Don't You Trust Me?

by Patrice Kindl

  Really? Brooke was terribly nervous about my coming? I wondered why. Secrets to hide, perhaps?

  “She’ll be able to take you around to your classes when school starts and introduce you to everyone. I know it’s always hard to start at a new school. You’re registered, by the way. It was a bit of a rush, since everything was decided only a few days ago. But your mother managed to get a package of your documents to me Express Mail, so we’re all set.”

  Documents?

  “I never thought of that,” I said.

  “Oh yes, they’re strict here. Your parents had to grant us legal custody to ensure that you were able to go to school in our district. My being a psychiatric social worker for the state helped too, I think.”

  A what? Boring old Auntie was a psychiatric social worker? Hmm. Maybe I shouldn’t underestimate her powers of penetration. Surely she had run into others of my kind before.

  “And naturally the school wanted a copy of your transcript and immunization record,” she concluded.

  So Uncle and Aunt-the-psychiatric-social-worker were my legal guardians, were they? Interesting. I would have to store that little tidbit in the back of my mind and think about it later.

  I couldn’t see how any of Janelle’s documents would get me in trouble. I don’t think you can tell by looking at someone whether or not they’ve been vaccinated for measles. And as for Janelle’s grades, well, she didn’t seem awfully bright to me, so unless she’d been hiding a massive intellect under that flaky personality, that wouldn’t be a problem—

  “And of course,” continued Aunt Antonia, casting a swift glance at me as she pulled out into traffic, “we are hoping that, since you will have no distractions here, you’ll be able to bring your grade point average up a bit.”

  Aaah. I smiled beatifically. Good old Ashton-the-distraction. It looked like I was going to be able to better Janelle’s performance in the classroom with the greatest of ease.

  8

  JUST LIKE IN BROOKE’S NEIGHBORHOOD, the high school grounds were one gigantic lawn, and there was hardly any chain-link fencing there, either. Yeah, the tennis court was fenced in, but the whole, sprawling campus was not, unlike my school in LA. Brooke’s school was wide open, so that anybody could walk in. People around here seemed to be awfully trusting, like nobody would ever need to be excluded, nobody would ever think to do anything bad. I suppose that’s the difference between the city and the suburbs; people in the suburbs think they have put enough distance between themselves and evil so that they can relax. In my opinion, though, greed and selfishness are a basic part of human nature. People can move away as far as they like, but their vices will come slinking along after them like a pack of half-tamed pariah dogs.

  My old school wasn’t bad. It sent a lot of kids on to college and met most of the state competency requirements even though an awful lot of the student body qualified for free lunches. You could tell that the average family income in this district was a lot higher. The cars in the parking lots were nicer, and so were the clothes worn by both faculty and students. I wasn’t used to so many people being white-bread-white either, even though I am pretty white-bread-white myself. There was a scattering of black and brown faces in the halls here, but most of the students looked like they’d blister and burn after twenty minutes in direct sunlight. Coming here from Southern California, this place had the look of a school in a 1950s teen movie.

  But who cares about the differences? School is school is school. So long as the class work wasn’t a whole lot harder, I’d survive all right. I always do.

  It was a lucky thing that Janelle was such a dope and expectations of me were therefore low. It was harder here. Well, for one thing, I skipped a full academic year because Janelle is six months older than I am. And I supposedly had two years of French under my belt. Forget that. I said I hated French and wanted to switch to Spanish. Janelle was failing anyway, so that made sense.

  But the math and literature classes were way harder than I’d expected, and instead of being goof-off periods like they were in my old school, you were actually expected to work in art and gym. Spanish was easy. I’d been taking it anyway, and living in LA, you absorb some through your pores.

  The thing was, I had a moment when I totally blanked out on “my” last name. Janelle— Um . . . yeah. I knew it—it was on her driver’s permit—but I hadn’t used it since I’d been here, so I sat there staring at the form I was filling out. Good thing Aunt Antonia had filled out nearly everything already. I had no idea what school I’d supposedly gone to, or where I’d been born or any of that stuff.

  Finally it came to me: Janelle Johanssen. Right. With a double s and an e not an o. I wrote it out as: “Morgan (Janelle) Johanssen.” I wasn’t going to be called Janelle by all these people.

  So far as social interactions went that first day, I sat back and watched as Brooke did her thing. It was hard to guess what place Brooke would occupy in the hierarchy. She was not bad-looking, even if kind of chubby, her family was rich, and she was in advanced placement classes. But she was clueless when it came to any kind of street smarts; she assumed everyone was like her, well-intentioned, friendly, and bubbly. She did not even seem to know that there was a hierarchy. I could tell that some of her dear friends, if they thought it would do them any good with the most popular crowd, would drop her so fast, she’d bounce. She obviously had no idea.

  Personally, I didn’t care about being in with the in crowd. I like being by myself, and have no need of peer approval to make me feel important. True, I wanted to be admired and respected here, but I didn’t need to worry about hanging out with a bunch of other people just to avoid being alone.

  Brooke, of course, thought that I must have felt terribly lonely and unsure of myself in a school where I knew no one, because that’s the way she would feel in my place. Aunt Antonia had arranged for me to be in several of Brooke’s classes and for us to share the same lunch period so I wouldn’t be on my own too much. Brooke dragged me from one clump of people to another, introducing me as, “My cousin from LA. She’s teaching me horseback riding, and she’s really good!” Some of these people were obviously the elite, some were elite-wannabes, some run-of-the-mill, and some were hopeless losers. Brooke treated them all the same and acted like she thought they would all be equally thrilled to meet her horsey cousin from LA.

  I nodded coolly, said hello and not much else. One girl who was apparently also into horses perked up at the mention of what a fabulous rider I was and started gabbling about dressage and point-to-points, whatever they were.

  All in all, I was satisfied with my first day at school. I would have to watch the scene here for a week or two before I figured out where I would fit in best. Socializing does not come naturally to me; I have to study people to figure out what is motivating them and what they are thinking beneath the surface.

  We already had a ton of homework—different again from my old school, where they let you off easy the first week—so we went straight home after school. After a snack of low-calorie dip and vegetables (Brooke was trying to lose a little weight, so I was condemned to diet food as well), we retired to our respective rooms and dug into the algebra problems our mutual math teacher had assigned.

  At dinner that night the conversation was lively, with Aunt and Uncle asking a lot of questions and Brooke burbling away the way she usually did, about her friends, her new teachers, and her classes. Finally Aunt turned to me.

  “And, Morgan, how about you? How did you like your first day?”

  “Oh, Morgan is really smart, you can tell,” put in Brooke before I could open my mouth. “She’s in my economics class, and she gave a brilliant answer when Mr. Humber asked us to discuss this quotation about how, when ethics and economics are in conflict, economics always win. She was ruthless! Wow, don’t ever cross Morgan! I think you should be a lawyer, Morgan. You’ve got that kind of logical mind. Only, it seems to me like economics have to be guided by ethics, or we’ll be living in a dog-eat-dog w
orld where only the strong survive.”

  “We are living in a dog-eat-dog world where only the strong survive,” observed Uncle Karl, the car-dealership king.

  “Oh, Dad, we are not! You know you are much nicer than you give yourself credit for. You are a generous—”

  “Actually, Brooke, Karl, I was asking Morgan how her day went,” pointed out Aunt Antonia. I replied in a composed manner that it had gone well, and Uncle Karl and Brooke picked up their argument and battled it out amicably for another ten minutes.

  “Any acts of generosity that I perform, I perform because they are in my own best interests,” Uncle Karl was saying. “I treat my customers well so that they’ll come back and buy another car from me in a few years. I treat my employees and suppliers well in order to make my life easier and my business more successful. Donations to charity are good for public relations because if people think you’re a nice guy, they’re more likely to stop by your dealership when they’re in the market. It’s enlightened self-interest.”

  This seemed entirely reasonable to me. In fact, I could not imagine what Brooke could see wrong in this; it’s how the world works. Brooke thought that her father had a generous nature because he was generous to her, when, really, he was generous to her because she belonged to him. She had his genes; she was an aspect of him that would live on into the future after he was dead. He was really being good to himself when he saved up for her college education. He was ensuring that a part of him would survive and thrive.

  Even Aunt Antonia’s buying spree for me had been based on the same thing. Okay, she and Janelle didn’t share any genes, but her husband and Janelle did, so it seemed right to her to spend his money on his sister’s child, especially since there was lots to go around. If she’d had any idea who I really was, do you think she’d have showered me with all those lovely clothes? Not a chance. She’d have called the cops, more likely. I was like a parasitic cowbird’s egg that had been laid in a finch’s nest. If the finch mother had recognized me for what I was, she would have pushed me out and let me go smash! on the stones below.

  Parents care about their kids because it’s their chance at immortality. At least, that’s the only way I can make sense of parents sacrificing for their children. If I had a kid, I don’t know how generous I’d be. Don’t worry; I’m not planning on becoming a mother, in either the near or distant future. But I guess it’s reasonable that parents want their kids to do well in the world, if you look at it that way.

  “Mom,” Brooke was protesting. “You know that Dad is better than that! Stick up for me!”

  “Your father is both a successful businessman and a decent human being, Brooke. He talks that way because he worries that you are too openhearted. He’s afraid it makes you vulnerable to all the wickedness of the world.”

  “Mom! Dad! I’m not some little toddler anymore!” Brooke caught my eye, sitting quietly at my place at the table, and blushed, probably realizing that she sounded exactly like some little toddler. “And I don’t believe that there is that much honest-to-goodness wickedness in the world,” she said defiantly. “I think that if you could see into the inmost heart of a person who has done something really, really wrong, you would find that they were just—just misguided. It was because they had an awful childhood or something.”

  Well, if Brooke could see into my inmost heart, I supposed she would think I was doing something wrong by being here at her dinner table. And I couldn’t claim to have had an awful childhood, so I had to beg to differ.

  Uncle Karl was girding up his loins to march into battle again, when Aunt Antonia apparently decided that she had had enough of the subject. In any case, she headed him off by asking, “Morgan, where did you get that pretty gold chain? I don’t remember seeing that before.”

  I glanced down at the chain around my neck. “Oh, I’ve had it for years,” I said vaguely. “Could you pass the butter, please?”

  Brooke looked surprised, either because I had just helped myself to some butter or perhaps because on the day after I arrived, she had, in her innocently curious way, looked over every single item Janelle had packed in her luggage. There had been no gold chain then. However, she evidently concluded that neither mystery was worth solving. I mean, a gold chain is a small thing, which might easily escape notice. She was soon diverted by a discussion about debate team, which her mother was anxious she join.

  However, I can sense that you, my reader, may not be satisfied by my explanation. You remember what I said about that gold chain. I implied that Aunt Antonia had bought it for me. I also implied that because she was so generous, I had stopped taking things that didn’t belong to me.

  Well, it certainly wasn’t my fault. We had gone into the jewelry store because Aunt Antonia’d had a repaired piece to pick up—a gruesome old-timey brooch. There were two clerks. One had brought a small rack of gold chains out to the counter to show to a customer. The customer tried a necklace on and moved to the mirror to admire it, and the clerk followed her. The other clerk went back behind the scenes to get Aunt’s brooch, and Aunt’s eyes were on her, not on me. One discarded necklace was lying on the counter, sitting in a ray of that high-intensity light that jewelry stores use, with nobody paying any attention either to it or to me. It glittered at me.

  I mean, I don’t know how anybody could have expected me not to snag it.

  There was a camera mounted on the ceiling, of course—there always is—so I put my purse and one of my shopping bags on the counter, blocking the stray necklace from the camera’s line of sight. Then I moved slowly down the line of glass cases, looking at the goodies inside. When Aunt Antonia finished up her business and looked at me, I “came to” out of my distraction. I hurried back to her, scooping up my belongings, and incidentally the necklace, as I followed her out of the store.

  So I lied. Big deal.

  9

  “HOW ARE YOU GOING TO get your hours?” Emma asked me, forking a green bean into her mouth.

  It was lunchtime on Friday, the first week of school, and Emma, the horsey girl, had settled down to eat with Brooke and me. I raised inquisitive eyebrows.

  “Hours?” I said.

  “Lebanon Hill High School makes you do twenty hours of community service before you can graduate,” she explained. “I’m going to work for the food pantry this afternoon. You two want to come?”

  “Oh, I’d love to,” Brooke said. “I volunteered at the homeless shelter last summer, but my father made me quit.” She made a face. “He said he didn’t care for the quality of people you meet at a homeless shelter.”

  Emma snorted into her milk carton. “No, I s’pose he wouldn’t.”

  “Volunteer?” I said. As in, work without pay? Then it came back to me. They were doing the same thing in LA. You had to “volunteer” or you couldn’t graduate. I nearly opened my mouth to assure them that I didn’t have to worry about it yet, as I was only a sophomore, but I remembered in time that Janelle, and therefore I, was a junior.

  “That sounds like a lot of fun,” I said hastily, trying to cover up for my indignant query. Whoop-de-doo. A food pantry. Cans of brown and orange food. Reminders of how close my family had occasionally come to needing a bag full of free food at the end of the month.

  “Actually, it is, kind of,” said Emma. “Lots of hauling stuff around, but everybody’s in a good mood, and the time goes fast. Sometimes we sing, you know, in rounds, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,’ if there are little kids there volunteering, or a cappella, if there are people who can sing.”

  “Oh, I can’t hold a tune, but I’m sure it’s great,” said Brooke. “My dad wants me to volunteer at something cultural, like the museum or symphony. That’s nice too, but I don’t feel like I’m really helping people who need it.”

  “The pantry needs it, for sure. Donations are down, and we have to stock it up again. That’s what we’re doing today, actually, not working in the pantry itself but going around looking for donations. People almost always have extra stuff th
ey don’t need on their shelves. Sometimes it’s, like, chocolate-covered ants or something, and we don’t take it, but there’s a ton of unopened food sitting around unused.”

  Not in my family’s cupboards. There was never anything left over at our house. Now that I thought about the dreary round of scrimping and make-do that was so commonplace in my former home, it was odd that my parents could have afforded to send me away to school. I suppose they must have taken out a second mortgage on the house. Considered in that light, I had done them a big favor by disappearing the way I had. With me gone, they wouldn’t have to pay. My folks had kind of slipped my mind lately—there had been too much else going on—but I found myself feeling a little pleased to think they were better off now too. See? I’m not that bad a person. I can have generous thoughts.

  Brooke’s Miata was not ideal for the job at hand, which required seating three people and hauling a lot of canned goods, so Emma followed us home after school in her mom’s Subaru wagon. Once we’d dropped off the car and our school stuff, we drove to Emma’s neighborhood. There had been flyers distributed a few days before, announcing the food drive, and a few houses here and there had plastic bags hanging from doorknobs, or mailboxes with jars and boxes inside. We drove slowly around picking these up and packing them into the car.

  Pretty soon we ran out of houses with bags outside. Emma heaved a big sigh and started complaining. “People are so cheap! Everybody in this neighborhood is making, like, a bazillion dollars a year, and they can’t be bothered to put out a few cans of food that they don’t even want, for charity. For people who don’t have enough to eat!”

  Naturally, Brooke was quick to defend Emma’s neighbors.

  “Emma, they probably forgot, that’s all. We’ll go back to my neighborhood and distribute flyers there. I’ll bet we’ll get lots of stuff.”