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with her words from time to time, and when it was something serious, I would shrink back or close myself off like a clam, but when it wasn’t, I would throw something back at her.Usually, she would surprise me and act as if she were pleased I had the backbone.
    Recently, when I asked her about it, she paused and then after a little thought said, “Like all older Patio sisters, I have to share the responsibility of shaping you into someone Daddy will appreciate. You have to develop some backbone, Lorelei. Without it, without confidence, you’ll fail, and if you fail, I fail, too. Not to mention how you will fail Daddy, how we will both have failed him.”
    “I won’t fail Daddy,” I said quickly.
    “Maybe,” she said, and then warned me again about doing something stupid with one or more of the boys at school. I had to listen to her warnings. She was more of my guardian now than Mrs. Fennel was.
    Marla looked up to her for guidance as much as I did, but after that night when Daddy asked me to wear the dress and made so much of it in front of her and Ava, Marla began to look up to me more, asking me many of the questions I had once asked Ava. I suppose it was because I was closer to her in age than Ava. Marla was very pretty as well, with sea-blue eyes and soft light brown hair, just a shade or two darker than blond. She had dimples in her cheeks and perfect features, but, like me when I was her age, she had not yet matured enough to be popular with boys. I knew she yearned for it but, like me, kept it to herself.
    I hated having to tell her I didn’t know the answers to many of her questions or that it wasn’t for me to tell her these things, but there wasn’t much more I could say.
    “Maybe you should ask Ava that,” I would tell her.
    She thought I was deliberately or jealously guarding something.
    “You could tell me, Lorelei. You just don’t want to,” she complained. “And you know I won’t ask Mrs. Fennel or bother Daddy.”
    “That’s not true. I would tell you anything you wanted to know if I could. Believe me, I wasn’t treated any differently from the way you’re being treated when I was your age, Marla.”
    “You just don’t want me to know,” she insisted.
    Frustrated, she complained about all the mystery in our lives. I couldn’t disagree, although I couldn’t do much to help her. It was as if every shadow had a voice whispering, every dark room had someone in it before the lights were turned on, every window had someone looking into our home before I turned to look out. Every creak was a clue, a letter, and a word to a sentence that would tell me something I didn’t know. It would be the same for her. The fact that I couldn’t satisfy her added to my own frustrations.
    Later that night, when I was in my room getting ready for bed, Ava came in. She came in the way she often did, silently, as if she walked on air. Many times she had told me we had to practice being soft. We had to catch people, especially young men, unaware. It added to the mystery when we suddenly seemed to appear beside them as if what they were fantasizing about had come true. Those sorts of little things, she said, were important. “Nuances of your sexuality,” she called them. “We finesse men, turn and twist them about like puppets on a string.”
    She certainly caught me unaware. I was in thebathroom, gazing at myself naked before the full-length mirror beside the tub. I didn’t know whether it was normal for someone to be so fascinated with her own body. Most of the girls I knew at school seemed to complain constantly about their bodies. They were too fat or had noses and ears that were too big. They were jealous of this one or that one. No one seemed to be satisfied. Sometimes I thought they hated me because I didn’t voice similar complaints or envy.
    “You think you’re so damn perfect, don’t you?” Meg Logan snapped at me one afternoon in P.E. All the girls were running through their litany of