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I hadn’t really expressed any opinion yet, but Mrs. March looked at me as though she had caught me in a betrayal and then relaxed her shoulders like someone accepting defeat.
“How did the audition go?” she asked.
“Neither of us was thrilled with it,” Kiera said. “We’re rethinking it.”
“Why?”
“Mother, will you ease up a little? Sasha has enough pressure adjusting to a new school, making new friends, learning the clarinet, and everything else.”
Again, Mrs. March turned to me for a reaction. I was silent. I’m already deep in a lie, I thought, and felt trapped.
“Very well,” she said. “I’m meeting your father at Palmeri for dinner. Don’t give Mrs. Duval or Mrs. Caro any grief.” She left.
I knew Mrs. March was very upset with us, but Kiera looked as if she couldn’t care any less about it. She continued pulling clothing off hangers and tossing what she liked onto the bed with cries of “This will look great on you! This is perfect!”
She stood back from the clothes. “You need some jewelry, too, and I have a watch you could have. Here,” she said, taking the watch off her wrist and handing it to me.
“But it’s your watch.”
“I have more than twenty, silly.”
“Twenty?”
“Those are real diamonds in it, by the way.”
I put it on my wrist.
“Looks nice on you.”
She dumped a box of earrings, bracelets, and necklaces onto the bed beside the clothing she had laid out and began putting the outfits together with the jewelry. She had so much I thought she could open her own jewelry store.
“Is any of this very expensive?” I asked.
“It’s all very expensive. I don’t buy junk, and I don’t let my parents buy me junk, not that they would. You have nothing here that would make you ashamed to wear,” she said.
“I don’t mean that. I don’t want to lose anything expensive. It makes me nervous.”
She laughed. “First of all, Daddy has some kind of insurance policy on our jewelry, and second, I could replace anything anyway, even without insurance, so don’t give it a second thought. I don’t. There,” she said, stepping back. “You have a different outfit for every day of the week with the right accompanying earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings. Start trying things on. Oh, wait a minute!” She examined my ears. “You don’t have pierced ears. Didn’t your mother ever want you to get your ears pierced?”
“No. She didn’t think I was old enough.”
“Damn. Most of these earrings are useless. We have to get your ears pierced. We’ll do it this weekend.”
I looked at the watch she had given me.
“Will you stop being such a worrywart about your homework? I’ll leave you alone after dinner. Promise,” she said, holding up her right hand.
I began trying her things on and was surprised at how well everything fit me. Everything looked and smelled new, too. She raved about it all. All of the tops were skin-tight, shirred, with plunging necklines. The skirts were short and also tighter than I would normally wear. There was a fuchsia halter-top dress that left little to the imagination. In fact, I thought what she was giving me was even sexier than the clothes she wore.
“Are you sure I can wear all of these things to school?”
“Of course you can. You’re not dressing much differently from most of the other girls. Besides, if you have it, flaunt it,” she said. “That’s my motto, and it should be yours, too. You have a great figure.”
I was still reluctant. “Your mother was very upset about it.”
“Of course she is. She has you in Alena’s room, playing Alena’s clarinet, and wearing Alena’s things. We know why, and we know how we both feel about that, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
