“Oh, wow! Here, you’d better come in. Are you all right? Sit down, and I’ll get you something to drink.” She deposited me in a chair in her front hall, examining me with a heightened attention as she noted my pale skin and apparently hairless head.
“I’m fine,” I said bravely as she disappeared down the hall toward the back regions. I leaned my head against the wall and rested my hands, palms upward, on my knees. When I heard her padding steps returning, I collapsed like a rag doll.
I timed it exactly. She walked in and looked at me, and for a split second I was bent over and breathing shallowly. Then, apparently becoming aware of her presence, I jerked to attention. I pasted a sickly smile on my face and sat up.
“Oh, thank you! You are so kind.” I took the glass of water from her and drank greedily. I sighed and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, I said, “I shouldn’t bother you anymore. Thank you. I’ll be fine now.”
“No, indeed,” she said. “You’re not well. What agency are you working with? They ought never to have sent you out like this!”
“Oh no, honestly,” I protested, “I’m fine, really I am! It was my idea to come out today. Look, there’s the van, down the road. They’d be horrified. Please don’t tell them. This is so embarrassing! Promise me you won’t tell them. See, I feel much better already.” I demonstrated, sitting up tall and smiling.
“Well . . . I suppose. You do look better. But you ought to take better care of yourself ! Oh, that’s right, you were collecting for . . . er, for—”
“It’s a general fund, ma’am, for people suffering from cancer—to defray costs getting to the hospital for treatments, and so on. Any small amount will be appreciated.”
“Oh yes, of course. I have my purse right here. Let me see, will fifty dollars be enough?”
Half an hour later I had received three hundred dollars, four glasses of water, and a shot-glassful of brandy. One heavily shawled and turbaned lady gave me twenty dollars. She whipped off her turban to show a bald head. “I’ve got small cell carcinoma. What have you got?”
Never missing a beat, I said, “Oh, I prefer not to discuss it. Sorry, but I’m not comfortable.” I smiled wanly. “You look great, though. I hope you’re getting better.”
“Don’t ever smoke cigarettes, kid,” she said. “Don’t do it.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Good. No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Looks like you got your own problems.” She seemed to want to move on to a detailed discussion of her prognosis, chemotherapy treatments, and doctor visits, so I made my excuses and was about to leave when she shot out a cold, clammy hand and grabbed my arm.
I don’t like being touched by strangers, especially not a sick one. I pulled away. Her face got all mean and slitty-eyed, and she snatched the twenty-dollar bill right out of my hand. I was about ready to haul off and punch her one, when she pointed at my head.
“Next time,” she said, “you’d better tuck all your hair under the scarf. Now get out of here and don’t come back.”
Uh-oh. I fingered the back of my neck. Sure enough, there was a wisp of blond hair that had escaped the scarf.
“Okay, no problem,” I said, as easy as can be. I left, minus the twenty.
At that point it seemed like I ought to change my focus and switch back to actual charitable fund-raising, preferably a few streets away. This was a difficult moment for me, as I was doing so well, vacuuming tens and twenties and the occasional fifty up and down the street and tucking them into my pocket as soon as I was out of the direct line of sight of the donor. One part of my brain urged me to quit while I was ahead. Besides the ill will of Ms. Small Cell Carcinoma, what would my fellow volunteers think if I returned to the minivan with nothing to show for my afternoon? My status as a fund-raiser would surely drop like a rock, and my popularity would drop with it. Another part of my brain said, Oh, c’mon! Just one more house for me!
Luckily, I spotted Emma walking down the road. If she were to see me made up like this she would notice, and the cancer lady might tell people about me. I raced to the van, removing the scarf and wiping my face and scalp with a moistened towelette. I grabbed a box I had brought along for food pantry items and cut through somebody’s backyard to the street beyond so I’d be out of view of the sicko.
Lugging jars of peanut butter and tuna fish around was nowhere near as much fun, but at least I did get a respectable haul, using my acting and improvisational skills to wheedle big fat checks out of some of the householders. And a few, of course, did hand out cash, which automatically belonged to me, or at least, that’s the way I figured it.
Rather to my irritation I discovered that the wealthiest households were not necessarily the most generous donors. A few of the richest ones tried to fob me off with a dollar. I accepted these offerings with teary-eyed gratitude, all the while allowing my gaze to wander over the Porsche in the driveway, the Persian rugs, the wide-screen TV, and the fancy antiques. Sometimes this did the trick, sometimes not. There are people out there who have no compassion for the disadvantaged.
When I returned to the van with my last box of food, it was packed with donations. My fellow philanthropists were growing tired; we had made a good-size haul for each of the causes, and everyone was feeling much more satisfied and companionable with one another than we had earlier.
We dropped off the food and checks for the food pantry and then went out for pizza. I managed to sit next to Brett. We talked about reverse lay-ups and left-handed dunks, which apparently have something to do with basketball, and he asked me to come watch him play at the gym after school on Monday. Helena missed this, as she was holding forth to Brooke about the pathetic sum—$27.45—that was the result of her afternoon’s efforts. Even the pizza was the way I like it, with lots of meat and no vegetables. And when we paid, everybody else put in six dollars. I slipped my contribution in under the pile—three dollars folded so they looked like six dollars, sticking out from beneath the others. It was just a little scam after the major maneuvers of the afternoon, but it put the cherry on the top of the cake for me.
All in all, a good day. I felt something that might even have been a glow of liking for my companions.
11
ON SUNDAY, BROOKE’S GRANDMOTHER STOPPED by. She looked older than grandmothers in Los Angeles generally do, which I assumed was because she didn’t dye her hair or go to the gym too much. Actually, neither do some of the abuelas in my neighborhood, but non-Hispanic white women in Southern California tend to resent the encroachments of old age and invest a lot of time in fighting back.
We were all five seated cozily around the breakfast table with a pot of tea and a plate of cookies, exchanging family news, when it occurred to me how lucky I was. When a woman that Brooke greeted as “Granny” had walked through the door, I hadn’t thought of the possibility that it might have been her paternal grandmother, who would presumably have been my grandmother as well. Neither of my real grandmothers has ever been especially interested in me, but I understand that some grandmothers spend their golden years doting upon their offspring’s offspring, demanding regular visits and photographs and so on. In that case the gig might have been up.
Luckily, this woman was apparently Aunt Antonia’s mother, so all was well. Really, it was good that any other possibility had not occurred to me—my air of unconcern was perfectly natural.
“How are your parents, Janelle?” she asked.
I corrected her use of my name and then explained about the problem with my father’s job that had cropped up in Brazil, and how my mother had closed the shop (what kind of shop? I wondered) and joined him in the swamp for three months.
“What kind of shop does your mother have, dear?” the nosey old thing wanted to know. “I would think that the fall would be a busy time for many businesses, in the lead-up to the holidays.”
“Oh, she was speaking metaphorically, weren’t you, Morgan?” said Aunt Antonia, smiling at me. “It’s not really a shop.”
> I made a noncommittal noise and took a sip of tea, waiting for somebody else to fill Grandma in.
“Aunt Jackie is a real estate agent,” said Brooke. Thank you, Brooke.
“And quite the go-getter,” said her brother, Uncle Karl. “But the fall and winter are slow times. If Jackie and John are going to take a vacation, they usually do it around then. She knows a few young, hungry agents who are happy to take any calls she does get.”
John, Jackie, and Janelle Johanssen? Were these people crazy? No wonder I wanted to change my name.
Grandma then began cross-examining me about the boyfriend from whose embrace I had been so cruelly torn. The other family members bit their lips and looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes, no doubt figuring I would burst into tears, or start throwing the cookies around the room at this tactless probing. I tried to remember what the guy’s name was. Oh yeah. Ashton Something.
I folded my hands across one knee and responded, “I am doing well, thank you. I have put that behind me.”
Brooke, her face scrunched up with the agony of recalling how Ashton had done me wrong with that blonde on Facebook, flung herself into the conversational fray. “Granny, guess what? I am learning to ride a horse. Morgan already knows how. She’s so good that our instructor wants to train her to jump. Oh, and Morgan is a really, really wonderful fund-raiser for charities. You wouldn’t believe how much she has gotten people to donate. She’s absolutely brilliant!”
“My! It seems we have quite the highflyer in our family!” said Grandma. “Morgan, come over here beside me and tell me all about it.”
So I got up and exchanged places with Brooke. Grandma went on quizzing me about my successes since I had blown into town three weeks before, and exclaiming in a gratifying manner over them. Finally I noticed that everyone else at the table had gone silent.
“Well, I shall have to come out to that stable and watch you, Morgan,” Grandma said. “I’ll be able to say I knew you when, after you go off to represent the USA on the Olympics jumping team.”
Aunt Antonia cleared her throat. “Uh . . . Mother? Don’t forget, Brooke is learning to ride too.”
“Of course, of course.” She looked around, trying to figure out where her actual grandchild had gotten to. “Brooke, of course! I’ll go and watch both of you. How exciting for me!”
When she left, she pressed my hand and asked if I would like to come and visit her sometime.
“Sure,” I said. I eyed the huge ruby solitaire rings on her knobby old hands. I’d be happy to pay a visit to Grandma’s house, trust me!
The companionable feelings after the fund-raising day did not last. When I went to watch Brett play basketball after school on Monday, Helena attempted to physically remove me from the gym.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Brett asked me to come,” I answered.
“Well, go away! You have no business here, you little out-of-town creep! I saw you smarming up to him last Saturday,” she said. She gripped my arm with both hands and pushed me backward into the hallway. That was another difference between city and suburb—she had no idea how to fight. The girls at my old school would have twisted my arm behind me until I yelled, and marched me out of there, but Helena just did a bit of ineffectual shoving, expecting the simple fact of her aggression to defeat me.
“I only want to watch basketball practice,” I objected. I swerved around and got past her, worming my way back into the room, with her still attached to my elbow. People were beginning to look at us, so she dropped my arm. “Brett asked me to,” I repeated.
Helena pursued me to my seat on the bleachers, hissing like a teakettle on the boil.
“Who do you think you are, anyway?” she demanded in an angry whisper. “You just showed up out of nowhere, and now you’re all over the place, sticking your finger into every pie. Brett is my boyfriend. Leave him alone.”
“He’s only your boyfriend as long as he wants to be,” I said. “You can’t lock him up, you know.”
Red spots burned high on Helena’s cheekbones. “Listen,” she said. “I have lived here all my life. My friends and I run this school. Don’t think that some little West Coast girl, a junior, no less, is going to sweep in here and grab my boyfriend. Not going to happen.”
I studied her in silence for a moment. Actually, if only she knew it, I was a sophomore.
“Okay,” I said, and smiled. At that moment Brett looked up and saw me. I waved. “Hey! Hi, Brett! Gee,” I said, turning back to Helena, “he looks great in those shorts, doesn’t he?”
“Ooooh!” she said, looking like she wanted to hit me. Fortunately, one of her friends called her over, and she left, casting furious glances in my direction. When she rejoined her friends, she said something and then pointed in my direction. They looked at me.
I smiled and waved, all friendly and unconcerned. One of them started to wave back, then jerked her hand down and thrust it under her thigh. Helena turned around and gave her a mean look.
Brett scored. I stood up and cheered. “Yay, Brett!”
Here is something I have learned: the best victim is somebody that nobody likes much, somebody that other people think deserves to be picked on. Bullies are fair game, for instance. Nobody feels sorry for them, and I become a heroine for teaching them a lesson. Even though Helena was one of the popular girls, I suspected that she was more feared than loved. If I toppled her from her position as Queen Bee of Lebanon Hill High, there would be no lasting animosity toward me, except, of course, from the ex-queen herself. So, as secure as she seemed, she was actually vulnerable.
She might not have been one of the cold like me—the cold at Lebanon were mostly males, and mostly engaged in a monotonous career of stealing cars and ditching them and then getting arrested for it, as well as one low-IQ sophomore girl who didn’t seem to get the idea that there are cameras everywhere in stores these days—but Helena was a lot more like me than she was like whatever Brooke was. I understood Helena and what made her tick.
On the other hand, I did not understand Brooke. She was so open to being taken advantage of, so easy to fool, so generous and unguarded. Yet she wasn’t stupid. It was more like she was willing herself not to see evil in the world, rather than being unable to do so. It would have been easy to victimize Brooke. She had no defenses, no idea that she could be in any danger. Yet I was wary of hurting her. I had the sense that any damage I caused her could boomerang around and smack me from behind. So, mentally, I declared Brooke off-limits.
Still, I am a creature of impulse, and Brooke might as well have been walking around with a big target painted on her back.
Our fund-raising efforts had pretty well exhausted the richer neighborhoods around Albany by the end of September. My hometown is a city of three or four million, while Albany doesn’t even have a population of a hundred thousand. If you drive north up I-87, you get to Clifton Park, which is a good-size suburb, and a little further up the freeway is Saratoga, where the thoroughbreds race in the summertime and the affluent come to spend money. When I suggested we harvest these fertile fields, however, my partners in philanthropy objected.
“They’ll want to give to their own food pantries,” said Emma. “People like to see donated money go to help local causes.”
Well, of course we didn’t have to tell them that the money wasn’t for their own food pantry, did we? However, this suggestion wouldn’t play well with Straight-Arrow Emma.
There were lots of middle- and lower-class neighborhoods we hadn’t touched, and I remembered how much more generous some of the people in the small houses were than some of the ones in the mansions. Still, I was getting bored with the door-to-door work, though it had been very profitable, for me and the other good causes.
I was ready for new worlds to conquer.
I was plenty busy. Academics were a stretch for me still, so I spent hours on math and English. Luckily, Brooke was always ready to tutor me, so I was passing quizzes and contri
buting in class. We took the PSATs one Saturday too, which meant we had to miss a riding lesson. Brooke tied herself into knots over her performance on the test, but I breezed through. Who knew if I would be here when we got the results?
Back in early September, Helena had been premature in saying I had a finger in every pie. But by early October she was quite correct. I had infiltrated every organization of any importance at Lebanon Hill High. I was on the yearbook staff, the spirit week committee, the booster club team, and I was auditioning for the lead in The Glass Menagerie. The charity work is what gave me an in; I guess ambitious society ladies work the charity routine for the same reason. I was known and respected by staff and students alike, and welcomed into positions of influence and authority.
I kept my cash in Janelle’s pink suitcase, and the pile was growing. In fact, I realized that I was going to have to exchange some of the fives and tens for larger denominations—it was getting a bit bulky. One day when I was secreting a new bundle of money, Mrs. Barnes walked into my room unannounced with a supply of fresh towels. I slammed the lid down the second I saw her out of the corner of one eye, but several bills fluttered out onto the floor.
“Oops!” I said gaily, gathering them up. “Look at me, throwing my money around!”
“You want to be careful about that,” replied Mrs. Barnes, her face unreadable. She put the towels in the bathroom and then paused on her way out of my room. “There’s a lot of money in this house,” she observed. “Not that Mrs. Styles and Brooke care much about it. They’re good people, for all they’re so wealthy.”
“They are,” I agreed. “And they sure have been nice to me.”
“Yes, they have,” she said, and left, closing the door behind her.
Hmm. What was that all about? I was almost certain she hadn’t seen anything but the twenty and the ten that had fallen out. I resolved to keep the pink suitcase locked from now on. And perhaps to pull a chair in front of the door when the suitcase was out and open.
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