Secrets in the Attic (Secrets 1)

I guess we were both a little weird, leaning just enough toward the unexpected and unusual for our peers to distrust us. It was important for us to be original. Karen came up with the idea of our being two parts of the same person.

"What we'll do is share things in ways other girls would never think of sharing," she told me.

"Like what?"

"Like earrings, for example. Here," she said, taking off one of hers. "You wear this one on your right ear. I'll wear this one on my left."

It seemed amusing to do, but no one really noticed, so she came up with sharing shoes, since we had the same size. I'd wear her left shoe, and she'd wear my left shoe. We

traded every morning on the bus. That caught everyone's attention, and when we were asked about it, Karen would say, "We are becoming spiritual sisters, two bodies, one heart."

There were lots of puzzled expressions punctuated with "Huh?" or "What?" and then the shaking of heads.

Every other day, Karen would come up with a new idea to illustrate what she was telling them. We shared the tops and bottoms of skirt-and-blouse outfits, socks, halves of sandwiches, anything, in fact, that we could divide in two. We even practiced finishing each other's answers in class. I'd start, stop, and look at her and if she winked, I would smile, and she would deliver the remaining part of the response. Some of our teachers were annoyed, but most thought it was amusing. They didn't take our antics half as seriously as our fellow students.

"Maybe these two will start a new fad," Mrs. Cohen remarked in math class one day, when we came to school with her right eye made up and my left and everyone was making fun of us.

Of course, I felt everyone should be more tolerant about our being different, especially in relation to me. I was insecure about myself, still trapped in that place between unisex, even boyishness, and emerging femininity. My menarche came late. I was like a runner who had missed the sound of the starting gun and had to run harder to catch up to the pack. I would stay up at night waiting for the girl in me to emerge, almost like a creature hovering under my skin. I willed it. Closing my eyes, I would chant, "Grow a bigger bosom. Lose all the baby fat. Soften and get more curvy." In my eyes, I wasn't enough of a woman yet but certainly no longer just a girl. What was I? When would I know it, feel it as confidently as Karen did?

I was actually envious of the girls Karen despised, because they seemed so secure about who they were.

I did my best to keep that from her. She would have none of their world and quickly picked up on the French phrase petite bourgeoise, which meant a petty woman belonging to the middle class, the middle class being something undesirable.

She wouldn't gossip and giggle or betray someone's confidence. She wouldn't agree with a group condemnation of another girl just to be one of the girls. She never shared her lipstick or admitted to a crush on any boy, at least to anyone else but me. Consequently, she wasn't invited to parties or group dates for movies and pizza. So it was just natural for us to pal around together, and I wasn't invited to most of these things, either.

"Don't worry about it," Karen would tell me before I could utter a complaint or regret about our social isolation. "You're known more by the enemies you make than the friends you keep. The truth is, they all envy us. They wish they were half as creative and had half as much fun. They're eating their hearts out with jealousy."

Were they? I wondered. In my mind, it was certainly true that Karen was growing more and more beautiful by the hour, and she was bright and funny, but did any of the other girls really want to be her, to trade places with her, to have her life?

Karen's real father had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his early thirties and had left her and her mother with insufficient life insurance and income. Unlike my mother, her mother had not attended college. She had worked as a secretary for a lumber company, where she had met Karen's father, Dave Stoker. He was working at building his own construction company, but at the time, he was a contracted laborer and didn't even have a regular job. He never put away enough money or built enough of a reputation to realize his goal. Karen was only ten at the time of his death. For two years afterward, her mother and she struggled with their finances. Finally, her mother took a job working in Pearson's Pharmacy and a year later married Harry Pearson, Aaron Pearson's son, who had graduated from Fordham University as a pharmacist and had taken over his father's drugstore after his father died.

Karen told me, "All the ducks quacked and quacked in a line, because my mother was almost seven years older than Harry. They all thought she plotted and planned to trap him. In fact, his mother went into a deep depression that was like quicksand. She never pulled herself out of it and died two years later from a stroke. Everyone blamed my mother. Even Harry blamed her."

"How could he do that?" I asked.

"Simple," she replied. "He decided maybe the gossips were right. She was a witch at heart, and she had put a spell over him."

"You don't really mean that. A witch?"

"Yes, I do. You know why, too," she reminded me. She paused to swallow the stone of sorrow caught in her throat and then added, "He blamed her for everything unpleasant in his life, especially me. Right from the beginning, I told him I was on his mother's side and didn't think he should marry my mother. I didn't say it with her present, but I said it, and he knew it, knew I would never accept him as a father, no matter how hard he tried!'

Karen had refused to permit him to adopt her, so her name remained Karen Stoker, even though her mother's name had become Darlene Pearson. If a teacher or anyone else made a mistake and called her, Karen Pearson, she would immediately correct him or her with enough vigor to cause them to say, "Well, excuse me for living," or something similar.

"Some people should be excused for living!" Karen said.

I agreed. We most always agreed. We had come to that comfortable place where we could drop all our self-defenses and let our souls stand naked without fear or embarrassment. We teased each other, but we never insulted each other, and if we stumbled and did something that upset each other, we usually blathered apology after apology until the other would cry for mercy. At least, that was the way we were before our world turned topsy-turvy.

The journey that would take us there began with the simplest of gestures and smiles when we were in the same places, be they classrooms, the lunchroom, hallways, or the streets of Sandburg. We would both hear something or see something and then look at each other and shrug, smile, swing our eyes, or simply stare blankly, which made a statement, too.

It was truly as if we were prodding each other's inner self to see where the similarities and sympathies lay. We needed to know how alike we were and how much of it we would care to admit to each other. Trust came to us through simple ways then. We laughed in chorus, echoed each other's wishful thinking, and mirrored each other's feelings.

I knew that boys were always suspicious of Karen. I also knew most of them harbored a secret crush on her as well but were afraid to admit it, because she would make them feel so inferior if they approached her at school. They would be wounded in their male egos, perhaps beyond repair. I thought that to compensate, they made up stories about her promiscuity, this one claiming that and another claiming something more. There was always some undertone of gossip running like a sewer under our feet.

After school one day only a few months after I had arrived, Alice Bucci took me into the boys' room when no one else was around to show me some of the dirty things boys had written about Karen on the walls of the stalls. Her brother was one of the authors.

"They're all lies," I told her immediately. I tried to hide how shocked I was at the descriptions and claims.

"How do you know? You haven't been here long enough, and you don't live with her," she countered. "Lots of people do lots of things secretly. Even their parents don't know. You'd better dump her before you get a reputation, too."