Echoes of Dollanganger Read online

  “I’m not really sure we should jump to conclusions about anything in the diary. We can’t treat it as gospel.”

  “What do you mean? You said it was found on the property. It’s the diary of the boy who was imprisoned there, Christopher, right?”

  “Right, but we are getting the story from Christopher. Maybe . . . maybe he’s not telling the truth. My father once suggested that after I had begun to read it.”

  Kane thought a moment and then nodded. “I’ll know pretty quickly once I get into it,” he said confidently. “But people don’t usually lie in a diary, anyway. That’s why I never kept one. I don’t want to be caught telling the truth.” He gave me that James Dean smile and shrug that he had become famous for in our school.

  “That I believe. So how will you know so quickly if he’s lying or not?”

  “I have a built-in lie detector. A buzzer goes off in my head, so don’t try to fool me.”

  “Maybe I’ve fooled you already.”

  He laughed. “You’re good, angel, you’re real good,” he said. “My father uses that line on my mother. It comes from some old Humphrey Bogart movie.”

  “Too bad Christopher Dollanganger didn’t have that built-in buzzer of yours to know when he was being told the truth and when he wasn’t. I’m sure he and his brother and sisters wouldn’t have suffered so much.”

  “I’ll have to catch up to see what you mean by suffering so much, but don’t tell me any more. I want to be objective and come to my own conclusions. I know that’s what you want, too, right?”

  I nodded, and Kane made the turn into the school parking lot. Others were racing not to be late, the cooler air putting more energy into their strides, because, like Kane, most were underdressed. Even though they looked like they were on treadmills going five or six miles an hour and looked as comical as silent movie stars, some boys thought it was macho to freeze.

  After Kane parked and shut off the engine, he sat there for a moment.

  “What?” I asked, seeing that he was still in deep thought.

  “Their mother brought them there, right?”

  “Yes, you’ll read about how and why. So?”

  “So maybe he rationalized a lot. Maybe he did know, Kristin.”

  “Did know what?”

  “Maybe he knew when he was being lied to but put up with it and lied to himself, and that’s what we’ll read. So your father could be at least half right.”

  “Why would he lie to himself?”

  “All of us are willing to forgive the ones we love, Kristin,” he replied, “even for their lies.”

  That was a perceptive thing to say, I thought, but what was going on in Kane’s life that brought him to that conclusion, a conclusion he was willing to share? I was more impressed with him every time we were together. The sensitivity he revealed was a nice surprise. My father always said that getting to know someone, someone you cared very much to know, was like peeling an onion. It took time and patience. Sometimes you peeled away too much and regretted it. I didn’t think I would regret it when it came to Kane. At least, I hoped I wouldn’t.

  I got out of the car, but I was still thinking about what he had said. All of us are willing to forgive the ones we love? Even for lies?

  I hope so, I thought. I hope that in the end, my father will forgive me.

  * * *

  A big secret changes you in ways you don’t realize immediately, especially if you share that secret with someone and hope he or she is keeping it safe. The bigger the secret, the more vulnerable and in danger you feel. Sometimes it shows right on your face, like splattered egg yolk, especially a face like mine. Practically every moment outside of class, I expected someone to rush over to me and declare, “You have the diary? You know what really happened at the original Foxworth Hall?” Every time I heard one of my friends call my name, an electric chill would rush up my spine.

  Everyone has little secrets. In our world, that was what made you more interesting. But this was very different. Anyone who found out what we had would surely pounce, and not just my classmates. Newspapers, radio, television people would haunt us. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing, nor would the doorbell. People would accuse us of always having had it and deliberately hoarding the truth because it was embarrassing for our family. My mother was a distant cousin of Malcolm Foxworth, so the children were distant cousins of mine. My father would feel terrible for calling me over that day to watch him open the locked metal box at the bottom of some debris in the remains of the restored Foxworth Hall. The restoration had used the same basement walls. My father thought the builders were just not very meticulous when it came to cleaning away the original debris. His colleagues would tease him about it. Some might even be nasty and make him angry. He would hate to go anywhere, except to work and right back home. Just going to the supermarket would become a big deal. I couldn’t even imagine what coming to my high school graduation would be like for him.

  He might lose business. He might want to sell our house and move away.

  I didn’t want to imagine any of it. It was like having a nightmare while awake. That’s what it was starting to feel like at school.

  Physically, I was walking about with my books embraced tightly against my breasts, as if I were protecting something precious inside the covers, or perhaps really more inside me. Emotionally, I felt clogged, as if my feelings were twisted into figure-eight knots. The weight of our secret slowed my pace, no matter what I was doing. I could feel my eyes widen in expectation every time I was asked a question, no matter how innocent the question might seem. Had I revealed anything accidentally? Had I whetted anyone’s interest? Had Kane inadvertently given something away already, and others were testing me? I was taking on real paranoia. This was triggered especially when one of my close friends, Kyra Skewer, asked me about Kane picking me up every morning and taking me home after school.

  “Does he hang out at your house, or do you go to his or what afterward?” she wanted to know. She asked in front of Suzette, Missy Meyer, and Theresa Flowman, and all four of them gave me their full attention, their ears perked up like extraterrestrial antennae.

  “It varies with my mood,” I said cryptically.

  “Huh?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “It’s spontaneous.”

  “You and your vocabulary,” Kyra complained. She had a grimace that made her look like she was being burned at the stake whenever she complained about anything.

  “Spontaneous? Please. That’s not a hard word to define, Kyra.”

  “I know what it means. I just never heard it used like that,” she said.

  “When you’re in love, everything is spontaneous,” Suzette said, and then giggled and turned her shoulders inward, which made her breasts bulge in the deep V-neck of her light blue sweater. I knew she often did that deliberately just to see where the gaze of the boy she was talking to went. “Whether it’s a kiss or something more,” she added.

  “Then every day is spontaneous for you,” Kyra said. “Every month, you fall into a desperate love that lasts as long as your period.”

  Everyone laughed. I smiled. It wasn’t all that much of an exaggeration when it came to Suzette. Recently, she had gotten blond highlights in her dark brown hair because Tommy Clark liked blond highlights, and soon after that, she let us all know she had pierced her navel. In fact, she let everyone know, especially Greg Storm, who had his nose pierced. It did seem like she remade herself weekly to attract some new boy she fancied.

  “I’d rather go to Kane’s house. You’d have more privacy,” Missy Meyer said, getting serious again. “I mean, you have a nice house. It’s just that . . .”

  “The way the house is laid out, her father might hear what goes on in her bedroom?” Suzette suggested, her silver-blue eyes brightening like two diamonds of promiscuous excitement. “Didn’t your younger brother hear what went on in yours when you brought Dylan Marks home one afternoon?” she asked Kyra. She embraced herself and mimicked groans and moans. />
  “Shut up.”

  “Well, no matter where you go after school, Kristin, he can’t help you with your homework. If anything, he’ll distract you,” Theresa Flowman said in her nasal voice. She was hoping for that result, hoping Kane would distract me enough to lower my grades. After the last marking period, Theresa and I were neck and neck for valedictorian.

  “Please, Theresa, distract her?” Kyra said. “What you need is a lot more distraction. Any distraction, come to think of it,” she added, flashing a sly smile at me. Suzette and Missy laughed. Theresa turned crimson, glared at her, and walked off.

  “All that girl knows about sex is that it’s a three-letter word,” Suzette said.

  “And what do you know?” Kyra teased.

  “I know Steve Cooper would like to practice the missionary position with you in his basement,” she retorted, and the three of them laughed again. Steve’s parents had let him move into their basement, which felt like a private apartment because it had a separate entrance. Lately, it had acquired a nickname: Steve’s Sex Pit.

  They looked at me, noticing I wasn’t laughing this time. The chitchat had reminded me of Christopher and Cathy talking about sex, and for a moment, I was back in the attic, thinking about an older brother being a young girl’s only source for information about her maturing body. Even though Christopher was coldly scientific, he was still her brother and not her mother or older sister. Any young girl would still be sensitive about asking him questions about sex, but especially a sister. I recalled how hard it had been for my father to talk to me about any of it. He finally had to ask his sister, my aunt Barbara, to speak with me about my own emerging hormones clamoring to be recognized. She had made a special trip from New York to do it.

  Who would make a special trip for Cathy? It didn’t look like her mother would take the time to do it. She certainly wouldn’t take her out of the room to have a private conversation, one of those mother-daughter talks that my girlfriends satirized. They didn’t realize how envious of them I was. There were so many little things that had become big things for all of us, but especially for children locked away like that, I thought, children locked in a room and an attic and left to their own imagination to amuse and educate themselves. Christopher would do fine, but Cathy . . . how would it end up for her? Did I really want to know? Would both Kane and I regret turning those pages in the diary?

  “Anything wrong?” Kyra said. “Hello, earth to Kristin?”

  “What?”

  She looked at Suzette.

  “We were both talking to you, and you didn’t hear us. You’ve been acting weird all day. You didn’t miss a period, did you?” Suzette asked. She would.

  The three of them looked at me with one face, mouths slightly open, eyes anticipating.

  “She hasn’t been going with him long enough, has she?” Kyra asked.

  “We really don’t know how long she’s been seeing him,” Suzette said, enjoying the implication as she kept her eyes on me. “And guess what? It doesn’t take that long to get pregnant. Some sperm are faster than a speeding bullet, right, Kristin?”

  “Get outta here,” I said, playfully nudging her. “You have a one-track mind,” I added, and then spotted Kane coming around the hallway corner. “Later,” I muttered, and hurried to join him.

  “Hey,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulders. “You all right?”

  He looked back at my girlfriends, who were staring at us and giggling.

  “Someone say something about us?”

  “No. They don’t bother me. I think I screwed up on a math quiz.”

  “Does the CIA know yet?”

  “I’m serious. I should have aced it, Kane.”

  “All right. Sorry. What happened?” he asked as we walked to our next classes.

  “I don’t know. My mind just . . . went blank or something.”

  “Everyone has a day like that.”

  “I never did,” I said.

  “So now you’re normal. Relax. You’ll do better the next time,” he insisted. He shrugged. “Isn’t that why there are erasers on pencils?”

  I stopped and smiled. “That’s exactly what my father says when I complain about something I’ve done wrong.”

  “My father doesn’t say it; my mother does. My father doesn’t believe in mistakes. He claims it’s not in his religion.”

  “What religion is that?”

  “Perfection,” he replied, then laughed and gave me a quick kiss on the lips, which at least twenty other students saw, their eyes blinking like the lenses of paparazzi cameras. And then he hurried off to beat the late bell for his class. Most of my classes were advanced placement classes now. He turned and waved and then pretended he had been grabbed and pulled into a room. I laughed. He could have entertained everyone on the Titanic.

  What a mixture of emotions I was feeling. I was excited about being with him. I really did love every minute, and I loved how we were like everyone’s perfect couple, but I was feeling a little numb, confused, very tentative about myself because of the plan we had made for reading the diary together. I kept coming back to it all day, and sometimes I’d be trembling. Why was I so nervous about it? Did I really think the diary had some evil magical power because it had been buried so long in the rubble of the original Foxworth Hall? Was opening it like opening Pandora’s box? Did my father get me thinking like this by his wishing so strongly that I wouldn’t read it?

  My father always had this weird attitude about the original Foxworth Hall, never really wanting to talk about it or what had happened there, even though I was related to them on my mother’s side. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about it precisely because of that. When I was younger and even now, some of my classmates wondered if I had inherited any of the Foxworth madness.

  It got so even I began to wonder.

  Finally, I decided I was just being stupid thinking all these weird things and pushed it all out of my mind by concentrating hard on my schoolwork.

  However, as soon as the bell rang to end our final class of the day, I felt my heart begin to beat faster in anticipation of what Kane and I were going to begin doing. My girlfriends, especially Suzette, continued to tease me about being with Kane before and after school, filling up every free moment with him. I thought they were just jealous.

  “Will we ever see you again?” Suzette joked.

  “Will you ever answer the phone when we call?” Kyra followed.

  I shut them out, their laughter falling behind me like pebbles falling from a speeding, bouncing dump truck, and hurried to meet him. He was already at the exit waiting for me. He put his arm around me quickly and turned us to the door.

  “I lucked out. Not much homework tonight,” he said. “I can spend more time reading.”

  “I have my usual ton.”

  He opened the door, and we walked out quickly to the parking lot and his car. Practically every classmate of mine smiled licentiously at us as they passed us, some walking faster just to do that. Kane seemed oblivious to it. We had known each other a long time, even though we had just started going out together. I was still trying to understand him. Was he indifferent to most of the things that captured everyone else’s interest because he was just plain arrogant, or did he simply not care? Perhaps our experience with Christopher’s diary would peel that onion faster when it came to him.

  “Don and Ryan were driving me crazy to go skeet shooting with them this afternoon,” he said after we got into the car. “I forgot I had made plans to do that.”

  “You want to?” I asked, welcoming the reprieve. “We can postpone this.”

  “Hell no. As you know, I’ve got reading to do, and with your father coming home late, we have a good opportunity to get into a lot of it,” he said. He started the engine and drove us to my house.

  I could never imagine Kane Hill nervous about anything, but until we turned into my driveway, he talked continually, describing the most inconsequential things that had happened during the day. It was a
lmost like someone dictating Facebook or Twitter posts. His desk in math class wobbled too much. His math teacher, Mr. Brizel, broke his green chalk, the one he used to underline answers on the blackboard when he was frustrated with class responses. It was too cool in shop class because Mr. Primack left a window open too much and no one had the nerve to complain.

  I was half-listening, anyway. I was thinking that I should call my father just to be sure he was going to be late for dinner and wouldn’t arrive earlier than I expected and discover us in my room reading the diary. When we entered the house, I went right to the phone in the kitchen. Kane glanced at the stairway and looked at me expectantly.

  “Go on up ahead of me and start,” I said. “I have to call my father.”

  He shot up the stairs, taking two at a time, and turned to my room before I even entered the kitchen.

  He really was into this, I thought, but that still wasn’t making me feel confident about it now. I called my father.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asked. “Anything wrong?”

  “No. Just checking to be sure you will be late for dinner.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I know you don’t like to eat alone.”

  “I might invite Kane,” I said. “You made enough for at least five people,” I added quickly.

  “Oh, so he’s there?”

  “Yes. We’re . . . doing homework together.”

  “Sounds romantic. Should I be worried?” He hummed the shark theme again, just what I had been anticipating when I thought about calling him from Kane’s car.

  “Dad! Stop!”

  “Okay.”

  “Is it all right to have him stay for dinner?”

  “Absolutely. Later are you going to brag that your father won over your new boyfriend with his cooking?”

  “No,” I said.

  He laughed. “Enjoy,” he said, and shouted to someone just before he hung up.

  I stood there for a moment thinking about it all and then walked slowly up the stairs. Kane was on my bed, his shoes off, the diary in his hands.