Deadly Little Lessons

by Laurie Faria Stolarz

  “We’re still your parents,” Mom reminds me. “We’re the ones who’ve raised you and cared for you and been there for you every day of your life.”

  And that’s when it suddenly dawns on me—as if this could feel any more surreal—not only is my mother not my mother, but Dad isn’t my father, either. “Who is my father?” I ask him.

  Dad takes a deep breath, trying to appear strong, but he looks even more upset than me: his face is blotchy, his eyes are full.

  “Why don’t we all take a little break?” Mom says, extending her hand to Dad. “We can continue this conversation later.”

  Without waiting for Dad to respond, I head into my room and close the door, wishing that I could block out my thoughts, that I could restart my yesterday, and that I’d never picked up the phone last night.

  He says he’ll be back in an hour, but how long have I been crying? My cheek is pressed against the dirt floor, and my tears have made a patch of mud; at least it feels that way. I’ve shut off my flashlight to preserve the battery.

  I almost wish he would just kill me. Thoughts and memories are like daggers in my heart. I imagine my mother, worried sick, unable to get out of bed. Then I picture the two of us stringing popcorn on the tree last Christmas. I replay the time this past fall when my father jumped up from the bleachers after I’d scored my fourth goal in soccer. And then the time he brought me a dozen roses on the opening night of Grease, when I understudied the role of Sandy Dumbrowski.

  I sit up, turn my flashlight back on, and dip my fingers into the dirty basin of water to wipe some mud from my eye. My lips are chapped. I wipe them, too, and my hand comes away with a smear of blood on it; they must be cracked. The corners burn from being stretched…from screaming. Two meals ago, I spent a chunk of time yelling, praying that someone would hear me. But no one did, not even the guy who took me.

  I’m pretty sure I must’ve been drugged on the night I was taken. He must’ve slipped something into my drink when I wasn’t looking.

  I remember being charmed by him—so much so that I didn’t object when he offered to take me someplace quiet. I went willingly, hoping that because he was older he’d actually understand someone like me.

  I also remember that Misery had warned me about him—the “creepy-looking” guy seated at the bar. Unfortunately, I hadn’t wanted to listen. I’d been so angry that she’d lied to me about the plan for that evening. She’d told me that we were going to a poetry slam, that there was a special boy she’d wanted me to meet—Tommy was his name—but in actuality it was a glow-stick-friendly party at an abandoned sewing factory, devoid of anything even remotely poetic, and no special boy at all. And so I purposely went over to Creepy Guy at the bar, only he wasn’t creepy at all. I remember thinking how good-looking he was with his smooth tanned skin and dark hair. I half suspected that he might be Tommy after all, that maybe Misery had changed her mind about fixing me up because she suddenly wanted him for herself.

  I grab the tape recorder, replaying in my mind what he said he wanted, and curious about why he needs it. Is it so he won’t forget anything I tell him? Or because recording my words helps maintain a distance between us, whereas a conversation might make me seem more real, more human? Or—my biggest fear—is it because he collects the recordings of all his victims, to keep them as souvenirs?

  IN MY ROOM, I stare at my reflection in the dresser mirror. I always thought I’d gotten my longish neck from my dad. For years, I’d assumed that the spray of freckles across the bridge of my nose was inherited from him, because he has it, too. I gaze down at my hand, remembering how just months ago, when Aunt Alexia placed her jittery palm against mine, it was a mirror image of my own.

  I grab my phone and text Adam to come pick me up as soon as he gets out of work. And then I sit down at my computer, hoping that I might have gotten an e-mail from Ben. We haven’t called or texted each other since he left. For now it’s only e-mail: a way to keep in touch while still remaining distant.

  I check my in-box, but I don’t see a new message from him, just the one from last week:

  Dear Camelia,

  I’m in D.C., just thinking about you. Having a great time, despite having to keep up with my homeschool stuff. I went to a bunch of museums today. There’s nothing like getting the education up close and personal. I’ll be heading north next. I hope things are well with you.

  Love,

  Ben

  I draft an e-mail back, filling him in about everything. My pulse racing, I move the cursor over the send button, but then hit the back arrow instead, deleting the entire message, because sending it would make me vulnerable to him again, and that’s when I get hurt.

  Still, I want to write him back. I make several attempts before giving up and busying myself with the array of news links on my home page. One of them concerns the missing girl from Rhode Island—the story featured on that unsolved-mysteries show—as if I needed another reminder of my panic attack at the diner. But I click on the link anyway, desperate for a diversion.

  A picture of Sasha Beckerman pops up on the screen. In it, Sasha poses in her soccer uniform, red shorts and a yellow T-shirt, with a soccer ball under her arm. According to news reports, all signs, including an already packed bag stashed away in her closet, point to the fact that she ran away. Because Sasha was angry as hell. Because her parents had kept something very significant from her. Oddly enough, it was the very same “something” that my parents had kept from me.

  I continue to read about the case, wondering what else Sasha and I have in common—if, at fifteen, a freshman in high school, I could’ve been so upset by the news about my parents that I’d have behaved like her, that I’d have quit all of my favorite activities, ditched those closest to me, and started hanging out with people much older—people on the verge of being kicked out of school.

  I look closer at the photo of Sasha in her soccer uniform, taken before she dyed her hair black and traded in her J.Crew–wear for torn jeans and tattered belly T’s. Before she found out the truth.

  Her skin is dark, like she just got back from someplace tropical; it brings out the golden-brown streaks in her hair and makes her blue eyes pop.

  “Camelia?” Mom calls. She and Dad come into my room and stand behind me. “What are you looking at?” she asks.

  “Sasha Beckerman,” I say, still staring at the screen. “Do you know about her?”

  “No,” she says. The response comes as no surprise. Ever the hater of news stations, Mom has long claimed that their biased headlines, negative images, and politically slanted comments disturb her energy and clog her chakras.

  I turn around to face them, focusing a moment on Dad: “Do you know about Sasha?”

  He grunts out a yes. And in that single syllable, I can hear him make the connection.

  “You’re not planning to run away, are you?” His eyes widen.

  “What do you want?” I ask, ignoring the question.

  “We need you to hear us out,” he says. “You know we love you, but you also have to understand that your mother and I made a conscious decision not to tell you the truth until we felt you were ready. I’m sorry if you don’t agree, and I’m sorry for the way you found out, but I’m not sorry about our decision.”

  “Does Aunt Alexia know that I’m her daughter?” I ask, feeling stupid for posing such a question. I mean, how could someone possibly forget childbirth?

  “I think she knows,” Mom says, twirling the mood ring around on her finger. The color has turned a murky brown. “On some level, at least. But that was a particularly difficult time for her. She was barely twenty-two, staying at an assisted-living home that was overcrowded and run by the state. There were way too many patients and not nearly enough staff.”

  “It was the first facility she’d stayed at since moving out of her mother’s house,” Dad adds.

  “I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.” Mom gives her ring a full twirl. “One of the facility’s staff members just dropped her of
f at our house one day, saying she was due in a couple weeks, and asking if we could care for her.”

  “How could you not have known she was pregnant?” I ask. “Hadn’t you visited her? Hadn’t you tried to keep in touch?”

  “That’s the weird thing,” Mom says. “Because I’d had lunch with her a month prior, and we’d spoken on the phone several times since then.… But she’d been keeping her pregnancy a secret. Not just from me—from everyone. Even the staff members said so. They said she’d been wearing lots of layers, keeping a low profile, and always toting around extra-large items to cover up her belly: her portfolio case, a giant purse, a couple of extra coats.”

  I sink back in my seat, imagining what that must’ve been like for Aunt Alexia: feeling so alone, so insecure, that she’d had to resort to keeping such a big thing secret.

  “Anyway,” Mom continues, “she stayed with your dad and me during the weeks leading up to the delivery. And then she asked me to be there at the birth. You were so beautiful.” Mom smiles at the memory. “Just waiting to be loved.”

  “Because nobody loved me yet,” I say, without even thinking.

  “That’s just it.” She shakes her head. “We all love you. Alexia loved you so much that she wanted your father and me to raise you as our own. She knew she wasn’t stable enough to care for you in the way she wanted. She wanted you to have a chance.”

  “Did she want me to know the truth?”

  “Honestly,” she sighs, “I don’t know. She never wanted to talk about you as being hers. Once she’d placed you into my arms at the hospital, that was it. It was as if she’d already crossed over, which is why I’m not even sure what she remembers.”

  “Or what she blocked out,” Dad says. “We’d invite her to family dinners, birthday parties, holiday celebrations. We’d tell her about various recitals you’d be in, softball games you were playing at, spelling bees you took part in.… We never wanted to exclude her from anything, but I think, even though she seemed to want to watch you from afar, the idea of most of that stuff was too difficult for her.”

  Mom continues to toy nervously with her ring. Dad notices and takes her hand to give it a reassuring squeeze.

  “There’s something else I need to know,” I tell them. “Who’s my father?”

  Dad shifts uneasily. “It was someone at the halfway house.”

  “Another patient?”

  “A med student,” he explains. “He was an intern, working at the facility. After it happened, he was fired and kicked out of his college. But Alexia made us promise not to press charges.”

  “Did she love him, at least?” I ask, able to hear the anxiety in my voice. “Or was it just…” My voice trails off. I can’t finish the thought: the idea that he might’ve taken advantage of her, that I might’ve been conceived out of something so horrible.

  “She said she loved him,” Mom says. “She said their relationship was consensual.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “We’re not sure,” Dad says.

  “Did he ever maybe ask about me?” I venture. “To know who I am or to find out how I’m doing? Did he ever want to see me after the birth?”

  Dad keeps staring back at me—his dark brown eyes are wide and unblinking—silently telling me the truth. My birth father never wanted to know me.

  “I think I need a moment,” I tell them.

  “Of course,” Mom says, already standing up. She mutters something about a pot of tea and quickly leaves the room.

  Meanwhile, Dad moves to take my hand, and once again I crumple into the strength of his embrace, unable to resist his affection, unable to stop my tears.

  ADAM COMES TO PICK ME UP as soon as he gets out of work. Dressed in cargo jeans and a bright white T that shows off his tan, he looks amazing, and he smells like vanilla-bean soap.

  I tell my parents that I’m heading out for a while. Mom actually thinks it’s a good idea. “Fresh air, fresh mind,” she says, with her jar of almond butter in one hand and a giant spoon in the other.

  But Dad is reluctant to let me go, perhaps fearing that I may never come back. “Don’t be late,” he says.

  I intercept Adam on the front walk, before he can even get to the door. “Hey,” he says, greeting me with a kiss.

  “Hey.” I give him a peck.

  He leads me to his car, a ’70s Bronco that looks pretty cool but that perpetually smells like eau de gas station. “So, what’s wrong?” he asks, opening the passenger-side door for me.

  “Please, let’s just go.”

  Adam climbs behind the wheel and drives us around for a while before finally pulling in to the parking lot behind my high school.

  “As if I didn’t spend enough time here during the school year,” I say, hating the tone of my voice, knowing that I sound ungrateful.

  “Well, we have to talk somewhere, and it looks pretty private. Do you want to go for a walk?” He nods toward the area behind the parking lot, where the Tree Huggers Society has created a sanctuary of sorts. A circle of pine trees surrounds a bunch of granite-slab benches.

  But the sanctuary reminds me too much of Ben. Of the time when I followed him along the path between the trees, sat beside him on a bench, and allowed him to run his fingers over my skin and to sense my biggest fears.

  Even the parking lot reminds me of Ben. The first time I ever saw him, it was here. The first time he ever saved my life, it was here. For months afterward, he watched me from afar, sitting on his motorcycle on the opposite side of the lot.

  Here.

  I take a deep breath, trying my best to stay in the moment, but then Adam reaches out to take my hand. And again I’m reminded of Ben.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Adam says.

  “I just found out that my parents aren’t really my parents. My biological parents, I should say.”

  “Wait, what?”

  I gaze out the window at the Tree Huggers’ sanctuary, almost wishing there could be some other way to make him know the truth without my actually having to say the words.

  But there isn’t. And so I tell him everything.

  “Whoa,” he says, combing his fingers through his shaggy dark hair. “I’m not even sure what to say to that.”

  “Well, maybe we don’t need to say anything.” I turn to him, hungry for his affection—for him to take me in his arms and tell me that it’ll all work out fine.

  But unfortunately, he doesn’t hold me at all. Instead, his face brightens. “I think I know something that’ll make you feel better,” he says.

  He puts the Bronco in drive and moves out onto the main road, eventually crossing over into the town of Hayden. Is he taking me to his apartment to talk? Is there something he wants to show me at the college he attends?

  There’s a Ferris wheel in the distance. I’m assuming we’re going to drive past it, but Adam pulls into the parking lot of the carnival.

  A proud smile sits on his lips, as if bringing me here is the best idea he’s had in a while. “No way anyone can stay upset at a carnival, right?”

  I want to tell him that I’m not up for it, but I’m too emotionally drained to argue. Plus, he seems so excited by the idea that I don’t have the heart to tell him that bringing me to a carnival isn’t remotely close to what I need right now. And so I suck it up and pretend to enjoy the ride.

  ADAM PULLS UP in front of my house to drop me off. We stayed at the carnival for about an hour, during which I tried to have fun. I went on a couple of rides, ate some cotton candy, and fed a few of the petting-zoo goats. But, as hard as I tried, I was way too distracted to enjoy myself.

  Adam turns from the wheel to look at me. “I’m sorry if that was a lame idea. I just thought…how can anyone stay sad while hanging upside down on the Twirl-’n’-Spin, right?”

  “Except I don’t do upside down,” I remind him, hating myself for sounding so deflated.

  “And now I know,” he says, still trying to keep things light. “From now on, it’ll be nothing but
right-side up between us.”

  “You’re very sweet, you know that?” I smile, the first smile on my face all day, and it actually feels pretty good. I lean in to kiss him good-bye, grateful for his attempt to cheer me up. “I’ll call you later?”

  “I hope so.”

  I kiss him again, feeling guilty for my lackluster mood, but I can’t fake what I’m feeling.

  Inside the house, to my surprise, I find Kimmie sitting perched on the living room sofa awaiting my arrival. In a sleeveless dress with a gargoyle-esque creature adorning the front, she looks more than slightly agitated, as evidenced by the way her arms are folded, the scowl on her face, and the bloodstained tongue of the aforementioned gargoyle. “Your. Bedroom. Now,” she demands, before I even utter a hello.

  I lead her into my room, relieved to finally be able to tell her stuff.

  She closes the door behind us. “So, um, what’s going on?” Her arms still folded, she taps the toe of her stiletto against the floor. “Because you were acting totally freakish on the phone earlier, and I’m not the only one who thought so.”

  “Have you been talking to Wes?”

  “He said you sounded like a mental patient, and from what he told me, I couldn’t have agreed more.”

  “Maybe ‘mental patient’ isn’t one of the most appropriate analogies to make with me these days,” I say, considering the fact that it was only months ago that doctors wanted to lock me up in a mental ward for hearing voices and talking about my premonitions.

  “Since when am I appropriate about anything?” she asks, motioning to the front of her dress; there’s a plastic fork stuck in the gargoyle’s bloodshot eye. “Did you not have suicidal fantasies earlier today?”

  “Excuse me?” I ask, wondering what Wes told her.

  “So, you didn’t threaten to jump out the window?”

  “Okay, yes, but not in the way you think. Plus, my room’s on the ground floor, in case you’ve forgotten. What’s the worst damage I could do? A sprained ankle?”