When Mother turned her back, Haylee looked at me. I couldn’t imagine any actor who played Iago having a more evil, self-satisfied smile.
“If there’s only the four of us, what are we supposed to do with all that food?” I asked her the moment we were away from Mother.
“We’ll have it recycled.”
“What?”
“We’ll have either Jimmy or Matt take it to some homeless shelter, Kaylee. What do I care about extra food? We’re going to have a good time. Get used to it,” she told me. “For the rest of your life.”
A part of me thought that maybe she was right. If I didn’t listen to her, I could dig myself into a corner of shadows thick with depression and ruin every chance I had for a happy high school life. A year ago, if anyone had told me that I would look to my sister for guidance socially or in anything whatsoever, I would have thought him or her nuts or stupid. Yet here I was, doing just that.
On Friday, I described our menu to Matt. He was amazed and then asked the same question. “Won’t you have a lot of leftovers?”
“Haylee’s in charge of figuring it all out,” I said.
“She’s in charge?”
“When it comes to planning anything behind my mother’s back, she’s in charge.”
On our way home after school, Mother described everything she had done. She brought us to the kitchen immediately and showed us all the dishes, instructing us on how to warm up everything and what silverware and dishes to use. She had even set up two folding tables in the dining room to serve as buffet tables. She had cleared away anything she thought might be damaged or broken.
“What are you planning to wear?” she asked us.
Haylee had plotted everything but this and looked at me quickly to reply.
“Nobody gets very dressed up for house parties, Mother, but we’re not sure. We want to wear something nice but not too formal,” I said, coming to the rescue.
“Yes.” She thought a moment and then brightened and said, “There’s that black and white lace dress I bought you as one of your birthday presents. It’s not very formal, and yet it makes a statement.”
I looked at Haylee. I knew she wasn’t fond of the dress, because she thought it made her look too young. It had been advertised for “tweens.”
“That’s a great idea,” she nevertheless said quickly. “And we have those shoes you bought us to go with it. Should we wear any special jewelry? We have those diamond bracelets.”
“Not for this. My advice is always to lean toward understatement when it comes to fashion. There’s a point where ostentation becomes offensive, especially to your girlfriends who don’t have good advice about appearance and will only be envious. Now, you’ll have to excuse me,” she added, smiling. “I need to spend some time planning my appearance.”
We watched her walk off.
“We can change after she leaves,” Haylee said.
“I don’t really mind wearing the dress.”
She shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. I won’t be wearing it all that long anyway,” she said with a wry smile.
We knew Mother would want to see us dressed before she left for her dinner party on Friday, so we waited for her in the living room. We were both taken by how beautiful she looked in her new dress. She did a little fashion walk for us the way she used to when we were younger and would clap and laugh.
Then she paused and turned serious. “I have a good feeling about all this now,” she said. “With your support, I know we’ll come out of it stronger than we were. For a while there, we were three small boats on a rough sea, but we’re in control now.”
“Thanks to you, Mother,” Haylee said.
“Yes,” I added quickly. Sometimes I felt like I was holding on to Haylee’s tail to keep up—and the devil was sometimes pictured with a tail, I thought.
Mother made sure we had no questions about the food and then hugged us and wished for us to have a wonderful party. “I don’t want you to worry about me.”
“We’ll try not to, but we will,” Haylee said.
“Yes,” I said.
Mother smiled and kissed us. For a moment, she stood there looking at us. My heart ached with how deeply I had gone into Haylee’s pit of deception.
“We’ll have so much to gossip about tomorrow,” Mother said, and she giggled like a teenage girl.
Haylee was smiling with such self-satisfaction that I felt a little nauseated.
We stood in the doorway and watched her drive off.
“I’ll see to the food,” I said, knowing that Haylee didn’t care and thinking that if I threw myself into the preparations, I would quiet my nagging conscience.
“Good. I’ll see to the music. They’ll be here soon. Jimmy wanted to pick up Matt, but he insisted on coming on his own. He’s not the easiest boy for Jimmy to make friends with.”
“I wonder why,” I said, and left the answer hanging out there. As with most such things, Haylee ignored it.
Jimmy arrived so soon after Mother had left that I suspected he had been waiting and watching. Haylee hadn’t told him anything about the food and was annoyed that he hovered over me admiring it all as I began to set things up.
“Don’t disturb the help,” she told him. She hooked her arm through his and dragged him into the living room. She turned up the music immediately. It was good that we had no close neighbors.
Ten minutes later, Matt arrived. He immediately began to help me. When we began to bring food into the dining room, Haylee and Jimmy appeared. It looked to me as if they had already been into something, but Haylee would know better than to smoke anything in our house, and I had frightened her by telling her that I had seen Mother measure the amount of liquor in every bottle in the cabinet. I hadn’t, but I thought it was a good idea to tell her that.
“Let’s eat first,” Jimmy said. “I think I’m going to need my strength again tonight.”
Haylee was giggling at everything he said and did. The first chance I got, I pulled her aside and asked her if she had taken anything.
“Did he bring something?”
“Relax,” she replied. “I’m in control.”
“You’re going to mess this up badly,” I predicted, and started to dish out food for the boys.
Haylee was quickly over the top with her behavior, sitting on Jimmy’s lap and feeding him sloppily.
“This is all delicious,” Matt said, trying to ignore them. Haylee had the music so loud throughout the house that he practically had to shout. “I hate to see so much get wasted.”
“Maybe I can figure out how to throw out some and freeze some,” I said.
“Count me in when it comes to leftovers.”
After we ate, the four of us were soon dancing in the living room, and despite the slutty way I thought Haylee was behaving, I was beginning to have a good time. Every once in a while, we would return to the dining room and get something else to eat, but we weren’t even making a dent in the amount Mother had prepared.
“My mother worked so hard on all that,” I told Matt. “I feel bad about it.”
“Maybe you can put some in containers, and I’ll take them home and tell my mother your mother made too much. She won’t care.”
I kissed him. Would I ever find another boy as considerate? I wondered. Mother never talked very much about any other boyfriend she’d had besides Daddy. I had the impression that dating in high school and even in college was more like training for when you were confronted by the real thing. I knew Haylee thought of it that way. Once, angry at her for how she had belittled my feelings for Matt, I told her she would be in training until she was a member of AARP. Whenever I was able to break through her defenses and strike a sensitive blow like that, she would look at me with eyes so cold that I trembled.
Haylee played some slow music, and the four of us were dancing romantically. I was later sure that it was then, behind our backs, that either Haylee or Jimmy put something in Matt’s and my soft drinks. Whatever it was, it made both Matt a
nd me a little groggy and dizzy. I could see how they were both watching us and smiling, whispering and laughing.
“C’mon,” Haylee declared. “Let’s show them our rooms.”
Before I could object, Haylee took Matt’s hand and practically dragged him to the stairway. Jimmy took mine, and we were all upstairs quickly. Of course, both boys were surprised to look in the doorways and see how identical the rooms were.
“If you came home drunk, you could end up sleeping in the wrong bed,” Jimmy said.
“Oh, there’s a big difference. Mine is used more,” Haylee said, her comment full of sexual innuendo.
I saw even Matt smiling. He looked drunk.
Haylee and Jimmy were laughing at everything now. She took his hand to pull him into her room, Before she did, she leaned toward me and whispered, “What you need is on your pillow.”
I had no idea what she meant until Matt and I went back to my room and we both saw the contraceptive packet on one of my pillows. He froze, a look of astonishment on his face.
“I didn’t put that there,” I said. Did he believe me?
He shrugged and flopped on the bed. “I feel so weird,” he said.
“Me, too.”
It was then that the idea that something had been put in our drinks began to worry me more. What if it was something so strong that Mother would be home before it wore off? When the room began to spin, I sprawled out beside Matt. He started laughing, and so did I. Neither of us could help it or stop. We hugged and kissed and laughed, and suddenly, the lights in my room went off. I knew that Haylee had done it.
“It’s a party,” I heard her say from the doorway. “Start to have fun.”
I was annoyed, but as Matt’s kisses grew more passionate and his hands moved over my body, that annoyance took a backseat. I was soon returning his kisses with the same passion. His fingers undid the clasp of my dress and slowly unzipped it. I helped him take it off me. My bra followed quickly. His lips nudged and caressed my nipples. He kissed me on the neck, and then our lips met and drew so deeply into each other that I felt like I was floating backward, sinking into a warm cloud.
He rustled out of his clothes until he was in only his underwear, and I was only in my panties. I felt his hardness, and my legs, as if triggered by impulses passed down through centuries, impulses that couldn’t be denied, spread to welcome him. When I did that, he quickened every kiss, every caress. He was whispering softly, confessing how I had captured his heart like no other girl could.
Somewhere in the background, I heard Mother’s warning. Beware of promises and compliments made in the heat of passion. It’s not the young man’s mind speaking; it’s his lust.
But how would I ever know the difference, Mother? I asked. People in love lust for each other.
If you stay in control of yourself, you will know, she promised.
Was I losing control?
Matt reached for the contraceptive. I heard it crackling in his fingers.
“Is this what you want?” he asked, in a whisper so soft that it seemed to come from inside me.
Was he now convinced that I had put it there and my denial was just my hesitation, my innocence and fear? Why hadn’t I plucked it off the pillow and made my intentions or lack of them clear? Deep inside, was I happy Haylee had done this? Had it excited me?
“Should I?” he asked again.
I was dancing with yes and no, reeling from the grip of one and then the other. In the back of my mind was the realization that this was what Haylee wanted more than I did, and it was Mother’s fault. She had taught us that what one of us did the other must do, or we would become too different and in the end hate each other because of the difference. The yes in me argued that I should do it for Haylee’s sake as much as my own.
The no in me was screaming that she was turning me into her. Didn’t I always want to be my own person, have my own identity? More important, didn’t I want this to be special and to come about only after a commitment of deeper feelings and an investment of trust, just like Mother told us? I liked Matt a lot, but how could all that have come so quickly? This was really only our second date. Yes, we had spent a lot of time talking at school, but that wasn’t intimate time.
And what about tomorrow? Could I live with the regret? Could I do what Haylee did and not make it as big a thing as Mother wanted it to be for us?
I wasn’t Haylee. I wasn’t. This was too soon.
“Not yet,” I said.
I could almost feel the disappointment in the air, because some of it was coming from me as well as from him.
He turned away and lay on his back. I felt a wave of cold air come between us.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” he said. “I just have to calm down a bit.”
I put my hand on his chest and pressed my face against his shoulder. We lay there silently. I heard his breathing slow to a regular rhythm and realized he was falling asleep. Whatever it was they had put in our drinks was doing this, I thought angrily. I slipped off the bed and reached for my bra and my dress. Then I went into my bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. I felt tired but not as dizzy as before. Perhaps I hadn’t drunk as much as Matt. When I stepped out, I saw that he was on his side now, sleeping. There was no point in waking him. I thought about the food we had left out and decided to go downstairs and put some of it into containers as Matt had suggested. The door to Haylee’s room was closed. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her anyway.
While I was taking care of the food, I saw that either Haylee or Jimmy had spilled some marinara sauce on one of the dining-room chair cushions. Mother would be very angry about it, I thought, and hurried to get the stain remover. It took quite a while to get the sauce out of the cushion. After that, I continued cleaning up. We hadn’t even touched the tiramisu. Maybe Matt and Jimmy would eat some when they came down. I looked at the clock.
It was almost nine thirty. We still had some time, but I thought I had better get them down here. I hurried up the stairs, intending first to knock on Haylee’s bedroom door, but when I reached the landing and started down the hallway, Haylee stepped out of my bedroom.
Totally naked!
She stood there smiling at me. For a moment, I felt as if my feet were nailed to the floor.
“What were you—”
“You’re not a virgin anymore,” she said, laughed, and sauntered to her bedroom.
I still hadn’t moved. What had she done? My heart was pounding. I approached my doorway slowly, almost with baby steps, and paused there looking in. Then I flipped on the lights. Matt was facedown on my bed, also totally naked. I gasped with a moan loud enough to stir him. He turned slowly, his eyes blinking. He rubbed them and gazed at me.
“Hey,” he said. “How did you get dressed so fast?”
Beside him on the bed was the empty contraceptive wrapper.
I still had not entered the room.
“What did you do?” I asked, my hands at the base of my throat.
“Do?” He sat up and leaned against the headboard. “What do you mean? You mean my falling asleep? I’m sorry—”
“No!”
My exclamation was so loud and sharp that he seemed to tremble like someone experiencing an earthquake. “What?” he asked, reaching for his underwear and slipping it on. He was grasping at all his clothes.
“My sister,” I said.
He shook his head and put on his pants. “Sister?” He looked at the doorway to my bathroom. “You came out of the bathroom . . . naked, and I was surprised, but—”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
Now he simply stared at me. His face moved from disbelief to suspicion and then back to disbelief. “You took it out. You put it on me and—”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said, slamming the palms of my hands against my ears.
He hurried to finish dressing. “It can’t be,” he mumbled. “It can’t be.”
I turned and went to Haylee’s bedroom. The door was closed, b
ut I thrust it open. Jimmy and she were on her bed, both now dressed. They smiled at me.
“How could you do that?”
“I saw you weren’t going to do it,” Haylee said, “and thought, why waste a good condom?”
Jimmy roared and slapped the side of his leg. “Good one.”
“It’s just a joke, Kaylee. Don’t get hysterical. Now it will be easier for you the next time.”
“I’ll swear she was in here with me the whole time,” Jimmy said, raising his right hand, and they both laughed again.
“If it makes any difference, he kept saying your name, not mine,” Haylee said.
“My dad is always saying ‘in the dark, all cats are gray,’ ” Jimmy said. “Meow.”
Haylee laughed. Then she stopped and looked soberly at me. “Is everything cleaned up, put away? Oh, don’t we still have the tiramisu?”
“Tiramisu? I love it,” Jimmy said, starting to get up.
“You put something in our drinks, didn’t you?” I looked at Jimmy. “What was it? You brought it.”
“Who, moi?” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t do that. Maybe you put it in yourself.”
“That’s my sister. She does stuff and then tries to blame it on me,” Haylee said. She rose, too.
“I’m going to tell Mother everything,” I declared.
“No, you won’t. She’ll be just as angry at you, maybe angrier for trying to blame me for something you wanted to do and did.”
“We’re wasting time,” Jimmy said. “There’s tiramisu waiting.”
They started toward me. I stepped away and went back to my bedroom. Matt was sitting on the side of the bed looking dazed, his hands on his temples.
“They put something in what we drank,” I told him.
He looked at me and nodded. “What was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That bastard,” he said, standing, his hands clenched.
“Don’t start a fight here. It will only make things worse.”
He shook his head, looked at the bathroom and then back at me. “It was your sister?”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”