Either to help Sophia feel better about it or maybe to make me feel less happy, she said, “I’m sure Angelica Johnson asked her daughter to invite Delia as a favor to me.”
“Well, what does that say about me, Mother? She didn’t invite me. Is that a favor for you?” Sophia asked, wagging her head so hard I thought she would give herself a headache.
“I’m sure it’s probably because of the girls you hang out with. I have told you many times, Sophia, that I don’t approve of the friends you’ve made. You make your own bed. Apparently, Delia’s making some nice friends.”
“Huh?” Sophia said. She thought a moment and then threw her spoon down and folded her arms. “You mean you’re going to let her go to the Johnson party even though I’ve been snubbed?”
“You’ve been invited to things I haven’t been invited to,” I said softly.
Rarely did I interject myself between them when they argued, but I also rarely heard Tía Isabela defend me, for whatever reason she had.
“She has a point, Sophia.”
“A point?”
“Do you want me to ask Danielle’s mother about it? I’m sure I can get her to invite you.”
“Absolutely not! Do you think I’m desperate to be invited to parties, desperate for friends?”
“So why are you making such a ruckus about it?” Tía Isabela asked.
I kept my eyes down, but I could almost feel the heat and frustration coming from Sophia.
“Forget about it,” she finally said. “If you don’t care, I don’t care.”
“Good,” Tía Isabela said.
I looked up at her. She was too pleased, I thought. She wasn’t only trying to teach Sophia some lesson. She was hoping for something else. It was so hard to live in a house with two spiders weaving their webs in dark corners, hoping I would fall into one of them.
The silence started to weave its own cocoons around each of us, but Sophia, never one just to accept and retreat, made a new demand.
“When are you going to decide about my having my own car? I have to wait for her after school if I want to come home in our limousine or ride in that stinking car with Casto. It’s embarrassing! You don’t like me riding with Alisha, who happens to have her own car even though her parents don’t have a quarter of our money.”
“When I think you’re responsible enough to have a car,” Tía Isabela said, “I’ll get you one. And I told you, I don’t want you riding around with Alisha.”
“If my father was alive, I’d have it by now. I’d have had it on my sixteenth birthday! He would want it. He left me a fat trust fund, didn’t he?”
“And when you’re old enough to have control of some of those funds, you can waste them any way you like, Sophia, but once you do,” Tía Isabela added, her eyes quickly glowing into hot coals, “you won’t get any money from me.” She sat back. “And I doubt you would get any from Edward.”
“No,” Sophia said wagging her head. “I wouldn’t get anything from Edward. He’d give it all to her,” she said, nodding at me. “The two of them don’t fool me, even if they fool you,” she fired back at her mother.
“Fool me? Fool me about what? What are you saying, you idiot?”
“Nothing,” Sophia replied, picking up her cereal spoon again and smiling. “Only…you’d better start wondering why Edward and Jesse spend so much time alone with her.”
Tía Isabela looked at me.
The implied accusation now brought a crimson tint into my face.
“Sometimes the innocent look guilty because they are so embarrassed by the innuendos and they are so outraged they are too vigorous in their denials and fit Shakespeare’s great line in Hamlet, ‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks,’” Mr. Buckner had said just yesterday during our reading of Hamlet. “The line between the innocent and the guilty gets blurred.”
I looked at Sophia when he told us that. She was doodling in her notebook and not paying attention, as usual. I wondered, if she had paid attention, would it make any difference?
“That’s not funny, Sophia,” Tía Isabela said. “What happens in this house reflects on me. Just remember that.”
“What happens in this house reflects on all of us, Mother. I live here, too. You, yourself, have told me that you think Edward dotes on her far too much. Well, maybe they do more than dote, and right under your nose.”
“That’s enough,” Tía Isabela snapped. “I have a full day today, and I don’t need to be aggravated before I even begin. You had better watch your own behavior, Sophia, and not worry about your brother.”