“What’s Virgins Anonymous? I don’t understand.”
“All of the girls in the club have given up their virginity to be members, and everyone has sex regularly with any boy. Kiera brought me to be a member, and they approved of me. I swore a vow on a notebook that contains the description of each girl’s first time. We meet regularly at Deidre’s house, because her mother works with her father and she has the house free after school. No one was supposed to talk about it, but Kiera’s lying to you about me. I didn’t ask for new clothes, I didn’t ask for the tattoo, and I didn’t steal her boyfriend. What happened was that I got seasick very quickly on the boat, and Ricky put me in the master stateroom. I wasn’t supposed to get seasick. Kiera said those pills she had given me would prevent it.”
“What pills?”
“The pills to make my periods less severe. Here,” I said, rising quickly and going to the drawer beside my bed. “I’ll show you.”
I opened the drawer and stared down in disbelief. The pills were gone. I looked carefully through the drawer.
“She must have taken them back,” I said under my breath.
“Sasha, Mr. March is very, very upset.”
“It’s not true. None of what she’s saying is true!”
“Get dressed,” she said, rising. “We’re all going to have a talk downstairs in Mr. March’s office. I’m sick to my stomach.”
I started to cry. She looked at me but not with the same compassion and sympathy I used to see in her face.
“Just get dressed. I’m calling Deidre’s mother right now,” she said, and left.
I couldn’t stop sobbing, but I put on some clothes, making sure not to wear anything Kiera had given me. I wanted to confront her first, but she was already downstairs sitting in her father’s office. She had her hands clasped on her lap and looked straight ahead, as though she was the one being accused of everything, as though she was the one so damaged and hurt.
Mr. March sat at his desk. Mrs. March was sitting across from Kiera.
“Just sit anywhere, Sasha,” Mr. March said.
I looked at Kiera, but she wouldn’t look at me. Nevertheless, I sat on the settee, too.
“Do you belong to or did you join a club?” Mr. March asked immediately.
Good, I thought. They found out the truth. It serves her right.
“Yes.”
He held up a printout of the digital picture he had taken of my tattoo. “Is this the club’s logo?”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
“Hell Girl?” he asked.
“What?”
“That’s what this calligraphy represents. I had it confirmed.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It spells ‘VA.’ That’s the club Kiera had me join, the VA club.”
Kiera blew air through her lips. She smiled at her father. “Did you ever? VA club?”
“The girls took me to get the tattoo,” I said quickly. “All of them.”
“Do you know where this supposedly occurred?” Mr. March asked.
“Somewhere in L.A. I don’t remember the address. If I saw it, I’d remember.”
“First,” Kiera began, “you know, Daddy, that someone under eighteen can’t get a tattoo in California legally. Why would anyone risk his business to give her that ridiculous tattoo?”
“She’s right. Sasha?”
“I don’t know why he did it. Maybe they gave him more money,” I said now, feeling real panic. “She has one. They all have one.”
Kiera turned slowly. “Did you see it? Is that what you’re telling my parents now?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding at Mr. and Mrs. March. “I saw it on all of them in the same place.”
Kiera stood up, undid her jeans, and lowered them. She turned to her father and mother and lowered her panties. Then she turned to me, and I gasped. It was gone.
“This is beginning to sound like Psycho,” Kiera said as she pulled her jeans up. “I don’t really care what my parents decide to do about you,” she told me. “What you did with Ricky was mean. I’m not going to lie for you anymore, though. I can tell you that.”
She turned to her parents.
“Haven’t I tried to be a good older sister to her? I’ve lost friends because of her and some of the crude things she says. Now she goes and seduces Ricky after I talk him into taking us to Catalina on his father’s boat. Don’t just take my word for it. Ask my girlfriends. Go on and ask her if she’s still a virgin or ever was when she first came here. Go on. You can have her examined if you don’t believe me.”
I couldn’t keep the tears from streaming down my face. The looks on Mr. and Mrs. March’s faces felt like knives in my heart. They both looked drained of any warmth and hope. I felt as if I were looking at them when they had first heard their younger daughter was terminally ill. I felt terminally ill. Kiera, always alert to an opportunity, had her finish perfected and perfectly timed.
“I told you, Mother. I warned you,” Kiera said with a voice soft and sorrowful. “She’s not Alena. She took advantage of you. She probably did know how to play the clarinet but pretended she didn’t.”
Mrs. March started to cry.
Kiera turned to me. “You’re not my sister. You never could be,” she said, and walked out of the office.
I took deep breaths to stop myself from crying. My chest ached. Mr. March rose and paced a bit behind his desk. Mrs. March stopped crying, wiped her face with her handkerchief, and, after a deep breath herself, turned to me.
“I spoke with Deidre. She confirmed Kiera’s story about what happened on the boat,” she began. “She doesn’t know anything about any VA club, and her mother confirmed that she has no tattoo on her lower back.”
“Deidre’s lying for her,” I muttered weakly.
“I called some of the other mothers, and they checked their daughters, too. No tattoos, Sasha.”
“Theirs weren’t permanent, then. They showed them to me to fool me,” I said. “I’m not lying. I didn’t seduce Ricky Burns on his boat. They gave me something to drink that was supposed to help my seasickness, only it made me feel weird. They were all in the room. I was raped!” I cried.
Mr. March stopped pacing and looked at Mrs. March. “This is no good, Jordan. We’re talking about a first-class scandal here.”
“I know,” she said in a voice of defeat.
He pointed at me. “You don’t go making such an accusation, Sasha. Tom Burns is an influential businessman. His chain of pharmacies is one of the most successful in the state. He’d destroy us in such a fight. I don’t want to hear that you’ve told this story to anyone at school. Is that understood? Is it?”
“Yes, but it’s true.”
“Don’t dare speak it,” he said, punching each word. He turned to Mrs. March. “I want you to move her out of Alena’s room for now. Put her in one of the guest rooms away from Kiera. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Sasha,” he said, turning back to me. “Maybe your life on the streets made you sly and clever in your battle to survive. Maybe you saw an opportunity in Mrs. March. She’s taken the loss of our daughter very hard. Maybe I need to send both you and Kiera to therapists. Whatever. But for now, I want no more talk about any of this. I’ll look into seeing what the best alternatives for you are. For the time being, go to the school we have had you going to. Do your work, and stay out of trouble. Come directly home after your school activities, and do not go out and about on weekends. Am I clear?”
“Yes.”
“You did impress me when you first came here. I have to believe that indicates you have good qualities. My advice is for you to nurture them and nothing else. You want to add anything, Jordan?”
“No,” she said.
“Tell Mrs. Duval to move her things immediately, then.”
She nodded and looked at me. “Go up and put together what you want to take to the guest room, Sasha. I’m sorry, but Mr. March is right. We want you away from Kiera.”
“And out of Alena’s room,” he empha
sized.
“Someday you’ll know that I wasn’t lying, and you’ll be sorry,” I said. “And I’ll feel sorrier for you than I do for myself.”
I walked out and up the stairs, but I felt like a sleepwalker. When I reached Kiera’s room, she opened the door. She must have been waiting right there, listening for my footsteps. She stepped out and smiled at me.
“I feel I should tell you something,” she began. “The second set of pills I gave you …”
“Where are they? What about them?”
“They were fertility pills. Ricky’s father owns a drugstore chain, remember? He can get anything. Maybe you’ll have twins.”
The heat that came into my face made me feel that I would go up in flames.
“Why did you do all this to me?” I asked.
She smiled. “My parents started to love you more than they loved me. That was the way it was when Alena was alive, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. Aren’t my friends loyal? They’re so wonderful.
“Besides,” she said, losing her smile of satisfaction to the hard, cold face I had first known, “I told you. It was your mother’s fault. She shouldn’t have crossed the highway there.” She closed the door softly.
I felt like someone in a coffin who wasn’t really dead watching the lid being shut.
31
Darkness
Although the guest room wasn’t as large as Alena’s suite and didn’t have a sitting area where I could set up my schoolwork, it was luxurious, with a king-size bed and a thick-carpeted floor. It had a very nice bathroom, too, but the room was in a wing of the house that was darker and lonelier, not that I wanted to be anywhere near Kiera ever again. She claimed the same about me and wouldn’t eat dinner if I was at the table at the same time. Her father accommodated her wishes and ordered Mrs. March to have me served my dinner an hour earlier than when they ate. Every night of the following week, I ate dinner alone in the kitchen nook. By now, all of the servants working for the Marches knew that something was seriously wrong, but no one asked me any questions about why I was being isolated, nor did anyone speak much more to me than was absolutely necessary, even though I could see sympathy in both Mrs. Duval’s and Mrs. Caro’s faces. I imagined they were all worried about losing their jobs.
Grover was driving me to school again but was back to his silent, formal ways.
I didn’t know what to expect when I returned to school on Monday. At first, no one noticed anything really different until lunch hour, when I ended up sitting by myself. That was when the buzz began. The stories about me couldn’t have been passed around quicker even in a general announcement over loudspeakers.
I had no idea exactly what the girls were saying about me yet, but Lisa Dirk couldn’t wait to be a messenger. She came sauntering over and slid into the seat across from me.
“How come you’re sitting all by yourself?” she asked. It was obvious that she knew the answer. My senior girlfriends didn’t want me, and I didn’t want them.
I didn’t reply. I just ate with my gaze focused on nothing, least of all her.
“Is it true what we hear?” she asked. “About you and Ricky Burns?”
I put my sandwich down and leaned toward her. The expression on my face frightened her, and she pulled back.
“I don’t know what you heard, and I really don’t care.”
“We heard that you threw yourself at him on his boat. You called him from a stateroom, and you were naked,” she blurted.
“They’re spreading lies about me,” I said, even though I knew it would be useless and a waste of time to defend myself. It was like holding back a waterfall with your bare hands. They were a chorus of gossipers, and I was a lone, lost voice.
“I’d never guess you were like that,” Lisa said, ignoring my denial. “To go after a senior boy so desperately is sad.”
“Sad?”
I was holding back a flood of truth with a dam made of paper. It was charging down my tongue. I was moments away from telling it all. I’m not Kiera’s cousin. While she was high on some drug, Kiera ran my mother and me over and killed my mother. Her mother took me in, enrolled me in this school, and made up that story.
For a moment, I thought I had actually shouted it all, broken through the dam, but I quickly realized that what kept the dam secure was my fear that telling the truth about myself would only alienate me even more from my classmates. Who would want to be friends with a homeless girl? No one in that school would want to be seen talking to me. That was for sure.
I couldn’t skip all of that and defend myself by telling Lisa I had been raped, either. Mr. March had forbidden me to say it. I could only swallow it all back and ignore everyone, but that was hard to do. By the end of the day, I felt covered in cobwebs of lies and distortions. There wasn’t an eye not looking my way or a tongue not wagging about me. I might just as well have been walking around naked. My limping was nothing when it came to drawing attention compared with the globs of mud thrown at me. In fact, they almost didn’t notice my limp, because they were too busy elaborating on the lies about my sexual exploits and sly ways. They saw only this promiscuous new student who probably had a bad reputation at her old school. In their minds, that was why I was so mysterious when it came to my past.
I did the best I could in my favorite class, art, but when I tried to start a new calligraphy project, I could only think of the horrible tattoo on my back and sat there for the longest time staring at blank paper. Mr. Longo kept coming over and encouraging me, but by the time the bell rang, I had hardly begun anything. I was the same earlier in music. I played my clarinet mechanically and so poorly that Mr. Denacio threw one of his famous fits.
“If I don’t see an improvement in you soon,” he threatened, “I will have to reconsider appointing you to a position in the school band.”
I didn’t protest. I had no enthusiasm for anything and plodded my way through the corridors from class to class. Occasionally, I caught sight of Kiera looking at me from across a hallway. At one point, I thought she looked amazed at how well her plan had succeeded. She seemed in awe of herself.
Ricky never gave me a second glance. A few times, I was tempted to walk up to him to ask him how he could be so cruel, but he and Boyd were always laughing, and I was sure that if I did speak to either of them, they would make me feel foolish and even more embarrassed than I already was.
Except for band practice on Tuesday and Thursday, I returned home immediately after school and went up to the guest room. I didn’t start right in on my homework as I used to do. I sat for quite a while just looking out the window, wondering what I could possibly do now and where I would eventually end up. I was terribly worried about becoming pregnant. I had no idea what I would do if my period didn’t come. I wanted to visit Mama’s grave, hoping that somehow she would talk to me and tell me what I should do, but I was afraid to ask Mrs. March for anything.
Mrs. March didn’t say much to me all week. When we confronted each other, she looked as sad and as lost as I did. I was numb by now, but she still appeared to be on the verge of new tears. She did tell me that Mr. March was still researching what was best for me under the new circumstances. I understood that this didn’t include my staying with them even like this. Sometimes, when I thought about all that Kiera had managed and how they had accepted everything she and her friends said as being true, I became more angry than sad for myself. I recalled the advice from Jackie, the nurse, and was tempted to threaten them with a lawsuit. I’d find my father, and he’d come back to do it.
Oddly, though, no matter how poorly I was being treated now, I couldn’t harden my heart against Mrs. March, and I actually felt sorrier for Mr. March. Kiera had him so tightly wrapped around her finger that he couldn’t see. Eventually, he would suffer some great tragedy. I went from wishing for it to chastising myself for wishing such evil things on someone.
In the midst of my misery, my loneliness in the dark side of the March mansion where my own footsteps echoed, I w
ould find myself recalling some happier, sunnier moments with Mama, even on the streets after we had sold more than we had expected. She would splurge, and we’d have ice cream sundaes or get foot-long submarine sandwiches and sit out on the beach as if we were back to being as we once were. She didn’t buy any alcohol with the extra money, so she was more like my mother again. She would tell me stories about her own youthful days in Portland, her boyfriends in high school, the plays she had been in, and the parties afterward.
I had heard many of the stories before, but for me, they were like the fairy tales other parents read to their children. Kids never heard them enough. You could recite them and know exactly what was coming next, but there was something special about having your mother or father read them repeatedly to you. It made you feel safe, wrapped securely in their love and in the magic they could conjure with their voices. The hard, cold world was kept outside. Nothing bad could happen, and you could slip softly into a comfortable sleep, unafraid of the darkness it necessarily had to bring along with it. There was always the promise of tomorrow.
Now there was no promise of tomorrow, and the cold, hard world had found its way to come back at me. There was no escape, no safety, and the darkness that came with sleep now was terrifying, not because it brought old ghosts and nightmares but because it made me blind and afraid to take another step forward, to have another thought, to dare to make another wish.
On Friday, Kiera broke her vow of silence when it came to me and approached me in the cafeteria, but it wasn’t to express any regret or remorse. She didn’t sit at my table. She stood across from me, keeping her distance as if she were afraid I might attack her.
“I see you’re still having trouble making new friends,” she began, nodding at the empty chairs.
“I’m not looking for new friends yet, but when I do, I’ll be more careful about choosing them,” I replied.
“You don’t have to be careful about it or worry about it. I doubt you’ll be here that much longer, anyway.”