Hidden Jewel Read Free

couldn't imagine was falling so deeply in love with someone that I would want to spend the rest of my life with him, see him every morning at the breakfast table and in the evening at the dinner table, go everywhere with only him, and be so beautiful and so desirable all the time that he would want to be only with me. I had had boyfriends, of course. Right now I was going steady with Claude Avery, but I couldn't envision spending my life with him, even though he was one of the handsomest boys at school, tall with dark hair and silver blue eyes. Many times Claude had told me he loved me and waited for me to say the same about him, but all I could muster was "I like you very much, too, Claude."
Surely love had to be something different, something more special, I thought. There were many mysteries in the world, many problems to be solved, but none seemed as impossible as the answer to the question What is love? My girlfriends hated it when I challenged their dramatic declarations of affection for one boy or another, and they were always accusing me of being too inquisitive and looking at things with microscopic eyes.
"Why do you have to ask so many questions?" they complained, especially my best friend Catherine Didion. Catherine and I were different in so many ways, it was hard to understand why we were so close, but perhaps it was those very differences that attracted us. In a way it was our curiosity about each other that kept us so interested in each other. Neither of us fully understood why the other was the way she was.
"It's not such a big party," Mommy said. "Besides, we're proud of you, and we want the whole world to know it."
"Can I see my portrait this morning, Mommy?" I asked. Mommy had painted a picture of me in my graduation gown. She was planning to unveil it tonight at our party, but I had yet to see the finished work.
"No. You have to wait. It's bad luck to show a portrait before it's completed. I have a little touching up to do today," she said, and I didn't protest. Mommy believed in good and bad gris-gris, and never wanted to tamper with fate. She still wore the good-luck dime that Nina Jackson had given her years ago. It was on a string around her right ankle.
"Now I'd better go speak to those brothers of yours to be sure they don't make a nuisance of themselves around this house today."
"Will you help me decide what to wear and do my hair later, Mommy?"
"Of course, dear," she said just as my phone rang. "Don't spend your morning gossiping with Catherine," Mommy warned before leaving to go to the twins.
"I won't," I promised, but when I said hello, it wasn't Catherine, I greeted, but Claude.
"Did I wake you?"
"No," I said.
"Well, it's here: our day," Claude announced. He too was a senior and he too was graduating, but I knew he wasn't referring only to that. Claude and I had been going steady for nearly a year. We had kissed and petted and once been almost naked beside each other at Ormand Lelock's house when his parents left him alone for two days. We had nearly gone all the way twice, but I had always resisted. I told Claude that for me it had to be something very special, and he had come up with the idea that it would be something we would do on graduation night. I hadn't agreed, but I hadn't disagreed, either, and I knew Claude thought that meant it would happen.
The first time it had almost happened, I stopped him by explaining why it was a prime time for me to get pregnant. He was frustrated and annoyed and fumed as I explained a woman's cycle.
"It starts when an egg is released," I began.
"I go out with you," he moaned, "and find I'm in science class getting a lecture on human
reproduction. You think too much; you're always thinking!"
Was he right? I wondered. When his fingers touched me in secret places, I trembled, but I couldn't help analyzing and thinking of why my heart was pounding. I thought about adrenaline and why my skin had become warm. Textbook illustrations flashed before my eyes, and