” he says, holding up one hand. “Put your laundry back in your bag.”
It’s not really laundry, it’s my clothes, I think, but that doesn’t seem like a good point to make right now. I stuff all my things back into my backpack and cinch it shut.
The customs officer is standing now, my briefing in his hand.
“Passport,” he says, and I finally hand it over.
He glances at it briefly, his eyes flicking from the photo to my face, and flips through the pages, looking at the stamps. Finally he closes it. I hold my hand out, but he doesn’t give it back.
“Come with me,” he says, and steps out of the train compartment.
I take a deep breath. Everyone else in here is still looking at me in total, stony silence as I hoist my backpack onto my back. For a moment I have the stupid urge to give them all a thumbs up as I leave, but instead I take a deep breath and follow the agent through the train.
Get a grip, I tell myself. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching my mom, it’s that cool, calm, and collected gets the best results.
We walk through four more cars, heading for the back. Through the windows to the left I can see the Black Sea, cliffs plunging down toward deep blue water, forested rolling hills to the right.
I definitely understand why the Svelorian royal family has their summer palace near here, because it’s gorgeous.
The officer keeps looking back at me, like he’s making sure I haven’t tried to escape or something. I want to point out that we are on a train, but I keep my mouth shut.
Once the initial panic wears off, I’m not actually all that worried. Not only am I an American citizen, my mom’s the American Ambassador to Sveloria.
So it’s not ideal that I’m about to be questioned by Svelorian customs, but I’m pretty sure it’s gonna turn out okay. As long as they don’t find the joint at the bottom of my bag.
I say one last prayer that Sveloria is cool about marijuana and follow the agent into the last compartment on the train. This one has a metal folding table in the middle, and two other customs officers are smoking and playing cards on it.
They both stub their cigarettes out when we come in, and the officer I’m with says something harsh-sounding to them in Russian. No one makes a facial expression, but they leave and he cracks the window, then slaps my folder onto the table.
We both sit, and he points to the folder.
“What is this?” he asks.
I take a deep breath, lick my lips, and make sure that I speak as clearly as possible.
“My mother is Ambassador Eileen Towers,” I start. “I’m visiting Sveloria because my parents invited me to spend the month with them at the royal family’s summer palace.”
No reaction, but he flips open my passport again.
“I have my father’s last name,” I explain.
“You’re Chinese?” he asks.
I’m tempted to sarcastically reply no, I’m American, just like my damn passport says, but I know better than to be a smartass to a foreign customs official. Especially when there’s a joint in my bag.
“My grandparents immigrated to the United States from South Korea,” I say, because I know the question he’s really asking.
He just grunts. I take that as an invitation to continue, so I explain that my mother might be the most thoroughly prepared person on earth, and she sent me this brief on Sveloria so I could learn something about the country before I came.
She also doesn’t believe in doing things halfway, so it’s complete with photos of the royal family, several members of the king’s small council, photos of the summer palace where I’ll be staying, and even a map of Velinsk, the nearest town. And of course it’s printed on high-quality paper, carefully organized with a table of contents, came in an official State Department folder, and was hand-delivered to my hostel in Kiev by a courier.
I finish, and he doesn’t say anything. Even though the silence makes me nervous, I force myself to sit there, poised, and wait for him to finish going through the papers. He flips past a couple of pages on proper manners, Svelorian traditions, cuisine, and traffic laws.
At the end, he gets to the photos and spreads them out on the table.
“Lots of Prince Konstantin Grigorovich,” he says.
I look down. There’s four of him, which is more than anyone else, but it’s not a lot.
Honestly, I think one of my mom’s assistants has a crush, and I do not blame her. Konstantin looks like the model for a prince in a Disney movie if Disney princes also dripped raw, rugged sex appeal. He’s got dirty blond hair and gray eyes, and in every photo he’s glaring at the camera with the hottest glare I’ve ever seen.
I don’t even like the serious, brooding type, but I didn’t mind the extra pictures of the prince. I didn’t mind them at all.