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It had all become like this because James-May Mielgrafe didn't like her.
The Mielgrafe family donated generously to SinAnne Prep at the beginning of each school year. They were old money, a part of the upper echelons of Magnus Society, descended from the Lockwood’s, who had arrived in the strange grouping of islands that would later become the Autonomous Zone of Magnus Island alongside the other founding families in the 1580s. No matter how much the people of Magnus loved their new age Artisans and Actors, the Nouveau Riche of Magnus were always looked down upon by the Old Standard of the city.
James-May Mielgrafe was, in the honest opinion of the other girls of SinAnne’s 6th-grade class, a total bitch and a brown-noser to boot. She wasn't liked, reviled more so, even by the oft-admired administration. Who folded, by way of the common bribe, to the whims of a 12-year-old girl. Nico herself was disliked in a less active, up-front way. Sure, it was undeniable that she held the ire of her fellow students, but it was done without quite the same degree of girlhood malice- which was a rather nasty thing to experience, no matter its presentation and precision. Due to this so-called ‘injustice’, James-May despised her with the fervidity that most saved for serial murderers and the De Veux Airport.
So, thanks to SinAnne Prep being quite actively in the pockets of the Mielgrafe family and what an attendee of one of her grandfather’s soirees once called Nico’s “interesting” way of handling social interaction, that the school had threatened expulsion multiple times, and it stayed that way, as a threat, until it wasn't.
It was halfway through the school year when Nico and her grandfather were called into the school on a day when it was otherwise closed and delivered the news of her expulsion from SinAnne Preparatory School for Young Ladies.
The ultimatum was passed down by Headmaster Lowton with a prim-ness and propriety that would rival the decorum her grandfather had acted with in the Detective Draper movies. Her grandfather’s switchblade sharp smile did nothing to disarm the inevitable bomb. The verbal sparing had made Nico’s stomach turn. She was not allowed to speak. This was an adults-only conversion, no matter the fact that she was the one on trial.
Lowton’s decree was thus, “Mr. Faraday, I'm afraid that due to recent action taken by your granddaughter against Miss Mielgrafe, she no longer seems like a good culture fit for our institution.”
Nico had never done anything to James-May Mielgrafe in her life. But she knew that an accusation from a Mielgrafe meant an ousting from the fairities of the upper crust. The news would spread like a wildfire. She knew that this would mean that her grandfather would be hard-pressed to find a private institution willing to take her. Somehow, a singular sentence could make an 11-year-old a social pariah. It would be impressive if it didn't spell out a special kind of doom for Nico herself.
Besides, she knew that being called a poor “culture fit” was just a pleasant way of saying that they thought she was too stupid and socially inept to reflect well on the school.
She had the wherewithal to not react until they were in the safety of her grandfather’s Towncar. Even with the privacy screen up, she knows it's Mr. Albright behind the wheel from the 40s jazz that was playing as they got in. Grandfather had a rotation of three drivers, Mr. Albright was her favorite, he was old and kindly and kept candy in the glove compartment in case she had a bad day at school. He was also the only one allowed to take her to and from school. Mr. Halvet and Miss Connors were her grandfather's work drivers. She wanted nothing more than to climb into the front seat and dig half-melted tangerine Life Savers out of the glove box.
Grandfather breaks the silence after a few minutes, the sounds of the city muffled by the cotton-like upset in her ears.
“I’m sorry Mały Tygrys.”
Little Tiger because as a baby she slept more than she woke, like a lonesome big cat, over-assured in her place. That idea had long gone from her head. So long ago, in fact, she can't even remember it being there in the first place.
“But it’s not fair,” Her words bite out, uneven. Uncouth.
“I know,” There’s an emotion Nico can't read upon his face as he sighs lowly, “But we will do what we always do, we’ll change course.”
“But I didn't do anything, why isn't James-May getting expelled.”
Nico knew why, she knew how all this works, but she needed her grandfather to look at her and agree with the injustice of all.
“That’s just the way the chips fell, Nico.”
The ride back to Fahy Tower is one taken in complete and total silence.
•-•-•-•-•
When Nico was younger, she had the uncanny ability to ask all the wrong questions, which is to say, any questions at all. For there were always no answers given.
She got over it years ago, now she didn’t ask at all, just listened. Or, at least, she tried to. She had always felt as though she was perpetually caught in this odd middle ground, never one or the other, never even both, just caught as something else, within bounds but out of place nevertheless.
Nico didn’t start fights. Nor did she end them. They just sort of happened around her. She didn’t shy away from them, nor was she scared of them, however, she found that she was often roped into them. Most other children her age thought she was odd. That she was trouble. Quite honestly, the only reason people treated her with anything closing in on respect was because she was the granddaughter of Ron Faraday.
After she was expelled from SinAnne Prep, the plan was that she would be homeschooled by private tutors for 6 months, before attending Arlington Arts in the fall- or well, it was supposed to be 6 months, but then swiftly turned into 2 years. While yes, technically, she was a student of Arlington Arts after that lapse of 6 months, she only set foot in the place for exams. When she had gotten expelled, her grandfather said he was going to put his acting career on pause until everything was sorted out. Until everything was back to normal.
Normal was such a trite and unfortunate word.
Nico tried, she really, really did. She did everything right. But being all but confined to the realms of Fahy Tower would drive anyone mad, especially a young girl in want of an act of rebellion. So she snuck out, a lot, just so long as she could be back before anyone would care to look for her. She used her good standing with the denizens of Fahy, with her Grandfather and Aunt Sav, to do what she pleased, so long as no prying eyes caught her. She could finish the weekly assignments given to her by both Arlington and her tutors in a swift fashion. Combine that with the maybe 4 hours any lessons that day would take, she had nearly 8 hours a day entirely to herself.
So, she began to sneak around with a bit of honest abandon. Breaking into her grandfather’s old rowhouse out near Velvet Vale became a weekly occurrence. She got smart about it quickly too. Nico was - is - smart, much more so than others often give her credit for. She knows that there is a certain way one must act to be successful, to be treated well. She knows when people are watching her, and when they aren’t. Unfortunately, they were watching her more often than not, so she had to be careful, choosey, about when she acted. How she acted.
People often called her lucky, but in her honest opinion, luck had nothing to do with anything. It certainly had nothing to do with being the granddaughter of Ron Faraday, of that much she was certain. Luck had nothing to do with good fortune.
So, that was it, in a way her very existence was antithetical to the eyes upon her, she had been a scandal from the day of her birth. Yet, in a pit in her mind, there is a voice, unceasing in its tenor, telling her that the only reasons people like her are twofold, because she’s the Granddaughter of Ron Faraday, and because she is- in the fashion of looking like the great beauty Hwaji Bangsong - “exotic”. Nico was the personification of the familiar other.
People often prefer the devil they know over the devil they don’t. Not many liked the oddly obsessive granddaughter of Ron Faraday, but she was better than any of the pesky brats that seemed to roam the streets of Blackwell Island without restraint or restriction.
Her grandfather has long been a man of great influence and admiration. In his youth, He was a fair man of 6 feet tall, with fine yellow-blonde hair always gelled back and quaffed into a fashionable tilt, and had bright, bottle green eyes. He still styled himself much like a 50s movie star, his hair still quaffed in much the same way, although it was more silver now than blonde, the crow's feet around his eyes complimenting his smiling face. His eyes were as bright now as they had been when he stepped onto the scene in 1953.
Nico had his eyes, bottle green and bright and mischievous. The eyes of Magnus’s patron saint of the silver screen. The eyes too, of his cowardly son. It was one of the few pieces of proof upon her face that she was related to him at all.
People have often said that Nico looks a lot like her grandmother. She supposes it meant to be a simple comment, maybe even a compliment, after all, Hwaji Bangsong used to be a model. Had gorgeous dark eyes and hair, hair that she always had styled in finger waves, which gave her an impression similar to that of Marlene Dietrich. But even though she’d had an acting career, on and off, in the 20-some-odd years she had lived in Magnus, she was not beloved in the way her grandfather was.
The people of Magnus were fiercely loyal to their home, to its own arts and culture. Hwaji had skirted by due to the simple fact of being beloved not by its people but by Ron Faraday, a man viewed as a shining relic of the bygone. Upright and kind. He was born a nobody, to Polish immigrants in the 30s, and he rose to become a great actor and philanthropist. He was aspirational. Never mind the fact that he had to change his name and the way he spoke just to get his foot in the door.
If Nico could respect her grandmother for one thing, it was that she stuck - fiercely and with great pride - to her guns. She arrived as Hwaji Bangsong and stayed as such, even when she married Nico’s grandfather, even when she traded modeling for acting. She stayed who she was, and when she couldn’t handle the pomp and circumstance, she cut her losses, burned her bridges, and went back to Berlin. Her grandfather, in sharp comparison, had reinvented himself, and then never let that persona slip. He spoke in his even-tempered transatlantic accent, he moved, in every step, measuredly. He had stopped being Hieronim Polachek 40 years ago.
The only remembrances of the name of Polachek are the rowhouse her Grandfather purchased for the simple pleasure of watching it crumble, and the surname on Nico’s own birth certificate. Minerva Richelle Hwaji Polachek was the name her parents had given her before unceremoniously dumping her on her grandfather. The name, Polachek, that was given onto her seemed more like a move of childish defiance on the part of her parents than anything actually meaningful. Richelle was after her father’s childhood nanny, the one tabloids still speculate had an affair with her grandfather, Hwaji for the grandmother she had stolen nearly every feature of. Minerva, however, was meaningless in the action of her parents' feeble attempt at backstabbing. Its only connection leads back to her mother’s parents, one a Professor of the Arts, the other a Professor of Hellenistic Studies. She had always gotten the impression that her father hated her grandfather, yet she was raised by him just as he was, so what conviction did he really have? Her grandfather renamed her from Polachek to Faraday, as he had done for himself nearly 30 years before, when she was 2 weeks old. A decade later, she would rename herself.
Nico was a name that had no significance, no familial ties to people she barely even spoke to, who barely even acknowledged her existence. It meant victory. The name Nico Faraday is a name without meaning, pulled from fiction and ether. It is a name of pomp and circumstance and scandal and re-creation.
She was not often regarded as a defiant child, not by her grandfather, or the denizens of Fahy Tower, or even by the tutors and teachers of Arlington Arts, who thought of her as a surprising delight. But she often thought of herself as such, her very name itself an act of defiance.
Even if they hated her, they could not take away the simple fact that she was herself, and that fact came with an amount of daring that more often than not would be a point of hubris for another girl of her age. Nico didn’t toy with hubris, she was simply right.