Deadly Little Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page A

started hanging out with people much older—people on the verge of being kicked out of school.
    I look closer at the photo of Sasha in her soccer uniform, taken before she dyed her hair black and traded in her J.Crew–wear for torn jeans and tattered belly T’s. Before she found out the truth.
    Her skin is dark, like she just got back from someplace tropical; it brings out the golden-brown streaks in her hair and makes her blue eyes pop.
    “Camelia?” Mom calls. She and Dad come into my room and stand behind me. “What are you looking at?” she asks.
    “Sasha Beckerman,” I say, still staring at the screen. “Do you know about her?”
    “No,” she says. The response comes as no surprise. Ever the hater of news stations, Mom has long claimed that their biased headlines, negative images, and politically slanted comments disturb her energy and clog her chakras.
    I turn around to face them, focusing a moment on Dad: “Do you know about Sasha?”
    He grunts out a yes. And in that single syllable, I can hear him make the connection.
    “You’re not planning to run away, are you?” His eyes widen.
    “What do you want?” I ask, ignoring the question.
    “We need you to hear us out,” he says. “You know we love you, but you also have to understand that your mother and I made a conscious decision not to tell you the truth until we felt you were ready. I’m sorry if you don’t agree, and I’m sorry for the way you found out, but I’m not sorry about our decision.”
    “Does Aunt Alexia know that I’m her daughter?” I ask, feeling stupid for posing such a question. I mean, how could someone possibly forget childbirth?
    “I think she knows,” Mom says, twirling the mood ring around on her finger. The color has turned a murky brown. “On some level, at least. But that was a particularly difficult time for her. She was barely twenty-two, staying at an assisted-living home that was overcrowded and run by the state. There were way too many patients and not nearly enough staff.”
    “It was the first facility she’d stayed at since moving out of her mother’s house,” Dad adds.
    “I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.” Mom gives her ring a full twirl. “One of the facility’s staff members just dropped her off at our house one day, saying she was due in a couple weeks, and asking if we could care for her.”
    “How could you not have known she was pregnant?” I ask. “Hadn’t you visited her? Hadn’t you tried to keep in touch?”
    “That’s the weird thing,” Mom says. “Because I’d had lunch with her a month prior, and we’d spoken on the phone several times since then.… But she’d been keeping her pregnancy a secret. Not just from me—from everyone. Even the staff members said so. They said she’d been wearing lots of layers, keeping a low profile, and always toting around extra-large items to cover up her belly: her portfolio case, a giant purse, a couple of extra coats.”
    I sink back in my seat, imagining what that must’ve been like for Aunt Alexia: feeling so alone, so insecure, that she’d had to resort to keeping such a big thing secret.
    “Anyway,” Mom continues, “she stayed with your dad and me during the weeks leading up to the delivery. And then she asked me to be there at the birth. You were so beautiful.” Mom smiles at the memory. “Just waiting to be loved.”
    “Because nobody loved me yet,” I say, without even thinking.
    “That’s just it.” She shakes her head. “We all love you. Alexia loved you so much that she wanted your father and me to raise you as our own. She knew she wasn’t stable enough to care for you in the way she wanted. She wanted you to have a chance.”
    “Did she want me to know the truth?”
    “Honestly,” she sighs, “I don’t know. She never wanted to talk about you as being hers . Once she’d placed you into my arms at the hospital, that was it. It was as if she’d already crossed over, which is why I’m not even sure