Mylia remembered the day her mother had told her they would be moving to a new town, to her Uncle Warren’s house. She recalled her mother coming back from the doctor who gave her the medicines she was to take. Small sample pills in small white envelopes that kept her alive.
May Li walked slowly up to the bench where Mylia had been waiting for her. Her mother would never allow her to visit the doctor with her, but made her wait outside.
“I make phone call. We go to live at Warren Trenton’s house. It is small apartment over garage, but it is out of cold, and winter is coming. I hate you to change schools, but we have to do something, my Mylia. I have enough for bus fare. And we must be very good to him, Mylia. He not have to take us in.”
Mylia was very upset that her mother had lowered herself to call Warren Trenton for help. She could work. She was sixteen and didn’t have to stay in school. But her mother most adamantly put her foot down and would not allow her to leave school to get a job. The small Social Security and Veteran’s checks that she received from Mylia’s father would keep them in groceries and necessities. It just wasn’t enough to pay the rent on a place to live.
When May Li and Mylia had arrived at the Trenton estate, they had only what they could carry. And when May Li had seen the rooms in which they were to live, her small shoulders slumped, but she straightened herself up, and Mylia had taken on the task of cleaning the place that had not been occupied in years. Warren’s wife, Patience, told Mylia, not acknowledging May Li at all, that Warren had said there were some things in the attic that she could use to furnish the rooms. Mylia was very grateful, as they had no furniture at all, having left all they had owned in the small town from which they’d traveled. Mylia had thanked the woman, and did all the work herself, lugging the heavy things down the attic stairs and out to the garage apartment, if one could call it that. It had taken her quite a while, but they each had a small bed, a dresser, along with a table and two chairs, plus a small sofa. The chair that her mother sometimes sat in was especially heavy, but inch by inch, Mylia had gotten it up the outside stairs to the room. The stove and small refrigerator were thankfully already in place as the apartment had been the rooms for the man who had taken care of the cars when there had been a fleet of them before her grandfather passed on.
Mylia lay in bed, watching the lights play on the ceiling when the wind blew, and thought about the boy who had come to the car to talk with her. Thick dark hair, not short nor long, curly nor straight, dreamy eyes that in the lights from the drive-in looked to be green, but they could have been gray. God, she loved smoky gray eyes. And he’d wanted her to go for a walk with him and she thought how very special that would be. To walk with a boy, maybe holding hands. But she couldn’t. It would only lead to other things, and she was not about to let him know what she was or where she lived. That they were outcasts who depended on the charity of her uncle to even survive. The tears came, quietly, as she would never let her mother know that she cried to be a normal person who could have friends and especially a boyfriend.
Deterring any boy who’d ever spoken to her, she’d never had a boyfriend and she wondered what it would be like to be held and kissed by the handsome boy who’d said his name was Darian Wilks. Imagining all sorts of romantic scenarios with Darian, after a while, she finally fell asleep.
The next morning, after seeing to her mother, she drove the Mercury across town to the only market that was open on a Sunday. How could she have let her mother run out of the special green tea she loved so well? She’d used the last for her mother’s breakfast tea. Luckily this store carried it and it was pure luck that she’d found it. As she was ready to get back into the car, she heard someone call her name. Looking around, she saw it was Jenny, one of the girls who had been cruising with her the night before. Having evidently stopped at the store on their way home from church, Jenny’s family waited while she ran and spoke with her friend.
“Hey, Lia! Fancy seein’ you here. What are you doin’ this afternoon?” Jenny ran toward her, her mouth going all the time she was running. “Butch wants me to go to the movies with him this afternoon, and I really want to go, but he was hoping I could get another girl to go with us.”
“He wants two girls?” she laughed. “Don’t you find that a tad odd, Jenny?”
“Oh, Lia, not that way! Goofball.” And she laughed knowing Lia was joking with her. “He has a friend that needs a date. You know. A double-date. He asked me to ask around and see if I could find someone to go with his buddy. And lo and behold, there you were.”
“Like a blind date?” She’d never been on a regular date, much less a blind date or even a double. She couldn’t go. The more she got in with these kids, the more they’d find out about her.
“Not really. You’ve seen the guy.” Jenny batted her eyelashes and said, “It’s that good looking Dari Wilks. The one who was sure as shootin’ after you last night. God, Lia, any of us girls would give our eyeteeth if he even looked at us and what does he do? Comes over to the car and introduces himself to you. Now that took some nerve. But he’s so cool he can get away with doing things like that. Just wish it was me he wanted to get to know. I tried my best to get his attention when we were crusin’ but he couldn’t take his eyes off you, honey.”
Lia’s heart went into overdrive. Darian? The one she had laid awake dreaming of for half the night? Oh, how she’d love to be with him, just for a little while. What would it hurt? One movie. Thank goodness Mallory, her cousin who was away in a private school, had gotten a new car and didn’t want the ‘old’ Mercury anymore, so she could meet them there. They didn’t have to see where she lived. Only a movie. And her mother would be so happy that she had a real date. Her mom was always trying to get her to go out, have a good time, but she never would in the town where they’d lived before. But with the car, she could, and still keep her life from being broadcast all over the school as it had been where they’d lived before coming to Speesburg.
Remembering back to the years after her daddy was killed, the way most of the kids laughed at her dilapidated house, her foreign mother, and had practically shunned her, she knew there was no way she could ever go through that again. Having only one or two friends who were as poor as she was in all that time, no one here would ever see that apartment that she and her mother called home.
“One condition, Jenny. I’ll go with this Darian guy, if I can meet you there.” At Jenny’s lifted eyebrows, Lia’s brain was going crazy trying to come up with an excuse as to why she had to meet them at the theater and finally hit on an idea that might work. “My mother’s pretty strict and if she knew I was with a guy, she’d ground me. She’s from overseas and she’s so old fashioned.” God, she hated to lie about her mother, but it was the only thing she could think of at the time.
Making a face, Jenny sympathized with her. “Boy, do I know how that can be! Sometimes I think my mom lived back in the Ice Age. Okay, I’ll tell Butch you’ll meet us. One-thirty at the Orpheum. Right on the main drag. You can’t miss it. Bye.” And she ran back to her family who waited in the car for her.
She’d seen the Orpheum when she’d been out last night. And Jenny had called Darian, Dari. Evidently they shortened his name like she did hers. Mylia was such a strange sounding name, but Lia was better and everyone assumed it was Leah until they really got to know her, or she was in class with them. Pleading with her teachers to call her Lia, there was always that one who refused and called her by her full name. Maybe it would be different there. Maybe she could be halfway normal. Because of the car, things were definitely looking up.
So excited she could hardly drive home, she was extra careful with the car. She had an honest to goodness date with someone who was tough as nails! And she couldn’t wait to get home and tell her mother!
Three
Mylia