flap-flap your arms,

Charlotte likes to think she was born twice, the year her mother brought her into the world and the year her mother left the world behind again. Charlotte was only seven, when her mother died, and in the years that followed, she had to reinvent herself - as a motherless older sister whose father was deep in grief and, at the same time, desperately searching for a replacement to his late wife. Charlotte and her younger brother, Adrien, lived for a while in a household where their main caretakers were nannies and house servants, while their father courted Alexine Dupont, a formerly prestigious ballerina. When she eventually agreed to marry him, WWI broke out and the next four years were shrouded in darkness. For the adults, because the world was coming apart at the seams. For the children, because the adults were their world and they were coming apart at the seams, too. Alexine had no passion or interest in her new husband's children, but took responsibility for, especially, Charlotte's upbringing, teaching her the piano and giving her dance lessons for the sake of her posture. All of this, though, Charlotte would grow to disregard as she became a teenager and the decade of the roaring 20's started to rear its head. Along with many girls in her social circle, she became a flapper, a progressive young woman studying literature at university and heading for a very different future than her stepmother could possibly imagine.