“Terrible.”
“Pretend you’re actually going to do it, Sage. Get yourself to believe it, and then it’s easier to convince someone else. That’s what I do. See you tomorrow. Oh,” she said just as I was going to hang up, “that handsome boy Mia saw today?”
“Yes?”
“He definitely is a new student, and he’s in our class. We already know his name. Get this: Summer Dante. And how’s this? Just like Cassie, he has no mother. He’s living only with his father. No brothers or sisters. One in, one out, but something tells me he’s not going to be shy,” she added.
“You’re better than CNN,” I said.
She laughed. “And you’re better than Dr. Phil.”
The conversation that had begun with heavy news turned into laughter and some intrigue.
Who was Summer Dante, and what had happened to his mother?
Put that aside for now, I told myself. Concentrate on the weekend and being as good a liar as Ginny and the others. It was almost a requirement to be accepted by them. How they could trust each other knowing that they were all capable of being so false amazed me. Perhaps it was just honor among thieves or something.
Or maybe they really believed in their hearts that everyone was dishonest, that everyone lied. I thought about a reference I had just read to Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who helped create the philosophy of cynicism. Supposedly, he went around with a lantern searching for an honest man.
Was it a fruitless search? Would I look just as foolish if I didn’t accept the same rules my girlfriends lived by?
Maybe my mother was right after all by anticipating my doing something evil and dishonest. Maybe once I had done so successfully, I would be addicted to it. I would be better at it than Ginny or any of them.
“Once you take a bite of the apple, it’s difficult to avoid eating it all,” my mother would say. “If you do and you stop, you’re one kind of person, a special kind of person. If you don’t stop, you’re like most people, and how far you fall depends entirely on how much of the apple you consume.”
How much would I consume? Maybe she was right. Maybe that would be the final clue to discovering who I really was.
9
At dinner, when I mentioned going to the movies with my girlfriends and then out to have some pizza, I expected my mother would absolutely refuse to permit it, but apparently, she and my father had discussed my behavior at Ginny’s party and how sensible I had been, because she didn’t say no before my words were spoken, as she often did. The more my father praised me for how I had handled being at Ginny’s party, the guiltier I felt about lying now, even though I had successfully done what Ginny had suggested, rationalized with myself that I might not be lying at all, that this might be all we would do. The party wasn’t a sure thing yet. I could lie to myself first and then behave as if that were the truth.
This shouldn’t have surprised me. Often it was easier to convince yourself of something than it was to convince others. In the end, everyone believes what he or she wants to believe. Facts and evidence melt away like icicles on the first day of spring under the heat of what you are determined will be true no matter what.
Anyway, neither of my parents seemed to pick up on my deception, and after the way they had picked up on the filing cabinet, I thought they might. Maybe I was just getting better at it. I had made it all sound so casual and ordinary. All my friends were going. It was just something for us girls to do together. My father was nodding, so I added, “It helps bond us, make us all closer friends.”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t girls enjoy just being with each other sometimes?” my father agreed. “Girls’ night out. Show the boys you don’t need them around all the time. Female independence.” He looked at my mother. “Didn’t you want that?”
“Times were different,” she muttered.
“Times are always different,” he replied.
I looked more closely at my mother. She didn’t disagree. For a moment or two, she was really lost in her own thoughts, perhaps recalling her youth and regretting not doing enough with her own girlfriends when she had the opportunities. Maybe she wasn’t always as serious as she was now, or she was wishing she wasn’t. Thinking deeply about that might loosen her up, I hoped. She might want me to have more fun than she did when she was my age. Before he had left, Uncle Wade could very well have lectured them both, mostly her. I could hear the words as if I had been a fly on the wall.
“Stop worrying about her,” he must have said. “Let her be a girl her age. Let her explore and make her own discoveries. She’s wrapped too tightly. That usually results in just the opposite of what you intended for her.”
I was sure he was convincing. Maybe I didn’t have to lie as much as I thought I did. Maybe they would have permitted me to go to another house party if I had been honest and told them what our real intentions were, but it was too late.
“Can I stay out at least until midnight this time?” I asked. “It’s embarrassing having to be the first one to go home, especially when everyone else can stay out that late.”
My mother looked at me in that intense way she often did, her eyes smaller, darker, her lips tightened with disapproval, and shook her head before she took on that all-too-familiar cold, cynical smile. “You know people don’t give the devil his due. He’s no fool. He’s clever.”
“Stop it, Felicia,” my father said under his breath.
“How cleverly he uses logic to worm his way into our souls,” she continued, ignoring him.
“What does this have to do with the devil? I’m just going out with my new girlfriends, doing what girls my age do. Nobody trusts someone who’s so restricted. They think she’ll get them into trouble by complaining to her own parents, who will then go to theirs,” I added, using the argument the others had used against befriending Cassie.
My mother sighed and sat back, now looking like she was the one overwhelmed. “It’s up to you,” she told my father.
“All right. I’ll drop you off at the mall and pick you up at midnight where I dropped you off and no later. I don’t want to have to go looking for you. This is a bigger test, Sage. We’re interested in how you handle yourself when you’re on your own. You know what’s right and what’s wrong. You’re a very bright young woman. You know there are others who will try to get you to do bad things. Sometimes kids your age do them just to be accepted. It’s not worth it if that’s the only way you’d be accepted.”
“I know.”
For a moment, as the reality set in, the two of them looked absolutely terrified, and for the first time it occurred to me that if they failed with me as they had with the first two children they had taken in, they would have to suffer something very unpleasant, that maybe they were looking out both for themselves and for me. Perhaps they were being tested somehow, and it wasn’t only me.
I always wondered why they sounded like they had an obligation to someone else. I thought it might even be a deeper sense of responsibility to my birth mother, that they really had spent more time with her than they had suggested and made promises that would make them feel guilty and terrible if they failed to keep them. I thought about what Uncle Wade had told me. Perhaps they hadn’t met the mothers of the previous orphans and weren’t as emotionally involved with them as they were with me.
How sad for them. They never mentioned them to me because they must have been so devastated. Suddenly, I was now thinking I was the one who owed the responsibility to them. I could fail them, and that would mean more. This was really unfair, I thought. What girl my age had so much pressure on her to do well, to behave like an angel? It deprived me of the carefree innocence and joy that were so much a part of being young. Yet I shouldn’t be so surprised about it, I thought. All my life, they were telling me I was old enough to know better. Simply put, they never wanted me to go through puberty and adolescence. They wanted me to be an adult almost as soon as I could walk and talk.
I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for them. Raising
children was like running through a war zone, worrying about minefields and holding your breath whenever your children did anything on their own. News of accidents befalling them and others their age, possibilities of misbehavior, the influence of their peers, exploration of drugs and alcohol to keep up with the crowd, speeding in cars, or being the victims of random violence like what was streamed into homes through television and radio news, newspapers, and telephone calls—it got to the point where parents trembled when they opened their doors and when they permitted any unsupervised activities.
But then again, I thought, what other girl in my group would worry so much about this? If I were even to mention such things, they would shriek at me like angry wildcats. I would be making them all feel guilty, preaching at them.
“Become a nun,” Kay or Ginny might say.
And I would be devoured by their total indifference to my very existence. Nothing more was said about the upcoming weekend. This morning, my father drove me to school and surprised me with the news that an uncle and an aunt of his were going to pay us a visit very soon. He had never mentioned either of them. I asked him why he hadn’t. I really wanted to ask why neither he nor my mother talked very much about any of their family, why asking questions about them was harder than pulling teeth.
“Uncle Alexis is what is normally called the black sheep of the family. He had little to do with our family after he left home on his eighteenth birthday. My grandfather and he were like oil and water. He and my father got along a little better, but my father usually sided with my grandfather.”
“What did they fight about?”
“Uncle Alexis always wanted to have a career in the military. My grandfather wanted him to go into business or some profession like law, but Uncle Alexis went off and enlisted as soon as he was old enough. Even though he rose in rank and became an officer, my grandfather never forgave him. My father got along with him, but he didn’t get in the middle of it. Most of the time, Uncle Alexis was stationed somewhere out of the country. I saw him only a half dozen times, if that. No one went to his wedding when he married Aunt Suzume.”
“Suzume?”
“She’s Japanese. Her name means ‘sparrow,’ and she’s like a sparrow, small, graceful, and very beautiful. She has a face that belongs on a cameo. They met in Japan when he was stationed there for a while. They have no children,” he added quickly before I could ask. “With Uncle Alexis’s lifestyle, they decided against it.”
“Do they know about me?”
“Absolutely. I always liked Uncle Alexis and kept in touch with him as much as I could. He’s a typical army general, but once you get past his snip-snap, as I like to call it, you find a decent chap.”
“I look forward to meeting him.”
“We’ll practice saluting,” he said, smiling.
“Really?”
“Just kidding, although I always felt like I should whenever I did see him.”
He smiled at me, and for the first time in a long time, I felt sincere father-daughter warmth between us. It should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. It made me feel worse, because I was going to deceive him this weekend. I was sure no one else felt so bad about betraying a parent’s trust.
Almost as soon as I got to school, I sensed the excitement in the air. All of it was coming from my knot of friends intertwined in one another’s laughter and smiles at Ginny’s hall locker. I hurried up to them, and they all turned, all with one gleeful face.
“What?”
“Summer Dante made a big point to say good morning to each and every one of us, as if he knew us all our lives or something,” Mia said, her breasts rising and falling as she gasped between her words. “He’s in our class. He’s a sophomore. I thought he was older, at least a junior. He’s absolutely . . .” She looked at a loss for words. “Absolute!”
I perused all their faces. How could any boy be so handsome and charming that he struck such a note in the hearts of all of them so quickly? They were behaving as if he was a rock star.
“He wasn’t wearing a jacket and tie,” Kay said, with audible relief in her voice. “He was dressed really cool in this coal-black shirt and black jeans, with the sharpest-looking black shoe boots I’ve ever seen. They had splashes of crystals on the back.”
“Not just jeans. Very tight black jeans,” Ginny added. “He looked poured into them as if they were a mold of him from the waist down.”
“They’re hip huggers,” Darlene said. “So it would be from below the waist down.”
“Excuse me,” Ginny fired back. “I didn’t take his measurements as quickly as you did.”
“You mean you wish you did,” she replied. “Maybe he didn’t give you time enough. Maybe he spent more time with me.”
Ginny pressed her lips together and slammed her locker closed.
What was going on here? Were they already competing for Summer Dante, competing so intently that they’d sacrifice one another on some altar of romance? Was all truly fair in love and war? I had been attracted to these girls because they were like a knot, tight, ready to risk almost anything for one another and so in sync that they practically ate and slept simultaneously. Everyone at school, even the older girls, recognized that there was something special about them, and everyone was jealous of their friendship, a friendship that they wore like dog collars around their necks. It was why I was so intent on becoming one of them and so depressed that I might have failed.
“What about Todd?” I asked Darlene.
“Todd who?” she replied, and they all laughed.
“Wait until you see Summer Dante’s eyes. I’ve never looked into eyes like his,” Mia said. “I swear, those ebony orbs were swirling.”
“Or yours were swirling,” Kay said. “Mine were,” she confessed without hesitation or embarrassment. “I felt like I was . . .”
“Like you were what?” I demanded. They were beginning to annoy me. No boy could be this compelling.
“Like I was falling into them, helpless. I think I would have done anything he wanted right then and there. I can’t explain it.”
They all turned strangely silent, falling into their own memories, reliving a few moments with Summer Dante. For a moment, I wondered if he could hypnotize people as well as Uncle Wade could.
“He doesn’t float or something, does he?” I asked. “His feet hit the ground when he walks, right?”
Indignation washed across their faces as if I had spoken blasphemy about a real American hero or a biblical one.
“Wait until you meet him, smartass,” Kay said. “We’ll see if you don’t drool.”
“Well, I hope I do,” I said, smiling. “You all seem so pleased.”
“So pleased?” Darlene mimicked. “Pleased? I don’t think that’s the word I’d use. It’s more than pleased.”
“It’s an orgasm,” Ginny said, finally breaking the intense mood. She laughed. “Practically. I mean, I’m speaking for myself when I say practically. One of you might have had one.”
“I won’t be the first to tell,” Kay said.
“Boys can pop their corks quickly, but girls are better off,” Mia said, as though she were the authority on sexual relationships. “We keep popping,” she added, and everyone laughed. I did, too.
Good humor returned, and we started for homeroom.
“I thought none of you would go out with a boy in our class,” I said.
“Somehow I can’t think of him as just another boy in our class,” Mia said. “He’s too sophisticated.”
“And you know this that quickly?”
“I have a sixth sense when it comes to that,” she offered. “We all do.”
Nobody disagreed.
“How does it look for this weekend?” Ginny asked, stepping up closer to me.
“I’m in.”
“How much do they know?”
“Only what I know for sure—the mall, a movie, and pizza afterward.”
“Very clever. See, it works. Believe your own lies first.
”
I nodded, clinging to the idea that it was still not a lie since the party wasn’t confirmed.
“Oh, and I have until midnight this time.”
“You’re a regular Cinderella,” she said. “Good work. We’ll get you straightened out yet.”
Will you? I wondered. Or will you bring me so far down I’ll never get up, not in my parents’ eyes? We sauntered in and took our seats. For a moment, I didn’t realize it until I saw where all my friends were looking. Summer Dante was in Cassie’s seat. I had the chilling feeling that he was somehow destined to be there, destined to replace her.
He sat with perfect posture and didn’t look at anyone. His hands were clasped before him on his desk. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, first because his sitting there brought home the reality that Cassie was gone, off into some therapeutic fog, working to bring herself back into the sunshine, and second because there was an aura about him that was both pleasing and dangerous.
Suddenly, he broke his perfect form by turning sharply in my direction and stabbing me with his eyes. I think I gasped audibly. He had turned just the way I might if I had felt someone was looking at me intently. There was that tiny sting at the base of my neck whenever I felt that, and I was always right. Someone was staring at me. Now I was caught doing the same thing. I felt my face flush with embarrassment.
The girls hadn’t exaggerated about his striking good looks. His beautifully formed full lips softened instantly into smoothly tanned firm cheeks. I couldn’t turn away. He nodded at me, and I rolled my eyes away like a fighter pilot might roll his plane to escape an attack. I was grateful for the relief the day’s announcements brought. I could catch my breath.
When the bell rang, we all rose with the same hopeful expectation: Summer Dante would gravitate toward one of us to walk through the halls to our first class. It would be like putting on a valuable jewel, eye candy, evoking green envy from the eyes of every other girl in the school.
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