House of Secrets Read online

  “If we do dance, I’ll go easy on you,” I said.

  I didn’t think Ryder had been listening, but he laughed.

  A number of the couples had left for Shane Cisco’s house before us. By the time we parked on the street, the music was booming. Fortunately, the Ciscos’ house was a good acre or so from the nearest neighbor. It was located in a more affluent neighborhood of Hillsborough. Despite its distance from the city center, the street was well lit. Loud voices, laughter, and shrieks of delight were spilling out of the opened windows and the front door as we approached.

  Ryder had advised that we leave our crowns in the car. “The wise guys will only kid us to death,” he said.

  I was more than happy to do so. Even though Alison didn’t complain about how it had turned out, I was still uncomfortable.

  Of course, despite the size of the Cisco house, it was nowhere near as large as Wyndemere. It did have wide open, flowing rooms and a full-length basement that had been designed for more entertaining. There was a long bar, a media center, sofas and chairs spaced well along the oak-paneled walls, and tightly woven cocoa-shaded carpeting. A portion had been cut around a light-beige marble floor that was great for dancing, and a dozen couples were doing so already. Everyone had to shout to be heard over the music.

  Not all the prom attendees had been invited, but there were at least fifty now in the basement. When we came down the stairs, cheers sounded, and Ryder was immediately teased about being the prom king. While alcohol wasn’t obvious, Shane’s parents having locked away the bottles behind the bar, beer bottles began to appear, some boys dancing with them in their hands.

  Before Ryder and Alison were dragged onto the dance floor, he leaned toward me to whisper. “Don’t drink anything you didn’t pour for yourself or see it poured for you,” he warned.

  As the evening wore on, it became obvious that some had smuggled in harder liquor, too. Shane and some of his close friends were egging Paul on to have a drink or do more. Babs Sanders pulled me aside to tell me Shane had offered Paul his sister’s bedroom. His friends were daring him to get me upstairs.

  “I think he’s a virgin. Everyone told him not to worry. You’d know what to do even if he doesn’t,” she said.

  “Why?” I snapped back at her.

  She widened her eyes and walked away. I wanted to go after her and make her say aloud what she was implying about me. It did seem like everyone who was looking my way had expressions on their faces similar to Babs’s and were whispering and laughing.

  I looked to Ryder, who never left Alison’s side. He glanced my way periodically and smiled, but he soon seemed much more involved with Alison. The lights had been turned down lower, and at one point, I no longer saw him and Alison in the basement. Paul and his friends kept teasing each other. If Ryder was my date, he wouldn’t be leaving me alone like this, I thought.

  Others, besides Paul and his buddies, were beginning to act wilder, too, talking louder, drinking beer and other things openly. Many on the dance floor resembled hospital patients suffering from Saint Vitus’s dance, which made people with the brain disease move radically. They looked like they had globs of red ants crawling over their backs and biting them. Joey Dunsten tripped over his own feet and fell, knocking into others, who then screamed. Most were laughing.

  I shook my head in disgust. This wasn’t what I had anticipated the after-party to be. I thought only about leaving now. Where were Ryder and Alison?

  “Hey,” Barry Austin said, coming over to me. “You look like you’re not having fun. I got something to loosen up the prom queen.” He held out his hand, in which there were small white pills. “Go on. Take one for free.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

  “I won’t say anything. You don’t exist,” I told him.

  He smirked and walked off.

  Paul returned to my side, and I told him what Barry was circulating.

  “Yeah. I stay away from that crap. Might hurt my fastball,” he said.

  I looked at his drink. “What is that?”

  “Just a little bit of vodka and soda,” he said. “Joey Dunsten had a flask.”

  “I can see that. He can’t even stand up straight.”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry. I’m not getting drunk or anything. I’m not losing my license.”

  “Or your life,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He looked at his drink and then put it on a table. “You want to get out of here for a while?”

  “Yes, but more than for a while. Where?”

  “Upstairs.” He shrugged. “We could just talk and maybe even listen to some better music or something.”

  “Where are Ryder and Alison?” I asked, looking around.

  “I think they’re up in Shane’s room. Whaddaya say? I’m getting a headache down here. You probably want to take a breather, too, huh?”

  I considered it. When I looked around now, everyone was either with familiar friends or couples were into themselves. I realized also that the few girls from my class who had attended the prom were not here. It was mostly seniors and juniors with a few sophomores.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked him.

  He looked at his watch. “We have Shane’s sister’s room for an hour.”

  “An hour? What’s he doing, renting it out?”

  Paul smiled but didn’t reply.

  Was he?

  “C’mon. I’ve been here before. I know the house,” Paul said.

  I followed him up the stairs, hoping to run into Ryder and Alison, who I also hoped were ready to leave. They were nowhere in sight. Paul led me down a hallway and opened a door on our left. There was no question it was a young girl’s room. The walls were pink with darker pink curtains. There were shelves with dolls and posters on the wall of young rock singers. The rug was a thick white looped carpet. Off to the right was a beautiful computer station and desk with shelves. The room had an en suite bathroom and a very large walk-in closet. There was a sweet fragrance in the air, but I saw no fresh flowers.

  It was the bed that caught my attention, a king-size four-poster canopy bed in birch veneer with pink swirls through the frame and headboard. The oversize pillows and comforter were done in a light pink. It was the sort of room I always dreamed of having. What a contrast to my stark, dark-paneled walls and thin gray area rug over the dark floorboards. My bed wasn’t even a queen-size; it was a double. My mother was always resistant when it came to my pinning anything on the walls. We couldn’t use nails or make any significant changes to anything. I had two side tables, each with a lamp on it, but the main lighting came from a plain overhead fixture.

  My desk was barely big enough for my books, notebooks, and laptop. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Stark, I wouldn’t have had the electrical outlets I needed, nor would I have Wi-Fi for my computer research.

  “Hey!” Paul cried, and dove onto the bed. “This is comfortable.”

  “You should at least take off your shoes,” I said.

  “Sure. I’ll take off everything if you want.”

  I glared at him, at his silly smile, and then looked at the books in the bookcase to my left. I saw the built-in audio equipment beside it. Attached to the wall to the right of the door was what I thought was at least a forty-inch television set.

  “Hey, we can watch some television while we wait for Ryder and Alison,” Paul said.

  I didn’t say anything. Paul pulled himself back and lay against one of the pillows, his hands behind his head, as he watched me continue to look around.

  “What’s your room like?” he asked.

  “A dungeon compared to this.”

  He nodded. He wasn’t really interested. “Ain’t you tired? C’mon and lay down for a while,” he said, patting the space beside him.

  “If I do that, I’ll probably fall asleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “I’ll keep you awake.”

  He smiled licentiously now. I thought there
was something different about him. He had lost that country-bumpkin look.

  “Was there something else in that drink you had? Are you high on something?”

  “I’m high on just you,” he said. “I know I haven’t paid enough attention to you, and I want to make up for it.”

  I pulled my lips back into an incredulous smile. He didn’t sound like the Paul Gabriel I had gotten to know these past days or earlier tonight. “Where did you come up with that line, Paul?”

  To me, it sounded like something someone had told him to say. Maybe his teammates had given him strategies to hook up with me.

  “It doesn’t sound like you,” I said, pressing the point.

  He shrugged. “A pitcher has to be able to adjust his technique on the mound.”

  “I’m not playing baseball.”

  “Me, neither.” He patted the bed again. “C’mon. Relax.”

  “Ryder and Alison won’t know where we are.”

  “Won’t take long for them to figure it out, or Shane will tell them. Don’t expect them to come out so fast. Besides, we’ll hear them.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Right across the hall. You don’t want to interrupt them, do you?” He reached for the television remote. “We’ll just see what’s on and relax,” he said.

  I felt foolish just standing there. Reluctantly, I went to the bed, slipped off my shoes, and lay back against the other pillow.

  “Comfy, huh?”

  “It’s a very nice room.”

  “You been out with anyone? I asked around, but no one knows if you have,” he said. He turned to me, leaning on his left elbow.

  “No. Why?” My suspicions about him were growing quickly. “Who’s keeping tabs on me?”

  “Nobody. So I’m your first date? I mean, your first real date?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very pretty,” he said, more like recited.

  Before I could say anything, he quickly kissed me and turned so that his chest was on my right arm and shoulder. Then he brought his right leg over my left and kissed me again, pressing his lips harder while he brought his right hand up over my breast. I squirmed to get out from under him. This wasn’t the first real sexual experience I had envisioned for myself. There were other boys besides Ryder in school whom I had imagined dating.

  “Stop,” I said, pushing on his chest. He was too heavy for me to lift away.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry. I came prepared.”

  He dropped his hand to my thigh and then began to pull up my dress until he could get his hand under it. I turned and twisted to get free.

  “C’mon,” he urged. “What do you think Ryder and Alison are doing?”

  “I don’t care what they’re doing. Whatever you think it is, I’m not doing it with you,” I said, and tried to turn out from under him, but he wasn’t moving. “Paul, stop,” I said, as he continued moving his hand up my thigh, slipping his fingers under my panties.

  “You wanted to go to the prom with me. Ryder said you would want to make out. Don’t be shy now.”

  “That’s a lie. Ryder never said that.”

  “That’s what he meant,” he said.

  I looked at his eyes. The pupils seemed so large. “You lied. You took those pills from Barry Austin, didn’t you? That’s why you’re like this.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  His fingers crossed over my pelvic bone and began to move quickly, like some creepy-crawler insect, through my pubic hair. When his fingers began to enter me, I brought my left hand around and dug my nails into the side of his face, screaming, “Get off me! Stop!”

  I had lived with a repeating nightmare frequently invading my sleep from the moment I was old enough to conceive of it, the moment I first learned what the concept of date rape meant. It was a deep fear of mine, not because I was terrified of it happening to me but because I suspected that was exactly what had happened to my mother. It made sense. Most young women who are attacked this way feel some responsibility. They had willingly placed themselves in the situation. Yes, they weren’t expecting to be sexually attacked, but, like the unsuspecting mouse, they had willingly walked into the trap.

  How complicated this made their claim of being violated. It was a classic “he said, she said” situation, especially if the woman didn’t show any signs of violence, no trauma to her face or body. The only wounds were to her innocence, to her self-respect, and to her soul. The man even could get away with signs of violence on his body, claiming the woman had done it in the throes of her passion. That happened, didn’t it? they could ask.

  And who was deciding, judging this accusation, most of the time? Other men, that was who.

  So perhaps my mother had let the violation of her go unreported and hoped nothing would come of it. Of course, anyone would logically ask why she had gone through with having a baby. Yes, it was becoming more difficult not to continue a pregnancy, but why didn’t she get it done one way or another? Why let everyone in the world know what had happened?

  Most important, who wanted to be faced with this horrible choice? It was so unfair. The man would walk off, unscathed, like some self-satisfied caveman. And in the end, the woman, no matter how clearly it was shown that she had been raped, would suffer not only because she had lost her own self-respect but also because everyone who knew her, although professing to be sympathetic, would always think of her as spoiled, ruined. How many men who knew her and what had happened to her would permit themselves to fall in love with her?

  Surely this explained much of what had happened to my mother and why she was the woman she was now, living as she was.

  The horror of this nightmare was what drove me to seek more romantic solutions to the mystery of my birth. She had the love affair with that handsome, charming married man. She couldn’t get rid of his child. The child was part of him, and as long as she had this child, me, she had part of him. Was it really just a fairy tale?

  What terrified me now was that I could have the same fate my mother had. All the terrible things said about me because I was an illegitimate child would be confirmed. People would whisper that, like my mother, I, too, had been date-raped. Go complain. Go make an accusation against one of the school’s sports heroes, and see how many flock to be at your side and support you.

  Why did you agree to go up into the bedroom if you didn’t have this in mind? Who’d believe any explanation you had?

  Finally, the pain of my fingernails digging into his cheek triggered enough of a retreat in him for me to turn more forcefully and slip out from under him. I didn’t realize that the entire time I was struggling, I had been shouting. Of course, no one below, with the music practically tearing down the walls, would hear me.

  But Ryder and Alison apparently had. Ryder opened the door to see what was happening. Alison came up behind him. Ryder had his jacket off and his bow tie loosened. For a moment, he just stood there looking in at us. Paul didn’t realize they were there. He was moaning about his face and cursing. I slipped off the bed, got into my shoes, and ran past Ryder and out to the hallway.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Ryder finally asked.

  “She wanted to come in here and get in the bed,” Paul claimed.

  Ryder turned to me.

  “He’s on that Ecstasy crap!” I shouted.

  Ryder turned back to him. “Are you? I told you not to do that, Paul. You said you wouldn’t.”

  “I just took one. It was so damn boring down there,” he claimed.

  Ryder hesitated a moment and then backed up and closed the door. “Come on,” he told Alison and me. He returned to the other bedroom and got his jacket. He had Alison’s purse, too. He nodded toward the entryway and took his mobile out of his inside jacket pocket as we walked.

  “Hey!” we heard Paul cry from the bedroom doorway. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Keep walking,” Ryder said. He was talking on the phone.

  Alison looked back at
him for directions.

  “Just walk out,” he said. “We’re meeting Parker at the corner of Hobly and Underwood.”

  The three of us headed out the front door and down the walkway to the street. He took my right hand in his and held Alison’s with his left. We headed away from the house, no one speaking.

  “How far did he get?” Alison asked after a few minutes.

  “Far enough with those long fingers,” I said.

  I was feeling all right now. Ryder was holding my hand firmly. We found a large rock to sit on while we waited. I expected Paul to come running after us, but maybe he was afraid now.

  “Did you take anything?” Alison asked.

  “No.”

  “How come you went into the bedroom with him?”

  “It was supposed to be just a rest from the racket downstairs.”

  “You believed that? You can’t be that naive.”

  “Forget about it,” Ryder told her. “It certainly isn’t her fault.”

  She looked away. He had actually snapped at her to defend me.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, Parker appeared, driving the Davenport limousine. He asked no questions. The three of us got into the rear, and he drove off.

  “We’re taking Miss Reuben home first, please, Parker.”

  “Absolutely,” Parker said.

  In silence, the three of us lay back, me cuddled against Ryder’s right side and Alison against his left. He stared ahead. I closed my eyes. It was easy to imagine that it was only Ryder and me going home from the prom. When we reached Alison’s house, Ryder got out to walk her to her front door.

  “Great finish to what was to be a great night,” she muttered to me.

  What did she mean? Was she blaming me?

  “Alison,” Ryder called.

  She closed the door. They walked to her front door and were there for a few minutes talking. He kissed her good night, but quickly on the cheek, and she went into the house.

  I was hoping Ryder would embrace me again, but he sat a little farther away this time and stared angrily ahead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a minute or so. “I thought he was too straight to be any sort of problem. I really haven’t gone out with him that much, but from what everyone else had to say about him . . .”