I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t criticize them for their anxiety about me. Yes, they were much stricter about what I could do than the parents of almost every other girl my age whom I knew. But maybe I shouldn’t dislike them for that, I told myself. Maybe I should be more understanding. After all, they had been willing to take me in and make a home and a future for me. They were willing to take risks, to invest in someone unknown. Also, I had to consider that I was, after all, an only child. I did see that parents of only children were more controlling, more nervous and concerned about everything the child did.
All of my parents’ friends and the students I knew at school who had met my parents seemed to understand. However, my school friends let me know they wouldn’t like it if their parents treated them that way. They would say things like, “Your parents are just obsessed with worrying about you. They should have had more children. My parents even forgot to ask me how I did on my recent report card. Tell them to get real!”
There was no question I was always on a tighter leash than the other girls in my class. Almost all of them had slept over at other girls’ homes. It was no major thing to meet somewhere and go to a movie or just hang out at the shopping mall. Whenever one of them was there to do actual clothes shopping, a group would be accompanying her.
But not me.
I never went shopping without my mother, who made all the decisions about styles and colors for me, and even though I was invited a few times to join some of my classmates at the mall on weekends, my mother and father didn’t approve of it.
“You’re too young yet to be in places like that without adult supervision,” my mother said, right through my fourteenth year.
Maybe my parents would grow out of their intense concern and worry about me as I grew older and became more of an adult, I hoped. When I crossed over that line into what everyone would consider adulthood, having to take more responsibility for myself, they would ease off, relax, and we’d be able to enjoy ourselves and each other more. Was that just a wish, a dream?
Meanwhile, there was a limit to how many times I would be invited and not accept. Before the end of my ninth-grade year, the girls stopped inviting me not only to join them at the mall and for movies but also to their parties. To be sure, not all of them were very upset about it. Some of the girls in my class never liked me or simply didn’t want me around, especially when they were trying to attract the attention of a boy. One of the girls, Patricia Lucas, told me they were jealous of me.
“Why?” I asked.
“You already have a body,” she said. “You’re too much competition.”
“Excuse me? We all have a body.”
“Not like yours. You have a mature figure, and you have beautiful hair and eyes, not to mention an unreal perfect complexion. I never saw you have a pimple. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how the older boys drool over you.”
I didn’t say it, but of course I had noticed. Besides the fact that many of them approached me in school, either in the hallways or in the cafeteria, I could actually feel their eyes on me, and I could hear them whispering behind my back. Some of the things they said made me blush, and later, when one of those older boys, Shelly Roman, approached me, I drove him off the way you might swat a fly. It was easy to do. Whenever he said anything, I asked him why he had said it, which began to annoy him, and then I told him I knew something about what had really happened between him and a girl named Sidney Urban. I said I could never trust him because of that.
“What did I do?” he demanded.
“You lied to her when you told her the drink you gave her at a party recently had nothing alcoholic in it. You didn’t know she had a serious alcohol intolerance and it would affect her.”
“She had something else wrong with her, some other allergy,” he whined in self-defense.
“No. You didn’t believe her. You thought she was just afraid of drinking. You hoped she would get drunk so you could take advantage of her.”
“Did Sidney tell you that?”
“No, she doesn’t know me,” I said.
“So who told you that?”
“No one,” I said. “I just know.”
He squinted at me and stepped back. “What are you, the school psychologist or something? Get a life,” he said, and walked off quickly. After that, every time he saw me, in a hallway or outside the building, he avoided me like the plague.
I didn’t lie to him, although I didn’t know exactly how I knew. I just knew. I had looked at Sidney after that party, and it all came to me, rolled out in my mind so vividly that it was as if I had been there. When the words came out of my mouth, however, I was just as surprised as he was. It was the first time I had ever done anything like that. It was actually a bit frightening. I felt like a small bird that had leaped into flight for the first time, full of trepidation but soon after elated. I felt like I had taken some drug that would make me high. It was as if I was rising off the floor.
A few days after I’d talked to Shelly, Sidney, who was in the tenth grade, approached me in the cafeteria. I was sitting at a table with some of my classmates. Everyone was surprised at how angry she looked. She stepped right up beside me, practically pushing me out of my seat.
“I want to talk to you,” she began.
“Here?”
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Why are you spreading stories about me?” she demanded.
Sidney was a good two inches taller than I was and had reddish-blond hair cut in a bob. She had delicate facial features and striking green eyes. The only feature that detracted from her good looks was that her neck was a little longer than normal. I thought she’d look better with a longer hairstyle because of that, but I wasn’t about to suggest anything to her now or ever.
“I’m not spreading any stories about you.”
She glanced at the other girls at the table. None of them was particularly close to me. None would ever defend me. In fact, they looked amused, happy to see me being dressed down.
“You told someone I had an alcohol intolerance and became seriously ill at a party.”
I shrugged. “Isn’t that true?” I asked. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything, you nit. Who told you to say that?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re a liar. I ought to pull your hair out, you and whoever put you up to it.”
“No one put me up to anything.”
“Right. You just came up with that out of thin air. Don’t make up any more stories about me, or I’ll come looking for you,” she said.
She marched off to join her friends, who all looked back at me, trying to outdo one another with expressions of rage. I looked at the other girls at my table. The silence felt like the inside of a tornado.
“Who told you to tell that story about her?” Susan Mayo asked me.
“No one.”
“Then where did you get it?”
“I just knew it. She’s lying about it, but worse, she’s lying to herself. She’s going to get into bigger trouble.”
I actually envisioned funeral wreaths, but I didn’t say it. I must have had a shocked expression on my face. No one spoke. They stared at me.
“It’s true. It’s not a lie,” I said. “She’s just embarrassed about it.”
“How do you know all that?” Susan asked. “You don’t hang out with her friends, so you wouldn’t hear them talking. Did you sneak into the nurse’s office and read some private stuff or something? Well?”
“No. I just know,” I said.
“You’re hiding someone,” Marge Coombe said. “They’re going to find out eventually. You’re stupid to protect them. Is it a boy, someone you like or who likes you?”
“No. I’m telling you all the truth. No one told me that story.”
“No one told you? You just knew?” Susan asked.
“Yes.”
“Delusional,” she told the others.
The word brought back memories of
my therapy. Was she right? I couldn’t explain to them how I knew. I couldn’t tell them about my visions and dreams, about the voices I had heard all my life. Of course they would think I was delusional, just as my therapist had, but deep inside, I couldn’t stop believing that I was right.
I didn’t think the incident got back to my parents, but I might have been wrong about that. My mother knew some of the other mothers. Maybe that was part of the reason my parents had decided to move me to a new school. Whatever the reasons, it did surprise me when they said they wanted me to leave the public school I was in and attend a charter school instead.
“Why?” I asked.
“This school has a much better reputation. It has smaller classes. You’ll get more attention from your teachers, and it’s closer,” my mother explained.
Either she or my father would still have to drive me there and pick me up after school. “It’s not that much closer.”
“It’s closer,” my mother insisted. We were all in my father’s office. He sat behind his desk, and she stood beside him, looking down at me on the settee.
“But I like my teachers. My grades aren’t bad. I’ve always been on the honor roll, and my teachers tell me I have top reading scores.” Usually, I never questioned a decision they made for me, but I couldn’t accept their reasons this time.
My father looked up at my mother. She sighed deeply but seemed calmer. “You’re getting to that age now,” she said. “Things are . . . well, things are just more delicate, actions more consequential. We hope you’ll make better friends, too.”
Better friends? I thought. Better than what? I never had what most girls would call best friends at my old school, but I did have some classmates who could have grown into real friends if my parents would have let me do more with them. Now I would never see them much anymore, if at all. I thought I would be even more alone.
There was no more discussion about it. Arrangements were made, and I was moved to the school they had chosen.
If they knew about the incident at my old school, they still hadn’t mentioned anything about it by the time we celebrated my fifteenth birthday. Whether my birth certificate was authentic or not, I had always been told that my birthday was on September 15, and what I had seen in the file confirmed it.
I say “celebrated,” although I’m sure anyone my age would question whether this was really a celebration. It was just the three of us. Uncle Wade was somewhere in Europe, and they hadn’t invited any of their friends. They never did when it came to one of my birthdays. It was as if they had always wanted it kept a secret in a house bulging with secrets. We had dinner, but it wasn’t anything extra special. My father liked pot roast with grilled rosemary potatoes. I liked it, too, but there were so many other things I liked more, and they never took me to a restaurant and had the waiter or waitress bring a cake with candles. Neither of them asked me what I wanted for my birthday dinner. My mother did put out the better dishes.
As always, I helped set the table, but just like on all my previous birthdays, it wasn’t just candles on a cake. We had a candelabra in the center of the table with four tall white candles like the ones in churches. They were lit at the start of the dinner, and the lights were turned lower. All the window curtains were closed, too. I couldn’t help feeling like we were doing something we shouldn’t be doing, but what? It was my birthday, but it felt more like we were at a séance.
My mother began with the same questions she had asked at every birthday for as long as I could remember. It was almost like the questions asked of children at religious dinners. They had a spiritual air about them.
“How do you feel tonight, Sage? Do you feel any different? Special?”
“I don’t feel that different,” I said. I always tried to give her the answer I thought she wanted or to avoid the answer she didn’t want, but I was too unsure. This time, I was very matter-of-fact. “I’m hungry, but I’m usually hungry.”
She grimaced and turned to my father.
“Your mother means, do you feel any older, wiser? Has something about you changed? Do you see the world any differently?”
What parents asked questions like that on their children’s birthdays? None of my friends ever described their parents asking such questions.
“I guess I do,” I said. “I’d better. I’m in the tenth grade now. The work’s going to be harder, and I’m around older kids more often, so I think I’ll act older.”
Neither looked satisfied with my response. What did they want to hear?
“Are you going to tell us about another birthday you remember?” my mother asked with a sour look.
“I don’t remember any right now, except, of course, Lucy Fein’s birthday last year. That was a big party. I was surprised she invited me. We had hardly talked in school before she sent out her invitations.”
“You know I don’t mean that sort of birthday, Sage,” she said. “No dreams, no illusions, no inexplicable memories to plague us with?”
“No,” I replied. “I haven’t had any thoughts like that.”
She looked happy and satisfied about that. The truth was that a few days ago, I did dream about being at a birthday party I could not explain. I supposed it would fit the definition of a nightmare more than just another strange dream.
It took place in a small house. The room was lit by many candles because there wasn’t any electricity. There were at least a dozen adults and two other children. All the adults were dressed in black. I could feel them all watching me as a woman who was my mother brought out my birthday gift on a dish. It was an amber necklace. Before I was given it, she lifted it out of the dish and began to recite something in what sounded like gibberish to me. Everyone around the table joined in, but the chant was hard to understand. When that ended, she turned and brought the necklace to me to put it around my neck. She was behind me, and the necklace was not as long as it had looked. It seemed to be shrinking, tightening around my throat until I gagged and woke up.
That was a dream I was definitely not going to tell them about tonight.
My father cut the roast and served me some. I took some string beans and passed the plate to him. I could see how my mother was watching every little thing I did, anticipating something or waiting for me to say something strange. My attention was centered on the gift package they had brought me. I wouldn’t be able to open it until after we had eaten dinner and my birthday cake was brought out. I’d had a glimpse of the cake when I opened the refrigerator earlier. At least it was my favorite, a vanilla cake with an apricot icing.
As we ate, they continued to ask me questions about my new school. I had been there only a week, but they wanted to know if I had met any girls or boys I would like to have as friends.
“Yes, there are a few girls I think I could be friends with,” I said.
Nothing terribly dramatic had occurred yet, and the other girls were feeling me out the way girls did anywhere. What kind of music did I like? What did I watch on television? What were my experiences with boys? Stuff like that. I tried to give them answers they liked, but of course, I was vague about the boys I had known. I didn’t want to reveal that I had no romantic experiences while they were unwinding spools of dates, parties, and sexual explorations that honestly made me tingle, especially the way they freely described their orgasms, trying to outdo one another.
Now my mother was silent for a moment. She glanced at my father and then asked me a strange question. “When you came out of school today, did you see anyone watching from across the way before you saw me waiting for you? A man?”
“Watching? Watching what, Mother?”
“You, of course.”
“No. I don’t remember seeing anyone watching me. Who would be watching me?”
“No one, but if you ever do see anyone doing that, you tell us right away. Do you understand?”
“No. Why would anyone be watching me? How do you mean?”
“There are sexual predators,” my father said. “They focus on som
eone, and it’s better if you’re aware of that sort of thing now, Sage. You’re a mature young girl. Clear?”
“Yes,” I said.
Why were they suddenly concerned about this now? Why not when I was at my old school? I was sure I wasn’t less attractive six months ago. The school I was at now was on a side street, that was true, but there was still lots of pedestrian traffic.
My mother rose, went to the kitchen, and brought out my cake, but there were no candles on it. She saw the disappointment on my face.
“You’re too old for candles on a cake,” she said. “We don’t have to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ You know that’s what we’re saying with this dinner, this cake, and your gift.”
I know, I thought, but who likes to feel their birthday is just something ordinary?
My father gave me my gift after my mother cut the cake and put the piece in front of me. I looked at the package and then up at them.
“What?” my mother asked.
“Nothing,” I said, but I already knew what was in the package. I had envisioned it. I was afraid to tell them I had done that, so I opened it carefully and took out the amber necklace.
“You don’t look happy about it. Don’t you think it’s pretty?” my mother asked immediately.
I couldn’t help my reaction. It was as if I had drifted into my frightening dream. “Oh, yes. It is very pretty.”
“Here,” she said. “I’ll put it on you.”
She rose to come around behind me. I looked at my father. I was sure he saw the panic in my face.
“What is it, Sage? You look very nervous, even frightened.”
“No. I’m all right,” I said. “It’s just so beautiful and looks so expensive. I was surprised.”
He looked up at my mother. Neither accepted my answer.
She plucked the necklace out of the box and undid the clasp. I closed my eyes. My heart was pounding. Would I choke to death? The necklace settled just below my throat. I reached up to touch it. Then I turned to look at myself in the wall mirror. When I was younger and I looked at the mirror, I sometimes saw other people sitting at the table, people who weren’t there. I had stopped mentioning that years ago. I was thankful they weren’t here now and hadn’t been for some time.
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