The Secret Sister by M. DeLuca (leveled readers txt) 📗

He shook his head. “Good for wiping your ass. That’s about it.”

Loni lobbed them all into the fountain, laughing as each one landed with a loud splash, bobbed around on the surface, then sank to the bottom.

“Let’s go,” said Birdie. “Leave her be.”

“You feeling sorry for your sister?” crooned Loni, taking hold of Birdie’s ear. “But I’m your real sister, Birdie, and don’t you forget it. Capiche?”

“I know,” said Birdie in a tiny voice. “But let’s go now.”

I felt the toe of Loni’s shoe thunk at my side as they left. “Keep your goddamn mouth shut next time. Nobody gives a damn about you. Nobody in the world. Not even your sister, cos now she’s got me instead.”

They took off, leaving me to scrabble around in the slimy fountain for my books. Two old drunks helped me out until a pile of wet pages sat on the mall floor. I thanked them, but I was crazy with anger. Birdie’s absolute betrayal was a searing knife in my gut. I’d wiped her nose, cleaned up her puke, held onto her hand when she lagged behind, suffered other people’s wrath to keep her safe. And now she’d stood by, not lifting a finger and let Loni abuse me. I stumbled to my feet, jarring my knee on the concrete edge of the fountain pool. My left eye throbbed with pain and my insides seethed with a thirst for vengeance that terrified me. I staggered out promising myself that I’d kill all three of them. I’d slit their miserable throats. I’d hold their heads under water until every bubble of air sputtered out of their bodies and their lungs burst.

Birdie had left me totally alone in the world and I could never forgive her. Ever.

I’d been drifting around the mall for over an hour and still not a word from Guy. I felt a nagging sense of fear. Would this be the argument that finally broke us? Just then my phone buzzed. I grabbed it.

“Anna?”

“Guy?”

“Where are you?”

“I went for a walk.”

“Anna, I’m sorry.”

“Me too. I said a whole lot of things I shouldn’t have. I gotta learn to keep my mouth shut.”

There was a moment’s silence. “No, Anna. It’s my fault. I overreacted. I’m a pompous idiot. You’re the one with the moral principles. Come to Mom and Dad’s for supper. I’m there right now but we’re just talking shop and you’d be bored. See you in a couple of hours.”

“Okay, sounds good,” I said, feeling the brief elation of victory that soon fled when I spotted the old fountain with its gray scum line and usual rag tag group of junkies hanging around its perimeter. My hand stiffened over my purse. I wasn’t ready to be here, near the place I’d been laid so low. The site of my betrayal. So I veered a sharp right in the other direction.

“You okay, Anna,” I heard a faraway voice ask. Then I remembered Guy was still on the phone.

“I’m fine. Just out of breath. See you later,” I said, heading east towards Toonz. Maybe I’d see Carla there, though I wasn’t sure what I’d say to her.

The record store was in a grubby corner of the mall next to LA Nail Palace, Kreatures, a pet store with some listless guinea pigs on a wheel in the window display, and DB’s Comics, a gamer and comic-lovers’ paradise frequented by a stream of slouching, greasy-haired post-pubescent boys who hadn’t seen the inside of a shower stall for at least a month.

When I spotted a couple of kids in hoodies walk hand in hand out of DB’s, I felt a sudden jarring of my consciousness as if time had shifted backwards and once again I was the ratty kid with the musty clothes and black eye that still smarted from Loni’s beating. This corner hadn’t changed in fifteen years. This was the place I first felt the stirrings of adolescent lust.

20

After the Birdie betrayal I stopped hanging out with her. Instead I came to the mall after school to look out for Colby, a guy from my English class who loved reading as much as I did. He hung out all the time at the comic store because he collected Batman and Green Lantern comics. He was a skinny, quiet kid with a hank of dark hair that covered his eyes and shielded him from the rest of humanity.

I’d become the only other member of his reading group the second day of English class and listened in awe as he let loose with his take on Raskolnikov, the consequences of alienation and the merits of nihilism. We were the only two reading Dostoevsky. The other kids in class – the cheerleaders, jocks, stoners and car fanatics – were still stuck on books with one-word titles like Busted, Ripped or Slammed or teenybop series like The Baby-Sitters Club or Goosebumps.

Miss Potter, our teacher, hadn’t even read Crime and Punishment. Her eyes bugged out when she read the first page, a look of incomprehension creeping over her doll face. But she shrugged and smiled, happy to let us sit together in the corner and keep a daily journal of our observations and discussions.

I liked her. At least she didn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t. Sometimes I sat on the floor in the hallway outside the classroom talking with Colby about the isolation of intellectual superiority and the concept of a human Superman, while the other kids made character posters, composed acrostic poems and created media collages that they plastered all over the classroom walls. Colby and I watched from our intellectual fortress, finding much to identify with in the solitary agonies of the tortured student, Raskolnikov.

I waited by DB’s every day after school, until Colby ambled out, jamming a new comic into the pocket of his denim jacket. Then I fell into step alongside him. He always ignored me for the first few minutes until I said something that piqued