"But what do we actually do? Swear on a Bible or cut an X in our palms or something and take some sort of blood oath?" Misty inquired.
"Too typical, right out of comic books," Jade replied. "So, then what?" Misty looked at Star who looked at Jade. She nodded at the candle.
"We have to toss something into the small flame," Jade continued, "something that will prove how much we trust the OWP's."
"I don't understand," I said. "Into the flame?"
"That's just symbolic," Jade said. "Fire consumes, burns away the se/fish part of ourselves. It changes one form of energy into another. That's why it's so often used in any ritual."
"But what would we toss into it? What form of energy?" I looked at Misty who didn't look worried anymore. She looked intrigued.
"We make an offering, a deep secret," Jade said, glancing at Star, which convinced me the two of them had talked a little about all this. "We change a secret into a common bond, an offering, a
commitment to each other. It has to be something we didn't even tell Doctor Marlowe, something so close, so revealing, we couldn't do it. Obviously, something then, that no one else knows about us. If you've told someone, it's no good. In fact," she said, tightening her lips and making her eyes even darker, "we need something you even hate to tell yourself."
Everyone was silent. The candle licked the air, the flame snapping at each of us as if it was challenging us, calling for our secrets.
Jade finally broke the silence. "Cat, why don't you go first."
"I can't think of anything worse or more secret than what I told you all about my father and me," I said.
"Think harder," Jade ordered.
I struggled with memories. I've told them everything that matters when I was with them at Doctor Marlowe's, I thought.
"Well?" Misty asked, shaking my hand. "Give her a chance," Star ordered.
I really did tell them almost everything about my father and me, I thought. I wanted to get all that out of my system. What could I give them now?
And then it came to me. I couldn't have told them this because I didn't know it then myself.
"My mother," I said, "is more than just my adoptive mother. She's my half sister."
Misty and Jade dropped my hands at the same time I opened my eyes. They were all looking at me.
"Your half sister?" Jade asked. "I don't understand."
"Remember how you all kept asking me why my parents would want to adopt me, why my mother especially would take on the responsibility of a child if she was so uptight about everything? Well, that's the reason."
I told them what I knew about my real mother getting pregnant with me and how my half sister had been influenced by her father and eventually got married and was persuaded to pretend she was my adoptive mother.
"No one else but me and my mother and father knows the truth," I said. "No one but you now."
"But who's your real father then?" Misty asked
"I don't know. There's a lot I still don't know. It's worse than pulling teeth to get my mother to tell me anything else."
"You still call her your mother?"
"It's hard not to call her that when I speak to her, but I really can't think of her like my mother anymore. It's easier for me to think of you all as my sisters than her. She wants me to call her my mother anyway, and she's always reminding me that she's legally my guardian and I've got to neat her with the same respect a parent deserves. She says sisters don't have the same reverence for each other. You know how she rules the house, how she always did.
"It's complicated," I admitted, "but up until now, I've done what Jade said, I've avoided thinking about it myself. I mean, I'd like to know more, but I don't as well. Know what I mean?"
"No," Misty said. "That's all too wild. Your whole life you thought your sister was your mother? I don't know what I would do if I found out such a secret. Why did they keep it a secret? It's crazy."
"I know. I guess anyone would think we're a sick family," I said, and stared at the flickering candlelight. "How I wish that what Jade said would happen could happen," I told them.
"What do you mean?" Misty asked.
"That I could toss all this into the fire and watch it go up in smoke."
They all stared at me, and then Star shook her head. "What?" Misty asked her.
"Just like Cat," she said, "to come up with a secret that none of us could top. Well, I guess that gets us off the hook."
"Yeah, Cat's secret makes anything I could come up with sound so stupid," Misty said, looking at Jade.
Jade sighed deeply. "I agree," she said finally, putting her stamp of approval on the decision.
4 True Confessions
The girls were shocked that I knew so little about my family and my origin. All I could say was "I don't know," and "I'm not sure," to every question they fired at me, making me feel like some criminal under the lights in a police station.
"If it was me, I'd be dying to know everything," Misty finally said. "I'd nag and nag until your mother, I mean half sister, told you every nitty-gritty detail. I'd give her no peace, not a moment."
"It's not that easy to talk to my mother," I said. "She can turn herself off like a light switch."
"I know what you said before, but I still don't understand how you can sit there and still call her your mother!" Jade cried. "You know now that she's not."
I shrugged.
"I know what she's told me, but it hasn't sunk in my head long enough I guess. It's all I've ever called her," I added when she widened her grimace.
"I wouldn't desecrate the word by calling her Mother." "You can't just erase all these years in a few minutes," I protested.
"From what you've been telling us about her," Star said, "you'd think you'd be glad not to have to call her Mother. What's her name?"
"Geraldine. I do think of her more as Geraldine since she told me the truth."
"She'd be lucky to have me call her that. I can think of a lot of better names for her. She's got no right to keep any of it secret," she added, "not now. Misty's right. You should want to know everything"
"I guess I do want to know. It's just that..."
"You're just afraid of her," Jade concluded. She thought a moment. "Did you ever think that maybe she's lying? Maybe she made it all up just to keep you under her thumb. Just from the little we know about her from what you've told us, I think she's capable of doing something like that."
Star nodded.
"What proof do you have that she's telling you the truth?" Jade demanded.
"Proof? Nothing," I said. "Except what she has told me."
"That's no proof, girl. Jade's right. First thing you do is snoop around, look for letters, documents, pictures, any- thing that will tell you something."
"You mean, go look through her personal things?" "Well sure, what else? They're your personal things too, right?"
"I don't know if I could do that. She guards her privacy religiously. I'm rarely in her room."
"You've got to find out more," Misty said, her face serious and determined. "You should be told who your real father is, for starters. It's not fair. It's not right." She looked at Star who nodded.
"Maybe she really doesn't know," I said.
"Maybe she does," Jade said. "All right," she added, straightening up and turning to them, "we have our first OWP project: to help Cat discover everything and anything about her own past."
They agreed quickly.
"What do you mean? What are you going to do?" I asked, my heart thumping. I was going to be in plenty of trouble as it was, sneaking out and coming here after Geraldine had specifically forbidden it.
"Were you born in Los Angeles?"
"I think so," I said. "I don't know."
"You don't even know where you were born?" Star cried.
"She never said where I was born."
"At least see if you can find out where and we'll see if we can check birth records, for starters," Jade plotted.
"Yeah, you have to ha
ve a birth certificate," Star said, "and your parents would be on it!"
"Maybe it was a secret birth, in a basement or an attic," Misty suggested with her eyes full of stories. "And then they forged a birth certificate. I read that in this book and--"
"Where did your real mother live?" Jade asked, waving Misty off as if she was waving away an annoying fly. "Here, in Pacific Palisades, not far from us."
"So at least you remember her?" Misty said.
"I didn't know her very well. My mother wasn't ever all that eager to take me to see her. I don't think they got along well."
"What about your grandfather?" Jade asked. "I mean, the man you thought was your grandfather," she corrected.
"He died two years later. I remember him a little better, although he wasn't really very interested in me and I didn't see all that much of him either. He was around holidays and such, but not too often otherwise."
"No wonder," Star muttered. "He always knew you weren't his, right?"
"I guess. Geraldine said he knew I wasn't his child, but I don't know."
"Will you stop with that 'I don't know' ! If I hear it one more time, I'll go mad!" Jade screeched.
"Well, I don't," I said, tears coming to my eyes. "It's something I just found out and I guess I'm still in some shock about it."
Jade looked up at the ceiling a moment as she regained control of herself.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Your assignment is to search for and locate any and all information that might shed light on your past."
"My assignment?"
"As a member of the OWP's. I'm the president, remember? I can give out assignments."
"When did we decide that?" Misty asked, her head tilted like a kitten.
"Just now. Any objections?"
Misty thought for a moment and shrugged. "I guess not," she said. Then her expression changed, her face brightening "Hey--when are we going
swimming' You mentioned it when we first came."
"Misty, can't you stay on the topic we're discussing?" Misty shrugged.
"I thought we were finished?'
"Oh, brother," Jade said. She looked to Star who smiled and shook her head. "All right, I guess we accomplished what we set out to do business-wise for now. Let's go to my room and I'll find bathing suits for everyone," Jade finished
"I don't know if I want to go swimming," I said.
"We all want to go swimming so you do, too. You're not going to start being negative, are you?" she asked, her eyes narrowing slightly. "You're not going to disagree every time we decide something?" Her voice rose in pitch. My heart actually began to skip beats. I shook my head.
"No, I..."
"So? Then? What?" she asked, raising her arms. "I don't know how to swim," I confessed.
Her mouth froze in the shape of an O.
"You don't know how to swim?" She looked at Star, who shook her head, and then turned back to me, skeptical. "How can that be? You never learned in school?"
"I had a doctor's excuse when I was younger. I once got a bad earache and my mother thought swimming would make it worse, and there isn't a pool at the parochial school I attend."
"No one ever took you to the beach or to a pool?" Star asked.
"No." I looked down. "My mother wouldn't ever buy me a bathing suit. Remember when I told you my father was thinking about building a pool?"
"Yeah, and your mother wasn't happy about it, so the idea of it went away," Star recalled.
"And with it, my hope of learning how to swim."
"All right," Jade said, lifting her shoulders, "second major OWP project is going to be teaching Cat how to swim."
"Really?" Misty said.
"Really," Jade said. "If one of us is weak in an area, we all are. That's what it means to be bound, to be one. Did you forget already?" she demanded.
"No." Misty started to smile but stopped. Jade looked like she might just explode any moment if another syllable even vaguely opposed to something she said was uttered.
"Let's go," she commanded, and leaned over to blow out the candle. Moments later, we left her secret room and headed for her bedroom and her closet, a walk-in, almost as big as my entire room.
Her room itself was three times the size of mine. She had a vanity table with a marble top and a gilded mirror that ran the length of the entire wall. I laughed to myself imagining what Geraldine would say about it if she saw it. You couldn't help but look at yourself all the time in this room.
Jade's bed, like her mother's, was also a canopy with white silk draped over posts. There were at least a half dozen huge pillows with frilly lace pillowcases that matched the beautiful bedspread. On the night table was a light red telephone shaped like a pair of lips.
Built into the wall directly across from her bed was not only a large screen television, but a stereo system.
All of her furniture had a glossy pearl finish. There were two dressers, an armoire, and a desk. The walls were a light pink. It looked like pink cloth. She had no posters, but on one wall was a painting of John Lennon of the Beatles. It looked very expensive.
When we all gazed into her walk-in closet, we could only stare at the rows and rows of garments, the shelves of shoes and the built-in dresser.
"There's more clothing here than in some stores," Star remarked.
"Every year I give away about a quarter of it to charities," Jade said.
"Put me on the list of charities," Star said, and Jade laughed.
She went directly to the dresser, opened the next-to- bottom drawer and began flinging bathing suits at us.
"This should fit Misty. I wore it only once when I was twelve," she added.
"Thanks a lot."
"Well, be happy I saved it," Jade retorted.
Misty held it up and reluctantly nodded.
"It looks like it will fit me," she said, "and it's not bad."
It was a black and gold one-piece with the black on one side of the top, streaking down over the center of the suit where it then wrapped around to the rear.
"Star is about my size so choose any of these," she ordered and heaved three at her. "Wait. This is my favorite bikini, but you can wear it today," she added and threw that as well. Star caught the top and held it up. The bottom was a thong.
"You wore this?" she asked.
"Only here, never at the beach. I'm a coward. Try it on. Go on," she urged and Star began to disrobe. Misty was already down to her bra and panties.
"Cat, I have this pair of shorts that matches my biggest bikini top," she added.
I stared at it.
"Unless you want to go topless," she added with a teasing smile.
I shook my head and took the faded pink top.
"It's going to be too small," I said. "It won't fasten in the back."
She thought a moment.
"We'll tie something to it. Here," she said and plucked a pink ribbon from the top of the dresser. "Just make a knot and it will work fine. It doesn't matter what it will look like. It's only us," she added.
Misty was already stepping into her suit. I looked at her with envy. She raised her eyebrows when she saw me staring.
"What?"
"I wish I had your figure," I said.
"What? Did you hear that? We're supposed to tell each other the truth," she reminded me.
"It is the truth," I said.
"I believe her," Jade said, picking out a suit for herself, another two piece, this one gold with a thong bottom. She started to get undressed and then stopped and looked at me. "Well?" she said. "Aren't you going to get into your bathing suit?"
"It's not a bathing suit," I moaned.
"It'll work, won't it? Later, we'll get you a real bathing suit and you can keep it here so your mother won't know," she added. Star laughed. She looked terrific in Jade's suit. What a beautiful figure she has, I thought. They all have beautiful figures. look like a baby elephant out there and I can't swim either.
I stared at the shorts and top in my hands I'll look so foolish in t
his, I thought. I was so ashamed of my figure that I was happy we didn't have as many mirrors at home.
"Can't I just watch you all swim?" I begged.
"No," Jade said firmly. She unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off quickly. "You're one of us now. You do what we do. There'll be no exceptions, no excuses."
I looked down. I felt myself trembling.
"Jade," Star said. "Maybe just this one time it's okay if she doesn't want to..."
"No," Jade insisted, flashing fire back at Star. "This is the first big test for the OWP's. We need to do everything together," she asserted.
"Okay, okay. Stop fighting," I cried. "I'll put on the suit, I'll try to swim." I wanted to be part of the group more than anything, even if it meant drowning in Jade's pool, wearing nothing more than a tight pink bikini top.
I reached back, undid my bra and took it off. I quickly put on the top Jade had given me and, just as I suspected, it was about an inch too short in back. Jade stepped around and tied the ribbon, making it work.
"There," she said. "You survived. Put on the shorts and let's get to the water. I have suntan lotion out in the cabana. And music, too."
I hurried to slip into the shorts she had given me. They were snug, but they worked.
"Onward, OWP's," Jade declared.
"It won't take you any time at all to learn how to swim," Misty said, coming up beside me. "Don't worry about it."
"Thanks," I said and followed them out, thinking that after everything that had happened so far at Jade's house, swimming will be easy.
Except for a gardener working in the far corner of the property, I was grateful to see that there was no one else around. When I put my foot in the water, I realized the pool was heated. It was almost as warm as a bath.
"My mother keeps the water warmer than necessary,"
49
V. C. ANDREWS
Jade explained. "I think she always did it to drive my father crazy. He was always complaining about how expensive it is. And she hardly ever goes swimming anymore."
She dove right in. Misty waded down the steps and Star followed behind her. Moments later they were splashing each other and laughing. I stood in the shallow end, my arms folded across my bosom, watching.
"Okay," Jade said, holding up her hand. "Let's help Cat."