8

I liked my teachers at Littlefield. Although they dressed more formally than the teachers in my previous school, the men here wearing ties and jackets and the women wearing dresses with hems at least at midcalf, I felt a more relaxed atmosphere in their classrooms. There was definitely a different energy throughout the school. Everyone moved more slowly, and teachers especially spoke more softly.

In my public-school classes, imposing discipline always seemed to be the first order of business and a continual issue. Many of my teachers, male and female alike, often lost their tempers. They held themselves like people who anticipated unpleasantness, shoulders braced, eyes full of suspicion. Sometimes you felt you could cut the air because it was thick with tension. For some of my public-school teachers, there were classes that ruined their entire teaching day and students they’d like to put in front of a firing squad. However, if they let down their guard, those who were more interested in disrupting our classes pounced.

Cutups were sent to the dean. Students were frequently suspended. Smoking in the bathrooms was a constant problem, as was graffiti. We knew that teachers were often judged, especially the new ones, on how well they kept order in their classes and how often they had to give up and send someone to the dean. They were aware of it, too, and tolerated a great deal more than they should, which in the end hurt how well we learned. There were so many interruptions.

Here at Littlefield, the teachers had a great weapon: the cost. If you were misbehaving repeatedly or did something that required the dean to be involved, you risked all the money your parents paid to have you attend, and even for well-to-do people, that was a significant loss, not to mention the embarrassment.

I learned quickly that it was true: Mrs. Mitchell was the Iron Lady when it came to discipline. If someone was speaking too loudly in the halls or even jokingly punched or pushed another student and she witnessed it, she sent laser arrows from her eyes, and the student cutting up instantly turned into Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Harry Potter of his time, perfectly mannered, polite, and considerate. It was like slowing down when you saw a traffic cop with a radar gun ahead of you.

She didn’t have a radar gun, but she had a way of looking so intently at us as she passed by or stood in an office doorway, watching us move from class to class, that most of us had to look away or down, soften our voices, or hold our breath. My fears were different, of course. I worried that she realized something more significant than what had brought the other students here had brought me to Littlefield, and I feared that one of these days, she would call me into her office to cross-examine me. I doubted I could lie to her.

Nevertheless, as the first week of school at Littlefield drew to an end, I did feel more self-confident. At breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with my classmates, I listened more than I spoke, but when I did speak, I talked about my school and social life before my abduction, answering the usual questions about friends and parties. Did we drink anything, take anything? How late could we stay out? Did I have parties at my house? How wild did our parties get?

I didn’t want to appear too goody-goody, but I didn’t want to make everything seem all right, either. I tried to sound just naive about it. Some were disappointed. They were like prisoners on an island who had hoped to hear raucous tales from the ones who had just arrived.

A number of times, I almost gave away that I was an identical twin, but I was able to rescue the references by assigning them to this mythical best friend. I made it seem like she and I were inseparable. I called her Audrina and fabricated her history, family, and personality, weaving in details from novels I had read.

Marcy asked the most questions about her, pressuring me for a detailed description, coming right out and asking if I thought she was prettier than I was. I simply put together some features from three or four girls and created an imaginary friend who was attractive by anyone’s standards. Marcy pushed on, wanting to know how long we’d been friends. What did we have in common? Did we share clothes and things? Was she jealous of me, especially over a boy?

If anything, I thought Marcy was the jealous one, jealous of my admiration for this mythical best friend. I realized early on that despite her outgoing personality, Marcy had really never had a close friend. I sensed she was hoping I might be her first. I wasn’t averse to it. For too long, Haylee had to be my best friend, and I had to be hers. The prospect of growing close to someone without Haylee looking over my shoulder and in some way interfering was exciting to me.

But Marcy’s questions made me feel like I was writing a teenage soap opera, and finally, one day at lunch after she asked me whether I knew if Audrina was a virgin, I spun on her and said, “Please, no more questions about her, Marcy. I’ve left that world. This is my world now. I don’t even email or Instagram anyone back home. To be honest, they were all mad at me for agreeing to attend a private school.”

She both liked and didn’t like my answer, but she stopped asking questions about the mythical Audrina. She did, however, want to know if any of the boys I liked or the ones who liked me felt I had become a snob or something when they learned I was going to leave and attend an expensive private school.

“That happened to me,” she said quickly, to be sure I would answer.

“I wasn’t really involved with any boy closely enough to care,” I told her. That was the truth.

Of course, what she suggested had been of some concern when my father and Dr. Sacks proposed that I attend a private school. I did have friends whom I admittedly pushed away in the period immediately after my rescue. I regretted losing them and imagined that their way of writing me off forever now was to think of me just the way Marcy was claiming her friends thought of her. We thought we were too good for them. The difference, I hoped, was that the ones who were sensitive and intelligent would realize how difficult it would have been for me simply to rejoin them.

Was it naive of me to expect that after a while, none of that would matter, that I would start a new life here and forget the horror I had endured? Can you really tuck away the painful memories in your life or bury them under new and better ones? How damaged was I? When, I wondered, would someone here look at me and realize it? I hadn’t met that many of my classmates yet, but every time I got to speak to someone new, I held my breath, anticipating her or him to pause and ask, What really made you want to come here? What happened to you, Kaylee Blossom Fitzgerald? Something did, so stop pretending otherwise.

Claudia had yet to ask such a question, but sometimes I caught her looking at me with more curiosity, and I thought she was on the verge of doing so. Haylee used to tell anyone who criticized her for something she had done

that, “It takes one to know one.” There was some truth in that. Someone who was deeply emotionally wounded should recognize someone else who was, I thought, and that was why I feared Claudia would eventually get the truth from me.

Claudia tagged along reluctantly when we went to the dining hall, but I wouldn’t let her drift into solitude, where she would surely only feel sorry for herself and thus make things gloomier for me. I always kept a place for her at our table in the dining hall and included her in any conversations. By driving her darkness back, I hoped I would be driving away my own.

I wasn’t starting to like her so much as I was finding it easier to tolerate her, thanks a great deal to Marcy, who would swipe away Claudia’s dour expression with a quip about Mrs. Rosewell or her own roommate, who she claimed was obsessive-compulsive, insisting that toothpaste tubes be squeezed from the bottom up.

“I do that, too,” Claudia claimed, after which Marcy went into a dramatic faint, slapping her hand over her forehead, falling onto my bed, and claiming she was overwhelmed by efficient, organized people.

“You don’t know what this means to confront another organized person. If this keeps up, I’ll have to reform, get good grades, and behave myself. I’ll choke on compliments!”

Claudia actually laughed. She can be rescued, I thought. I still wondered if I could, but she certainly did have good qualities. She wasn’t one to raise her hand in class to answer questions, but when she was called on, she always had the answer the teacher was looking to get. As she had predicted, she started off well in math, getting a hundred on our first quiz and A-pluses on her homework. Thanks to her, I did just as well. She had no problem tutoring me and certainly showed more patience than I would have tutoring someone.

Maybe I’d learned more about psychology than I thought, but gradually, whenever Marcy wasn’t hovering over us, I began to get more and more out of Claudia concerning her home life and her self-image. She was less reluctant to talk when I did what my therapists did and acted almost disinterested, clearing away any sense of pursuit or pressure. If she offered something, some detail, I made reference to someone I knew who had a similar experience, so I could say, “I know what you mean, Claudia.” As a result of all this, she grew more comfortable with me, more comfortable, I thought, than she had been with any previous roommates.

Although I didn’t think she would like it, I began to feel sorry for her. I had trouble believing and accepting the idea that a parent could dislike his or her own child, but the more she told me about her relationship with her parents, especially her mother, the more I accepted that it was possible and the sorrier I began to feel for her. My father was right. I was becoming a little more than an amateur therapist. You suffer a wound and watch how the doctor treats it, and nine times out of ten, when something similar happens to someone else, you can help.

I understood her bitterness when she told me how her mother, almost from the days of Claudia’s infancy, never wanted to go shopping with her for clothes, shoes, or practically anything for her. She gave that assignment to their housekeeper and nanny, Beneatha Patterson, an African American woman, whom Claudia admitted she liked more than her own mother. Claudia never had the mother-daughter talks Haylee and I had with our mother, and she certainly spoke little with her about sex and relationships. I gathered that the icing on the cake for Claudia was when her mother decided she didn’t need Beneatha to serve as nanny to her new daughter, Jillian. Now she would willingly and lovingly take on those motherly responsibilities.

I could easily understand why that was so painful for Claudia. After all, this was the exact opposite of how Mother had treated Haylee and me. There was never to be an iota of favoritism in our house, nothing to ever stimulate jealousy or sibling rivalry. Mother would practically lunge at my father to claw him if he complimented only Haylee or me for some reason, no matter how simple. Listening to Claudia describe her home life, I began to wonder if Mother was all that terrible after all. She had become something of an expert in parenting. She just went a little overboard. Well, maybe she went a lot overboard.

My father was the first to bail out, of course. The divorce still came as a shock to both Haylee and me when it happened, but Mother didn’t seem as disturbed by it, as we had anticipated she would be. Now all of it, all the responsibility for us, had fallen squarely on him.

Tags: V.C. Andrews The Mirror Sisters Suspense
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