Cloudburst

  “Mrs. Duval,” Donald called, and the kitchen door opened. Mrs. Duval and Mrs. Caro paraded in carrying the dinner. All that was missing was a drumroll. Mrs. Caro had a dish with a silver cover, and Mrs. Duval had our salads and bread. Mrs. Caro placed the silver-covered dish in front of Donald.

  “What are we having?” Jordan asked, which surprised me. She was always in charge of the dinners.

  “Another surprise,” Donald said. He nodded at Mrs. Duval, who moved forward to lift off the silver cover. “Lobster fra diavolo,” he announced.

  I looked at Jordan to see if she was as shocked as I was.

  I had told her that was what the Garfields were having tonight. Had she told Donald, or was this all an amazing coincidence?

  “It looks absolutely delicious, Mrs. Caro,” Donald said. “I’m sure it matches any other lobster fra diavolo anywhere,” he added, directing himself more to me than to her. “Mrs. Duval, let’s pour the wine, and tonight, be sure to give our future class valedictorian a glass.”

  Mrs. Duval looked surprised but did what he asked. Jordan squinted and stared at Donald. I was glad to see it wasn’t only I who thought he was behaving strangely. When I first came here, he made a big show over my calligraphy, but his reactions to anything I did after that were always even-tempered, restrained. I thought he was as sensitive to Kiera’s being jealous as I was.

  He did most of the talking during dinner, describing this new account that he emphasized he wanted me to evaluate. I promised I would stop at his office tomorrow after school. I was hoping he had forgotten the comment Jordan had made just before he entered the dining room, but as if it had lingered there in midair, he suddenly turned to her and asked what she had meant when she said he had been deluding himself.

  “Now, let’s get back to what you said before I walked into the dining room, Jordan. Deluding myself about what?”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Kiera?” He shook his head, looked at me and then back at her. “Now what has she done?”

  “Apparently, she had an extended weekend and could have come home but didn’t. I have no idea where she went, but I suspect neither of us will be pleased when and if we ever find out.”

  “Maybe she never left the school,” he said. “Anyway, that’s hardly a reason to say I’m deluding myself, Jordan. You’re still thinking only the worst possible things about her.”

  “Me? You’re the one who just pointed out how she had lost my expensive earrings.”

  “That was a few years ago.”

  “Oh. Fine. I guess I should make nothing of the fact that she’s avoiding us.”

  “When I was in college, I wasn’t crazy about rushing home all the time, either.”

  “All the time? She hasn’t been home once since she went this year. She wasn’t home very much the year before, and she spent most of the summer with rich friends traveling through Europe. The girl is drifting farther and farther away from both of us, you included, Donald. I know it’s easier to ignore it all, but I think it’s time you had a good talk with her.”

  “She did say she would like to hear from you,” I said, seeing the opportunity.

  “She did hear from me,” Donald replied, and finished another glass of wine. “I called her today.”

  “You called her?”

  “Exactly. Why? She said I didn’t?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure. I might have gotten it wrong.”

  “I doubt it,” Jordan said. “She’s still exaggerating, distorting, and lying outright.”

  “What? She isn’t failing any subject, and she hasn’t had any problems at school, or we would have heard. Why would you say such a damning thing?” Donald demanded, his mood changing instantly. Usually, when he was this upset, Jordan backed down, but I could she wasn’t going to this time. She was still smarting about not being included in picking out my gift.

  “I don’t believe this boy she’s seeing is the son of some English aristocrat. I told her to bring him home if she liked, but she hasn’t. She says more about him to Sasha than she does to me or you, for that matter.”

  “That’s a girlie thing,” Donald said, waving it off. “Hardly anything to get upset about.”

  “I’ve heard that before, Donald. And we both lived to regret it.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll call her again,” he said, relenting. “Maybe we’ll all take a ride to her school one weekend.”

  Jordan was silent. She had said as much as she wanted to say. Her eyes fell on me, focused on my new necklace. For the first time since I had come here, I felt Jordan March was actually jealous of me, jealous of something I had besides my youth.

  As soon as dinner ended, I went up to my room to ponder what all of this meant. Why did Kiera lie about her father not calling her? Or could it possibly be that he was lying to cover up for his neglect?

  Family life was so complicated, and being rich or famous didn’t seem to provide any sort of relief from that. In fact, it might make it more complicated. If anyone should know how wonderful having a family could be, it was I. Most of my young life, I had been envious of other kids my age who had parents and brothers and sisters. As far as I could see, a family gave you a safety net. No matter what you did or what happened to you, they were there for you, supporting you, comforting you. Who took more pride in you and your accomplishments than your parents? Yes, sisters and brothers could be jealous of each other, but they couldn’t help being proud of each other as well. Your success did bring something wonderful to them, too.

  And yet I also knew how devastating the rupture of a family could be. Losing friendships, losing your job, and failing in your career were difficult to take, but there was always the prospect of new friends, new jobs, and even new careers. No girlfriend could really replace a mother, and for a boy, no friend could replace his father. Deep in my heart, I knew that Jordan March had hoped the opposite might be true for me, that one day I’d wake up and see her as my mother. Perhaps she had even hoped she’d wake up and see me as Alena.

  No one could blame her, I supposed. Who wouldn’t want to end the pain? But it was one thing to lose a mother or a daughter because of an illness or an accident and a far different thing to lose either one because of a family disagreement. People who loved each other deeply were obviously capable of hating each other just as deeply.

  At the end of your life, at some dark moment when your whole life streamed through your mind like an all-day movie, all of the happiest moments highlighted, all of the smiles and laughter seen and heard once more, you surely couldn’t help but feel the cold regret that would join the pallbearers who brought you to your final rest.

  Surely you would wonder if there wasn’t some way, some magical phrase you could have used, some words you had never thought of or had thought of but never spoken that could have mended and begun the healing of these wounds. Wasn’t there something more, one thing more you could have done to change the downward movement of your family? Could you have pushed regret away with a simple “I’m sorry” or perhaps just by saying “I love you”?

  I felt like calling Kiera up and saying only one thing to her. The day will come when it will be too late for apologies and expressions of love. There’ll be no one to hear them, and the empty echo of your own voice will haunt you until the day you die and maybe even within the grave in which you sleep. Don’t let that happen.

  I practically lunged at my telephone when it rang. It jolted me out of my deep and troubled thoughts.

  “Hey,” I heard Ryder say.

  His voice felt like cool rain on a hot, muggy day. My body softened and relaxed. “Hey.”

  “How was your dinner?”

  Should I tell him that Donald had ordered the same exact meal for us? It was too weird for me; it would surely be too weird for him.

  “My foster father found out about my grade-average standing in the class.”

  “Really? What is it?”

  “I could be, I mean, I probably will be valedi
ctorian if I just maintain my grade average. He wanted me home for dinner so he could give me a gift to show how proud of me they are.”

  “It wasn’t a new pen, was it?”

  I laughed. “Hardly.” I still had the necklace on, and I touched it. “I have a feeling what it cost would have kept my mother and me safe and sound for years.”

  “What is it?”

  “A pearl and diamond necklace. My foster mother is taking me for a new dress Saturday to wear to the concert my foster father is getting tickets for next month, and he wanted me to have it before she went shopping. At least, that’s the story he gave.”

  “Why do you say that? You think there are other reasons?”

  “Nothing is simple here,” I said. I knew it sounded very cryptic, even dark and dangerous, but it came to mind.

  “Sounds like we could easily exchange homes and families. Any chance of doing something this weekend? I didn’t get the opportunity to ask.”

  “The Marches are taking me to dinner Friday night at a hot restaurant.”

  “Which one?”

  “Castles.”

  “Boring,” he sang. “Each table has a full-length mirror for the guests to look at themselves.”

  I laughed. “Saturday is free,” I said.

  “All right. I know a cheap, small, unimportant sushi joint in Venice Beach. Unless you want to stay clear of the ocean.”

  “I don’t hate the ocean or the beach, Ryder. As long as I don’t have to sleep on it.”

  He laughed. “Seven?”

  “Yes, and Tuesday is fine for us here.”

  “Maybe after the real date, you won’t want me coming over.”

  “Maybe I won’t,” I said a little too seriously, but I wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s self-pity. “But I doubt it,” I added, “so shut up.”

  He laughed, and I said I had to get to my homework.

  “You’d better, especially after accepting that gift,” he told me.

  That gift, I thought, and went to my vanity mirror to look at it again.

  I made a decision when I took it off and put it back into its box.

  I wouldn’t be the one to tell Kiera about it. Later, she might be even angrier that I didn’t, but it wasn’t a lie, and it wasn’t deceitful if the reason you did it was to keep someone else from being unhappy. That way, it wasn’t bad, was it?

  I smiled, remembering my little battle of quips in English class when Ryder had first entered school.

  Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

  I chose to think it was good.

  Thank you, Shakespeare, I thought, and put the necklace in a drawer.

  If only we could put all of our troubles in a box and close it in a drawer, how well we would sleep and how easily we could turn from nightmares to sweet dreams.

  12

  Rumors

  My mother thinks you have potential,” Ryder told me when we met in the parking lot the next morning.

  “Potential? What’s that mean? Potential for what? She hardly talked to me.”

  “As a model or something. What else? She certainly doesn’t see you as a doctor or a lawyer. Not that you couldn’t be,” he quickly added. “It’s the way she looks at all girls and other women. My father calls it feminine envy. All women, he says, think someone else is prettier and never think they’re pretty enough. When he starts complaining about that, they really go at it. I sit back and watch. It’s better than the soap opera he’s in.”

  I laughed, but I thought he really did see his parents as people cast in roles. Every day of his life was simply another episode. He even talked about his sister as if she were playing a part she had been given at birth. I wondered if he saw himself the same way. Maybe he just didn’t feel real.

  “By the way, Summer wasn’t too happy about the way my mother went on about you this morning.”

  “Why? Doesn’t your mother compliment her?”

  He looked at me as if I had asked the dumbest question. “With the way Summer dresses, what she does with the clothes my mother buys her, what she did recently, and that Gothic makeup she loves? I thought they’d break out into a fistfight over piercing. Dear old Mom, as you saw, hates stress, so she just shakes her head and walks away.”

  “Well, maybe Summer would behave better and have a better image of herself if your parents paid more attention to her, spent time talking to her and trying to reason with her.”

  “Dr. Sasha!” he cried. “Can I make an appointment for my parents with you today?”

  I punched him in the shoulder, and he pretended it hurt. I pretended to be shocked and sorry, and he stopped and threw his arm around me.

  “Hey, I’m just kidding.”

  “So am I,” I said, and he laughed.

  “I think I’ve finally met my match,” he said as we entered the building. He still had his arm around my shoulders.

  There wasn’t a single senior high student who wasn’t looking at us. I was always afraid of being too proud, too arrogant about my looks and achievements. Because of where I had come from and where I was now in my life, I told myself I could easily be a little egotistical and not have people criticize me for it, but I was still afraid of it. Look at how pride and vanity had practically destroyed Kiera. We had been studying classic tragedy in English class, and I knew the famous statement about pride coming before a fall. When you were too big for yourself, you always made serious mistakes.

  But being with Ryder and knowing who his parents were made it very difficult to act nonchalantly. The way the other students were looking at me now, the girls so full of envy, the boys so impressed, made me feel as if the Garfields’ celebrity had somehow spread to me. What girl here didn’t dream about being on the covers of magazines or a star in movies and television? Especially in this school, it was almost a natural part of being a teenager. You weren’t normal if you didn’t dream of these things. The stream of conversation in the hallways, in the cafeteria, in the bathrooms, everywhere, was fed from a pool of currently famous teenagers who were idolized. Almost everyone bragged about some experience that had brought him or her close to one of these much-publicized people.

  “My parents know so-and-so.”

  “My father got me backstage tickets to this one’s concert or that one’s, and I got to shake his hand. He hugged me!”

  “We actually ate dinner at the table next to so-and-so.”

  On and on it went, everyone trying to outdo everyone else with his or her celebrity experience. It was easy, at least for me, to see how much of it was exaggerated.

  But there was no way to doubt me, to accuse me of exaggeration. I was seeing Ryder Garfield. I was at his home. I had to have had real contact with his parents. I was touched with the golden fingers. I already commanded their envy for other reasons. Now I was almost untouchable myself. Why, any day now, I might get photographed in the presence of one of Ryder’s parents, and my picture could be in magazines or even on television. I could see all of these thoughts in the faces of other girls.

  I tried to look away, shifting my gaze quickly from one face to another, and then caught Summer Garfield standing at the corner of the junior high corridor. She stood with a few of the other girls who were looking at Ryder and me, but her face wasn’t awash with admiration. Her face was brilliant with red rage almost washing out her black lipstick and mascara. For a moment, her hateful stare took my breath away, and then Ryder turned us toward homeroom, and she was out of sight, but not out of mind, at least not out of my mind.

  Even so, our day started out smoothly. Ryder was talkative in all of our morning classes and was even a little friendlier toward most of the other guys in our class. Between classes, we walked together, either holding hands or with his arm around my shoulders. I could see we were the focus of everyone’s attention, especially again at lunch. I thought things were going very well. Bobby Jenkins even paused to tell me everyone was giving me credit for turning Ryder Garfield into a human being. But it was toward t
he end of the lunch hour when I realized things were not going to remain so picture-perfect. I could see it in the way other students were now looking at us. Something had occurred that had radically changed things.

  As Ryder and I were heading for our first afternoon class, Jessica tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could speak to me. I could see from the expression on her face that she was bringing me some unpleasant news. Jessica was one of those girls who seemed to feed like vampires on someone else’s misery. Whose was it going to be this time?

  “Go on. I’ll catch up,” I told Ryder, and hung back. “What?” I asked, impatient. I was getting intolerant of the immature behavior and planned to say something about it, even though it might lose me friends.

  “Summer Garfield is spreading very nasty rumors about you,” she said.

  “What do you mean? What rumors?”

  “She’s been telling girls in her class that you did everything with Ryder at their house yesterday. You did go there.”

  “Did everything?”

  “Everything!” she emphasized. “She claims she saw you. She says you’re just like all the other girls Ryder brought home, star-struck and easy. She’s going into disgusting detail.” She smirked. “Are you sorry you told me to keep my mouth shut about her now?”

  “No. Don’t say anything about that.”

  “Sydney told me she heard something. I didn’t tell her,” she quickly added with her right hand up, palm out. “You’re more important. His sister is telling these stories to everyone she can. People are believing her, Sasha. They’ve come up to me, because they know we’re best friends, to get it all confirmed. It doesn’t matter what I tell them or how I defend you. They just smile and say, ‘Sure, sure.’ ”