Heavenstone 02 - Secret Whispers

news and stories of family tragedies. It was one of the reasons I could get along so well with her.
    I continued with my private birthday ritual and blew out the candle. Ellie never asked me anything else about itagain, and, of course, I never mentioned it to her. I didn’t like lying to her. I never liked lying to anyone, in fact, even though my sister, Cassie, had thought that was a weakness.
    “There are very few people, Semantha, whom you can trust with the truth. The truth is naked, unprotected. Once it’s out there, it’s alone. Lying,” she had said with that Cassie smirk I had grown used to seeing, “is simply another layer of protective skin.”
    I knew the other girls at Collier thought I was unusual in many ways, but my brutal honesty did the most to keep me from becoming very friendly with anyone else but Ellie. Despite what Cassie had told me about the value of lying, she had rarely bothered to do so even when it came to holding on to a friend. I had her way of simply telling other girls and boys whatever I really thought, no matter what the consequences. My quiet manner and my revelation about a potential nervous breakdown already had done much to create a deep, wide valley between me and the others at Collier. This characteristic of being coldly and factually honest at times was the icing on the cake. Even when I sat with them in the cafeteria or walked alongside them in the corridors, most avoided looking at me, and when anyone did, she usually turned away quickly. It was as if she was looking at something forbidden.
    From the way the others whispered and sometimes hovered with Ellie in corners, I knew they were peppering her with questions about me. They surely wondered what it was like sleeping in the same room with someone as weird as I was. I never asked Ellieabout it, but occasionally, she would reveal some of their questions—mostly, I think, because she was curious about the answers herself.
    Naturally, they wanted to know what interested someone as offbeat as I was. What does she like? Does she have a boyfriend? Did she ever have one? Is she gay? What makes her so quiet most of the time? What does she really think of the rest of us? Is she just a rich snob? Does she do anything strange, anything at all that frightens you?
    Most of all, they wondered why Ellie didn’t ask to be transferred to another room. Of course, I wondered about that myself, but it wasn’t long before I thought I knew the answer. I never did anything to make her feel uncomfortable. I didn’t take up more room than I should. I didn’t dominate our closets or dressers or bathroom cabinets the way some of the other girls did to their roommates. I was willing to share anything of mine with her. I certainly didn’t keep her up at night talking in my sleep or complaining about the school and the other girls, which was what many of the girls suspected.
    “After all, she’s mental,” I actually overheard a girl named Pamela Dorfman tell Ellie. “She confessed that she had and probably still has deep-seated psychological problems, didn’t she? She’s scary. Maybe she’ll smother you in your sleep one night. I’d be afraid to room with her.”
    Natalie Roberts went so far as to nickname me Norma Bates, a play on the name Norman Bates from the movie Psycho. To her credit, Ellie always came to my defense, but not so strongly as to alienateherself from the other girls on my behalf. There was a limit to loyalty, especially loyalty to someone she had only met here and probably would never see again after graduation, which was now only a few months away.
    There were other reasons she didn’t desert me. Ellie was the youngest in a family with three other children, another girl and two boys. From the way she described her siblings, I understood that they usually overwhelmed her. “Trampled me,” was the way she put it. She had had to fight to get a word in at dinner, had often been teased and criticized, and had always been the recipient of hand-me-downs.
    “My sister would get new things, and I always got what she no longer wanted or what no longer fit her perfectly,” she told me with bitterness. “‘Nothing should be wasted’ meant I got the used stuff.”
    Ellie came right out and confessed to me that she saw herself as Cinderella without the pumpkin and especially the glass slipper. “How would you like growing up in a family like mine?”
    She claimed her parents always favored her older sister, Laura, and