Shattered Memories

“Public school. This is my first private school. Anything else?”

  “Any conclusions yet?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked up quickly.

  “The open-faced turkey sandwich is very good,” I replied.

  His smile seemed to grow out of his eyes and trickle down to his lips. “What are you doing after dinner?”

  “Nothing special. Writing some letters.”

  “Writing letters? You mean emails?”

  “No, old-fashioned letters. There’s still something about you in your handwriting.”

  “To old boyfriends?”

  “I wouldn’t write to more than one, would I?”

  “Most of the girls here would. So it’s a boyfriend?”

  “No. I’m writing to my mother, if you have to know.”

  He nodded, sat forward, and ate some more. I did, too.

  It did feel like some sort of fencing match, I thought, but strangely, as my surge of rage subsided, I realized that I liked it.

  “How would you like to go for a ride first? I’ll show you the neighborhood,” he said, still looking at his food. “Nothing special, just a chance to get away for a while.” He paused, like someone waiting to hear an explosion. I realized he was even holding his breath.

  And I thought, Here I go. I felt like I was about to attempt a deep-sea dive.

  “Okay,” I said, and then, with caution still in control, added, “but not too far or for too long.”

  He went back to his dinner as if I weren’t there.

  “Are you shocked by my answer?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, just hungry,” he said. “And this is a good open-faced turkey sandwich.”

  Another girl might have felt taken for granted or something, but I felt just the opposite. It was a feeling I had practically disowned for the rest of my life when it came to being with a boy.

  I was excited.

  10

  “What’s it like living in Ridgeway?” Troy asked as we left Asper Hall and headed for the boys’ dorm parking lot. One thing I had noticed about him immediately was that whenever he asked me anything even remotely personal, he avoided looking directly at me. The new amateur psychiatrist in me suggested he had been hurt deeply in some way and, like me, was nervous about getting too close to anyone. Lately, however, it seemed like I was diagnosing many people similarly, perhaps hoping to find kindred spirits. Misery truly loves company, which was probably why I got along so well with Claudia.

  Maybe, I told myself, Troy really was just shy despite his great looks, his intelligence, and his obviously wealthy family. Shy people were too often mistaken for arrogant people. Perhaps all the girls in this school, including me, were unfairly judging him.

  I had hardly gotten to know him, and here I was already looking for ways to rationalize being with him. However, I had seen the way the other girls had looked at us when we left the cafeteria, and I anticipated Marcy pouncing on me.

  I walked with my arms folded over my breasts, my hands buried under them. Nights were cooler now, bordering on chilly. I hadn’t chosen a warm enough jacket, only a light sweater over my blouse, but I didn’t want to complain and have to return to my dorm. Troy had on a soft-looking black leather jacket, and as we walked, he began putting on black leather driving gloves.

  He turned to me when I didn’t answer his question. “You left lots of friends back there, I imagine.”

  “Some.”

  “They resent your going to a private school.”

  “Some,” I said.

  “Did you really want to come here, or were you pressured into it?”

  “You mean you don’t know all about me from watching me so closely?”

  “I think you’re like classified.”

  “Classified?”

  “For national security. I overheard two dissectors discussing you outside room twenty-two the other day. One said, ‘Getting Kaylee to talk about herself is like pulling teeth.’ I wanted to turn around and ask her if she had ever pulled teeth. Sometimes it’s not so hard to do. Apparently, not only don’t you gossip about others, but you don’t gossip about yourself. How do you expect to survive your teenage years?”

  “Very funny. Naturally, I miss Ridgeway. I’ve lived there all my life,” I said, in the tone of a captured soldier giving name, rank, and serial number. He wasn’t too far off the mark. I was behaving as though most of my life were classified. Here at Littlefield, that wasn’t far from the truth.

  “One of the few places in the state I’ve never been to, so I can’t comment. I like taking long rides. That’s my car ahead, third from the end.”

  “I heard about it. A brand-new red Jaguar convertible.”

  “Birthday present when I turned seventeen in August. It was a bribe.”

  “A bribe? To get you to do what?”

  “Turn eighteen,” he said. He didn’t smile or laugh.

  He unlocked the passenger door and opened it for me. The interior was so new and pristine it was like no one had ridden in it yet. The leather still had that new-car scent. He closed the door and went around to get in. I waited until he was settled behind the steering wheel to ask about what he had just said.

  “You’re not serious about that bribe, right?”

  “I said that’s why they gave it to me, but I didn’t say it was justified. My parents think I’m too . . .” He started the engine. “Dark,” he said. “Seat belts,” he added, clicking his own on and waiting for me to click mine. He backed out of the parking space.

  “I can’t imagine why your parents would think such a thing.”

  He gave me one of his rare direct and intense looks. “I hate being so right on my first impressions of someone all the time, but I sure was right about you.”

  “I know that’s a compliment, but I’m not sure if you’re complimenting me or yourself.”

  This time, he laughed. “I guess you’re just going to have to wait and decide.”

  We drove out of the parking lot and down the drive to the school entrance. It would be my first time off the campus since I had arrived. It felt as if I had swum out too far in the sea. I hoped he couldn’t see how nervous it made me. I had this recurring nightmare in which I went off campus with Marcy and the girls, and someone stopped us on the street in Carbondale and asked, “Aren’t you that girl from Ridgeway who was abducted?”

  If that really happened, I’d probably transfer out the following morning.

  “So where are you from?” I asked Troy as he turned right. Getting people to talk about themselves usually kept them from asking probing questions of me.

  “Here. Carbondale,” he said. “I’ll drive past our house. It’s kind of historic, once the home of a prominent coal mine owner who at one time employed most of the people living here. My mother wanted the house as a trophy, but she has this preoccupation with dust, as if the original owner came home covered in coal dust every day and it’s embedded in the walls or something. She has air filters everywhere and has our two maids do a top-to-bottom cleaning practically every other day. Drives my father nuts. He claims their bedroom could be an OR.”

  “OR?”

  “Operating room. It’s that immaculate. Most of the year, my sister and I aren’t there to make any sort of mess, not that we would. We’ve been brought up dabbing our mouths with a napkin after every bite.”

  “Where is your sister?”

  “Jo, short for Jocasta, a name she hates, attends Merrywood, a private junior high school in Philadelphia. She’s twelve.”

  “Interesting name, Jocasta.”

  “My mother was into Greek mythology. She was determined we’d be different. Jocasta is the mother of Oedipus.”

  “What about you? Troy? How is that mythological?”

  “Helen of Troy, the city of Troy. Achilles and his heel . . . all of it.”

  “Your father went along with that?”

  “My father chooses his priorities carefully,” he said. “Which is another way of saying he d
idn’t care as much as my mother did about our names. He wasn’t into naming us after dead relatives or anything like that. He was into ‘Get it over with. I’ve got a meeting.’ ”

  I laughed, even though he didn’t even smile when he said it.

  Then he did smile. “I see you’re someone who appreciates a dry but honest sense of humor. I like that.”

  “What’s your father do that he has to have meetings?” I asked.

  “He’s the CEO of a major telecom company, Broadscan. It has international reach, so we’ve done some extensive traveling when my mother felt like going along. I’ve been to all the major European capitals, like Paris, Madrid, Rome. What’s your father do?”

  “Runs a software company. My parents are divorced,” I added, hoping that would end the questions about family before they could really start.

  “My parents should be divorced, but my mother is made of Teflon.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The things other women would rage over just slide off her. I think she stayed married to my father just to get revenge.”

  “Revenge? For what? What’s he done?”

  “That’s a list, arm’s length,” he said. “Besides, I don’t like talking about parents, do you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “but most of my classmates would agree with you, I think. My roommate certainly would.”

  “Claudia, right?”

  “If you come up with my social security number, I’m not going to be surprised.”

  This time, he really laughed. “I can see that there will be little or no pretending with you,” he said, and was silent as he made one turn and then another. “About a minute more to the Dust Mansion.”

  “That’s close by.”

  “I practically fell out of my bed to get here the first day.”

  “Are we going in?”

  “Not tonight. My mother is not someone who tolerates surprise visits. Even by me alone,” he added. “So how do you like this school, really?”

  “I like it. I hope that’s cool to say.”

  He shrugged. “I like most of my teachers. It’s like anything else, I guess. It is what you make of it.”

  “I believe that, too.”

  He glanced at me to see if I was sincere or simply humoring him. “Do you really?”

  “Yes, but beware. I’m not in the habit of agreeing with everything people say, especially people I meet for the first time. It gives the wrong impression.”

  “You sure you haven’t taken fencing lessons?”

  “I’m sure, but maybe I should.”

  “You’d be a natural.”

  Would I? I wondered. Is that what Haylee really did to me, made me forever defensive with any boy I’d ever meet? How much would any boy have to tolerate in order to develop a relationship with me? Would anyone think I was worth it, especially after he had learned the truth about me? Could I find someone with that sort of patience and sensitivity? Guys our age weren’t exactly willing to overlook anything unpleasant. It was the snapshot generation. You could meet, fall in love, and break up the same day. There was little time for true compassion.

  “Say,” Troy said, “neither of us had any dessert. How about I take you to the place that makes the best ice cream sundaes in Pennsylvania?”

  “With that description, how could I refuse?”

  He sped up but didn’t go over the speed limit. “Now, besides your favorite movie star, singer, color, fruit, and television show, what interests you?” he asked.

  “What would you say if I said myself?”

  He glanced at me. He didn’t smile as much as his lips relaxed in the corners, and when an oncoming car’s headlights washed us in a moment of illumination, his eyes seemed to glow with pleasure. I didn’t want to be caught staring at him, but he was very good-looking, the way someone who was said to have a cinematic face was, and I felt like I was snapping pictures of him with my eyes. When he heard something that pleased him, his face lost its veil of gloom.

  “I’d say you were one of most honest people I’ve met,” he replied. “Everyone is interested mostly in himself, but I don’t know many, actually any, who would admit it.”

  “I don’t mean to sound self-centered. What I mean is I’m constantly wondering about my own thoughts and feelings, why I have them. So I guess I’m interested in psychology. When we read something in literature class, I’m usually intrigued with character motivation, like Iago in Othello. God, listen to me. I sound like some sort of intellectual snob.”

  He laughed a laugh that reeked of amusement and pleasure. “If you’re an intellectual, most people, especially in our school, think you’re automatically a snob. I doubt there have been too many conversations in your dorm room or at the cafeteria table about why Iago did what he did to Othello.”

  “No, but I’m fine with that. You do have to relax sometimes.”

  He was quiet so long I thought I had just turned him off me completely. Part of why I was afraid even to attempt any sort of relationship with a boy now was that he might think I was too serious all the time. Here I was telling Troy it was important to relax, but I didn’t think I’d really had a single relaxing moment yet at Littlefield. I was too on guard, constantly distrustful, and worried that my story would emerge, break out like some horrible rash, and reveal every painful moment of my abduction and what my own sister had done to cause it. I’d be seen as some deeply wounded person, so scarred I might as well be an untouchable. There was no way to outlaw discrimination against my kind, victims.

  “I think that’s why you drew my interest,” Troy said, and glanced at me.

  “What?”

  “Despite what you prescribe, you don’t seem to relax. I don’t relax, either,” he quickly added, like someone who when criticizing someone had to admit he or she suffered from the same fault.

  “You could tell that so fast?”

  “As they say, it takes one to know one. I’m one. I’m sure you have your reasons. I know I have mine.”

  Now it was my turn to be silent. The obvious question was Why don’t you relax? I was afraid of the topic, afraid of how it would quickly lead to why I was not relaxed, so I avoided asking him his reason.

  “There,” he said after about thirty or forty seconds. “On the right.”

  I looked up at an enormous gray stone house at the top of the knoll. It was well lit and loomed over everything before it, rising higher and higher as we drew closer. It seemed to go on forever.

  “What is it? The governor’s home?”

  “Almost. That’s my house,” he said, “or, more accurately, my mother’s house.”

  He slowed down so I could get a better look at it. The driveway looked like it was made of glass with black marble beneath it. There were lampposts on both sides all the way up. The driveway wound around and disappeared behind the rise. Even in the darkness, I could see that the grounds were elaborate, with trees and bushes so perfect they looked like set pieces on a movie lot.

  “It’s so large.”

  “It’s Georgian-style architecture,” he said, coming to a stop. “Thirty-two thousand square feet on ten acres. It’s one of the biggest houses in this area. We have seven bedrooms, a ballroom, a den with a pool table, a media center, my dad’s home office, and two kitchens.”

  “Two? Why two?”

  “One is solely for catered affairs like celebrations, business anniversaries. Sometimes my mother does a charity event. People pay five thousand dollars to attend and then bid on things donated, like a ten-day cruise or something. As I mentioned, we have two full-time maids, and we also have three regular grounds people. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a small building behind the house. The maids sleep there. It has a small kitchen, too. There’s a pool off to the left, with a cabana and whirlpool, and to the right are a tennis court and my dad’s putting green.”

  “It belonged to the owner of a coal mine?”

  “Yes, but my mother redid the whole place, changed flooring, replace
d all the furniture, and added some new windows and lots of new curtains. My father modernized much of the technology. Those driveway lamps are all solar. About five years ago, they added a wing to the house, too. It’s mostly my father’s home office and library, his sanctuary where he can smoke a cigar and have meetings at home.”

  He started to drive again. I looked back once.

  “Very impressive,” I said.

  “It’s like living in a museum, believe me,” he said.

  “No wonder your mother thinks your father is a nobleman. We have a big house, but that’s really a mansion.”

  “Home sweet home,” he muttered. “If you want, I’ll give you a tour. You just have to take off your shoes, take a shower, change into a visitor’s uniform, put a plastic cap over your hair, and put on a pair of surgical gloves before you touch anything.”

  “You’re kidding, of course.”

  “Yes, but if you ever did meet my mother in that house, you’d understand that I’m not exaggerating as much as you think. Okay. We’re coming to it, the best sundaes in North America, not just Pennsylvania.”

  He slowed down as we approached a strip mall with half its stores already closed. A few looked empty, out of business. The mall didn’t look like anything special, so I was surprised when he pulled into the parking lot. There were very few cars.

  “Here?” I asked. “The world’s best sundaes?”

  “It’s a big secret. No one else at our school will know of it.” He nodded to the right at a small shop whose sign advertised toys, magazines, and stationery goods. “The owners have an old-fashioned soda fountain. You’ll see,” he said, getting out. He moved around quickly to open my door and reach for my hand. “It’s the proper way for a lady like you to get out of a royal carriage,” he said.

  For a moment after I stepped out, he continued to hold my hand and then suddenly realized he was doing it and let go.

  As we drew closer, I saw the place was simply called George’s.

  “How did you find it?”

  “I have this fountain pen my father’s younger brother gave me for my sixteenth birthday, one of those two-hundred-dollar fountain pens. George Malen, the owner, special-orders the replacement ink tubes for me. He was quite impressed with the pen when I stopped by to see if he could get the tubes, and then I saw the soda fountain and ordered a sundae. His wife, Annie, works the fountain. I think they’re both in their late sixties. This is a true mom-and-pop operation.”