“I need to spend more time with you,” Ava said. “Especially after last night.”
Marla looked at me enviously. Ava wasn’t up this early talking to her because of her. She was up talking to her because of me. “What happened last night?” she asked.
“Never mind,” Ava said.
“I’m old enough to know,” Marla moaned. If she was looking to Mrs. Fennel for any help, she might as well look at the wall, I thought. Neither she nor Ava responded. Marla sulked, but when Mrs. Fennel glanced at her, she quickly returned to her breakfast.
I sat and started on my cereal. Like everything else Mrs. Fennel made, it was different from anything my classmates would eat. From what I understood, many of them didn’t even eat breakfast, and if they did, it was some sweet cake or some supposedly healthy morning drink their mothers made them drink. Of course, they were starving at lunch. Mrs. Fennel always prepared our special lunch drink for Marla and me. We drank it with one of her unique crackers, which were always a dark gray color, nothing that appeared too appetizing to the other students who saw us drinking and eating.
Recently, Meg Logan, pretending to have a change of heart about me, had sweetly asked me what I ate and what skin cream I used. As difficult as it was for her to admit it, she envied me for my complexion and my figure. Of course, I couldn’t tell her, because I really didn’t know exactly what I was eating or what Mrs. Fennel put into her recipe for our skin creams. I couldn’t describe the flavors, either, at least not in ways she or any of the others would understand, and Mrs. Fennel had made it very clear, frighteningly clear, that we must never let anyone else taste our food.
“Nothing unusual,” I replied, which she took as a blowoff.
She pulled her head back and her nose up, as if she had suddenly smelled something horrible. “Well, excuse me for asking,” she said. “You might not eat anything unusual, but you’re certainly weird.”
“Is that the only word in your vocabulary, Meg? Try ‘different,’ ‘strange,’ ‘peculiar,’ and give ‘weird’ a day off. In fact, shut up for a day, and give the English language a break.”
She muttered something under her breath and hurried away to tell her friends what I had said. They all glared angrily in my direction. Although I wouldn’t show it, I would have to admit that all of this bothered me. When I told Ava about the looks they often gave me, she said, “Ignore them. They’re meaningless,” but I was having trouble doing it—more trouble, I believed, than she and Brianna had had when they were my age. Neither had ever expressed the unhappiness I felt at school and at not being part of anything girls my age were a part of. Why didn’t they long for these things as much as I did?
Of course, I was very curious about what Ava wanted to discuss. It had to be important to get her up this early. She began the moment we were all in the car and leaving for school.
“I told Daddy that I had a really good feeling about you last night. I don’t have to tell you, Lorelei, that I’ve had my doubts about you.”
“Why?”
“That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is I saw things going on in you last night that were positive, things that reminded me of myself when I first went out. You’re a quick study, maybe even quicker than I was.”
“Really?”
Was this my sister Ava talking? Giving me compliments? Was I really the reason for this new bloom about her face, this pleasantness and happiness? I couldn’t help but be suspicious. When would the famous second shoe be dropped? What was the catch here? Where was all of this flattery taking me?
“Yes,” she said, smiling at me. “Maybe you don’t realize it yet, but the change, as Daddy likes to refer to it, has begun in you and, I might add, is going gangbusters. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it in yourself.”
“I do, Ava, but I’m not sure what it is I’m feeling exactly.”
“You’re feeling the power,” she said.
“What is the power?”
“The gift that makes it possible for you to do for Daddy what your sisters, what I, have done for him. It’s not just being attractive. You will mesmerize, capture, and fascinate. When the expression He lost his head over her is applied to you, it will have real meaning.” She laughed. “You’ll get to feel like a goddess, like the puppeteer pulling the strings and making them dance. You had a taste of that last night, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
She smiled and nodded. “I remember my first taste of it. It was truly like drinking from the Fountain of Youth. The energy, the strength, the confidence in yourself that you feel right now will never die, Lorelei.”
“You make it sound as if we’re immortal.”
She smiled and then lost the smile quickly as her real purpose for getting up early and driving me returned. “The reason I wanted to drive you to school today and talk to you, something Daddy insists on, by the way, is that you’re going to see the change reflected in the way the boys in your school look at you today. You’re going to lay down a direct path to their libidos.”
“What’s a libido?” Marla asked. For a while, I had forgotten she was with us, I was so lost in the things Ava was saying.
“You want the technical definition?” Ava asked, winking at me.
“Okay.”
“It’s what Sigmund Freud called the generalized sexual energy of which conscious activity is the expression. I’m taking a course in human psychology,” Ava told me.
She never discussed or even mentioned her classes at UCLA. I always thought it was an unpleasant experience for her but something she had to do because Daddy asked her to do it. In fact, she complained so much about doing it that I was afraid to ask her anything.