Bittersweet Dreams Read online

  “At last, we agree about something,” I said. “If you were inside me, I’d rip you out. You know, like a bloody cesarean section.” I held up my hands as though they had just been in a mother’s womb and were dripping with blood down my arms.

  She gasped, turned quickly, and marched out, holding her head high. She was always worried about what she looked like, even when she was alone and wouldn’t see anyone else. However, frustrating and defeating her didn’t give me as much satisfaction as she thought it had. I had long ago given up on baiting her and making her look foolish in front of my father, hoping it would open his eyes. I certainly had nothing to gain from it today. It was far too late, too late for many things. I was soaked in regrets.

  I stood by the window in my bedroom, looked out toward the Pacific Ocean, and thought it should be gray and rainy today, at least. That would fit my mood, everyone’s mood. I didn’t pay much attention to the weather. Maybe that was because we lived in Southern California and took beautiful days for granted, or maybe it was because I spent most of my time inside, my face in a book or at a computer screen. I wasn’t one of those people who stopped to smell the roses. We actually had beds of them out front, along with other flowers. If I stopped, it wouldn’t be to enjoy the scent and beauty of anything but instead to examine the flowers, looking for some microscopic genetic change. I couldn’t help it. As my teachers were fond of saying, and which was probably true, it was part of my DNA.

  Moments after Julie had stopped bitching and left, I heard someone behind me and thought she might have returned to say something else that was even nastier that had crawled into her clogged brain, a brain I imagined infested with little spiders weaving selfish, hateful webs of thought. This time, I would face her down more vehemently, not with calm sarcasm but with what she hated: cold, dirty language. When I spit back at her, she would rush to cover her ears, as if my words would stain her very soul.

  However, when I turned, I saw it was my thirteen-year-old stepsister, Allison. That surprised me. I was sure her mother had told her to stay away from me, especially this morning. She probably told her I had done her enough damage, and maybe, like Typhoid Mary, I would contaminate her further. “Stay in your room, and keep the door locked until she’s gone,” she surely had said. She was unaware of the short but honest and sweet conversation Allison and I had had the night before. Her mother was on her this morning, however. She wanted nothing to happen to change anything now.

  Allison did look very nervous sneaking in here, but, like last night, she looked very sad, too, sad for both of us. She stood there staring at me.

  “What is it, Allison? I thought we said our good-byes last night.”

  “I know, but I remembered something. My father gave me this pen the last time I saw him,” she said, holding up a silver pen. “He said it was a special pen, one of the ones the astronauts used in space. You could write upside down or sideways with it, everything. I wanted to give it to you to use.” She stepped forward to hand it to me.

  “You want to give it to me? Why? Do you think I’ll be upside down or sideways?”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “It’s just a very special pen.”

  I looked at it. On the surface, it didn’t look like anything terribly unusual, but I did make out the word NASA.

  “Please take it,” she said, waving it. She looked like she would cry if I didn’t.

  “Your father gave it to you? Are you sure you want to give it to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “The words you’ll write with it will be better than the words I’ll write.”

  The way she said the obvious truth, with no self-deprecation or self-pity, made me laugh. In some ways, Allison was already head and shoulders above her mother.

  I took the pen.

  “Okay. Thanks. Who knows, maybe I will hang from my feet in my closet when I do my homework up there. Some people think I’m a vampire.”

  She smiled. “No, you’re not. No one thinks that. You’re too pretty to be a vampire.”

  “Pretty?” I glanced at myself in the mirror. I didn’t feel especially pretty today. I thought my face was pale, my eyes dull and dim, and my hair unkempt. If anything, I looked more like some homeless girl wondering what in the world had happened that she should find herself so lost and alone.

  “That’s a nice color on you, too, turquoise. Remember? I made my mother buy me the same blouse, but it didn’t look as good on me as it does on you.”

  “It will,” I said. “You’re going to have a nice figure, Allison.” As hard as it was for me to say it, I added, “As nice as your mother’s.” What was true was true. Julie was physically attractive. If only she could be kept under glass like a wax figure, I thought, and not bother or hurt anyone else.

  Allison smiled again. “Okay, see you when you come home for the holidays.” She started to turn to leave.

  “We don’t get holidays,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know. Things are very different there. I’ll let you know.”

  “Will you? Really? I mean, let me know and not my mother first?”

  “She’ll know, even though the moment I leave, she’ll have a moat built.”

  “A what?”

  “Forget it. Okay. Like I said last night, I’ll send you an email or text you.”

  “I know you said it, but will you really?”

  “You sure you want me to do it, Allison? You know you’ll have to keep it secret from you-know-whom.”

  “I’m sure. Please, send me emails. My mother doesn’t know how to use a computer.”

  I stared at her with a hard look. She knew why.

  “I’ll keep this secret. I swear,” she said in a deep whisper, with her hand over her heart, and then turned and went to the door, checking first to be sure her mother didn’t know she had come in to see me. She looked back, smiled, and then hurried away.

  I put the pen into my bag.

  My father’s wife was in her glory, my father was in a deep depression, and my stepsister was terrified of breathing the same air I breathed.

  How would I go about explaining all of this to anyone if I had trouble explaining it to myself? I thought I should write it down so I could study it all exactly the way I would study a math problem or a science theory, pause, step back, and analyze. Maybe if I did a full, intelligent, and objective review, I would have an easier time living with myself, not that it was ever easy to be who I was or who I was going to be.

  Was I cursed at birth or blessed?

  I suppose the best way to answer such a question is to ask yourself how many people you know your age or a little younger or older who would want to trade places with you, would want to have your talents and intelligence, or envied you for your good looks enough to accept all the baggage that came along with it.

  Right now, in my case, despite my accolades and awards, people like that would be harder to find than the famous needle in a haystack.

  But the thing was that despite it all, I didn’t even want to look. I didn’t want to be validated, complimented, or even respected in any way.

  I looked in the mirror again. Allison was right. This was a nice color for me.

  I wondered, would anyone where I was going notice, and if they did, would they care?

  I must have wanted someone to care. I did want to have friends, and I did hope that there was some boy out there about my age who would find me attractive.

  Otherwise, why would I have taken so long to choose my clothes, the way a prisoner on death row might contemplate his last meal?

  2

  When the phone rang in my room, I thought it was probably my father giving me an update on the time we would be leaving, but it was Joy Hensley, my new and only best friend ever since I’d made an effort to help her with her anorexia, something her own mother hadn’t been addressing properly. The school nurse wasn’t effective, probably worrying about a lawsuit or something, and there certainly wer
en’t any other girls at the school who would give her a second look or show any concern. I would have to admit that when I first considered helping her, it wasn’t out of any particular affection for her. She interested me the way anything abnormal might. There aren’t too many species that deliberately do something harmful to themselves.

  Joy fit so many descriptions of potential anorexia sufferers. She was heavy when she was younger and thought being thin would win her more friends and admirers. I suspected that she was afraid of growing up; she wanted to be a preadolescent forever. In short, she was afraid of sex. Eventually, I was fascinated with what I could do to change or heal her.

  “I really didn’t say good-bye to you properly,” she began.

  “Is there a proper way to say good-bye, Joy?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, and followed that with the jingle of a giggle she usually used when she was nervous or frightened.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I know what anything means, Joy.”

  “Oh, no. If anyone does, you do.”

  For months, I had tolerated Joy’s exuberant compliments, knowing she was desperate to keep me as a close friend, but I had gotten so used to over-the-top compliments that I almost didn’t react to them anymore.

  For most of my life, people, especially teachers and other adults, were more interested in what I thought than in what I felt. It was as though being given almost supernatural intelligence deadened my feelings or diminished them to the point where they weren’t necessary or important. If I was sad, I could think my way out of it, you see, and the only way I could be happy was to discover a new fact or add something to my encyclopedia of knowledge. That’s what they believed about me. No wonder they saw me as some kind of monster, a brain creature who had microscopes for eyes. Despite how ingratiating and fawning Joy could be, I had no doubt she harbored some of the same feelings about me. Ironically, she was very fond of me, respected me, but was also at least a little afraid of me. Can you have a close friend with that combination of feelings about you?

  “Is your new school more expensive than ours?”

  “Yes, very,” I said. “Julie was just complaining about that, as a matter of fact.”

  “I guess you’ll meet more very rich kids, then,” she said sadly.

  “There are only fifteen students, if that many.”

  “Fifteen? It sounds more like just one class. How can that be a school?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said dryly.

  I hadn’t told Joy much about where I was going. She was one of those who were under the impression that I was leaving our school to enjoy better opportunities, and while that was probably going to be true, it wasn’t what had motivated my father and Julie to agree to it.

  It was true that Beverly Royal was a ritzy private school in Beverly Hills, which I had attended along with the sons and daughters of famous Hollywood actors, producers, and directors, not to mention wealthy business executives. Everything was new and clean, with the finest equipment and the latest technology. The over-the-top security, with metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and half a dozen security personnel, gave the students’ parents a sense of comfort that was rare in, if not totally absent from, public schools. The teachers were among the highest paid and most likely the best qualified. Administrators at Beverly Royal liked to brag that while the lowest five percent of college graduates went into teaching, Beverly Royal hired only from the top five percent. Who would want to leave such a school voluntarily?

  My father and Julie would deny that I was being sent to this new school as a kind of punishment. My father would deny it because he really believed it wasn’t. Despite what my stepmother had just told me, she couldn’t have me sent to some penitentiary or mental clinic. She was trapped. She had to put on an act and claim that I was being offered a unique opportunity, because she didn’t want the scandal to grow. She was always very protective of her lily-white reputation. She was terrified that her friends would gossip about her the way she and they gossiped about other people.

  Of course, in your heart, if you were me, you would know it was at least partly a punishment, and no form of sugarcoating would change that.

  “So I guess someone like me couldn’t get into your new school even if my parents wanted to spend the money, huh?” Joy asked. If I were going to just another private school, I had no doubt Joy would pressure her mother to put out the extra money and send her there, too.

  “No, Joy. Despite what most of the others at our school believe, money can’t buy you everything. You have to qualify, and the standards are very, very high, so high you need oxygen.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I was never falsely modest about myself. If anything, I thought that would be futile. It would be like a blind person pretending he could see. I was what I was, and being modest and humble didn’t change anything. I was profoundly gifted. The whole faculty and all of my father’s and Julie’s friends knew it.

  Whenever anyone heard me called that, he or she would look at me and surely wonder, What’s so special about her? What’s her gift? On the surface, I supposed I didn’t look different from any other girl my age, although I’d been accused of being very pretty. I say accused because for most of my teenage life, I had done relatively little to make myself look beautiful. Until recently, I had rarely dwelled on my hair, clothes, makeup, or jewelry. There had never been an actress or singer I wished I resembled. Unlike the other attractive girls in my classes, I never flaunted my good looks and figure, and I never flirted with or teased any boy.

  But I did recognize that real beauty, natural beauty, didn’t need to be emphasized or exaggerated. It couldn’t be hidden, and perhaps that was the sort of beauty I possessed. I supposed I should be more grateful, feel more blessed, but the truth was, I hadn’t yet gotten control of it the way I controlled most things in my life, and that made me nervous and insecure. A girl my age who was beautiful but didn’t dwell on it or even realize it was always surprised at how others, especially men, treated her. She was always at some disadvantage, and I hated being at any disadvantage when it came to relationships with others my age, or actually, with anyone regardless of age, especially men.

  People who heard I was gifted didn’t fully understand what that meant. They might expect me to get up and play Beethoven when I was only five or create a magnificent work of art. Those are truly gifted people, but they are gifted with a quickly and easily displayed talent. I’m different.

  “I know, Mayfair,” Joy said, with some discouragement in her voice. “You’re a genius, and the school probably takes only geniuses.”

  “You know I hate that word, Joy.”

  “I know you do, but you are.”

  “A genius is someone who supposedly doesn’t make mistakes. They are expected to be right always.”

  “You always are.”

  “Believe me, Joy, I’m not. Besides, people anticipate that great things will come from geniuses, and I’m not sure anything of great value will ever come from me.”

  “It will,” she insisted.

  My faithful friend, Joy Hensley, I thought. She was practically the only person I might miss, besides my father, of course.

  “You’re lucky,” she added.

  “Lucky?” Now I was the one to follow what I said with a jingle of a giggle.

  “Of course. Look how much you know and how fast you can learn anything.”

  Joy didn’t understand and probably never would, but when you’re young and brilliant, especially if you’re female, people think you don’t want the same things so-called normal or average young girls want, like love and romance or even sex. From where do they get these ideas? Don’t eggheads have hormones? And why is falling in love unusual for someone who can solve the most complicated algebraic equations?

  Maybe that’s what made most boys hesitant about approaching me even though I was quite attractive, even having been called voluptuous. They thought that if t
hey did get to make love to me, I would be analyzing them and then might reveal that they had premature ejaculation or something. What hurt a boy’s feelings more than a girl thinking and saying he was poor in the sack? Why risk it?

  “Yes,” Joy insisted. “You are. Will you write to me as soon as you can?”

  “As soon as I can,” I said with a very noncommittal tone.

  “I’ll miss you, Mayfair. It’s not going to be fun going to school anymore.”

  “I hope you have more self-confidence now, Joy. You’re doing so much better. Don’t let any of those bitches push you around.”

  “It wasn’t hard when you were there to help.”

  “You’ve got to be on your own sometime, Joy. Just think about what I would do, what I might say, okay?”

  “Yes, thanks,” she said in a small voice.

  Here I was giving someone else advice when I was the one who needed it the most. My self-confidence surprised even me now. What right did I have to do it?

  “I’ve got to go, Joy. Still packing.”

  “Well, have a good trip,” she said. “I guess you’ll email me sometime.”

  “I said I would. I want to hear good things about you. You know I don’t like failure, and I’ve invested time and energy in you.”

  She laughed. “I’ll try.”

  “Don’t try. Do. Remember what I told you. What doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said.

  After I hung up, I realized I’d been giving myself that advice, not her.

  If my grandmother Lizzy, my mother’s mother, was still alive, she’d be chiding me for showing even the slightest evidence of self-pity. I knew I took after Grandmother Lizzy more than any other relative, including my own parents. She had a way of saying things that not many wanted to hear. She would often say that something was “plain and simple.” I appreciated her more than anyone else did, and when we looked at each other, we knew we were special. She wasn’t gifted, of course, unless you would consider being bold and coldly truthful a gift. With all the phoniness raining down around us these days, maybe that could be a very special gift after all. She didn’t understand my superior intelligence or what it would come to mean, but she tried to treat me as if I were no different from any other little girl my age. She didn’t want to bring any unusual attention to me. Now that I think back to that, I realize how impossible a task that was for her.