“You make it sound as if we’re all two different people fighting with each other.”
“We are,” she said, spinning on me. “That’s the point, Semantha. There’s you in your developing body, and there’s you in your mind, which doesn’t always keep up. You already know where to touch yourself to feel the excitement, right? Right?” she asked again sharply, stepping toward me.
“Yes,” I said. She looked as if she would pounce on me if I hesitated one second.
She nodded and sat on the bed again. “Now, I’m sure you’ve been lying here,” she said, her voice growing softer as she ran her hand over my bed, “dreaming of what it would be like to have Kent Pearson touch you in those places.”
I started to shake my head.
“Don’t!” she snapped. “Don’t be dishonest with me, Semantha. Not for a second, not an instant. Tell me the truth right now. You have, haven’t you? Well?”
I took a deep breath. Despite my age, my youth, I still felt there were things that should be private and only mine. She was reaching so deep down inside me, reaching to explore places I hadn’t explored myself. She was crawling into my fantasies, my dreams. Even the closest of sisters, brothers, even husbands and wives, can’t possibly share all that.
“You don’t have be ashamed with me, Semantha. I’m your sister, your only really faithful companion. No one will care for you as much as I do. Being sisters, we can share the most intimate things, and now that you’re obviously at the age when you will have more intimate things to share and explore, I’ll be here for you. So, admit it. Am I correct about your thoughts concerning Kent Pearson? Well?”
“Yes,” I said, barely above a whisper.
She nodded, smiling with satisfaction. “That’s good, Semantha. It’s good that you trust me. You know I trust you, because I’ve told you things I wouldn’t tell Mother. I knew you wouldn’t go running to her to tell on me, either. You’re my best friend in the world.”
That took me by surprise. Of course, I knew she had no real friends. She talked to other girls about schoolwork and did hang around with some girls at school, girls I thought no one really wanted to have as friends, but I never dreamed she would tell me that I was her best friend. Sisters didn’t have to be best friends. I knew many other girls and boys, for that matter, who wouldn’t consider their sisters and brothers best friends. Most were always complaining about them.
“Now, then,” she continued, returning to her mother demeanor, “since you’ve already fantasized, imagined Kent touching you in places that would get you excited, the danger of your actually permitting him to do so is that much greater. It might even seem as if you’re still dreaming, and don’t forget that there is that terrific curiosity in you, that thing about your body I described, its craving, as I put it.”
“Craving?”
“It craves to be touched, to be riled up and brought to that point where it can welcome more. It’s the more that’s most dangerous.”
“Oh. I know about how we get pregnant and all that, Cassie.”
“You know nothing,” she said sharply. “You’ve never been fondled, kissed passionately, touched, and driven toward an orgasm. Yes, you’ve read about it in your textbooks or those silly romance novels on your shelves there. My God, The Taste of Love, The Deepest Kiss, Under My Secret Heart? Give me a break. None of those books will tell you the absolute truth, help you to understand yourself.”
“What is the absolute truth?” I asked.
“Simply this, Semantha. No matter how nice Kent Pearson is to you or any boy is or will be, he wants only one thing: to satisfy his own need.”
I nodded. Should I tell her what Gloria Benson had told me about herself and Donald Marcus, how they had agreed not to do it but she satisfied him a different way? It had shocked me when I first heard it, and despite what Cassie had just said about us being best friends, I couldn’t get myself to share it with her and describe it.
“So,” she said, “you can go to the party with Kent. I’m sure he’ll try to get you to go to a private place in the house, and then he’ll kiss you and touch you and try to get you to let him insert himself inside you, and if you’re not careful and if you don’t have the willpower to resist, you could be very, very sorry. It could ruin your whole life!”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry, Cassie. I’m not going to do that.”
“You say you won’t, but when you’re there in the darkness, alone with him whispering all sorts of things in your ear and touching you, and you’re thinking about your fantasies … it could happen. I won’t be there to protect you. No one will.”
“It won’t happen,” I repeated more firmly. “Don’t worry.”
“Because you can ruin yourself for more important things, Semantha,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You’re a Heavenstone. You have a major obligation to our family, our heritage, to all Daddy has been building for our family.”
I nodded, but I wanted to ask her why she didn’t think of her own obligation, too. She told me before I could ask.
“Just as I do,” she said. “Why do you think it is that I’m so particular about whom I see? I have control of myself, and I want you to have control of yourself. Do you understand me? Do you understand the things I’ve told you?”
“Yes, Cassie.”
She pulled herself back and tucked in the corners of her mouth as she looked at me. “I wouldn’t have to do this if our mother had done her job with you,” she said again.
“She’s done her job. She’s told me about sexual things, Cassie,” I said.
Her eyes grew colder, darker, as her cheeks sank. She turned in her lips so tightly that little white lines ran above her top lip and below her bottom lip. “Mother told you? What sexual things?”