Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

asking meant nothing.
    “Why are you not working harder and being as good a student as Cassie, Semantha? I’ll tell you whyyou’re not,” he would say before I had a chance to protest and tell him that I really was working hard at being a good student. It was just impossible for me to be as perfect as Cassie. I know I spent more time on my homework than she did. Whatever I would say wouldn’t matter anyway, I supposed. What Daddy believed was already, as Cassie would say with one of her dramatic gestures, “a fait accompli.”
    Because Cassie could frighten me, she could easily command and hold my attention. Besides, it was fascinating to watch her parade about with her mother-perfect posture and cast her deep and serious pronouncements at me, as would someone tossing flower petals while riding in a parade. Cassie was always either in a parade or on a stage, and I was always on the sidelines or in the audience.
    Many of those solemn declarations that she made were about being perfect for our parents.
    “We have to be better in every way than other children would normally be for their parents, Semantha. We’re a famous family here. We have a real history, a rich heritage. Few families do. There is no official royalty in America as there is in countries like England, but there is in the minds of Americans. What that means,” she quickly added, because she could see I didn’t understand her—she claimed my face was so easy to read that it could have a library card—“is that people still look way up to certain other people, people with a history like ours, and think of them as something special. We truly are something special, so you can’t be ordinary. It’s absolutely forbidden for any of us Heavenstones to beordinary,” she emphasized, which was Cassie’s Second Commandment.
    “We have to say double the clever things other children would say. We have to make our parents laugh twice as much as other parents laugh. We have to give our parents twice as much love, too, especially our daddy, who has been handed down all this grand heritage.”
    “I give them all my love,” I said.
    “It’s not enough. You’re not enough, I’m not enough, as we are. We must … rise to the occasion. We must be like angels, so much like angels that Mother will swear she sees wings on us both. Daddy already sees them on me, as you know, and that’s not by accident.” She paused and turned to me as if she had just remembered she was speaking to me and not to herself. I would swear that the way she held her shoulders when she said that actually made me think I did see wings on her, too. “Are you listening?”
    I nodded emphatically, but the more Cassie talked about being more than perfect for our parents, the more worried about failure I became. How can I be twice as much as I was? I wondered. I didn’t doubt that maybe Cassie could. She was so intelligent and clever and read far beyond what girls her age would or could read. She was far more mature than her classmates, too. However, I knew that her teachers weren’t all fond of that. Some complained that she was racing through her childhood too quickly. She should play more, enjoy more, they said.
    “Cassie is Cassie,” Daddy would reply, as if that explained everything.

    Sometimes, however, I thought Mother was really becoming more and more unhappy about Cassie, rather than taking double pleasure in her. Ironically, Cassie had a personality that resembled our mother’s more than mine did, and I was sure Mother saw things in her and about her that she didn’t necessarily like in or about herself.
    For one thing, Cassie was too quick to see and point out weaknesses and flaws in other people, and once she rendered a judgement about someone, she couldn’t be moved from it, even, as Daddy might say, with a bulldozer. I sensed he actually liked that about her. “Too many women are flighty,” he said. “Their minds are tied too tightly to their erratic emotions and go from high notes to low notes like some out-of-tune piano.”
    But Cassie was so particular, especially about her classmates, that she had no real friends, just casual acquaintances she tolerated. She wasn’t just a snob. She was “a snob’s snob.”
    Although Daddy didn’t come right out and say it, I was sure he thought Mother was a snob, too. Mother didn’t belong to any clubs or organizations, and whenever Daddy asked her why not, she always answered with a complaint about the other