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“You left my door open a bit, remember?”
“Yes.”
“I heard everything she said. I don’t read. I wouldn’t listen to Alena. I’m not mature and responsible. See what I was saying? That was a lie. I always listened to Alena. She would sit on the floor next to me and tell me her stories while I sat there filing my nails or doing my hair. Why, she’d even come in while I was soaking in the tub and sit on the bathroom floor and recite them.”
Now she was the one who looked as if she might burst into tears.
“I hope you never call her Mother,” she said. Then she turned and rushed out, closing the door sharply behind her.
It sounded so ridiculous, even outright funny to say it, but I muttered to myself, “Maybe I was better off in the streets.”
26
The VA Club
I was nervous from the moment I got into Kiera’s car the next morning and never stopped being nervous all day. I did well enough in instrumental class to avoid any looks or words of dissatisfaction from Mr. Denacio, and I got an eighty-eight on a vocabulary test in English, but all through the day, I would have these moments when my heart would race and I would have a shortness of breath. I knew that this was because I was attending Kiera’s secret VA club meeting and because of our lying to Mrs. March about a school play audition. If and when she found out, she would be very upset that I had gone along with it, but I felt that if I changed my mind, Kiera would return to the way she had been when I had first arrived.
I was good at keeping it all to myself. Ricky was the only one who sensed anything different about me. Kiera and her other friends were their usual buoyant selves, laughing, gossiping about other girls and boys in their classes and teachers as well. No one noticed that I was especially quiet. It wasn’t until the very end of lunch period that anyone said anything about the VA club. Deidre came up beside me as we were all leaving for class and said, “We’re all looking forward to you coming today.”
Before I could say anything, she walked away and left me with Ricky, who now looked even more suspicious.
“What was she whispering about? What are you she-devils up to today?” he asked.
The first thing that came to my mind was that if I said anything that even suggested we were meeting after school, he would mention it, and Kiera and the other girls would think I had already betrayed them.
“Nothing very important,” I said. “Girlie stuff.”
“Well, that’s no fun,” he replied, and walked the rest of the way wearing an impish grin. Kiera never mentioned any boys knowing about or going
to the VA club. Was that one of the surprises that awaited me?
When the final bell rang to end classes, my heart felt like a yo-yo. Kiera was at my classroom door before I got to it myself. She must have run all the way from her wing of the building the second the bell rang. She had told me that sometimes she faked a desperate need to go to the bathroom just to get a head start on leaving.
“C’mon,” she said. “We can’t stay at Deidre’s longer than we would have stayed for a play audition, remember.”
I followed her out as quickly as I could. I hated it when she or someone else made me move so quickly that my limp became more pronounced. I knew there were students, even in my own classes, who ridiculed me. I didn’t see any of the other girls in Kiera’s group of friends when we reached the parking lot. When I asked about them, she told me they had already left. Deidre had actually feigned an excuse to leave before the last period.
“They always get excited when we agree on a possible new candidate for the club,” she said as we got into her car. “There are lots of girls who would love to join, but we’re very particular. Usually, we don’t ever consider a new student to the school, but since I vouched for you and all of them except Deidre believe you’re my cousin, they agreed. Excited?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t know or understand what the club does.”
“Oh, you will before today’s meeting ends.” She stopped the car as we reached the driveway to the parking lot and turned to me, her face tightened into a look of seriousness and intensity I had not seen. “Nothing we can do together, nothing we say or promise each other, will ever bring us closer together than you being in the VA,” she said. “I can assure you. We’re closer than real sisters, and every girl in the club would rather tell her most secret thoughts and things to one of us than she would to her own real sister.”
She drove out. I sat back, impressed. Never had I dreamed I’d be close friends with girls older than I was and in a new school, too. Now, according to Kiera, I would be even more special. I felt as if I had stepped onto a rocket ship, and it wasn’t only because of Kiera’s driving, either. Trips to Disneyland, parties, boat trips, all of it lay before me like some promised land filled with delight and pleasure. Months from now, I thought, I won’t even remember living on the streets.
Deidre’s house was in a gated community. The guard checked off Kiera and opened the gate for us. All of the houses were big and beautiful, but none was even half the size of the March mansion. That didn’t mean Deidre’s family’s home wasn’t a big, beautiful house in Pacific Palisades, too. As we approached, Kiera told me more about her. First, she explained that none of them talked about each other much with anyone who wasn’t a member of the VA club.
“We hold each other’s trust sacred,” she said. “Any of us gossiping about any one of us would be considered worse than being a serial killer, but I can tell you more about Deidre now. Deidre, as you know, is an only child. I became friendlier with her than I was with the other girls because I frankly felt like an only child, especially after Alena came along. I think you’re beginning to understand why.
“As I told you, Deidre’s father is an important business attorney with beautiful offices in Century City. Her mother works with her father. She’s his personal secretary. I think she became that because most men hire beautiful women to become their personal secretaries and then have affairs with them.
“Look, everyone’s here already,” she said, nodding at the three cars parked in the driveway. We pulled in behind the one on the right and got out.
Deidre’s house was a sprawling Spanish-style hacienda with a large courtyard. It didn’t have views of the ocean because of the tree line on the west side, but it was high enough to capture the sprawling vistas and the lights of sections of Los Angeles on the east side. Deidre opened the arched front door before we reached it.
“Everyone has to take off her shoes today,” she said. “We just put in a new carpet in the living room, and my mother is anal about it.”
Kiera kicked hers off, and I slipped out of mine. We put them next to the four other pairs there and followed Deidre over the tiled-floor entry, down a hallway, and into the living room, where the girls were sitting on settees. There were some soft drinks on the table and a bowl of popcorn with smaller bowls, but I was glad to see no whiskey. It looked as harmless as a gathering of teenage girls could look.
