Don't You Trust Me? (12 page)

So I got up and exchanged places with Brooke. Grandma went on quizzing me about my successes since I had blown into town three weeks before, and exclaiming in a gratifying manner over them. Finally I noticed that everyone else at the table had gone silent.

“Well, I shall have to come out to that stable and watch you, Morgan,” Grandma said. “I'll be able to say I knew you when, after you go off to represent the USA on the Olympics jumping team.”

Aunt Antonia cleared her throat. “Uh . . . Mother? Don't forget,
Brooke
is learning to ride too.”

“Of course, of course.” She looked around, trying to figure out where her actual grandchild had gotten to. “Brooke, of course! I'll go and watch
both
of you. How exciting for me!”

When she left, she pressed my hand and asked if I would like to come and visit her sometime.

“Sure,” I said. I eyed the huge ruby solitaire rings on her knobby old hands. I'd be
happy
to pay a visit to Grandma's house, trust me!

The companionable feelings after the fund-raising day did not last. When I went to watch Brett play basketball
after school on Monday, Helena attempted to physically remove me from the gym.

“What are
you
doing here?” she demanded.

“Brett asked me to come,” I answered.

“Well, go away! You have no business here, you little out-of-town creep! I saw you smarming up to him last Saturday,” she said. She gripped my arm with both hands and pushed me backward into the hallway. That was another difference between city and suburb—she had no idea how to fight. The girls at my old school would have twisted my arm behind me until I yelled, and marched me out of there, but Helena just did a bit of ineffectual shoving, expecting the simple fact of her aggression to defeat me.

“I only want to watch basketball practice,” I objected. I swerved around and got past her, worming my way back into the room, with her still attached to my elbow. People were beginning to look at us, so she dropped my arm. “Brett
asked
me to,” I repeated.

Helena pursued me to my seat on the bleachers, hissing like a teakettle on the boil.

“Who do you think you are, anyway?” she demanded in an angry whisper. “You just showed up out of nowhere, and now you're all over the place, sticking your finger into every pie. Brett is
my
boyfriend. Leave him alone.”

“He's only your boyfriend as long as he wants to be,” I said. “You can't lock him up, you know.”

Red spots burned high on Helena's cheekbones. “Listen,” she said. “I have lived here all my life. My friends and I
run
this school. Don't think that some little West Coast girl, a
junior
, no less, is going to sweep in here and grab my boyfriend. Not going to happen.”

I studied her in silence for a moment. Actually, if only she knew it, I was a sophomore.

“Okay,” I said, and smiled. At that moment Brett looked up and saw me. I waved. “Hey! Hi, Brett! Gee,” I said, turning back to Helena, “he looks great in those shorts, doesn't he?”

“Ooooh!”
she said, looking like she wanted to hit me. Fortunately, one of her friends called her over, and she left, casting furious glances in my direction. When she rejoined her friends, she said something and then pointed in my direction. They looked at me.

I smiled and waved, all friendly and unconcerned. One of them started to wave back, then jerked her hand down and thrust it under her thigh. Helena turned around and gave her a mean look.

Brett scored. I stood up and cheered.
“Yay, Brett!”

Here is something I have learned: the best victim is somebody that nobody likes much, somebody that other people think
deserves
to be picked on. Bullies are fair game, for instance. Nobody feels sorry for them, and
I
become a heroine for teaching them a lesson. Even
though Helena was one of the popular girls, I suspected that she was more feared than loved. If I toppled her from her position as Queen Bee of Lebanon Hill High, there would be no lasting animosity toward me, except, of course, from the ex-queen herself. So, as secure as she seemed, she was actually vulnerable.

She might not have been one of the cold like me—the cold at Lebanon were mostly males, and mostly engaged in a monotonous career of stealing cars and ditching them and then getting arrested for it, as well as one low-IQ sophomore girl who didn't seem to get the idea that there are cameras
everywhere
in stores these days—but Helena was a lot more like me than she was like whatever Brooke was. I understood Helena and what made her tick.

On the other hand, I did
not
understand Brooke. She was so open to being taken advantage of, so easy to fool, so generous and unguarded. Yet she wasn't stupid. It was more like she was
willing
herself not to see evil in the world, rather than being unable to do so
.
It would have been easy to victimize Brooke. She had no defenses, no idea that she could be in any danger. Yet I was wary of hurting her. I had the sense that any damage I caused her could boomerang around and smack me from behind. So, mentally, I declared Brooke off-limits.

Still, I
am
a creature of impulse, and Brooke might as well have been walking around with a big target painted on her back.

Our fund-raising efforts had pretty well exhausted the richer neighborhoods around Albany by the end of September. My hometown is a city of three or four million, while Albany doesn't even have a population of a hundred thousand. If you drive north up I-87, you get to Clifton Park, which is a good-size suburb, and a little further up the freeway is Saratoga, where the thoroughbreds race in the summertime and the affluent come to spend money. When I suggested we harvest these fertile fields, however, my partners in philanthropy objected.

“They'll want to give to their own food pantries,” said Emma. “People like to see donated money go to help local causes.”

Well, of course we didn't have to
tell
them that the money wasn't for their own food pantry, did we? However, this suggestion wouldn't play well with Straight-Arrow Emma.

There were lots of middle- and lower-class neighborhoods we hadn't touched, and I remembered how much more generous some of the people in the small houses were than some of the ones in the mansions. Still, I was getting bored with the door-to-door work, though it had been
very
profitable, for me and the
other
good causes.

I was ready for new worlds to conquer.

I was plenty busy. Academics were a stretch for me
still, so I spent hours on math and English. Luckily, Brooke was always ready to tutor me, so I was passing quizzes and contributing in class. We took the PSATs one Saturday too, which meant we had to miss a riding lesson. Brooke tied herself into knots over her performance on the test, but I breezed through. Who knew if I would be here when we got the results?

Back in early September, Helena had been premature in saying I had a finger in every pie. But by early October she was quite correct. I had infiltrated every organization of any importance at Lebanon Hill High. I was on the yearbook staff, the spirit week committee, the booster club team, and I was auditioning for the lead in
The Glass Menagerie
. The charity work is what gave me an in; I guess ambitious society ladies work the charity routine for the same reason. I was known and respected by staff and students alike, and welcomed into positions of influence and authority.

I kept my cash in Janelle's pink suitcase, and the pile was growing. In fact, I realized that I was going to have to exchange some of the fives and tens for larger denominations—it was getting a bit bulky. One day when I was secreting a new bundle of money, Mrs. Barnes walked into my room unannounced with a supply of fresh towels. I slammed the lid down the second I saw her out of the corner of one eye, but several bills fluttered out onto the floor.

“Oops!”
I said gaily, gathering them up. “Look at me, throwing my money around!”

“You want to be careful about that,” replied Mrs. Barnes, her face unreadable. She put the towels in the bathroom and then paused on her way out of my room. “There's a lot of money in this house,” she observed. “Not that Mrs. Styles and Brooke care much about it. They're good people, for all they're so wealthy.”

“They are,” I agreed. “And they sure have been nice to me.”

“Yes, they have,” she said, and left, closing the door behind her.

Hmm. What was that all about? I was almost certain she hadn't seen anything but the twenty and the ten that had fallen out. I resolved to keep the pink suitcase locked from now on. And perhaps to pull a chair in front of the door when the suitcase was out and open.

Anyway, as I was saying, the money was mounting up, though I couldn't help but think with mingled frustration and resentment of the much larger sums I had been forced to hand over. After all,
I'd
done the work. Why should the charities reap such rewards? At least the net results were positive, and I was learning new skills all the time.

For instance, I was becoming more social. Back in my old school I'd been nobody. The power structure had firmed up in middle school, with me on the outside
looking in. Now, coming here as an unknown entity from exotic Southern California, I had made a big splash in the small pool of Lebanon Hill High. I was reading people's faces and actions better these days, since there were so many who were not only willing but eager to talk to me. I was steadily hauling Brett into my orbit and out of Helena's, much to her chagrin. And I had discovered that whenever you are at a loss for what to do or say, if you put a pleasant, amused expression on your face and wait, like when Grandma wanted to know about my mother's shop, somebody will fill in the silence and fix the problem.

If I'd known what a great hustle this philanthropy stuff was, I'd have taken it up long ago. Then my parents might have been fooled into thinking I was a person of sterling character, and I wouldn't have had to leave home.

But if I hadn't left home, I might never have learned to ride, which I was enjoying more and more as Bounce allowed me to gallop all over her property, and I would almost certainly never have eaten Mrs. Barnes's pecan pie, one of the highlights of my life so far.

I had no complaints.

“AND NOW WE COME TO
the character of Morgan le Fay. An enchantress and a sorceress, she came of fairy blood, hence her name, ‘le Fay,' which means ‘of the fairies.' Morgan? Perhaps you can give us some insight into the character of your namesake?”

Ms. Tavernier, my English teacher, was trolling for comments during the last class of the day, at the peak of a long, golden October afternoon. The whole class was staring out the windows at blue skies and red and yellow foliage, bending their united will onto the clock on the wall to make it tick faster toward dismissal time.