Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [27]
The dining room was bright with the morning sun and swathed in an unsettled quiet. The quiet held, like a plane that’s circling because it can’t get clearance to land. Victoria couldn’t tolerate the quiet. To her the quiet was a prelude to disaster, like Ramona hitting Shern, hurting her; she was getting near hysterical over the thought. “Shern!” Victoria dragged her sister’s name along on a breath that was getting ready to cry. “Why is Shern doing this?” she whined, making waves in the dining-room air, her voice was shaking so.
Bliss jabbed her finger in the air. “I don’t see what the big deal is. My gosh, she’s telling her where we’re going.”
Victoria couldn’t hold it. Told Bliss just to shut up. Then she yelled, “Shern, just ask her, ask her, just ask her, Shern.” Her yelling did unlock the air between Shern and Ramona. Ramona eased back from Shern’s face a bit.
Shern coughed a few times. They both looked at Victoria through the dining-room air. “May my sisters and I go to the library.” Shern said it quickly, startled the air as she said it; she still said it as a declarative, though. All she did really was add the “may” because there was certainly no questioning tone to her voice.
It was enough for Ramona. “Don’t let the sun-fall beat you back here, you understand me?” she commanded.
“Okay, Ramona,” Victoria said, out of breath from yelling so. “How do we get there?”
Ramona walked out of the dining room without answering. She had to. She had to gather clothes together for the Laundromat. Plus she would have called Shern a little bitch, stashing on her, challenging her like that. She might have even grabbed her by her throat.
“Oh, forget her,” Ramona could hear Bliss saying. “How hard can it be to find the library?”
They did find the library, stopped to ask the mailman if they were headed in the right direction. Stayed there all that Saturday, except when they got hungry and ventured to the corner of Baltimore Avenue for soft pretzels topped with mustard, then back to the library, where the tall windows reminded them of the windows at their real home. They lost themselves in the stacks of books in the young adult section. Checked out two books apiece—Little Women, Nancy Drew, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—then lied when the librarian asked them what they were doing so far from home according to the address on their library cards. “Just visiting friends,” Shern said. She figured they’d suffered enough all month at the Sayre Junior High School when it caught on that they were daughters to the famous dead caterer, Finch, and his almost dead wife, Clarise, and they were forced to endure the whispers behind their backs and the pitying looks in the teachers’ eyes. Shern hated that school. Some days she couldn’t decide which was worse: Mae’s house, where Ramona was always cursing under her breath, or the school, where she looked straight ahead whether she was in class or walking through the crowded, sweaty hallways to avoid conversation. She’d hold her water the entire school day so she wouldn’t have to venture into the bathroom, where, on the one and only day she’d gone in there, the bad girls smoked cigarettes by an open window and looked her up and down and called her snobby bitch. They asked her if she thought she was cute or something walking around in her real mohair sweaters and fur-lined boots. Shern didn’t answer, turned around, and walked back out more angry than afraid, even when she heard them saying to her back that if they weren’t in the middle of a smoke they would have kicked her stuck-up ass. Victoria seemed to be faring only a little better at the school. Her fearfulness over getting beaten up, “moved on,” as the people here called it, made her smile all the time, and say “excuse me, please,” if she brushed up against someone, and look people in the face lest she get called names like Shern. Bliss, though, wasn’t afraid at all, smiled only when she felt like it, adopted the hand-on-hip, roll-around-neck stance of the bad girls, imitated the teachers when their