| OCR Text |
Show hands trembled with the cellophane. I ended up swallowing the piece whole, too sick to chew, too scared of being caught. It was the only time I stole. Which is actually not true. As I write, I recall another moment equally filled with guilt and also involving candy, though this time stolen from someone's house rather than the store. In the nine months we lived in Seattle, I was invited to only one birthday party. My friend Lori, the one who loved horses and had a bed that was high enough off the ground that we could get underneath it and pretend we were pioneers crossing the prairie in a wagon, invited me to what must have been her tenth birthday party. I had bought a plastic model of a horse for her, one that was black like her hair. It was perfect. What wasn't perfect were the directions Lori's mom gave us to her new house. My mother drove forever around a subdivision, the first subdivision I had ever seen, passing the pool and the rec center again and again but failing to find the right house. We finally stopped at the information building near the pool to ask for clarification. But before my mother could reach the desk, a woman my mother knew from my Brownie troop said she had just dropped her daughter off at Lori's party. Relieved, my mother wrote down the new directions and within minutes deposited me at Lori's house. Only it was a different Lori's house, a Lori I knew from Brownie's, but not the Lori with the black hair and high bed. What could that second Lori's mother have thought when this uninvited nine year old showed up at her doorstep bearing a present? And why didn't I say something to that Lori's mother or to my mother or to Lori herself? Why did I just walk in, hand over the gift, and make my way to where the other kids were assembling in the living room? The second Lori hated me, and I had never liked her. Yet, 138 |
