Treasure Island!!!

blank, I scowled, and after a week or so, she gave up the effort. And then, strangest of all, Adrianna started disappearing at night.
     
    “Where does she go?” I asked one evening when my parents and I were scraping leftovers out of the fridge.
    “Who?” my father said.
    “Adrianna. This is the third dinner she’s missed this week. Where is she?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “We don’t ask her,” my mother said mildly.
    I would ask her. I had too much time on my hands
not
to ask her. It wasn’t that I thought she was up to anything interesting. She had probably signed up for a night class on how to make a drum out of a gourd. But the fact that she’d do it without telling us was bizarre. Her life was always out in the open. Every scrap, blowing loose like a tissue in the breeze. When I asked her what she had been getting up to in her off-hours, she replied woodenly that she hadn’t been up to anything.
    “These awkward absences from dinner,” I clarified.
    “Awkward?”
    “You’re leaving me a bit exposed. If you’re not there to babble on about your day, they’re likely to ask
me
questions. I’m not eager for an interrogation, and now I have to manage them without you.”
    She looked at me blankly. “You don’t have to
manage
them. Just talk to them. They’re people.”
    “Mom and Dad? Like hell they are! Anyway don’t try to change the subject. Where’ve you been?”
    “Working late,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. How much prep does a third grade teacher have? One, two, sometimes three times a week, she would leave the house while I was dreaming bad dreams under the yellow chenille spread and not return till after dark.
    My mother seemed to know her schedule, but each night, sucker that I was, I counted on her return until the deadly moment when my mother set the table. Three plates? My heart sank. Where was she? The deserter! One night, after deflecting a series of barely-veiled remarks from my mother (“So, Sweetie, I went by the gift wrap department today at Flounkers, and you know who I saw? Your old boss Edie. She says the Christmas rush is already
starting.
I wonder if they could use people.”), after eating two extra helpings of lasagna in an effort to maintain a mouth too full to answer my father’s questions (“What are the other people in your class doing? The other English majors?”), after voluntarily leaping up to clear the table and wash the dishes just to erect a physical barrier between them and me, I took a strategic position in the kitchen. At 10 P.M. my mother planted a kiss on my cheek as if she were scattering salt onto the drive. “Sleep well,” she said blandly. My father had scudded down the hallway without any ceremony.
    Listening to the uneven hum of the refrigerator, I tried to read but soon gave up, cut the lights, and waited for the sound of Adrianna’s car in the drive. I became one hundred and eighteen pounds of human ear, vibrating with every impulsion of air, every click and creak of the house until, just as the digital clock on the stove said eleven-twenty-eight, her figure loomed in the doorway. She flicked on the light, said, “Oh!” and peeled off her parka to reveal a long brown velour dress—soft, hideous, and intricately embroidered with flowers at the yoke.
    “Where’ve you been?” I said.
    “Working.”
    She threw her coat on a kitchen chair and failed to register my meaningful silence.
    “Nobody stays up till midnight doing lesson plans for third graders.”
    “I do. What’s got into you?”
    “What’s got into
you
?” I parried. “Do you know what you smell like?”
    “Jean Naté?”
    “No, sister. You smell like sex.”
    “Gross,” she said, ducking as I leaned in to sniff. We engaged in a brief scuffle during which I tried to smell her hair and her hands, but she eluded me, laughing nervously and emitting small unattractive grunts. I was only trying to get a rise out of her, but her reaction suggested I had happened on the correct line of pursuit. Adrianna has a prude’s decorum, which she would do anything to preserve, so I stopped chasing her and began to say things she didn’t want to hear. She interrupted, she evaded, she tried to shut me up, and then just when I threatened to embarrass her completely—by telling her the details of my
own
sex life—she caved.
    “All right, all right. I
wasn’t
at work, it’s true. I’ve been
seeing
somebody.”
    “Who?” I said coolly.
    She opened up the