The Heavenstone Secrets

  I started to shake my head.

  “Don’t!” she snapped. “Don’t be dishonest with me, Semantha. Not for a second, not an instant. Tell me the truth right now. You have, haven’t you? Well?”

  I took a deep breath. Despite my age, my youth, I still felt there were things that should be private and only mine. She was reaching so deep down inside me, reaching to explore places I hadn’t explored myself. She was crawling into my fantasies, my dreams. Even the closest of sisters, brothers, even husbands and wives, can’t possibly share all that.

  “You don’t have be ashamed with me, Semantha. I’m your sister, your only really faithful companion. No one will care for you as much as I do. Being sisters, we can share the most intimate things, and now that you’re obviously at the age when you will have more intimate things to share and explore, I’ll be here for you. So, admit it. Am I correct about your thoughts concerning Kent Pearson? Well?”

  “Yes,” I said, barely above a whisper.

  She nodded, smiling with satisfaction. “That’s good, Semantha. It’s good that you trust me. You know I trust you, because I’ve told you things I wouldn’t tell Mother. I knew you wouldn’t go running to her to tell on me, either. You’re my best friend in the world.”

  That took me by surprise. Of course, I knew she had no real friends. She talked to other girls about schoolwork and did hang around with some girls at school, girls I thought no one really wanted to have as friends, but I never dreamed she would tell me that I was her best friend. Sisters didn’t have to be best friends. I knew many other girls and boys, for that matter, who wouldn’t consider their sisters and brothers best friends. Most were always complaining about them.

  “Now, then,” she continued, returning to her mother demeanor, “since you’ve already fantasized, imagined Kent touching you in places that would get you excited, the danger of your actually permitting him to do so is that much greater. It might even seem as if you’re still dreaming, and don’t forget that there is that terrific curiosity in you, that thing about your body I described, its craving, as I put it.”

  “Craving?”

  “It craves to be touched, to be riled up and brought to that point where it can welcome more. It’s the more that’s most dangerous.”

  “Oh. I know about how we get pregnant and all that, Cassie.”

  “You know nothing,” she said sharply. “You’ve never been fondled, kissed passionately, touched, and driven toward an orgasm. Yes, you’ve read about it in your textbooks or those silly romance novels on your shelves there. My God, The Taste of Love, The Deepest Kiss, Under My Secret Heart? Give me a break. None of those books will tell you the absolute truth, help you to understand yourself.”

  “What is the absolute truth?” I asked.

  “Simply this, Semantha. No matter how nice Kent Pearson is to you or any boy is or will be, he wants only one thing: to satisfy his own need.”

  I nodded. Should I tell her what Gloria Benson had told me about herself and Donald Marcus, how they had agreed not to do it but she satisfied him a different way? It had shocked me when I first heard it, and despite what Cassie had just said about us being best friends, I couldn’t get myself to share it with her and describe it.

  “So,” she said, “you can go to the party with Kent. I’m sure he’ll try to get you to go to a private place in the house, and then he’ll kiss you and touch you and try to get you to let him insert himself inside you, and if you’re not careful and if you don’t have the willpower to resist, you could be very, very sorry. It could ruin your whole life!”

  I shook my head. “Don’t worry, Cassie. I’m not going to do that.”

  “You say you won’t, but when you’re there in the darkness, alone with him whispering all sorts of things in your ear and touching you, and you’re thinking about your fantasies … it could happen. I won’t be there to protect you. No one will.”

  “It won’t happen,” I repeated more firmly. “Don’t worry.”

  “Because you can ruin yourself for more important things, Semantha,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You’re a Heavenstone. You have a major obligation to our family, our heritage, to all Daddy has been building for our family.”

  I nodded, but I wanted to ask her why she didn’t think of her own obligation, too. She told me before I could ask.

  “Just as I do,” she said. “Why do you think it is that I’m so particular about whom I see? I have control of myself, and I want you to have control of yourself. Do you understand me? Do you understand the things I’ve told you?”

  “Yes, Cassie.”

  She pulled herself back and tucked in the corners of her mouth as she looked at me. “I wouldn’t have to do this if our mother had done her job with you,” she said again.

  “She’s done her job. She’s told me about sexual things, Cassie,” I said.

  Her eyes grew colder, darker, as her cheeks sank. She turned in her lips so tightly that little white lines ran above her top lip and below her bottom lip. “Mother told you? What sexual things?”

  “Things. When I got my first period, she spoke to me about what was changing in my body and what I had to think about and what not to worry about.”

  She relaxed again. “I’m sure. That’s Mother. Always looking for things not to worry about, instead of facing the things that we should worry about. Did she tell you what not to do with boys? Well? Did she? Because, as I said, she never did with me.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. She had suggested some of it, but I didn’t want to tell her that or say anything that might make her jealous. “Not the way you just told me.”

  Her face softened even more, and she smiled.

  “Of course not. Anyway, I want you to come right to see me when you return from the party Friday night. You come to my room, no matter how late it is, understand? And you tell me exactly what you did, what he did, what happened between you. You’ve got to trust me, trust and believe that I will help you. Okay? Will you do that?”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t help the way my forehead folded as I imagined telling her every nitty-gritty detail of what went on with Kent.

  “I don’t want you to be unhappy, Semantha, and I don’t want to stop you from having fun. I care about you, about us, about our family, that’s all. All right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.”

  She stood up and looked at me for a long moment, so long that it made me nervous.

  “You’re prettier than I am, Semantha, so all of this is more important for you than it is for me.”

  I started to shake my head. I had always believed I was, but I never wanted to say it or have anyone else say it in front of us.

  She smiled. “I’m not jealous or unhappy about that. We’re two different people. You have your good qualities, and I have mine. Some girls, pretty girls like you, have to depend more on their looks than anything else. That’s fine for them. The only problem with depending on your looks is the problem of age. Looks degenerate, change, like a lightbulb dimming and dimming and dimming, until it goes out completely.

  “But don’t worry. You’ll always have me beside you, helping you, caring for you. I’ll be even more loyal to you than the man you eventually marry,” she added, and then she did something she rarely did.

  She hugged me and kissed me on the forehead, just the way Mother always did.

  “Good night,” she whispered, and left, closing the door softly behind her.

  I didn’t know why, but I was trembling. She had left me with words that should have made me happy, but they didn’t. And even worse, whenever I had a thought about Kent, about the things she described, I immediately felt terribly guilty. I would have gone to sleep dreaming of sitting next to Kent at the game and then going to the party with him. I would have imagined us dancing, everything, but the moment one of those thoughts came into my mind, I did everything I could to chase it away. I even imagined Cassie next to me as I slept, just waiting for a fantasy to com
e into my brain. As soon as it did, she would nudge me to make it leave.

  I would have been nervous when Friday came, anyway, but after Cassie’s little mother-daughter-like talk, I was practically trembling all day. She made sure to put reminders in my head, too. On our way to school, she said, “I hope everything I told you is still fresh in your mind. I know how easy it is to forget when you get excited.”

  “I won’t forget,” I said.

  “Good.” She smiled at me. “We’ll be perfect, as perfect as I planned for us to be. Remember, we are the Heavenstone sisters. That means a lot around here. I can almost hear people thinking it whenever they see us together. ‘There they go, the Heavenstone sisters.’”

  She laughed. She seemed to be in one of the best moods I had seen her in since the night Daddy announced Mother’s pregnancy. Mother had gotten strong enough to look after herself. She didn’t want Cassie to miss any more school. Daddy said he would hire a nurse if we had to, but Mother insisted she was fine, and Cassie agreed.

  “I’ll be coming right home from school, anyway, Daddy,” she told him. “No need to bring a stranger into the house. I can do whatever has to be done.”

  “Well, I don’t doubt that,” Daddy said. “I can’t think of too many women who are as reliable as you, Cassie.”

  Cassie beamed. That helped put her in the good mood, I thought.

  We entered the school building together. Because she was two grades higher than I was, Cassie and I rarely saw each other in the building, even at lunch, because there were two lunch rooms, one for students in grades seven through nine and one for tenth through twelfth. I don’t know if it had been designed to be that way or just turned out that way. Rarely did she come looking for me, but this particular lunch period, I looked up from my tray of food and saw her in the doorway, obviously searching for me. I was sitting with Kent, two other boys, and two other girls. The moment I saw Cassie, I felt my face flush, as if I had been caught doing just the things she had warned me against.

  “What’s wrong?” Kent asked, seeing how I had stopped eating and listening to everyone.

  “My sister’s looking for me. I’d better see what she wants,” I said.

  I rose because I saw she had spotted me and was heading in my direction. I didn’t want anyone else to hear what she might say. She paused when she saw me heading for her.

  “Something wrong with Mother?” I asked quickly.

  “No.” She looked past me at my table. “Do you have lunch with him every day now?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. I really did, but one day he had missed lunch.

  She leaned toward me to whisper. “Listen carefully to the way his friends talk. It will tell you a lot about him. If they make sexual references in your company, and he lets them, that will tell you something important about him and how much he really respects you. Understand?”

  I nodded. Had she come here just to tell me this? It made me feel as if the relationship between girls and boys was really just some game, some contest, and she was assuming the role of my coach. In a real sense, I realized that she was.

  “Same with the other girls in your company,” she said, still looking past me at my friends. “If they giggle or don’t seem embarrassed, you know they’ve been promiscuous. You remember what that means?”

  “Yes, Cassie. Don’t worry so much.”

  She pulled her face back. “Don’t tell me not to worry so much. What happens to you happens to me. I thought you understood.”

  “I do. I’m just … it’s all right. I’m being careful.”

  “Um,” she said, looking past me again at the boys and girls at my table, as if they were all part of some gang doing sex and drugs. I felt like bursting into tears. She was embarrassing me. I could see other students starting to pay attention to us. “Okay, we’ll talk later.” She turned and walked out.

  I stood for a moment, trying to catch my breath and calm down. On the way back to the table, I fumbled for an explanation. They were all surely going to be curious.

  “Anything wrong?” Kent asked immediately.

  “My mother had a little setback a few days ago, and my sister stopped in to tell me she had gone to the doctor and all was well,” I rattled off. I started to eat again to make it seem like nothing.

  It worked for a while. My girlfriend Bobbi talked about life with a much younger brother, and Kent’s friend Noel described what it was like for him to have a much older brother. Then Kent said, “Your sister’s pretty tough. My brother Brody says most of the boys in her class and his are afraid of her. But she’s the smartest kid in her class, so maybe she knows something the others don’t.” Everyone laughed.

  Noel changed the conversation, and we didn’t talk about Cassie anymore. On the way back to class, Kent repeated how much he was looking forward to seeing the game with me. “And afterward,” he added with a smile that a few days ago, I would have welcomed, would have warmed my heart, but today put little butterflies in my stomach. I only nodded and went into the classroom quickly, feeling terrible that I hadn’t seemed more enthusiastic. I tried giving him a warm smile, but I could see he was concerned.

  The moment I got into the car with Cassie at the end of the day, she began her cross-examination.

  “So tell me,” she said, “was I right? Did you hear and see what I anticipated?”

  “No,” I said, and then I thought I would get her off the topic quickly by telling her the things Noel and Bobbi had said about having big differences in ages between themselves and their brothers and sisters. It worked, because it got Cassie back to one of her favorite topics: The Foolish Pregnancy.

  “People live as if they’ll live forever, be young forever. They don’t plan their lives intelligently. Everything was going just fine in our family.”

  She ranted and raved about it all the way home. I didn’t have to say anything. Then she surprised me by telling me not to worry about my after-dinner chores tonight.

  “Just get yourself ready to go to the game and your party. I’ll take care of everything after I bring you to the school.”

  “Thank you, Cassie.”

  She seized my arm as I started to get out of the car. “You know I only want what’s best for you, Semantha, because what’s best for you is best for me and for the Heavenstones.”

  “I know, Cassie. Thank you,” I said.

  She held on to me a moment, as if she could read my inner thoughts through my arm to see if I was being honest. I didn’t doubt she could. Finally, she smiled and let me go. I got out quickly and hurried in, first to see how Mother was and then to go to my room to choose what I would wear. I found Mother in the kitchen, up and about and preparing dinner. Cassie came flying in behind me.

  “What are you doing?” she cried. “You know you shouldn’t be on your feet this long, Mother. I told you I would prepare dinner tonight. I can do those veal chops just the way Daddy likes them.”

  “Oh, I felt a lot better, Cassie. I’ve been putting too much on you. I know you have your own work to do,” Mother said, smiling. She did look a lot stronger.

  Cassie seemed to deflate with disappointment. “You’re disobeying the doctor’s orders,” she said. “Daddy will be mad at me.”

  “Oh, no, he won’t, honey. He’s been here twice today checking up on me,” she said.

  “Twice? How can he do that and be overseeing the new store in Lexington?” Cassie asked, as if she were Daddy’s boss and disapproved. “This is taking him away from important work.” That wiped the smile off Mother’s face so quickly it was as if she had dipped her head into the path of a raging tornado.

  “Don’t worry,” Mother said. “He said he had to spend his day at the local office today.”

  Suddenly, she looked as if she had lost her renewed energy, and she put her hand out to brace herself on the counter.

  “Mother, are you all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “No, you’re not. I can finish here, Mother,” Cas
sie said, throwing her books down onto the table. “You just go back upstairs and rest. Go on. Do it!” She was so gruff that Mother recoiled. Cassie smiled quickly. “Daddy will be relieved to know you didn’t overdo it, and this way, you can enjoy dinner with us later.” She sounded as if she were talking to a child.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Mother said.

  She described what she had done and what was left to do. Cassie whipped the apron off the closet door and practically charged at the food.

  Mother smiled at me. “I’ll go up with you, Semantha. You can tell me all about tonight, the game, the party.”

  I took her arm, and we left the kitchen.

  “Your sister is such a workhorse. She’s a wonder. I’m so lucky to have a daughter like her. And like you,” she added quickly. “Two beautiful young women. As your uncle Perry says, the infamous Heavenstone sisters, although I wouldn’t say infamous. I’d say fabulous.”

  She leaned over to kiss my cheek, and we walked up the stairs together to her room. All the while, I was boiling with the thought that I should tell her about the conversation I’d had with Cassie about boys and sex. Something inside me told me she should be made aware of it all, but something else, something stronger, warned me of how Cassie would react once she found out. To her, it would be a betrayal of the special relationship she believed we had. She had talked so much about trust and how we kept things between us, kept them even from our parents. It would be devastating to her if I told Mother about it all now. Maybe later, I thought. Maybe I would tell her after it was all over.

  I helped her get back into bed.

  “This is good. I should rest. Your sister is such a realist. She always makes me look past the dreams and the fluff to see the truth. Maybe she’ll become a doctor. She’s not afraid to tell anyone what she believes. That’s the self-confidence I described. She’s a strength in this family, Semantha. You should rely on her as much as you can.”

  “I rely on you, too, Mother.”

  “Of course, but sisters have a special bond. I always wished I had had a sister. You can confide in each other and share so much. Especially about boys,” she added, smiling.