Secrets in the Attic (Secrets 1)

Everyone was always trying to get me to stop being Karen's friend.

"As long as you're with her, you're nobody," Alice told me.

"I'd rather be nobody with Karen than somebody with you," I replied.

"Suit yourself," she said, and reported our conversation to the others.

"Zipporah Nobody," they labeled me, and then pretended I was invisible by walking into me.

Ironically, that would all change. I would wake up one morning and find myself the most sought-after girl in school.

"Tell me about her," they would plead.

But that wouldn't happen until the sleepy hamlet was jerked awake to face the most startling and shocking scandal in its modern history. Things like this happened only outside the walls of the idyllic community, only to

urban people. It was like living on an island. Why, in our little town in the early sixties, even divorce was a rarity. Adultery was known only through whispers. The worst things teenagers did were still called pranks. A psychiatrist was as rare as an albino. Schools had guidance counselors mainly involved with scheduling classes and suggesting colleges rather than psychological counseling.

People didn't lock their front doors or their cars. Anyone who tried to make a living owning a home security company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Town policemen often held second jobs. Sophisticated detectives came only from the state. There were no radar traps. We could walk about unafraid on dark streets at night. Kids my age still hitchhiked and took rides with strangers. Smiles and invitations were still largely innocent and true.

When I tell my grandchildren today about that world, they think I'm fantasizing.

Maybe I am.

Maybe that's why we got into so much trouble. We were living in a fantasy and never really understood that we were.

2 A Minute Lost

Karen and I and the other kids in Sandburg went to high school on the bus unless we had a friend with a license and a car or unless my parents took us. Karen's stepfather never seemed to be able to do it, and her mother either never volunteered or Karen never wanted her to drive her.

Where we had lived before, I could walk to school. Riding a bus was new to me, but after the novelty wore off, I wasn't crazy about it. Karen didn't mind riding the bus, even though we had the noisy junior high kids riding along with us to be dropped off after we were. Their building was in a different town within the school district, and ours was the next stop after Sand- burg. The ride from the center of Sandburg took us all of twenty odd minutes, but it always seemed much longer to me.

"Don't think of it as a bus," Karen told me when I complained. "Consider it our personal limousine. The bus driver is our chauffeur, and we live in Paris."

When she boarded the bus, she would look at Mr. Tooey, the sixty-year-old baldheaded driver, and say, "Bonjour, Pierre." Mr. Tooey would just shake his head.

Karen always wanted to sit in the last seat at the rear, which was the most undesirable, because it would take longer to get off the bus. She liked to curl up as if she were at home on her sofa or up in our nest and look out the window the whole trip there and back. She had a way of shutting out the noise and ignoring the spit balls.

Because of her, I sat back there, too. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we made the whole journey without saying a word. I could tell when she had shut herself down. I knew it usually meant it had been a bad morning at her house or a bad evening. Usually, she was just as quiet at school those days. Like a snail, Karen could crawl into herself and practically disappear. I learned to respect her need for silence and just wait for her to resurface. Sometimes, she would just burst out with a stream of thoughts as if she had broken the surface of water in a pool, and, voila, we'd be chattering like two mad squirrels.

Karen didn't easily tell me about all the trouble in her home. She disclosed it in little ways, sometimes not even in words. She would have a look on her face that revealed she and her mother had been arguing, usually, according to her, because of the way she had treated Harry, whom she even refused to refer to as her stepfather. He was just Harry. Those arguments grew worse as time went by, but in those days, everyone kept his or her home life and intimate information behind closed doors, so no one but me really knew the extent of them. That wasn't unusual. There were no shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer. People were ashamed of their difficulties and not willing to share them. I'm not sure if that was better or worse. It is probably true that holding it all in made for little explosions that became bigger and bigger ones.

Through her fantasies, Karen started to drop little hints that things were not just getting worse, they were getting impossible.

"Last night, they locked me in the tower," she would say. "I was given only bread and water, and the bread was moldy, too."

Or, "My mother had a tantrum last night and sliced up the mattress with a meat cleaver."

Her tidbits seemed to grow more and more violent, even though she always followed her statements with a laugh.

The first black-and-blue mark I saw on Karen was on her upper left arm. It looked like the imprint of a thick thumb, as if she had been grabbed and held until the capillaries broke and there was trauma. I knew all about that medical stuff because of my mother being a nurse. Karen covered it with her longsleeved shirt, but she kept the shirt unbuttoned, and when she was curling like a caterpillar in the back of the bus, the shirt slipped off her shoulder and fell down enough on her arm for me to see it.

"What's this?" I asked, pointing at her blackand- blue mark.

She turned, realized what had happened, and quickly pulled her shirt back, up, and over her shoulder.

"Nothing. I bumped into something while I was sleepwalking last night," she said. "And lucky, too, because if I hadn't, I might have fallen down the stairs."

"You never told me you sleepwalk," I said, smirking.