“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you. It will put me to sleep, a good sleep,” she said, and closed her eyes.
I stared at her a moment, and then I left, feeling as though I was the one who might begin to have nightmares.
20
New Friends
Oddly, that night, I thought I played the clarinet better than I ever had. It was as if Alena possessed me for a while and had me do it well enough to help her older sister get through her own darkness. Afterward, I went to sleep
feeling contented, too. I felt safer knowing that Kiera needed me.
For the first time, she was up before me in the morning. She knocked on my door, which was already different behavior for her. Usually, she would just burst in as if I didn’t have any right to privacy, especially in her dead sister’s suite. I thought it was Mrs. Duval and that I had overslept and was missing breakfast, but I saw it was early.
“Yes?”
Kiera peeked in first. “Hi,” she said, and entered. She was already dressed in a pink and blue tennis outfit and wore a blue wristband. I had never seen her look as fresh and as buoyant this early. She practically bounced over to my bed.
“Get up, get up!” she cried. “We’re having an early, simple breakfast, and then I’m going to teach you the fundamentals of tennis so that eventually we can play doubles. I’ve had all sorts of professional lessons, as you can imagine, so I’m qualified to give instruction. I’m not terrific, but I’m pretty good, better than most of the girls in my circle of friends, for sure. And it won’t take you long to be as good as, if not better than, them, too.”
“I’ve never played tennis.”
“That’s the point, silly. That’s why I want you up and out there with me this morning.” She smiled coyly. “I have a few friends coming over to play later, swim, and have lunch. I got my parents’ permission,” she added quickly.
“Really?” I said, feeling a little excitement but not rushing to get up.
“I know what’s troubling you. Stop worrying about your limping. You get around pretty quickly when you want to, and you’ll see that in doubles, you don’t have to move that fast, anyway.”
“But I can’t expect to be too good at it, good enough to play with you and your friends.”
“So? None of us is going to be in any tournaments. It’s just for fun. Stop arguing. If you’re going to call yourself a March, you have to live up to the March reputation for self-confidence, if not downright arrogance. My father happens to be an excellent tennis player. My mother, however, is a professional sideliner.”
“Sideliner? What’s that?”
“Someone who sits on the sidelines, silly,” she said. “She worries about breaking a fingernail even more than I do.”
I couldn’t help but laugh with her, even though it felt wrong to make fun of Mrs. March. Kiera was so lighthearted and happy, I didn’t want to ruin her mood. I had gone to sleep wondering if everything she had said and claimed she wanted was just words that would drift away with all of the broken promises I had heard in my life, but this morning, that didn’t seem to be happening.
I started to rise, and she went to the closet.
“Alena had a very cute tennis outfit that should fit you,” she said, and began to look for it. While she did, I went to the bathroom and prepared to get dressed. She was waiting with the outfit when I came out, and she stood there watching me try it on.
“You have a pretty good figure for your age,” she said. “With the right clothes and makeup, no one would say you were only fourteen. I didn’t have boobs and a rear end like that until I was sixteen.”
Her comments brought unexpected heat to my face. I caught my image in the closet wall mirror and saw that my cheeks were crimson. It wasn’t that I never thought of myself as becoming a woman. I used to worry about it when Mama and I were living in the streets, in fact, because I had not gotten my first period. I expected that our poor diet would have an impact on my development, perhaps stunting me. When my first period came, I was excited and told Mama. She had looked at me and started to cry.
“I can’t be happy for you,” she had said. “Not now.”
But I wanted to be happy for myself. I’ll be all right after all, I thought. Mama had once had a beautiful figure, and when I looked at myself from time to time, I dared to think I might get to look just like her, like she was before this had all happened to us.
Kiera laughed at the way I blushed. “You’re embarrassed, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said, but not very convincingly. “Don’t you ever think of yourself as being sexy?”
“Not really.”