She nodded at my computer. “What was that you were reading?”
“Oh, you know my friends. They have to send me every new bit of gossip.”
“What did we do without computers?” she asked herself as we walked to the stairway.
Unless I ran all the way, it took nearly thirty seconds to get there. The mansion, something built in a style the Marches called Richardsonian Romanesque, had three floors. We slept on the second level. There were guest rooms on the third floor and a storage room with family artifacts that neither Jordan nor Donald knew what to do with or where to place, even in this huge house. All of it waited like refugees hoping for a visa to another home. I realized that no matter how rich people were, most still hoarded really useless things. I’d probably be the same way. I had nothing when I came here, but if I could have brought even the smallest, most insignificant thing, I would have brought it and cherished it.
Donald and Jordan’s bedroom was right down the hall from mine. Kiera’s was closer to the stairway. When I first arrived, nothing was changed in my room. It was, as I understood it, exactly as it had been the day Alena died. She had loved giraffes, so there were pictures and paintings of them, lamps shaped like giraffes, and giraffes on most of the linen and pillowcases, as well as on the wallpaper. They were all still there, but over the course of three years, the suite had come a little closer to suiting who I was. The wallpaper had been changed only in the bathroom, but some of the things I liked were hung on the suite walls, including many of the works of calligraphy I did both in art class at school and at home. Donald had one in his office here, and Jordan had put one up in the entertainment room.
It had always been a delicate thing to change or replace anything that had been Alena’s. First, I didn’t want anyone to think I’d rather that they forget her and think only of me now. For a long time after I first arrived, I had felt her presence in the room and even had secret talks with her. Second, despite the time that had passed since her death, Jordan and Donald never seemed to be past it. I often caught one or the other looking at Alena’s picture or something of hers and then growing teary-eyed. Their sighs were deep and pained.
Inevitably, my identity eventually had to take hold in this room, how
ever. More than once when I first arrived, I offered to move to another room. There were so many guest suites that were just as large and comfortable, but Jordan wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted me close, and she told me it did her heart good to know that someone like me was living in Alena’s room. Even to this day, she referred to it that way, despite all that was mine in it now. Despite how long I had been here, it was still and probably always would be Alena’s room.
“Donald left already,” Jordan told me as we started to descend the curved stairway. “He’s going to Boston for four days,” she added.
I didn’t sense sadness in her voice as much as a note of defeat and acceptance. Donald had been traveling more and more and had been away from home for longer and longer periods of time. For as long as I’d been here, he always took business trips, but they did seem more spaced out back then and never for as many days. Jordan had begun to complain about it often at dinner, but he either didn’t respond or said it couldn’t be helped. He told her that they were busier than ever and it would be foolish to pass up big opportunities.
“Besides,” he said once, “you always knew what it would be like for us when we were married. You knew how I was about the things that I did. There should be no real surprises.”
I remember looking at her and wondering if she really had known. My mother hadn’t known what it would eventually be like when she got married to my father. I was sure that, like Jordan, she had had other dreams and visions for their marriage. It wasn’t fair for Donald to say that to Jordan, I thought. It made it sound as though she were partly to blame and should not complain. After all, didn’t he know who she was? Didn’t he realize how alone and lost she might feel?
“I’m going to a dinner tonight,” Jordan added as we continued down the stairway. “I’m sorry you have to eat alone. If you want, you can invite one of your friends over, but be sure you get your homework done, okay? Not that I have to remind you,” she said. “It’s just a habit I got into whenever I spoke to Kiera.”
I nodded but immediately began to think about whom I would choose. I knew it was very immodest of me to say it, but whomever I chose would be the object of envy for the other girls in my class with whom I was friendly. It wasn’t only because they would be coming to this extraordinary house with its game room and theater, its indoor and outdoor pools and tennis courts. I was far from oblivious when it came to how popular I had become at school for other reasons. In the beginning, it surprised me and even made me feel a little uncomfortable, but over time, I grew used to other girls vying for the seat next to mine or winning my friendship and approval. My phone was ringing too often, not only for Mrs. Duval and Jordan but for me as well. I hated gossip and backstabbing, especially when it came to girl bullying, but I would be a liar if I denied that being so important to them made me feel good.
Of course, I wasn’t receiving phone calls and attention only from girls, but until now, I hadn’t settled on any one boy. Nothing seemed to annoy them more than my dating someone one weekend and then another the following one. I hadn’t dated anyone for weeks now. Despite what Kiera and her friends had ended up doing to me, I was impressed with how they all avoided long-term relationships. Long-term for them was two weeks. “Playing the field,” Kiera used to say, “is a lot more fun. Besides, our parents are right. We’re too young to get so serious.”
Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought I saw looks of envy and regret on the faces of the girls who were going steady. Their time was so dominated by their boyfriends they didn’t spend much of it with us.
“Girls who go steady so young are insecure,” Kiera told me. “They don’t have confidence in themselves. They’re terrified that no one will ask them out.” She laughed and added, “Like Mrs. Caro is fond of saying, ‘A bird in hand is grand.’ But that’s not for me. I’d probably squeeze it to death.”
How stupid it would sound to anyone if I told them that Kiera’s words were still important to me. “Look at what she did to you, getting you to believe in a club called Virgins Anonymous and literally having you raped on that boat ride to Catalina Island. Why would you think anything someone like that had said was important or significant?” he or she would surely ask.
Because despite all that, I would tell them, I was still in her world, and no one knew better what rules to play by in that world than Kiera March. You have to give the devil her due. Besides, don’t forget, coming here from where I had been and what I had gone through was like landing on another planet for me.
In the beginning, I was terrified that the other students would learn the truth about me, discover that I had been homeless and lived on the streets. I thought their parents surely would warn them to stay away from me. They would tell them that I could be diseased or something. Despite living in the Marches’ home, I would be like a leper.
Ironically, at least in the beginning, Kiera was afraid that her friends would learn the truth about me, too, but of course, not for the same reasons. More students would know what she had done, and then she would be tainted not only by that crime but also by living beside a girl like me. To her, that was akin to some subtle punishment. So she went along with the story that I was her cousin who had moved in with her and her parents because my parents had been killed in a car accident. That was why I limped when I first arrived, why I had been injured, too.
When everything was eventually revealed, thanks to Kiera’s nearly killing herself with a drug known on the street as G, the truth about me emerged. By then, everyone had accepted me in the school. I was doing very well in my classes and had become a lead clarinet player in the orchestra. To my surprise, after all was known, I became something of a heroine. Instead of the truth chasing my classmates away from me, it drew them to me. Everyone wanted to know more about me. Suddenly, being poor and downtrodden was romantic.
Did I exploit all of this? Probably, but whom did I hurt? It felt good to take advantage of other girls and boys who had enjoyed so much, anyway. They weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They were born with a gold one. If it was all reversed and they could, they wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of me, I thought.
Did I lead the other girls to believe that I was far more sophisticated and worldly when it came to sex and boys than I really was? Yes, but I enjoyed the way they looked up to me, spoke to me, competed for my attention. After all, I had not only survived what had been done to me here, but I had also survived the streets. I had been to hell and back. Who could claim the same or similar experiences? They made me feel like a local celebrity, a sort of Pygmalion, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, educated and washed until she could no longer be distinguished from the blue bloods.
All of that reverence and respect never ended. In fact, it was happening more than ever, and I couldn’t help but smile at the irony. I sat where Kiera had sat, walked where she had walked, and held court just the way she had. I was the queen now, and I wasn’t about to give up my throne over a pang of conscience. I told myself there wasn’t anything I could do to any of them in this school, anyway, that she or he couldn’t survive, not with their support systems.
Enjoy yourself, Sasha, I told myself. As Mrs. Caro had said many times, “She deserves to be a little spoiled.”
Mrs. Caro had my breakfast ready seconds after I sat at the table in what the Marches called their breakfast nook. Rarely did we have breakfast in the dining room since Kiera had gone off to college. The nook had bay windows that looked out on the beautiful gardens, the rolling lawn where the Marches had some statuary and stone benches. It looked like a private park. There was so much to maintain that they had more than a dozen employees for Alberto to supervise. For me, it was still too much to believe that one family had all this. What they spent on maintenance could probably feed all of the homeless people I had met and known. Kiera always took it all for granted. No matter what my response to something wonderful here was, she always said, “What’s the big deal? If we didn’t have it, someone else would, and why should they have it and not us?”
Live where I have lived, be who I have been, and you’ll understand why it is a big deal, I thought, and then I thought, Well, maybe not you.
“Just coffee for me and a piece of toast,” Jordan told Mrs. Caro. “I’m having a big lunch out today,” she added before Mrs. Caro could ask after her health.
She’s going out to lunch and dinner, I thought. Lately, both she and Donald seemed to want to get away from their beautiful house and estate. Perhaps the memories of Alena were haunting them even more than ever with Kiera away. I was sure I didn’t fill the caverns in their hearts. Jordan had tried by having me wear Alena’s things, sleep in her room, and learn to play the clarinet. I was even using her clarinet. Even though it all distracted her from her sorrow for a while, it didn’t end it. Nothing would, just as nothing would end my mourning my mother’s terrible death.