Storms 01 - Family Storms

real value. I couldn’t recall anything that would have had our names. We had no address. If it had all been left on the side of the road, some other homeless person or persons might easily have come upon it and taken what they could use.
    Of course, my thoughts went to the next day.
I like Ricky,
I thought. He was certainly very good-looking and so far very nice to me. It was exciting being with him. But to do what I was about to do, for the reasons I was about to do it, was troubling to me, and not because I was afraid. I wasn’t old enough to have spent much time thinking about losing my virginity, but whenever I had thought about it, it was in terms of romance and love. Just doing it to get it over with diminished it, made it seem like such a common exercise. Was it just me? Why didn’t these other girls feel and see that too?
    Maybe they didn’t really believe in love. From what I could see and what I heard them say, none of them had a particularly strong feeling for any one boy. If one of them had such a feeling, she surely kept it secret from the others. I had always dreamed of having a boyfriend who took me to school dances, movies, and restaurants. Maybe we would be too young to be really in love, but we would like each other so much that it would seem that way, and when we eventually broke up to go our separate ways, maybe forcollege, we would be broken-hearted, at least for a while. Years later, married to other people, we would meet and smile, almost laugh, at how intense we had once been. Yet in our heart of hearts, we would wonder what it would have been like if we had gone on together. The wondering would last only a second, but at least we would have had that.
    None of the girls in the VA club would have anything remotely close to that. What would their memories of high school be like? How long could they continue to mock and belittle other girls who had had long and deep affections for boys in the past? Would they wake up one day years from now and realize what they had missed and lost and, most important, what they had given up when they treated their first sexual experience as just something they had to get over with?
    I was tempted to go into Kiera’s bathroom and sit beside her while she was in her bath and talk about all this, but I was afraid that the moment I brought it up, she would carry on with how I was not only betraying her but making her look bad to her friends. She might even find a way to blame it all on her mother, and things would return to the way they had been, a house full of thunder and lightning which would only bring us all to some new great tragedy. Whether Kiera would blame it on me or not, I would think I had caused it when all I had to do was make love with a boy I admittedly thought of as handsome and exciting.
    How I wished I had a real mother to talk to now, even a mother who was in and out of sanity the way Mama was when we lived on the streets. I’d know when I could talk to her, when her mind was clear enough to hear me and care.
    But I didn’t even have that.
    It was at times like this when I knew just how lost and alone I really was and that no amount of money, no house, no special school, nothing, would fill the great and deep hole in my heart.

29
Initiation
    K iera was really very clever when it came to manipulating her father. I watched and listened to an expert at dinner that night. The excitement and sweetness in her voice was so well crafted, as were her smiles, her looks at me, and her way of bringing me in at the right times to support what she said. She had a way of tilting her head just slightly to the left while rolling her eyes to the right to look cute and innocent. She tossed back her hair with a flick of two fingers and pursed her lips as if she was sending her father a kiss across the table.
    I looked at Mr. March as Kiera described what our outing on Ricky’s boat was going to be. Mrs. March’s face was more like a mask, nothing moving, her eyelids barely blinking as she listened. Although Kiera never came right out and said it, she implied that Ricky’s father was going to keep close tabs on us. She reminded her parents that she had been on Ricky’s father’s boat before and how well it had gone. The weather was going to be perfect for boating, too.Most of all, this would be the most exciting thing I had ever done. She made it sound as if all the others, Ricky, even his father, were going along with this outing for my benefit. How