Pathways - Jeri Taylor [71]
“You can’t let them shame you into hiding. That’s not how Klingons behave.”
“I don’t care! I’m not Klingon!”
There was a brief silence, and then the rattling of the door to her bedroom. “B’Elanna—open this door immediately.” Her mother’s voice had taken on a new and more definitive tone. It was one with which B’Elanna was familiar, and which ordinarily struck dread into her heart. Today, she steeled against it. She had activated the electronic lock on the door, and she would stay in her room until she died. How long did it take to starve to death? No matter. However long it took, she would stay right where she was, under her bed with her stuffed cat, Gato, beside her. They would lie like that forever, until her body rotted away and only the bones were left, small skeleton fingers still clutching Gato’s fluffy pelt.
Moments later, she heard the door open and saw her mother’s feet and legs as she entered the room. The legs moved toward her, and then her mother’s face, ridged and bony, appeared in her view.
“Come out from there. I won’t have you hiding.”
Dismayed, B’Elanna scrunched forward and emerged from her safe place. How had her mother gotten in?
As though she’d read her mind, Prabsa Torres stared at her and said, “It doesn’t do any good to activate the lock. I can disable it whenever I want. What if there were a fire and I had to get you out? Or you were sick and couldn’t open the door?”
What if I wanted to starve to death? thought B’Elanna, but the thought went unspoken. She just wanted to get through this as quickly as possible.
Her mother sat at her desk and looked at her with black eyes probing. “Well? Do you want to tell me what happened? And why do you have that dirty scarf around your head?”
B’Elanna’s hand went instinctively to her forehead. She tugged the scarf—a scrap she had found discarded on the street—farther down in defiance. “Nothing’s going on. And I’m wearing the scarf because I like it.”
Something seemed to drain from her mother, and her next statement was softer, less challenging. “You left the house to go to the park an hour ago. Not wearing a scarf. Then you came running home as though you were being chased by Fek’lhr himself and slammed into your room. Something happened to upset you, and I want to know what it was.”
“Nothing.”
“Were the other children taunting you?”
In spite of herself, a sharp breath escaped B’Elanna’s lips. Taunting her? No, not at all. That would be something she could confront. But the indifference the others showed her—how could anyone confront that? It might as well not exist. Except that it did, as clearly as though the children of the outpost on Nessik were shouting it aloud.
“No, they weren’t.”
“Did you get in a fight?”
You’d be proud of me if I had, thought B’Elanna, but that idea went unspoken as well. “No. No fight.”
“Did you fall? Get hurt?”
“No.”
Her mother looked at her with increasing exasperation. “We could go on like this all day. Just tell me what happened.”
“I already told you—nothing.”
Prabsa drew a sharp breath, clearly vexed. She looked for a moment out the window as though to gain control of herself, and then she began speaking.
“Once, when Kahless had been walking in the desert for eighty days . . .”
B’Elanna rolled her eyes. Not this again. Not another Klingon story with a lesson to be learned. Why did her mother inflict these morality tales on her? What good did she think they did? They were foolish, empty stories that B’Elanna found embarrassing. She couldn’t believe her mother actually thought she might learn something from them. They were all alike—long, rambling legends featuring the exploits of one Klingon hero or another, all ending with some nugget of wisdom by which, she assumed, her mother thought she should live.
As her mother droned on, her mind wandered, back to the park and the scene of her latest humiliation. A group of little girls—pretty girls, human girls—were playing there, practicing the ball-kicking techniques of