“Ricky’s usually the most gentle,” Doris added.
“I prefer Boyd,” Margot said.
“It’s not your initiation.
It’s hers,” Doris told her.
“Boyd is more professional about it. He spends more time on foreplay,” Margot insisted.
“I think this should be a secret ballot,” Kiera announced. “There’s a little too much personal business going on here.”
“Whatever,” Margot said.
Deidre produced a sticky pad and handed each girl a sheet.
“I don’t have a pen,” Margot said.
“Use your lipstick,” Doris told her.
“Then everyone will know it’s my vote. That’s not a secret ballot.”
“I’m just kidding, stupid.”
Deidre got up, walked out, and returned with pens for those who didn’t have any.
“Just an R or a B is all that’s necessary,” Kiera said.
I watched as they spread out to vote. It wasn’t until they all handed their folded papers to Kiera that the full realization of what they were deciding for me hit me. I had sworn their oath, and I had gotten the tattoo, but I wasn’t confident that I could go through with the rest of it, especially if they had chosen Boyd. Kiera didn’t announce the votes. She opened each slip and put it on the right. She put none on the left.
“It’s settled,” she said. “Unanimous. Ricky.”
“When?” Margot asked immediately.
“As it happens, we’re all going on Ricky’s boat tomorrow,” Kiera said. “I didn’t say anything until I knew for sure and knew this would be the vote for sure. I mean, Boyd will be there, too, but Ricky’s the one.”
“And you can make it dangerous, too,” Margot said, “if it happens on the boat.”
“No, that wouldn’t count as dangerous,” Kiera said. “It’s only us. Besides, you wanted real privacy the first time, as I recall. I heard Tony almost had to use a sheet with a hole.”
“That’s not true!” she cried.
Everyone laughed.
“Let’s have some music,” Deidre declared, “and order some Chinese.”
Everyone rose to congratulate me as if I had done or would do something historic. Maybe I was naive about sex, but I knew that what they expected me to do, what I would do, was not all that much of an accomplishment, except, of course, that it would make me solid with these girls. I’d be part of their family, and for an orphan, that was some accomplishment.
“I bet you’re really excited,” Kiera said after we left Deidre’s house.
“This is all supposed to happen tomorrow on Ricky’s boat?”
“Sure. It has two staterooms. Don’t look so worried. You’ll do fine.”
She made it sound like a performance or a test. When we arrived home, however, we were both almost grounded. Mrs. March had learned the truth. The drama teacher had not held auditions for the play yet. She intercepted us just before we were about to go upstairs.
“In here,” she commanded, standing in the living-room doorway.
Kiera and I looked at each other. On the way into the living room, she whispered, “Whatever it is, let me do all the talking.”
Mrs. March was alone. She stood with her arms folded under her breasts and nodded toward one of the settees. We sat.
“What now, Mother?” Kiera asked.
“What now? Why did both of you lie to me about the auditions? There were no auditions that day. Well?”
“I was too embarrassed to tell you that I had made a mistake and misread the date on the bulletin-board announcement. We actually went to the auditorium and felt like idiots. At least, I did. It wasn’t Sasha’s fault, so don’t blame her.”
“But you continued the lie, giving me that story about changing your minds,” Mrs. March said, looking from Kiera to me. I couldn’t look directly at her.
“Yes.”
“Why? Why wouldn’t you just tell me the truth? You made a mistake?”
“I didn’t think you’d believe me, and besides, we really did decide not to do it.”
“Where did you go that day?”
“Nowhere. We just killed some time riding around and then came home. It’s not a federal case, Mother. It’s not like we did some terrible thing instead.”
“I don’t believe you, Kiera.”
“Don’t believe me. Ask Sasha.”
She looked at me. “Is what she’s saying true? You just rode around?”
“Yes,” I said softly, almost too softly for her to hear.
“I’m very disappointed in both of you. Why don’t I see you working on your calligraphy anymore, Sasha?”
“I’ve done a little, but with my homework and clarinet practice …”
“And the time you’re wasting riding around,” she completed for me. “This is very discouraging. Alena never lied to me, ever.”
“Oh, please, Mother. She had her little white lies, too.”
“Never,” she insisted. “Your bad habits never rubbed off on her. She was too good, an angel. That’s why God took her back.”
Kiera looked away, and when she turned back, her eyes were filled with tears.
“You just love making me out to be the bad one all the time. You did it when she was alive, and you still do it now. You hate me!” She leaped to her feet and ran out of the living room.
“Kiera!”
I sat there, frozen. Slowly, Mrs. March turned back to me. “I don’t hate her,” she said. “She’s my daughter. Of course I love her. I wouldn’t put up with all her antics if I didn’t care for her and love her, but I’m not one of those mothers who are so blind they will not see. I know her faults. Pretending, ignoring, excusing will not help her to change and improve. And you won’t do her any good by supporting her when she lies or disobeys.”
She took a deep breath and sat on the settee opposite me. After a moment, she looked up at me. “Sasha, I think, as Donald does, that it’s wonderful you’ve found a way to get along with Kiera and perhaps help each other, but you must be wary. She has too many years of successfully manipulating both her father and me. She’s an expert at it. Will you be careful?”
“Yes, Mrs. March.”
“I don’t mind your being a normal teenager, but please, be careful. I take my responsibility for you very seriously. Remember, I made that pledge to your mother the day she was buried.”
I nodded, now nearly in tears myself.
“Donald is so happy at how things are going or seem to be going. I won’t say anything to him about this, but no more lying, okay?”
“Okay, Mrs. March.”
“Oh, I hate that ‘Mrs. March.’ At least call me Jordan,” she said. She smiled. “So, you got your ears pierced?”
“Yes.”
“Kiera has plenty of earrings to lend you. That’s for sure. Alena always wanted her ears pierced, but we never got around to it.” She was quiet a moment and then smiled again. “Donald is planning to take us all on a little trip, perhaps to San Francisco. Won’t that be nice?”
“Yes, Mrs…. Jordan.”
“Good. Okay, I won’t keep you.”
I rose and started out. She held her smile and then turned away. I paused once after I walked out of the living room and looked back at her. She suddenly looked like the saddest person in the world, alone, bedecked in expensive jewelry and her designer outfit, her hair recently cut and styled. But instead of looking wonderful, she looked like someone trapped and chained by her wealth, lost and alone with nothing but her expensive possessions to keep her warm.
Kiera’s door was open. She wasn’t crying, but she was facedown on her bed. She heard me enter her suite and turned.
“Why didn’t you run out with me?”
“You jumped up and ran so fast I didn’t know what to do,” I said. It was the truth.
“What did she say? Did she tell you how terrible I am again?”
“No. She said she loves you, but she was worried. She liked that I got my ears pierce
d.”
“That figures. Oh, well,” she said, shaking off her rage and smiling. “At least I got us out of that one, even if she tells my father.”
“She said she wouldn’t.”
“Did she? Great. I was afraid she would get him to lay down some new restrictions and ruin tomorrow. Perfect. We’ll tell them both about it at dinner. Be sure you look and sound very excited about it.” She studied me a moment. “You are, aren’t you? You’re not going to back out now?”
“No,” I said, although I could hear a chorus of voices inside me saying yes.
“I’m going to take a bubble bath. Come in to talk if you want,” she said, and headed for her bathroom.
I went to my suite and just sat for a while looking out the window. It was odd, I thought, but it wasn’t until now that I realized I didn’t even have a single picture of my mother. Everything we owned had disappeared in the road that night. Maybe it had all been tossed aside as junk. The sacks and the suitcases had been battered and stained. There had been some pictures in Mama’s suitcase, but we had had nothing else of any real value. I couldn’t recall anything that would have had our names. We had no address. If it had all been left on the side of the road, some other homeless person or persons might easily have come upon it and taken what they could use.
Of course, my thoughts went to the next day. I like Ricky, I thought. He was certainly very good-looking and so far very nice to me. It was exciting being with him. But to do what I was about to do, for the reasons I was about to do it, was troubling to me, and not because I was afraid. I wasn’t old enough to have spent much time thinking about losing my virginity, but whenever I had thought about it, it was in terms of romance and love. Just doing it to get it over with diminished it, made it seem like such a common exercise. Was it just me? Why didn’t these other girls feel and see that too?
Maybe they didn’t really believe in love. From what I could see and what I heard them say, none of them had a particularly strong feeling for any one boy. If one of them had such a feeling, she surely kept it secret from the others. I had always dreamed of having a boyfriend who took me to school dances, movies, and restaurants. Maybe we would be too young to be really in love, but we would like each other so much that it would seem that way, and when we eventually broke up to go our separate ways, maybe for college, we would be broken-hearted, at least for a while. Years later, married to other people, we would meet and smile, almost laugh, at how intense we had once been. Yet in our heart of hearts, we would wonder what it would have been like if we had gone on together. The wondering would last only a second, but at least we would have had that.
None of the girls in the VA club would have anything remotely close to that. What would their memories of high school be like? How long could they continue to mock and belittle other girls who had had long and deep affections for boys in the past? Would they wake up one day years from now and realize what they had missed and lost and, most important, what they had given up when they treated their first sexual experience as just something they had to get over with?
I was tempted to go into Kiera’s bathroom and sit beside her while she was in her bath and talk about all this, but I was afraid that the moment I brought it up, she would carry on with how I was not only betraying her but making her look bad to her friends. She might even find a way to blame it all on her mother, and things would return to the way they had been, a house full of thunder and lightning which would only bring us all to some new great tragedy. Whether Kiera would blame it on me or not, I would think I had caused it when all I had to do was make love with a boy I admittedly thought of as handsome and exciting.
How I wished I had a real mother to talk to now, even a mother who was in and out of sanity the way Mama was when we lived on the streets. I’d know when I could talk to her, when her mind was clear enough to hear me and care.
But I didn’t even have that.
It was at times like this when I knew just how lost and alone I really was and that no amount of money, no house, no special school, nothing, would fill the great and deep hole in my heart.
29
Initiation
Kiera was really very clever when it came to manipulating her father. I watched and listened to an expert at dinner that night. The excitement and sweetness in her voice was so well crafted, as were her smiles, her looks at me, and her way of bringing me in at the right times to support what she said. She had a way of tilting her head just slightly to the left while rolling her eyes to the right to look cute and innocent. She tossed back her hair with a flick of two fingers and pursed her lips as if she was sending her father a kiss across the table.
I looked at Mr. March as Kiera described what our outing on Ricky’s boat was going to be. Mrs. March’s face was more like a mask, nothing moving, her eyelids barely blinking as she listened. Although Kiera never came right out and said it, she implied that Ricky’s father was going to keep close tabs on us. She reminded her parents that she had been on Ricky’s father’s boat before and how well it had gone. The weather was going to be perfect for boating, too. Most of all, this would be the most exciting thing I had ever done. She made it sound as if all the others, Ricky, even his father, were going along with this outing for my benefit. How could her parents reject it?
“Well, it sounds like you two are in for a great time,” Mr. March said. “I’d take you myself, but I’m having so many problems with this project in Oregon that I’ve got to work all weekend. I don’t know why I took on doing anything with Rick Stanton,” he said to Mrs. March. “His preparation is always so sloppy.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Mrs. March said curtly, “but not because of Rick Stanton. You’re taking on too much, Donald. We need you to spend more time with us.”
The way she said “we” made it clear, at least to me, that she meant herself. He nodded and promised that he was going to cut back. He said he had already rejected two major projects. Kiera glanced at me as he spoke, a look of victory and satisfaction in her face. There was no other discussion about our going on Ricky’s boat. She was happy they had gone on to other topics. Secretly, I had been hoping that they wouldn’t let us go and my crisis would be postponed for a while, but I should have realized that there was little or nothing Kiera didn’t get the way she wanted.
“I’ve picked out some things for you to wear tomorrow,” she told me after dinner. “Boyd’s picking us up at nine.”
The outfit she had chosen looked more like a tennis outfit to me. When I put it on, I thought the skirt was too short, but she insisted that it was perfect. She gave me another watch to wear, with a band that matched the colors of my outfit, and different earrings, too. This watch, like the other, had diamonds.
“Now, don’t worry about becoming seasick or anything,” she said. “That pill I gave you actually helps prevent that, too. Don’t ask me how or why. It just does. Tomorrow’s your day, and we won’t permit anything to ruin it.”
I felt as if I were on the high seas already when I went to bed. I tossed and turned, struggling to fall asleep. The conflicting arguments going on inside me were fierce. I was caught in an echo chamber. A strong part of me was screaming how wrong it all was. I was doing it for the wrong reasons, and I would regret it for the rest of my life. The other part of me kept reminding me of what I had now and what I would have afterward. For a girl who had had few, if any, friends most of her life and none during the entire past year, the idea of being part of a group like the VA club brimmed with great promise. I’d be included in everything. I’d have trusted friends in school and out of school. Boys would like me even more. And besides, I had already gone too far. I had the tattoo. I had lost any chance of having friends my own age. They all thought I was too snobby because I was hanging around with the seniors. If I didn’t do this, I’d be all alone again.
Sometime just before morning, I fell asleep and slept so late that Kiera came rushing with panic into my suite.
“You’re still in bed?” she c
ried. I groaned and turned over to look up at her. She was already dressed in her boating outfit. “It’s after eight! Get up. Get dressed. Get ready. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. You know my mother will make a big deal of us having a decent breakfast. C’mon. And don’t forget to take your pill,” she said, ripping the blanket off me.
I ground the sleep out of my eyes, sat up, and then, still half asleep, jumped into the shower to shock myself awake with cold water. I was just putting on my boat shoes when Kiera returned.
“Let’s go,” she said. “My mother is already wondering if you’re sick or something. If you don’t look good and full of energy, she’ll find a reason to stop us. C’mon,” she urged.
I hurried out after her.
Mrs. March was in the dining room waiting for us. “Are you all right?” she asked me immediately.
“Yes.”
“She just stayed up too late doing her homework. You know how she is about her homework, even on weekends,” Kiera said.
Mrs. March looked at me suspiciously but said nothing. I had to eat more than I wanted so she wouldn’t think something was wrong with my appetite. At least, Kiera did most of the talking for us both, describing the day that lay ahead in Catalina and reminding her mother how much fun they’d had there when her father had taken them. She made the point of reminding her that Alena was alive then and loved the day.
“Never mind all that. You’d better make sure both you and Sasha are wearing your life jackets on that boat,” her mother warned.
“Oh, of course. Ricky follows all the regulations to a T. What are you doing today, Mother?” she asked to throw her off.
“I’m meeting Deidre’s mother for lunch at the Ivy,” she said. “It’s a lunch meeting we’ve both been looking forward to for a while now.” She made it sound as though they were meeting to discuss her and Deidre.
“That’s nice,” Kiera said without missing a beat.
“I want to hear from both of you periodically,” Mrs. March said. “You both have cell phones, and this time they’re not to be forgotten or turned off. Is that clear?”