Prologue 2
The Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001. They took Mom and Dad with them. You watched from Classroom 401 at Brearley on the roll-in TV set while Mrs. Mordane wrung her Hermes scarf in her liver spotted hands and Jeyne huddled around you and wept. You knew—it was dad’s birthday. You and Mom had planned his special surprise: box seats at Beauty and the Beast. She would hand deliver them to the CEO of StarCom. The king of telecommunication, and you, his princess.
The king died.
The king died, and Mr. Baelish picked you up from school in his sleek black Porsche. He was a friend of the family, a finance man, who shortly married Aunt Lysa and became family-family. But that day he was still Mr. Baelish, and he came with an armful of ribbon wrapped boxes—for you. Arry, not quite Arry then, had a temper tantrum in the backseat, and you opened presents.
"Ralph Lauren, my sweet," said Mr. Baelish. "From the latest winter collection."
"I really love them," you said, face gooey, snot dangling oh so close to fine silk taffeta.
Mr. Baelish stole back the pretty dresses to spare their ruin by body fluid. He patted your bare thigh above your knee-highs and said, "There, there. Your mother was a wonderful woman. She will be dearly missed."
This was your first tour: Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 5, Channel 7. Littlefinger (he was always Littlefinger actually) wasn't paid but he was already your manager in practice. That day your uniform was the costume, tear-stained cheeks the makeup. Your siblings lined up like sad little ducklings and cried on national television for what felt like six months straight. They let Robb talk a lot because he was seventeen and handsome and knew how to make two perfect tears fall from his red lashes. Jon and Arry hated cameras and glowered. You held Bran and Rickon under your wings and when Taena Merryweather asked, "If you could speak to your father one last time, what would you say?"
You answered simply, "I would sing."
"Will you sing to us now, sweet Sansa?"
"I would be honored."
So you cried and sang and cried and sang—maybe your tears put out the smoldering rubble at ground zero. A broken America drank you up. There's video evidence: the shelf full of tapes in your home theater. You know that. You watch them sometimes at five AM when you haven't slept because slimy black creatures come alive in your brain and decide to have a dance party. You looked so skinny and knob-kneed and flat-chested. You wish you still looked so skinny. You're not watching the videos to remember Mom and Dad; you're watching yourself.
Fourteen (So skinny! Ugh!) and you watch yourself with the intensity of three hundred million eyes—closer to five billion, the world was watching. They saw a girl with hip-length red curls and big blue eyes in crisp prep school uniform sing her little heart out. You did a very good job. You learned when to pause to shed a single tear. You learned when to let your voice break on a high note, when to sneak in a sob. The quick favorite was Somewhere Over the Rainbow. There are at least three dozen versions on three dozen tapes; you know each performance by heart.
Sansa Stark: America's Bluebird
She came from over the rainbow! From the land of dreams! Look at her, our little dream!
Dreams sell!
So does Ralph Lauren—that was the schtick. American fashion on an American girl. "Tell them," Littlefinger said. "Make sure they know."
So after every televised breakdown—an ad, sung by the bluebird herself. "And what are you wearing today, sweetheart?"
"My favorite, of course. Ralph Lauren!"
And what did you care? You earned yourself clothes by the bushel. No, the Boeing-ful. From Ralph and Ralph's competitors—everyone wanted to dress America's doll. So here's what you actually remember from that time: mastering a pitch-perfect cry, and presents. Dad used to buy you whatever you liked (don't forget), but the rest of the world gave you more, and Mr. Baelish gave you the most. He handled everything with Mr. Reed when the time came. When Arry, Rickon, Bran, Robb and Jon moved to Denver to live with Uncle Edmure, you stayed in the city. Mr. Baelish became Uncle Petyr, though he didn't live with Aunt Lysa upstate. No, you moved into his three-story townhouse on Madison Avenue. Like home, you told yourself. It's just like home.
Home was white marble floors and tall domed ceilings that suspended gold chandeliers with crystals like precious immortalized raindrops. Boxes and bags lined wainscoted walls and climbed to this pretty, stormy sky. They were all for you. The Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs, Tommy Hilfiger. You were Tommy's girl, and oh, he spoiled you! There were jewels from Tiffany's and Cartier and Harry Winston, more tiaras than you could count. (That's a lie, there were 25 in all, totalling 1,223 diamonds, 82 sapphires, 76 emeralds, and 69 rubies. You tallied late at night by blue-screen glow when you couldn't sleep. You know this.) So you click-clacked around your palace in size seven Jimmy Choos and opened box after box, all of them tagged: We're sorry for your loss, Miss Sansa. Please accept our condolences.
Of course! Condolences accepted and worn from one studio interview to the next. The StarCom heiress, orphaned, a tragedy, look at her sing, look at her cry, look at her wear the season's hottest and latest, her tears match her four carat earrings, isn't she lovely? That's how Taena closed each session: "A tragedy, truly. But isn't she just darling? And one more time—who are you wearing?"
Oh, you were always a princess, always in a castle. But kings are irreplaceable and dragons a perpetual threat. Even the nice kind that makes all your wishes come true. Even Shenron.
You learned this too late, obviously.
And the more you think about it, the more you remember other things. Becoming an orphan in a single plane stroke is a messy affair. Your world weeps like bodies from a hundred floors high. The ground tilts and sags beneath your pedicured feet. Molten steel touches down and forms a close prison on delicate bones. It gets dark there. It gets very very dark.
But you don't think about the dark! It can be daylight all the time, when you have a flat screen TV and a Macbook and a flip phone and best of all, a brand new Gameboy Advance! If you eat an orange pill, you won't even worry about sleep. Take a white rectangle, and you won't worry at all. Or a white circle, or the salmon oval, or a blue circle, or the kind you like best that you buy in secret from the Kettleblacks: colorful pills stamped like smileys or aliens or peace signs or teddy bears. Then you take one of Littlefinger's white ovals when you absolutely have to crash. Forget the dark!
Live inside the rainbow!
And oh, you did. The Gameboy was for Bran, but Nintendo didn't know that he was far away. Littlefinger let you keep it. So when sleepless days turned to sleepless nights after he had his way with you, when ten tons of hot metal kissed the inner reaches of your skull, under the covers you went, to the Pokemon World. You learned Johto first, in Pokemon Crystal. What if monsters were cute? What if you collected them in your pockets and they went with you everywhere in your custom baby blue Chanel purse?
Turns out, all the cutest and funnest things come from Japan. Littlefinger let you collect the cards, the figurines, the plushies, the friends. "But don't tell a soul," he said. "It's not for girls, and especially not the pretty ones."
It was on the list of things he despised, alongside smoking, drinking, and wearing pink.
No pink! You'll turn into a strawberry!
But you love(d) pink…
and strawberries :-(
Oh well!
(Your bedroom in Malibu is another secret: pink frills and ichigo everything. It drives Littlefinger mad, so mad he doesn't dare enter. No blowjobs here, sorry!)
So your world was a glittering rainbow of fabrics and gems and flashy screens. So bright that when Robb turned eighteen and moved to LA and didn't call or text but showed up in the tabloids dazed and distant, you didn't bat an eye. When the news came that his Lamborghini crumpled like kleenex on the side of a cliff, you already knew how to cry. When Arry became Arry and you fought and he ran away to live with Jon in Portland, you didn't talk for two whole years. You didn't need to—you were busy.
In the dawn of 2002, you signed your first contract with Two Blue Records. You'd make three albums, run three tours, and exhaust your youth under the watchful eye of the whole entire world. This is where you started: a hastily assembled stage before the black gape of ground zero. You're wearing plaid taffeta, Ralph Lauren, puff sleeved and skirted, short on long legs. It's December and snowing; you have a fluffy white coat and earmuffs to match. You wove your own French braids—"Quaint," Littlefinger said. "Homey charm." Your cheeks are bright red and the tip of your nose even redder. (You can see yourself on the two big screens that flank the stage, but you're not supposed to look. Stare straight ahead and smile, but make your eyes wet, let sorrow sparkle there, it's very pretty, you're very pretty, if you try.) You smile, cry, and try. To a physical audience of thousands, an omnipotent audience of billions, the tremulous chords of Over the Rainbow puff out from your unglossed lips like little sideways mushroom clouds.
So there you are, a bluebird, bandy-legged, scrambling from a soft-skinned shell. You fancy yourself Forticuno, and that's why you're smiling. You're fourteen, skinny, and pretty when you try. You've worked very hard to get here, little Starkling. After all, you've never cried so much in your life! You deserve this! There is only one of you, you are special, you are a legend, you are snow-kissed and bound to fly high! From the smoldering wreckage you rise, you brought the house down, you have killed, and now, you shine!
(You're going to fuck up very badly, you dumb baby bird. Cute monsters are still monsters. You have a lot to learn.)