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That gift, I thought, and went to my vanity mirror to look at it again.

I made a decision when I took it off and put it back into its box.

I wouldn’t be the one to tell Kiera about it. Later, she might be even angrier that I didn’t, but it wasn’t a lie, and it wasn’t deceitful if the reason you did it was to keep someone else from being unhappy. That way, it wasn’t bad, was it?

I smiled, remembering my little battle of quips in English class when Ryder had first entered school.

Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

I chose to think it was good.

Thank you, Shakespeare, I thought, and put the necklace in a drawer.

If only we could put all of our troubles in a box and close it in a drawer, how well we would sleep and how easily we could turn from nightmares to sweet dreams.

12

Rumors

My mother thinks you have potential,” Ryder told me when we met in the parking lot the next morning.

“Potential? What’s that mean? Potential for what? She hardly talked to me.”

“As a model or something. What else? She certainly doesn’t see you as a doctor or a lawyer. Not that you couldn’t be,” he quickly added. “It’s the way she looks at all girls and other women. My father calls it feminine envy. All women, he says, think someone else is prettier and never think they’re pretty enough. When he starts complaining about that, they really go at it. I sit back and watch. It’s better than the soap opera he’s in.”

I laughed, but I thought he really did see his parents as people cast in roles. Every day of his life was simply another episode. He even talked about his sister as if she were playing a part she had been given at birth. I wondered if he saw himself the same way. Maybe he just didn’t feel real.

“By the way, Summer wasn’t too happy about the way my mother went on about you this morning.”

“Why? Doesn’t your mother compliment her?”

He looked at me as if I had asked the dumbest question. “With the way Summer dresses, what she does with the clothes my mother buys her, what she did recently, and that Gothic makeup she loves? I thought they’d break out into a fistfight over piercing. Dear old Mom, as you saw, hates stress, so she just shakes her head and walks away.”

“Well, maybe Summer would behave better and have a better image of herself if your parents paid more attention to her, spent time talking to her and trying to reason with her.”

“Dr. Sasha!” he cried. “Can I make an appointment for my parents with you today?”

I punched him in the shoulder, and he pretended it hurt. I pretended to be shocked and sorry, and he stopped and threw his arm around me.

“Hey, I’m just kidding.”

“So am I,” I said, and he laughed.

“I think I’ve finally met my match,” he said as we entered the building. He still had his arm around my shoulders.

There wasn’t a single senior high student who wasn’t looking at us. I was always afraid of being too proud, too arrogant about my looks and achievements. Because of where I had come from and where I was now in my life, I told myself I could easily be a little egotistical and not have people criticize me for it, but I was still afraid of it. Look at how pride and vanity had practically destroyed Kiera. We had been studying classic tragedy in English class, and I knew the famous statement about pride coming before a fall. When you were too big for yourself, you always made serious mistakes.

But being with Ryder and knowing who his parents were made it very difficult to act nonchalantly. The way the other students were looking at me now, the girls so full of envy, the boys so impressed, made me feel as if the Garfields’ celebrity had somehow spread to me. What girl here didn’t dream about being on the covers of magazines or a star in movies and television? Especially in this school, it was almost a natural part of being a teenager. You weren’t normal if you didn’t dream of these things. The stream of conversation in the hallways, in the cafeteria, in the bathrooms, everywhere, was fed from a pool of currently famous teenagers who were idolized. Almost everyone bragged about some experience that had brought him or her close to one of these much-publicized people.

“My parents know so-and-so.”

“My father got me backstage tickets to this one’s concert or that one’s, and I got to shake his hand. He hugged me!”

“We actually ate dinner at the table next to so-and-so.”

On and on it went, everyone trying to outdo everyone else with his or her celebrity experience. It was easy, at least for me, to see how much of it was exaggerated.

But there was no way to doubt me, to accuse me of exaggeration. I was seeing Ryder Garfield. I was at his home. I had to have had real contact with his parents. I was touched with the golden fingers. I already commanded their envy for other reasons. Now I was almost untouchable myself. Why, any day now, I might get photographed in the presence of one of Ryder’s parents, and my picture could be in magazines or even on television. I could see all of these thoughts in the faces of other girls.