Cloudburst

  He looked at it and took it.

  “Enchantée,” I said.

  “De la même manière.”

  “You speak French?”

  “A little. We lived in Paris for five months when my father was making a film there and my mother was doing some modeling for a French designer. What about you?”

  “Just what I’m learning in class. How come you’re not in French class? It would probably be easier for you.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. I never had a formal class. I just learned on the streets,” he said. “The streets, get it? So maybe we have something in common.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “To some people, I guess, but you want to know something?” he said, leaning toward me. “I’m convinced that what we learn on the streets lasts longer and has more meaning than what we learn here. Take it for what it’s worth, and make whatever you want out of it,” he added. “If you can’t stand it, leave.” He bit angrily into his food.

  “You’re pretty sensitive. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Me? You practically had me assassinated for asking about your street life.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Because it’s you. Maybe you’re not so interesting, after all. Maybe that’s why you’re so guarded.”

  “Maybe I’m not.”

  “I’ll bring a magnifying glass to school tomorrow and tell you,” he replied.

  We stared at each other, neither wanting to give ground by relaxing a lip or even blinking, and then we both laughed.

  I glanced slightly to my right and saw that my girlfriends—most of the school, in fact—were watching us intently. If they could hear our conversation, they would think they were watching a tennis match.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you about myself, but only if you do the same.”

  “I don’t have much to tell,” he said. “You’ll be disappointed, even bored.”

  “I’ll pretend not to be,” I said, “and that will make you feel important.”

  He smiled again. “You are more than vaguely interesting.”

  “Ah, more than vaguely. I guess that’s progress,” I said. “You’re slowly slipping into the body of a human being.”

  He laughed. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll play you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

  “Careful,” I said. “You could end up naked.”

  His jaw finally fell.

  “Finish your hamburger,” I said, “before it gets cold.”

  Obediently, he began to eat, not taking his eyes off me. I could almost feel the wall between us begin to crumble. The question was, did I really want it to crumble? Did I really want to relive my past, and from what he was telling me, did I really want to hear more family dysfunction?

  “I’ve been to five different schools since grade school,” he told me when the warning bell sounded.

  “Five? Why?”

  “Our traveling, mostly. For a little while, Summer and I had a tutor.”

  “I had one when I first came here. I hadn’t been in school for nearly a year, so there was a lot of catching up to do.”

  “How come nobody checked on you? I thought you had to be in school. It’s a law.”

  “Are you kidding? When you’re homeless, you don’t exist. Nobody even looks or cares, and that includes policemen. Believe me.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I don’t exist. Maybe I’m homeless and don’t realize it,” he said as we entered the building. “I mean, a house doesn’t automatically mean a home, and having parents doesn’t mean you have a family.”

  I thought about Kiera. Maybe he had far more in common with her than he had with me. “I know what you mean.”

  “Do you?” he asked, as if he thought I was patronizing him.

  “Yes. My stepsister would say the same thing, and for her, it would be very true.”

  “I’d like to hear about that.”

  “All you seem to want to hear is bad, ugly, or dark news.”

  “It’s like flies attracted to garbage,” he muttered.

  I can’t say I wasn’t used to other students staring at me from time to time, but walking with Ryder, I felt the eyes of our classmates so glued to us I wanted to flick them off the way you might flick dandruff or dust. He either was oblivious or simply no longer cared.

  “I think we’re going to need more time to get to know each other,” he declared at the classroom doorway. “These little intermissions between classes don’t do it.”

  I was speechless a moment, recalling my first dream about him. He had used almost the exact same words in the dream. Neither of us moved or spoke for a moment. Other students brushed by us, all of them looking at us as we stared at each other.

  “What do you suggest?” I asked.

  “Well, you have your own car, so I can’t offer to drive you home, and I have to take my sister home first, anyway.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  “Yeah, do that,” he snapped back, and entered the classroom.

  Did I really want to have anything to do with anyone who had such a hair trigger, I wondered, no matter how good-looking or interesting he was?

  I entered the class and took my seat. I could see the girls smiling at me and laughed to myself. If they only knew how hard to know Ryder Garfield was, they wouldn’t be anywhere nearly as envious, I thought.

  He grew calmer as the day came to a close, and before we left to go to the parking lot, he gave me his cell-phone number.

  “Let me know whatever you decide,” he said. He looked toward his sister approaching. “Unfortunately, my life isn’t exactly my own right now.”

  “I’ll call you,” I promised.

  My thought was to have him come over after school after he had dropped off his sister, but I wanted to get permission from Jordan first. I always got her permission before I invited anyone to the house, even though she had told me countless times to consider the March house my house, too, and not to stand on any ceremony. Despite the years and the many, many wonderful things they did for me, I couldn’t take that final step she so wanted me to take and truly see myself as her and Donald’s daughter. It didn’t have to do with their not legally adopting me yet, either. Even if and when they did, I was sure I still wouldn’t get to the place Jordan wanted me to get to. I doubted that I ever would or even should.

  The moment Ryder left me, Charlotte Harris, Jessica, and Sydney pounced.

  “Wow, what’s going on with you and Ryder?” Charlotte asked.

  “You two were pretty tight all day,” Sydney said.

  “C’mon, tell us,” Jessica whined.

  “Nothing’s going on. We simply got to know each other a little more. And we weren’t that tight, Sydney.”

  They stared at me, waiting for something delicious to add.

  “I don’t know if it’s going anywhere yet, so don’t go blabbering about us,” I said.

  “Did he invite you to his house? Are you going to meet his father and mother?” Charlotte asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and started for my car.

  “You don’t know what?” Sydney asked. The three of them followed me like cans tied to the back of a newlywed couple’s car.

  “Stop making something of it. It’s nothing.” I paused. They waited, and with a smile I added, “Yet.”

  They all squealed as I got into my car.

  “If there’s anyone who could handle him, it’s you,” Sydney said before I closed my door.

  “Why?” I asked her. I gave her an intent look, and she started to fumble for words.

  “I just mean . . . I mean . . . with . . . what’s happened to you . . . you just know what to do better than any of us.”

  “Not everyone and every situation is the same, Sydney. And I didn’t grow up around kids whose families were rich and famous.”

  “I know. I just thought . . .” She looked at the other two for help.

  It always bothered me that most of t
he girls in my class who knew what Kiera and her friends had done to me when I first came to this school treated it as a war wound or something similar. They practically had me wearing a Purple Heart. It was good for my ego to have them think I was so sophisticated, but the truth was, it didn’t make me all that much wiser when it came to relationships with boys. If anything, it made me more frightened, and maybe that was really why I was so hesitant about being involved with one boy all this time.

  I realized that this was partly my fault. Instead of telling them that I didn’t know what was right or wrong for them to do when they came to me with their romantic problems, I offered suggestions. Sometimes I even tested some of the questions out with Kiera. Give the devil her due, I would think. Let’s see what she would tell them. And most of the time, I thought her advice was good and gave it, but now I was sorry I had gone so far with this. It was enough to be responsible for myself, much less everyone else’s teenage love life.

  “It’s nothing to spend any time over,” I offered, but the three of them smiled at me as if I were the delusional one. “See you tomorrow,” I said, and closed the door.

  “You better call me tonight,” Jessica called after me.

  I waved at her and drove off, feeling strangely numb. It was as if I had left my body and was as light as air. I felt emotionally exhausted. The banter I had with Ryder was stressful at times but also exciting. I could see that he was sincere when he said he was interested in me. If he had been to five different schools, he surely had met many girls, girls who were like the girls here, excited about who he was and how good-looking he was. Some of the girls in this school might as well have waved a white flag at him, announcing their complete surrender to his every whim and wish, and there were many who were very attractive, some who I thought were far more beautiful than I was.

  And yet he was drawn to me. Despite the Grand Canyon of differences between us, between the world into which he was born and the world into which I was, I felt we did share something very important. Both of us, despite how we might appear to others, were deeply wounded. I couldn’t help sensing that he was as lonely as I was at times, and as lost. We came to the same place over different roads of pain and suffering, but we were like two people who had found each other on a deserted island, undecided about whether we even should try to get off it and return to the world.

  Was it good for me to be close to someone like Ryder or even just around him? Could I fall back into deep depressions? Should I tell him my story and, in doing so, revive so much pain? Maybe once he learned the terrible details, he would avoid me anyway. If he was looking to me to cheer him up or give him some sort of hope, he might be terribly disappointed.

  And what about me? I knew what it was to be poor and almost invisible. When I was that way, living with my mother in the streets, I would often stare in awe at the well-dressed, beautiful women who drove expensive cars. I was sure some of them were celebrities. We lived in a place where celebrities were often sighted. How I envied them. And if I should see someone like that with a little girl beside her or holding her hand, how much I envied her or wanted to be just like her. Surely they lived in a perfect world.

  But here was Ryder Garfield and his sister, Summer, children of the beautiful people, wealthy and famous, and yet both of them seemed unhappy and lost. What did I hope to learn from being with him? That there was no good place to be? That whether you had parents who were wealthy and successful or parents who were failures, you still ended up on that same island? What did matter, then?

  Jordan had warned me about having anything to do with someone who was dark and unhappy. Was she right? Why was I both excited and frightened by the prospect of getting to know Ryder more and maybe becoming his lover? Was I just destined for this sad part of life? Would I always dwell in the darkness and feel tears on my cheeks in the rain?

  I drove onto the March estate, conflicted. A part of me was saying that I shouldn’t even ask her for permission to invite him. Forget him. This can lead to no good. Tell him your foster mother didn’t approve or give you permission to invite him. It might be easier that way to discourage him, to stop this before it became too late.

  But another part of me was clamoring for the challenge and the excitement. Just as he told me that I was the most interesting girl in the school, I saw him as the most interesting boy yet. So it’s a challenge. So what? If you retreat now, you’ll always retreat whenever a relationship shows the slightest difficulty. You’ll end up either like Kiera, always skeptical and selfish, or like Jordan, afraid and alone.

  What would my mother tell me to do?

  How I hated the silences I had heard and the silences I would hear.

  How I longed for someone with not only wisdom to give me but true, real, and deep love.

  Would I ever have that again?

  6

  Fighting

  I was surprised to find Jordan sitting alone in my room. My first thought—and fear—was that she had been into my computer, suspecting that Kiera and I were keeping an e-mail correspondence that I didn’t share with her, and had read some of Kiera’s outrageous e-mails, but I could see that the computer was not turned on, and Jordan wasn’t very fond of computers. She had one, but she rarely used it. She told me, “I still like the feel and sound of someone’s voice. E-mails are just too impersonal. I can tell what someone is really thinking when I hear him or her speak, and that is especially true for my own daughter.”

  She sat with her back to the door, looking out the window, and was in such deep thought that she didn’t seem to hear me enter.

  “Jordan?”

  She turned, and for a moment, I thought she had taken one of those pills I knew she took to calm herself. Sometimes they made her look pretty spaced out. I know her husband hated it when she did that. Right now, she looked as if she didn’t recognize me. I could see the confusion whirling about in her face.

  “Jordan? Are you all right?” I said, approaching her.

  “Oh,” she said, snapping out of her look of bewilderment. “Yes, yes, Sasha. I’m sorry. I was in deep thought for a moment and was thinking back to when I would sometimes wait here for Alena to return from school. Before she became very sick, she would bounce up the stairs and burst through that doorway, exploding with excitement about something she had done in school or something that was going to be done. No matter how bad my day was, it all became warm and sunny again. Just embracing her and kissing her did that for me.”

  I nodded but couldn’t help thinking that she was comparing me with Alena and was very disappointed. I wasn’t coming home as buoyant and happy, perhaps, or at least excited enough to cheer her up and help her forget any dark thoughts, and I never rushed to have her embrace me. I was still haunted by dark thoughts of my own, and neither the size of this house nor all of its luxury could shut them out completely.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What? Oh, yes, yes. Well, there’s nothing more we can do about it, is there?” She shook her head and then smiled. “But do tell me about your day. Were you absolutely amazing in instrumental class again?”

  “Any day Mr. Denacio doesn’t slam his hand on the desk and rant about how little everyone is practicing is a good day for me, as well as the others. I like the music he’s chosen for us to play at the next concert. I guess that shows when I play. He looked very pleased.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said, and stood. “And guess what? My college daughter called finally to tell me she was growing more serious about this young man, Richard Nandi Chenik. I asked her what that meant, and she just laughed the way she does when she doesn’t want to tell me something and said, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ What am I waiting to see? I hope she’s not getting herself into any serious trouble,” she added, glancing at the computer. The implication was clear. If I knew something about it, I should tell her.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “But you don’t know?”

  “When it comes to Kiera’s
love life, I don’t think even Kiera knows,” I said, and Jordan laughed.

  “How true. And your love life?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I was coming to see you to ask if I could invite someone over after school tomorrow,” I said.

  She tilted her head and looked at me with suspicion. “Not that dreary boy you and Jessica described, I hope.”

  “He’s not really that dreary. I got to know him a little better,” I said.

  “You know, I do worry about you even more than I worry about Kiera these days, Sasha. Most girls wouldn’t be able to contend with what you’ve experienced, but all that’s happened damages you in ways that even you are not aware of. Believe me, you are still very fragile.”

  “I know. It’s all right. I’ll be fine,” I said.

  She hesitated and then nodded. “Okay. I’d like to meet him, actually, and Donald will be home tomorrow, remember, so he can meet him as well. I’ve always trusted Donald’s impressions about people. It’s part of what he does, his training and his success.”

  For a moment, I wanted to change my mind. The one thing that I was sure Ryder would hate would be to be put on display or obviously evaluated. I know I wouldn’t like it, but I supposed it was only natural for parents to do that, especially today. Everyone was worried about the influence of other teenagers. It seemed that no one’s son or daughter could ever be the originator of trouble. It was always because of someone else’s child.

  “What are you planning on doing with him? Playing tennis? Studying? It’s not really warm enough to swim outside, but I suppose you could swim in the indoor pool. Would he like that?”

  “I’m not sure what he likes and doesn’t like to do,” I said. “I’m not even sure he will want to come here.”

  “Really? Well, if anyone thinks he’s too good for you, he’s not good enough for me. Remember that,” she said. She glanced around the room once more and started out.

  After she left, I tried to concentrate on my homework, but my mind kept drifting back to Ryder. I took out his cell-phone number and put it on my desk. I was still very hesitant. Maybe Jordan was right. Do you know what you’re getting yourself into? I asked myself once more. You put on a good act, but Jordan is wrong when she says you are still very fragile.