“I don’t get into the personal lives of our employees. And she doesn’t look like a chipmunk. Let’s just forget it. I’m tired,” Daddy said, his voice strained with defeat and frustration.
They were quiet. I waited, listening. I was just about to turn away when Mother said, “I’ll look into enrolling them in Betsy Ross. But not this semester. The next. It’s coming up very soon.”
“That’s good, Keri. It will give you a chance to spend more time with your friends, too. You should get out more.”
“Oh, that’s so shortsighted, Mason. It’s when your children begin school and start to socialize that you need to spend more time with them.”
“Whatever. Whatever you think’s best,” he said, sounding like he was waving a white flag.
I waited, but I heard nothing more and returned to bed. Haylee woke when I crawled back under the blanket.
“I just heard something important,” I said.
“What?”
“Mother is going to look into enrolling us in Betsy Ross next semester, and she said that was very soon.”
“Good. I’m tired of only looking at your ugly face.”
“It’s your face, too,” I said.
“You don’t see it because you don’t want to,” she said, raising herself on her elbows, “but our faces are not really exactly alike. I’m prettier. When we go to school, you’ll see I’m right. I’ll have more friends, especially more boyfriends.”
“Don’t let Mother hear you say that. You’ll be in the pantry for days, and I won’t come to keep you company through the door.”
She lay back again. I was so angry that I didn’t think I could fall asleep.
“Don’t worry about Mother,” she said. “Someday she’ll think I’m prettier and nicer, too.”
I didn’t think there was anything she could say that would hurt me more.
But we were still young.
She would have lots of opportunities to come up with worse ideas.
And she did.
4
During the days that followed, Haylee thought I had lied to her, because Mother didn’t come right out the next day and tell us she finally was going to enroll us in the Betsy Ross school. Although I had caught Haylee lying to me many times, I had never lied to her, and she knew it. Nevertheless, she turned on me one afternoon and with a hateful look said, “You lied to me about our going to school, Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald. That was mean.”
“That’s silly, Haylee. Why would I lie to you about it?”
“You want to be more important than me,” she said. “Mother would never tell you something and not tell me.”
“I didn’t say she told me, Haylee. I said I overheard her talking to Daddy. You were asleep.”
She pursed her lips as she always did when she didn’t like something I had said. It was something else I rarely did, but somehow Mother never noticed. Maybe she didn’t think it was important. If she did see something one of us did differently, something that bothered her enough, like scowling or chewing the insides of our mouths when we were nervous, she would tell us to stop, or else “your sister will be doing it, too.” It was impossible to believe that one of us would do something that eventually the other wouldn’t. Mother had drummed that into our heads from the moment we could understand what she meant. However, I believed it more than Haylee did, I thought, which was why I was always frightened by some of the things Haylee did.
Haylee didn’t really care what was true and what wasn’t about what I had told her anyway.
“You just want to be more important,” she repeated. She was good at hearing what she wanted to hear and being deaf when something displeased her. Sometimes she could make me so angry and frustrated that I did feel like getting her into trouble, even if it meant I would be in trouble, too.
“You’ll see that I’m right and not lying,” I said, but now I wasn’t sure myself.
Mother had promised that she was going to do things for us in the past, especially things Daddy wanted her to do, and then she had never done them or had put them off so long that Daddy simply forgot about them. But us going to a real school was something Daddy often mentioned. I hoped he wouldn’t forget or give up. Being with others our age was something Haylee and I really wanted, although Haylee always told me she wanted it more, because I was more afraid of it than she was. She repeated that now.
“Why am I afraid of it?”