Storms 01 - Family Storms

stepped out and smiled at me.
    “I feel I should tell you something,” she began. “The second set of pills I gave you …”
    “Where are they? What about them?”
    “They were fertility pills. Ricky’s father owns a drugstore chain, remember? He can get anything. Maybe you’ll have twins.”
    The heat that came into my face made me feel that I would go up in flames.
    “Why did you do all this to me?” I asked.
    She smiled. “My parents started to love you more than they loved me. That was the way it was when Alena was alive, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. Aren’t my friends loyal? They’re so wonderful.
    “Besides,” she said, losing her smile of satisfaction to the hard, cold face I had first known, “I told you. It was your mother’s fault. She shouldn’t have crossed the highway there.” She closed the door softly.
    I felt like someone in a coffin who wasn’t really dead watching the lid being shut.

31
Darkness
    A lthough the guest room wasn’t as large as Alena’s suite and didn’t have a sitting area where I could set up my schoolwork, it was luxurious, with a king-size bed and a thick-carpeted floor. It had a very nice bathroom, too, but the room was in a wing of the house that was darker and lonelier, not that I wanted to be anywhere near Kiera ever again. She claimed the same about me and wouldn’t eat dinner if I was at the table at the same time. Her father accommodated her wishes and ordered Mrs. March to have me served my dinner an hour earlier than when they ate. Every night of the following week, I ate dinner alone in the kitchen nook. By now, all of the servants working for the Marches knew that something was seriously wrong, but no one asked me any questions about why I was being isolated, nor did anyone speak much more to me than was absolutely necessary, even though I could see sympathy in both Mrs. Duval’s and Mrs. Caro’s faces. I imagined they were all worried about losing their jobs.
    Grover was driving me to school again but was back to his silent, formal ways.
    I didn’t know what to expect when I returned to school on Monday. At first, no one noticed anything really different until lunch hour, when I ended up sitting by myself. That was when the buzz began. The stories about me couldn’t have been passed around quicker even in a general announcement over loudspeakers.
    I had no idea exactly what the girls were saying about me yet, but Lisa Dirk couldn’t wait to be a messenger. She came sauntering over and slid into the seat across from me.
    “How come you’re sitting all by yourself?” she asked. It was obvious that she knew the answer. My senior girlfriends didn’t want me, and I didn’t want them.
    I didn’t reply. I just ate with my gaze focused on nothing, least of all her.
    “Is it true what we hear?” she asked. “About you and Ricky Burns?”
    I put my sandwich down and leaned toward her. The expression on my face frightened her, and she pulled back.
    “I don’t know what you heard, and I really don’t care.”
    “We heard that you threw yourself at him on his boat. You called him from a stateroom, and you were naked,” she blurted.
    “They’re spreading lies about me,” I said, even though I knew it would be useless and a waste of time to defend myself. It was like holding back a waterfall with your bare hands. They were a chorus of gossipers, and I was a lone, lost voice.
    “I’d never guess you were like that,” Lisa said, ignoring my denial. “To go after a senior boy so desperately is sad.”
    “Sad?”
    I was holding back a flood of truth with a dam made of paper. It was charging down my tongue. I was moments away from telling it all.
I’m not Kiera’s cousin. While she was high on some drug, Kiera ran my mother and me over and killed my mother. Her mother took me in, enrolled me in this school, and made up that story.
    For a moment, I thought I had actually shouted it all, broken through the dam, but I quickly realized that what kept the dam secure was my fear that telling the truth about myself would only alienate me even more from my classmates. Who would want to be friends with a homeless girl? No one in that school would want to be seen talking to me. That was for sure.
    I couldn’t skip all of that and defend myself by telling Lisa I had been raped, either. Mr. March had forbidden me to say it. I could only swallow it all back and ignore everyone, but that was hard to do. By the end of the day, I felt