Don't You Trust Me? (8 page)

“Your parents didn't know about the name change,” she said, without opening the door. “Neither had ever heard you express any dissatisfaction with your name or interest in changing it. They wondered where you had gotten the idea.”

“They don't know everything there is to know about me,” I said, which was entirely accurate.

She sighed. “I suppose that's true. Well, let's get shopping.” Finally,
finally
she got out of the car, and I followed suit. Still, she looked at me over the roof as we shut the doors, a long, long look that I did not entirely know how to interpret.

Oh well. Whatever.

I knew it was going to be
so
much easier for me to turn over a new leaf and stop stealing things here; I had everything I could possibly want! Designer clothes, new haircut (Aunt Antonia insisted, and I looked
great
!), new shoes (Aunt didn't seem to think much of the ones I was wearing), even a pretty little gold necklace. True, I didn't have a phone, but what of it? I'm not social, I don't play games, and I don't listen to music, so it wasn't as big a deal to me as it would be to most teenage girls. And if I behaved myself and didn't hook up with any inappropriate boys, I bet Auntie would eventually be
persuaded to come across with one. Assuming I decided I wanted one.

The only thing I regretted about our shopping spree was that I didn't feel well enough to milk Aunt Antonia for all she was worth. As I'd anticipated, taking clothes off and putting them on multiple times was painful, and I wasn't able to enjoy the experience as much as I would have liked. Buying jeans was the worst. Toward the end she thought I should try on another pair, and I could not do it. The only thing I wanted was to get back home to the bottle of ibuprofen in my bathroom.

“No thanks,” I said, and since there was no way I could benefit any further from her largess at the moment, I added cunningly, “You have been more than generous. I couldn't possibly accept anything else.”

“Oh, think nothing of it, dear,” said Aunt Antonia. “It's a pleasure buying clothes for a girl who enjoys them. Brooke isn't interested.” She unlocked the trunk of the Cadillac so I could store my bags of wonderful new things. “You've got a great figure for clothes, and good taste, too. I used to be fond of new things myself, but in my line of work you have to be conservative, and nobody ever notices what you're wearing anyway.”

One of these days I was going to have to figure out what Aunt did for a living.
Could she possibly be a lady minister?
I laughed aloud.

She smiled back at me and said, “We're so happy to
have you here, Morgan. Brooke was terribly nervous about you coming, you know, but she's very pleased about it now. I think this is going to work out well for both of you girls.”

Really? Brooke was terribly nervous about my coming? I wondered why. Secrets to hide, perhaps?

“She'll be able to take you around to your classes when school starts and introduce you to everyone. I know it's always hard to start at a new school. You're registered, by the way. It was a bit of a rush, since everything was decided only a few days ago. But your mother managed to get a package of your documents to me Express Mail, so we're all set.”

Documents?

“I never thought of that,” I said.

“Oh yes, they're strict here. Your parents had to grant us legal custody to ensure that you were able to go to school in our district. My being a psychiatric social worker for the state helped too, I think.”

A
what
? Boring old Auntie was a psychiatric social worker? Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't underestimate her powers of penetration. Surely she had run into others of my kind before.

“And naturally the school wanted a copy of your transcript and immunization record,” she concluded.

So Uncle and Aunt-the-psychiatric-social-worker were my legal guardians, were they? Interesting. I would
have to store that little tidbit in the back of my mind and think about it later.

I couldn't see how any of Janelle's documents would get me in trouble. I don't think you can tell by looking at someone whether or not they've been vaccinated for measles. And as for Janelle's grades, well, she didn't seem awfully bright to me, so unless she'd been hiding a massive intellect under that flaky personality, that wouldn't be a problem—

“And of course,” continued Aunt Antonia, casting a swift glance at me as she pulled out into traffic, “we are hoping that, since you will have no
distractions
here, you'll be able to bring your grade point average up a bit.”

Aaah
. I smiled beatifically. Good old Ashton-the-distraction. It looked like I was going to be able to better Janelle's performance in the classroom with the greatest of ease.

JUST LIKE IN BROOKE'S NEIGHBORHOOD,
the high school grounds were one gigantic lawn, and there was hardly any chain-link fencing there, either. Yeah, the tennis court was fenced in, but the whole, sprawling campus was not, unlike my school in LA. Brooke's school was wide open, so that anybody could walk in. People around here seemed to be awfully trusting, like nobody would ever need to be excluded, nobody would ever think to do anything bad. I suppose that's the difference between the city and the suburbs; people in the suburbs think they have put enough distance between themselves and evil so that they can relax. In my opinion, though, greed and selfishness are a basic part of human
nature. People can move away as far as they like, but their vices will come slinking along after them like a pack of half-tamed pariah dogs.

My old school wasn't bad. It sent a lot of kids on to college and met most of the state competency requirements even though an awful lot of the student body qualified for free lunches. You could tell that the average family income in this district was a lot higher. The cars in the parking lots were nicer, and so were the clothes worn by both faculty and students. I wasn't used to so many people being white-bread-white either, even though I am pretty white-bread-white myself. There was a scattering of black and brown faces in the halls here, but most of the students looked like they'd blister and burn after twenty minutes in direct sunlight. Coming here from Southern California, this place had the look of a school in a 1950s teen movie.

But who cares about the differences? School is school is school. So long as the class work wasn't a whole lot harder, I'd survive all right. I always do.

It was a lucky thing that Janelle was such a dope and expectations of me were therefore low. It
was
harder here. Well, for one thing, I skipped a full academic year because Janelle is six months older than I am. And I supposedly had two years of French under my belt. Forget that. I said I hated French and wanted to switch to
Spanish. Janelle was failing anyway, so that made sense.

But the math and literature classes were way harder than I'd expected, and instead of being goof-off periods like they were in my old school, you were actually expected to work in art and gym. Spanish was easy. I'd been taking it anyway, and living in LA, you absorb some through your pores.

The thing was, I had a moment when I totally blanked out on “my” last name. Janelle— Um . . . yeah. I knew it—it was on her driver's permit—but I hadn't used it since I'd been here, so I sat there staring at the form I was filling out. Good thing Aunt Antonia had filled out nearly everything already. I had no idea what school I'd supposedly gone to, or where I'd been born or any of that stuff.

Finally it came to me: Janelle Johanssen. Right. With a double
s
and an
e
not an
o
. I wrote it out as: “Morgan (Janelle) Johanssen.” I wasn't going to be called Janelle by all these people.

So far as social interactions went that first day, I sat back and watched as Brooke did her thing. It was hard to guess what place Brooke would occupy in the hierarchy. She was not bad-looking, even if kind of chubby, her family was rich, and she was in advanced placement classes. But she was clueless when it came to any kind of street smarts; she assumed everyone was like her, well-intentioned, friendly, and bubbly. She did not even
seem to know that there
was
a hierarchy. I could tell that some of her dear friends, if they thought it would do them any good with the most popular crowd, would drop her so fast, she'd bounce. She obviously had no idea.

Personally, I didn't care about being in with the in crowd. I like being by myself, and have no need of peer approval to make me feel important. True, I wanted to be admired and respected here, but I didn't need to worry about hanging out with a bunch of other people just to avoid being alone.

Brooke, of course, thought that I must have felt terribly lonely and unsure of myself in a school where I knew no one, because that's the way she would feel in my place. Aunt Antonia had arranged for me to be in several of Brooke's classes and for us to share the same lunch period so I wouldn't be on my own too much. Brooke dragged me from one clump of people to another, introducing me as, “My cousin from LA. She's teaching me horseback riding, and she's
really
good!” Some of these people were obviously the elite, some were elite-wannabes, some run-of-the-mill, and some were hopeless losers. Brooke treated them all the same and acted like she thought they would all be equally thrilled to meet her horsey cousin from LA.

I nodded coolly, said hello and not much else. One girl who was apparently also into horses perked up at
the mention of what a fabulous rider I was and started gabbling about dressage and point-to-points, whatever they were.

All in all, I was satisfied with my first day at school. I would have to watch the scene here for a week or two before I figured out where I would fit in best. Socializing does not come naturally to me; I have to study people to figure out what is motivating them and what they are thinking beneath the surface.

We already had a ton of homework—different again from my old school, where they let you off easy the first week—so we went straight home after school. After a snack of low-calorie dip and vegetables (Brooke was trying to lose a little weight, so I was condemned to diet food as well), we retired to our respective rooms and dug into the algebra problems our mutual math teacher had assigned.

At dinner that night the conversation was lively, with Aunt and Uncle asking a lot of questions and Brooke burbling away the way she usually did, about her friends, her new teachers, and her classes. Finally Aunt turned to me.

“And, Morgan, how about you? How did you like your first day?”

“Oh, Morgan is really smart, you can tell,” put in Brooke before I could open my mouth. “She's in my economics class, and she gave a brilliant answer when Mr.
Humber asked us to discuss this quotation about how, when ethics and economics are in conflict, economics always win. She was ruthless! Wow, don't ever cross Morgan! I think you should be a lawyer, Morgan. You've got that kind of logical mind. Only, it seems to me like economics
have
to be guided by ethics, or we'll be living in a dog-eat-dog world where only the strong survive.”

“We
are
living in a dog-eat-dog world where only the strong survive,” observed Uncle Karl, the car-dealership king.

“Oh, Dad, we are not! You know you are much nicer than you give yourself credit for. You are a generous—”

“
Actually
, Brooke, Karl, I was asking
Morgan
how her day went,” pointed out Aunt Antonia. I replied in a composed manner that it had gone well, and Uncle Karl and Brooke picked up their argument and battled it out amicably for another ten minutes.

“Any acts of generosity that I perform, I perform because they are in my own best interests,” Uncle Karl was saying. “I treat my customers well so that they'll come back and buy another car from me in a few years. I treat my employees and suppliers well in order to make
my
life easier and my business more successful. Donations to charity are good for public relations because if people think you're a nice guy, they're more likely to stop by your dealership when they're in the market. It's enlightened self-interest.”