Secrets in the Attic (Secrets 1)

"Made love in the dark? Don't you have to see a little to know what you're doing?" I asked, and she laughed, thinking I was joking. I wasn't. Karen knew much more about it all than I did, but I didn't think that was because she had the same sort of conversations with her mother that I had with mine. "Then she didn't fall in love with him?"

"No. When I asked her about that once, she said we couldn't afford it."

"Huh? What a funny thing to say."

"No, it wasn't," Karen said. Almost overnight, she had become so much older and more serious. "When you're younger and you don't have children or responsibilities, you can be carefree and adventurous. You can have twenty dollars in your pocket and elope and worry about everything else later. But my mother had me, a teenager, and she was barely making enough to give us food and shelter. We didn't have health insurance. We had nothing extra that was really important. Harry was a solution, so I don't blame her. I don't!"

She was contradicting herself.

She blamed her mother. She would always blame her mother for bringing Harry into their lives.

I pedaled to her house in record time. After my discussion with my mother, I was driven to delve deeper into Karen's problems, and I was just dying to know whether or not she had fallen in love with a boy in our school without my knowing. Was she pining over him because he had rejected her? Was that why she was crying the other night?

I dropped my bike on the Pearson lawn and hurried up the steps to ring the doorbell. I waited, but no one came to the door, so I went over to the livingroom window. I saw a small lamp lit by the sofa, but no one was there. I returned to the front door and rang again and waited, the disappointment dripping through me. Where was Karen? Like me, she had no after-school activities. She hadn't mentioned meeting anyone or going anywhere that day. We had come home together on the bus as usual, and she had left saying, "Talk to you later." Had she gone off to have some rendezvous with this mysterious boyfriend I was imagining?

We spoke to each other on the phone at night, but not that often. She told me her stepfather wouldn't put in another phone line for her and forbade her to tie up their line for longer than two minutes. She said he would actually time it by calling the house periodically to check, and if she violated the rule, he would forbid her ever to use the phone, even for a minute, and would permit no incoming calls for her.

Discouraged now, I turned and walked slowly back to my bike. Just as I picked it up, however, Karen's mother drove in. She rolled down her car window and called out to me.

"Hi, Zipporah."

"Hi," I said, and before she could continue into the garage, I asked, "Where's Karen?"

"Karen? She should be home," she said. "Why? She didn't answer the door?"

"No."

"Just a moment," she said,

She looked upset, parked, the car, and came out of the garage quickly.

"She didn't tell me she had anything to do after school. Is she in detention or something like that?" she asked, the fury coming into her eyes in preparation.

"No, Mrs. Pearson. We came home on the bus together."

"You did? Oh. Well, let's see what's going on," she said, and went to the front door, dug the key out of her purse, and opened it.

I wasn't sure what I should do but decided to put my bike down again and follow her.

"Karen!" she called from the entryway. "Karen, are you here?"

She looked back at me and smirked, but then we heard Karen's voice.

"Yes, I'm here."

"Well, what are you doing? Zipporah has been ringing the doorbell."

"I didn't hear it," Karen said, but she didn't come down the stairs to greet me.

"Well, do you want your friend to go up to see you or not?" her mother asked.

"Not now," Karen said.

Mrs. Pearson turned to me and shrugged.

"You heard her. Sorry. You teenage girls are a different species these days, Zipporah. I can't keep up with the mood changes. Talk to her tomorrow."

"Thanks, Mrs. Pearson," I said. I tried to get a glimpse of Karen, but she was already back in her room.