Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (24 page)

     "Okay," she said, stepping back and holding up a mirror. "All done."

     Frizz regarded her reflection for a moment, then looked up at Christine. "I'll miss you, Choppie, when I go," she said. "If I hadn't had you for a friend while I was here, I don't know what I would have done. The thought of going on without you is more than I can bear. Hey!" she said suddenly. "I have a great idea! Why don't you come to New York with me? We can get an apartment together, and jobs, and we'll be like sisters."

     "I'd like that, Frizz, but I'm going to live with my father when I get out of here. Why don't you study drama here, in San Francisco? You could live with us."

     "Would that be all right? I mean, what would your father say?"

     "He's traveling most of the time. I've written to him all about you. I'm sure he wouldn't mind having you with us."

     "But he doesn't have a place. You said he gave up the apartment. You write to him at a post office box."

     "Then we'll find a new place, one that's perfect for all three of us."

     "Gosh, that would be swell! We'll both find jobs and we'll—"

     A scream suddenly tore the air.

     The girls fell silent and looked at one another.

     "Where did that come from?" Christine said, jumping to her feet. She looked around the room. "Where's Mouse? Did anyone see her leave?"

     "She said she had to go to the bathroom."

     When they heard another scream, Christine ran down the hall to the bathroom and burst through the door.

     "Help help help!" Mouse was screaming, her eyes screwed shut, her hair dripping wet. She was running blindly around the bathroom, clawing at her face, which was a terrifying red.

     "Mouse!" Christine yelled, running to her. "What happened? Oh, Mouse!"

     A shattered bottle lay on the floor, and toxic fumes filled the air.

     As she got hold of the girl, Christine cried, "Frizz! Somebody! Get Sister Gabriel!
Hurry!
" Then she dragged Mouse into one of the shower stalls and turned the cold water on full force. "Open your eyes," she said. "Mouse! Open your eyes!"

     But Mouse was hysterical, flailing her arms and screaming. So Christine grasped her chin and turned her face into the spray, getting Raspberry Torte lipstick all over her hands.

     The others stood in shocked silence as they watched Christine hold the screaming girl under the spray, trying to keep her face turned up to the water, while Mouse did a little dance on the tiles, flagging her arms up and down and howling in pain.

     When Sister Gabriel arrived in her nightdress, carrying a first aid kit, she took one look at Mouse and said to Frizz, "Run to the kitchen and fetch the bottle of olive oil. Quickly! Dee Dee, run and wake up Mother Superior. Tell her to call an ambulance!"

     As she set the kit on the floor and opened it, she said, "What happened?"

     "She put that stuff—" Christine said, terrified. She was still holding on to the sobbing Mouse; they were both soaked through. "In that bottle. She put it on her head."

     Sister Gabriel picked up a shard of glass and murmured, "Merciful heaven." The bottle had contained the cleaning fluid the novices used to scrub down the bathroom tiles.

     The nun stepped into the shower, mindless of her night dress or that her white cap was getting wet, and took Mouse from Christine. "There, there, my dear," she said. "Keep your face up to the water. We have to flush it out."

     Mouse was quieter now, her thin little body shuddering with painful sobs, her faced smeared with garish lipstick. Sister Gabriel said, "Just a few more minutes, and then I'll put a dressing on your eyes." When she reached up to stroke the girl's head, a great handful of hair came out.

     The girls gasped. Christine put her hand over her mouth, suddenly feeling sick.

     When Frizz came back a minute later with the olive oil, the girls watched in frozen silence as Sister Gabriel brought Mouse out of the shower, wrapped a towel around her, and then poured a few drops of oil into each eye, after which she applied sterile gauze and then wrapped a bandage around the girl's head.

     Christine stared in horror as more chunks of Mouse's hair came out.

     Mother Superior was trembling with fury; even though she tried to control herself, Christine and Frizz saw how the scarf around her head quivered as she spoke. "Do you know what you girls have done?" she said, each word slicing the air like a knife. Spread out on her desk were cosmetics, nylons, bottles of permanent wave solution, all confiscated from Christine's room. Among them was the well-thumbed book,
Fanny Hill;
or,
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
Christine felt her cheeks burn with shame.

     "This secret club was your idea, wasn't it, Christine?" Mother Superior said. Because she had been roused from bed, and the hour was late, she was wearing a plaid robe over her nightgown. Behind her, rain washed down the windows and bare tree branches tapped the windowpanes. The ambulance had taken Mouse away an hour ago; it was feared that she had been permanently blinded.

     "You are a disgrace to this school, Christine Singleton," she went on, her fury barely contained. "You encouraged the other girls to do wrongful things, you encouraged poor little Lanie Freeman to try to change her hair color. You made her believe that her life would be better if she were blond. And so she poured cleaning fluid on her head, thinking it was ordinary bleach. Through your own vanity, Christine, you have caused a terrible thing to happen. If that poor girl is blinded for life, it is your fault. I hate to think of what your future is going to be like. You are vain and selfish. You think rules are only for other people. You are never going to amount to anything. I am ashamed of you. And you, too," she said to Frizz. "Well? What do you girls have to say for yourselves?"

     "I'm sorry, Reverend Mother," Frizz whispered, her head bowed. The curlers had long since come out, and her hair looked kinkier than ever.

     "I'm sorry, too, Reverend Mother," Christine said. "I'm sorry about Mouse, I really am. And if she's blind, then I'll never forgive myself. Only—just please don't tell my father about this."

     "It's too late. He already knows."

     Christine stared at her. The rain that was washing down the windows seemed to beat harder at the panes. "You
spoke
to my father?" Christine said. "You spoke to him tonight? You know where he is? Where is he, please tell me!"

     "I'm afraid I can't do that, Christine. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said what I said."

     "What are you going to do?" Frizz asked as the two sat listening to the rain. Christine had not been able to get any more information out of Mother Superior regarding her father, only that he had somehow persuaded Reverend Mother to allow Christine to remain at the school.

     "They know where he is," she said. "They have a telephone number for him, they've known it all along, and they won't tell it to me." It was midnight. She tossed a tennis ball back and forth between her hands while she stared at the rain-washed windows. "But I'm going to find it."

     "How?"

     "The records are in Mother Superior's office. The cabinet isn't locked. I saw her put my file away."

     "Gosh, that's awfully dangerous, Christine. You could get caught, and then what will she do to you?"

     "I hope she expels me."

     "You don't want that, Choppie, because then your father would get mad."

     Christine threw the ball so that it bounced against the dresser and rolled under Frizz's bed. "Maybe that's what I should have done long ago. Maybe I should have forced him to come and get me. Well, that's what I'm going to do now."

     "I'll go with you."

     Mother Superior's office wasn't locked, and the girls searched through the files with flashlights stolen from the kitchen. When Christine found her folder, the flashlight beam trembled on the page as she read: "Christine Singleton, born Hollywood, California, 1938. Father's occupation, Businessman. Mother, deceased." There was an emergency phone number for Johnny.

     "I found it, Frizz!" Christine whispered, and she hastily wrote down the number. But she was puzzled—it was a local exchange.

     "Is he in San Francisco then?" Frizz said, her face illuminated in the pale glow of her flashlight. She was searching through the files for her own folder, out of curiosity.

     "I don't know," Christine said. "I don't understand. Mother Superior said she spoke to him tonight. If she called him at this number, then he must be in the city." She went through the rest of the file, most of which was concerned with childhood illnesses, vaccinations, reports written by her various private tutors. Until she came to a lined page that contained notes in Sister Gabriel's handwriting, information, according to the date, that she had written down the day Christine had been admitted to the school four years ago. One word leapt off the page.

     
Adopted.

     "Formal adoption took place in Hollywood, California," Sister Gabriel had written, "when Christine was two weeks old. Mr. and Mrs. Singleton brought the baby back to San Francisco, where she has lived ever since."

     She stared at the page. "I don't understand," she murmured.

     "What's the matter?"

     She looked at Frizz. "It says here that my father isn't my real father. That I'm adopted."

     "Oh, there must be some mistake."

     Suddenly, certain things became clear: the night Johnny's blond girlfriend had said, "Maybe her mother was overweight. Did you ever see her?" And on another occasion, during their picnic on Tiburon, when Christine had asked if she looked like her mother. "You're like her in spirit and heart, Dolly," he had said. Now Christine realized why there was no resemblance between her and the ethereal beauty in Sarah Singleton's picture—they were not related.

     "No," she whispered. "It isn't true. I don't believe it."

     "Maybe you were an orphan," Frizz said. "Maybe your father was protecting you from something awful."

     "Yes, that must be it," Christine said, finding a glimmer of hope in that. If her real parents had died and Johnny had rescued her, well, that would somehow make it okay, wouldn't it?

     She went through the file again, shaking so badly that she dropped the papers and had to gather them up. She found no birth certificate, no mention
of who her real parents were. But there was a notation in the corner of her admissions sheet, written in Sister Gabriel's handwriting: "There is no communication between the natural parents and Mr. Singleton."

     The room suddenly swung around her.

     No communication...

     Could they still be alive? Her parents?

     Frizz had been going through her own file, and she suddenly said, "Oh God, Choppie! My mother didn't give the school an emergency number! It says here that she didn't want them to contact her if anything happened to me! That they were to take care of it themselves!"

     She reached out for Christine's arm. "My mother doesn't want me," she said. "She's never wanted me."

     When Frizz's hand touched her arm, the room stopped moving, and Christine stared at the damning word again:
adopted.
"My real mother didn't want me either, Frizz. She gave me away when I was two weeks old."

     The two girls stood in the cold, dark office listening to the rain, the air around them heavy with betrayal. Christine tried to assimilate her new knowledge: that Johnny had lied to her from the day she was born, telling her he was her father, that the dead Sarah was her mother. And then later, putting her in St. Bridget's and promising that it wouldn't be for long, that he'd come back soon for her. Lies, all lies.

     She looked at the rain and thought how cold and empty it seemed, like her own insides. "I'm leaving, Frizz," she said at last. "I won't stay here anymore. I'm leaving this place tonight."

     "How can you?"

     Christine had some money. An allowance often dollars had been doled out to her every month out of the money her father sent semiannually to the school, and she had put it away in a shoebox under the bed. It came to several hundred dollars.

     "I'll go with you."

     "I have to go alone, Frizz. I'm going to find my father." The only address was the postal box she already had. But now she had a telephone number.

     "I want to go, too. We don't have to go the same way. We can part when we cross the Bay. I couldn't bear to stay here without you. I have some money
saved. I'll go to New York. I have a cousin there who'll help me. She doesn't like my mother either!"

     The two friends regarded each other in the thin glow of their flashlights, and suddenly they saw that they weren't girls anymore; their childhoods were over. "Yes," Christine said, "we'll both go."

     Frizz said, "I hate my mother. I've never hated anyone as much as I hate her. I wish I didn't have anything to do with her. I wish I were someone else. I wish I could change my identity."

     "Take my name if you like," Christine said. "After all, it isn't my real name anyway, is it?"

     "And you can take mine. Here." Frizz pulled her birth certificate out of the file and handed it to Christine. "I was born in 1937, a year before you, but you could pass for seventeen. So from now on, I'll be you and you'll be me."

     They took the first ferry at dawn. The rain had stopped. They were carrying raincoats and suitcases; both had changed into civilian clothes and left their uniforms behind. When the ferry docked at Fisherman's Wharf, the girls stood for a long moment in the biting morning air, breathing in the salt of the sea that mingled with the fish smell from the seafood stalls that were just opening for business.

     "I'll never forget you, Choppie," Frizz said solemnly.

     "Me neither," Christine said.

     "You've got my cousin's address. Write to me."

     "I will. Friends forever."

     "Friends forever."

     They embraced for a long minute, sniffling back their tears. Then Christine watched Frizz walk to the end of the cable car line that would take her into the city, her mass of untameable hair rising up in the mist in an explosion of burgundy-colored kinks.