“We’re taking the convertible?” I asked Ava as she headed for the Mercedes. Daddy had three cars: two sedans, one of which I used for school, and this convertible.
“Of course. We want to look the part. We’re on the prowl,” Ava said.
“Like wolves.”
“Better than wolves,” she replied, and finally laughed at somethi
ng I said.
Now that we were on our way, I was feeling as if I had fallen into a blender. A variety of emotions were swirling around inside me. I was frightened, nervous, excited, and even a bit numb. I waited for her to continue talking and explain why she didn’t go to these places normally. When she didn’t follow up, I asked her why not.
“This sort of a place is a college hangout. College boys are usually too immature for me and too gregarious.”
“Gregarious? What do you mean?”
“They hang out in clumps to give each other moral support. The worst are fraternity guys with their rah-rah, boom-bah. Those pins and sweaters and hats drive me nuts. And these sorts of young men gossip more than women do. Take my word for it. When they return from a date, they have to give a blow-by-blow account, and they usually exaggerate to make their buddies jealous. They are, in a word, too dangerous for us. So, as I told you, Lorelei, nothing will happen tonight, not in the sense we mean, understand? This is really and truly just a field trip, an experimental little journey.”
I nodded, but she didn’t see it. We rode on.
“That’s not to say there isn’t a great deal to learn from these college boys. You want to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. You want to know when you return a gaze or a glance or when you fish with your eyes and hook with a smile. This isn’t like some harmless flirtation in class, either. These young men aren’t at this place to find little high school romances. They’re not there to find a girl they can go steady with and write home about. Most of them, anyway,” she added. “There are always the dreamers.”
“Dreamers?”
“Why shouldn’t there be some of them looking for their miraculous soul mates? You’ve got to be able to recognize them and, for the most part, stay away from them. The men we want are those who want no lasting relationships. They won’t care if they don’t learn all about you in one or sometimes two nights. They want to go to bed with you, have a laugh, and go back out there with no promises left on the table. Some men,” she said, smiling, “give women they’re with promises the way people leave tips for the maid in a hotel. So,” she continued, “what you want to telegraph to them, sometimes like breaking news on television, is the fact that you, too, are not looking for anything lasting. You want a good time. And boy, does that work fast.”
“How do you mean?”
“They drop all caution, Lorelei. They’ll go practically anywhere you tell them you want to go and do whatever you want to do. Like puppies you feed little tasty tidbits after they go outside to pee.”
Something struck me about the way she was talking about men, something I hadn’t thought about, even though this wasn’t the first time I had heard her speak about them in this mean, disrespectful manner.
“You don’t like men, do you, Ava?”
I could see my question gave her great pause. She even slowed down a bit, her face darkening, tightening. For a moment, I thought she was teetering between turning to me to shout something nasty and suddenly breaking out in tears herself.
“It’s not a question of our liking them or not liking them the way you mean. We don’t have that sort of freedom.”
“Freedom?”
“Lorelei, tonight, if you learn anything important,” she said, “you will begin to learn that being so attractive to men is our particular curse, while at the same time being our particular blessing.”
“I don’t understand. How could it be both?”
“We can get who we want when we want him.”
“And that’s bad? How is that bad?”
“You will understand,” she said with Daddy’s confidence. “I promise. You will.”
We drove on in silence for a while after that. My mixed emotions of excitement and nervousness had suddenly settled into a pool of dread. This was certainly not the first time I had had this feeling, but right now, it seemed stronger than it ever had been.
When Daddy had decided we were moving after I had begun my first years at school in New York, I had dreaded starting a new school. I was in fifth grade by then. Having friends was something everyone wanted and pursued. Friends invited friends to their homes and to birthday parties. One or two friends were important companions, to help each other get through any difficult challenges. They shared homework, stories about funny and sometimes sad things that had happened at their homes. They trusted each other with their emotional baggage, invested in each other in small but significant ways.
No matter what school I attended or where we were living at the time, it didn’t take long for my classmates to learn that I had been adopted and had only a father. Few had older sisters who bore so much responsibility for them as mine did. Many differences, such as differences in race and religion, even family wealth and importance, usually don’t matter as much to younger children. They concentrate more on the similarities, but my being an orphan and the way I was made to stay aloof from the rest of them caused them eventually to ignore or avoid me.
So when I began again in a new school, I knew I would hate the strangeness of it. I would hate having to get familiar again with all the small but necessary things every new student has to learn. But most of all, I knew what would soon happen. I knew how the other students would treat and see me, and that filled me with dread. I hated that feeling. I often wanted to cry when I was alone at home, thinking about the world I was missing, but nothing was more frightening to me than Daddy believing even for an instant that I was unhappy having him as my father and living in his home with my sisters, that I was in the smallest way unhappy about our lives. If I cried or in any way showed my disappointment and dissatisfaction, he would see it and be terribly hurt, I thought.
Besides, and this was most important, I could see that my older sisters were not upset about the way we lived, so I thought that would soon be true for me as well. I would get over these feelings. I must be patient. Brianna, before she left home, had seemed very happy to me. Ava never complained and really seemed to enjoy being who she was and what she was. How could it be any different for me? The ecstasy that came with being a daughter of darkness was just ahead, waiting for me to claim it.