There are no houses around. Just meadows and spindly trees stretching into the distance like something from a van Gogh painting. Everything in France feels a little unreal, like someone took globs of paint to a canvas and it dried only moments before we arrived.

I’m not nervous. I even like Pascal. His energy is more amusing than suspicious, but it’s been a long time since I’ve walked into a thicket of strange trees. It didn’t end well for me before.

On we stroll, Pascal singing songs in French that Maxine occasionally joins in on.

Pascal is right about the walk. After about thirty minutes, the tree-lined path curves, then opens at a lake.

I blink at the scene. It’s like something from a storybook. Sunlight skips off the glassy surface of the water, throwing beams of gold across the camp set up upon its shores.

Perhaps a dozen white tents have been pitched in the ground, staked with pale wood posts, with arching roofs like mini cathedrals. Each has a small pendant flag, each of a different color, waving cheerily at the top. There are chairs scattered about the camp, some armchairs as if from a fine estate, embroidered with silk, fading and fraying at the edges. Others are wooden dining chairs, set around a still-smoking firepit dug into the ground.

There’s a long dining room table set up right on the pebbles of the shore, covered in mostly melted, tall, white taper candles, placed on an ornate rug that’s sun-bleached and covered in dust.

There’s a surreal quality to the place, like something from a dream.

“Mes amies! Welcome to the home of Les Selectionnes!”

“What’s a Le Selectionnes?” Lena asks. She’s kind enough to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, but it’s there, glinting like steel in her eyes.

At Pascal’s noisy arrival, a few others have come spilling out of the tents. People all about our age, girls in white tea gowns, stained brown at the hems, their hair unbound around their shoulders; there are more of them than the boys, but there are boys with white shirts unbuttoned around their throats, wearing suspenders and trousers.

“Bonjour!” a few of them call over.

One of them, I’m not sure which, magicks over a tray of lemonade in crystal goblet glasses.

I grab one hesitantly, as do the others. The ice clinks. There’s a sprig of French lavender floating in the center.

“Thank you,” Oliver calls tentatively to the awaiting group, ever polite, the gentleman his mother raised him to be.

“What is this place?” Maxine asks.

Pascal turns toward the glinting water. “It is a home for those who could not find one elsewhere.”

“They live here?” I ask. The tents are beautiful, but I can’t imagine that they offer much protection from the elements.