“I know,” Haylee said. “We do.”
“Then there is no problem. Kaylee likes Sarah, too, don’t you, Kaylee?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Haylee?”
“She likes my friend Melanie Rosen, too,” Haylee quickly inserted, so that I would not get what I wanted while she didn’t get what she wanted. “We both do.”
“Then you mean our friend Melanie, don’t you?” Mother corrected.
“Yes, Mother.”
“You don’t want any friends who don’t like your sister as much as they like you, and your sister doesn’t want any friends who don’t like you as much as they like her. Is that clear?”
Haylee nodded. Mother looked at me, so I nodded, too. It was like swallowing some bad-tasting medicine to have to pretend to like Melanie. For one thing, she made fun of Sarah whenever she could. She cheated on tests, stealing answers willingly given by Haylee, answers I had given her. So she was really cheating from me, too. Some of the things she told us when we were at her house disgusted me, especially about what her older brother was doing in the bathroom. I could see that Haylee enjoyed all that and even enjoyed my discomfort at hearing the details, which she now blamed on my being less mature.
“He doesn’t know it,” Melanie said proudly, “but I can see him reading magazines with pictures of naked women and then playing with himself. You know what I mean by that, don’t you, Kaylee? It’s not like he plays ring toss or something,” she said, grinning at Haylee, who grinned back.
“I know,” I said, even though I wasn’t as sure as Haylee was.
Sometimes I thought Haylee was conspiring with Melanie to make me feel uncomfortable and help her differentiate herself from me. I was sure she said things about me to her new friends. I did hear that she was telling them how much she had to look out for me because I was so trusting and innocent. She made it seem like I was a big burden.
Mother, who was unaware of all this, was pleased at how we were supposedly making friends together. I didn’t like the way we were deceiving her, but if I didn’t go along with it, I wouldn’t have any of the friends I wanted to have. They would all be Haylee’s friends.
Now Mother looked at us both for a moment and then smiled and nodded. “You’ll both be just fine if you depend on each other the way your left hand depends on your right,” she said. “You can depend on your sister, Haylee.” We waited for her to say the same to me, but she didn’t. It was so unusual, but I didn’t want to do anything to remind her.
Haylee looked down rather than at me. She was afraid I would gloat the way she would at the way Mother had singled one of us out for a warning or what seemed clearly to be a compliment. Then she surprised me by looking up with a little more defiance than usual and said, “Sometimes we need our peers to teach us things, right, Mother? Things neither of us knows because we don’t have the same experiences or haven’t been to the same places. That’s okay, isn’t it, Mother?”
Mother’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What places, Haylee?”
She shrugged. “Places. I don’t know.”
Mother nodded to herself as a suspicion emerged. She looked from me to Haylee, who could clearly see that she had said too much. “Do any of your girlfriends have boyfriends already?” She looked quickly at me first for our response.
“Not steady boyfriends,” I offered.
“I think,” Mother said, nodding to herself again, “that the time has come for us to have a serious talk about the stork and his first visit.”
She indicated that we should go into the great room. Haylee looked up at me quickly, suspecting that I might have said something more to Mother secretly. I hadn’t, but I tried to look more surprised than she was so she wouldn’t think that.
“W
e can’t depend on what you learn in science and health classes,” Mother began, after we had sat beside each other on the settee. She took her usual teacher position.
Haylee almost groaned. She was afraid that Mother was about to turn something exciting into another biology lesson.
“You know more about the human body than most of the other students in your class, I’m sure. Even before Haylee got hers, you already knew why you have a period every month and what that leads to. You knew that before anything about it was explained to you in school. You were always way ahead of the other girls your age because of the homeschooling,” she said proudly.
“She still doesn’t have one,” Haylee pointed out.
Mother closed and opened her eyes. Then she turned to her slowly. “Don’t you believe she will have it soon?”
“Yes.”
“Then why mention that at all, Haylee?”
“I don’t know.”