Read Uncovering Sadie's Secrets Online
Authors: Libby Sternberg
Uncovering Sadie's Secrets
Copyright 2003 by Libby Sternberg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by Bancroft Press (“Books that enlighten”)
P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209
800-637-7377
410-764-1967 (fax)
www.bancroftpress.com
ISBN 1-890862-23-1 cloth
LCCN 2002109263
ISBN 1-890862-28-2 paper
LCCN 2002109266
Cover and interior design by Crescent Communications,
www.tsgcrescent.com
, 814.941.7447
Author photo by Beltrami Studio, Rutland, VT
T
o Hannah, my faithful helper, critical editor, and “favorite” daughter
Chapter One
N
OW BEFORE you rush to judgment and say I should have handled it differently, ask yourself what would you have done had you been in my shoes? I mean, here I was trying to hook up with a guy who was my major crush, staying on top of my schoolwork, being a good daughter,
and
having to deal with what looked to be a major, possibly life-threatening problem involving a strange new friend.
They don’t cover this stuff in the “Healthy Living” classes I snooze through. Trust me, I’ve read the syllabus.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is something my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Bernardino, says is a major problem for me. She’s always circling the beginning of my reports with a fat red marker (one of these days, I’m going to buy her a slim-point gel pen in a nice muted purple), and writing things like, “Isn’t this more appropriate at the end?” or “Why are you starting here?”
So, pardon me for my impatience with beginnings. I’m still learning.
The whole mess started one Saturday morning in October.
Kerrie called me at seven that morning—yes, Saturdays have a seven in the morning, too—to tell me Doug was going to meet us at the mall. (Doesn’t every good story start with a trip to the mall?) With that news, I sat bolt upright in bed with no prompting from my annoying alarm clock. In fact, my heart started pounding out its own alarm and my palms got sweaty.
Kerrie is my best friend. She knows me, and she knows that deep down I think that Doug is my match, that we were destined to be together, that our paths must have crossed in some other lifetime, but to come out and admit all that will somehow make the whole thing burst like a fragile bubble.
So all I said to Kerrie was: “You woke me up to tell me
this
?”
After a little conversation in which Kerrie explained how Nicole had Instant Messaged her late last night with the Doug news, I padded downstairs, thinking of what I would wear now that my afternoon worldview had shifted. Passing our hall mirror, I caught sight of myself and nearly had to be taken back up on a stretcher. My shoulder-length brown hair was hanging in clumpy strings, and my face was as white as Elmer’s Glue, with enchanting circles under my eyes to boot, making me look ghoulish and grumpy all at once. Heck, I
was
grumpy.
I decided to deal with the grumpy part first, by heading to the kitchen for a bowl of Frosted Flakes.
“You should eat something healthier than that!” my sister Connie said, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge as I got out the milk. “You’re fifteen, for goodness sake!” My sister is in her twenties, a slightly taller, curvier version of me, and she’s a private investigator.
“For your information, that granola you scarf down by the truckload is nothing but sugar-infused cardboard. Read the label,” I pointed out to her. But my gentle observation wasn’t what she was in the mood to hear, so she grabbed her purse and sunglasses and headed out with a shrug of her shoulders that I interpreted as “sez who?”
In the Balducci household, we often communicate through body language. It saves a lot of time.
As I looked at the picture of Tony the Tiger grinning at me from the big box and shoveled in the crunchy sweet cereal, my grumpy mood started to lift. Almost time to get a new box, I thought as I tilted this one to pour more into my bowl. After I was done, I added it to the shopping list stuck on our refrigerator door. My mom usually does the shopping on Saturday mornings, but today she was at her boss’s office downtown doing some extra work on a big case. My mom is a legal assistant in the district attorney’s office. She wishes she had gone to law school and become a lawyer herself, but she’s done okay for herself anyway.
Breakfast was over and I couldn’t put off the other problems that faced me. First, the hair. Then, what to wear.
The best hairstyle I can manage is a casual, didn’t-do-a-thing-with-it look accomplished by washing my hair before I go to bed, sleeping with the damp mess mashed into my pillow, and brushing it out in the morning so it has a sort of “wind-swept” appearance. This rarely fails me. It communicates a kind of cavalier disregard for my personal appearance while at the same time making me look like a younger version of Cindy Crawford who just hasn’t been discovered yet.
Okay, okay. Maybe not quite.
Today, I jumped in the shower and gave it the old lather-rinse-repeat. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my bedroom with a towel around my head swami-style while I tackled my next problem— what to wear. As I worked through these challenges, I realized it was a good thing Kerrie had awakened me so early. Looking like you don’t care about how you look takes a lot of prep time.
Jeans and a t-shirt are my usual choices. But with Doug in the picture, I considered other options. It was early fall but still warm in Baltimore, so a tank top, though acceptable, was maybe too obvious. Besides, I didn’t like my tank tops.
I moved from the closet to the floor, where I started to paw through a pile of clothes. Jeans and a peasant blouse? Hmmm. . . that sounded good, especially since the blouse had a hot design on it and I had worn it only once. What was it doing in this pile anyway? I pulled it out and put it aside for further consideration.
A half hour later, I had narrowed it down to the jeans and blouse versus the black t-shirt and khaki pants, but I was leaning toward the latter because that outfit would look neat but not like I was trying too hard. Besides, the black tee would look good with my new gold stud earrings, which would get lost next to the embroidery in the peasant blouse.
These hard decisions made, I went about the business of the rest of my morning, which consisted of some cleaning chores, a few phone calls to friends, a little web surfing, and a glance at my homework assignment book just to remind myself that I was okay putting off that book report because it wasn’t due until early next month.
My mother came home around noon and called up to me to make sure I was alive. My 18-year-old brother Tony came in shortly after that from his morning shift at the Burger Boy. Before his car keys even hit the half-table by the wall in the entrance hall, I yelled down to him.
“Don’t forget, you’re taking me and my friends to the mall today!”
I heard what sounded like a swear coming from his mouth, which was confirmed a second later when my mom barked from the kitchen, “Tony, watch that mouth!”
My poor mom has a lot of patience. She’s been alone for a lot of years—my Dad, who was a cop, died just after I was born. She’s got a lot of spunk too, which is why she moved us back to the “old country”—from a rented house in the ’burbs to an old townhouse in a section of the city where she was raised. Which is one of the reasons Tony is taking my friends and me to the mall—so I can sort of ease into the city scene. Mom told him the night before that he had chauffeur duty.
In a few minutes, I was downstairs. Running past the mirror didn’t make me panic this time. I was pretty much where I wanted to be—not too neat, not too curled, not too dressy, not too anything.
“Let’s go, Tone,” I called out to my brother. And we were on our way.