The Unwelcomed Child by V. C. Andrews Page B

where I had stepped forward barefoot and suddenly felt like an astronaut stepping out into space, free from anything that had once had a hold on me. I was, however, still tethered to the ship that had brought me here, held firmly in check by an invisible umbilical cord that kept me from being fully born.
    Would that happen now?

6

    “C’mon,” Mason said after Claudine had stepped out and tied the rowboat to the dock. He kept a hold on it to steady it. Claudine held out her hand for mine. I hesitated.
    “You’re not going to wait out here while I make our picnic lunch, are you?” she asked.
    I glanced at Mason. He nodded, and I stood up carefully and reached for her hand.
    “You can leave your stuff in the boat,” Mason said, taking it all gently from me.
    I stepped up the short part of the ladder and stood on the dock, looking across the water at where we had started. Standing on the dock made me recall my seeing them both naked. The memory made me feel naked. I embraced myself and waited for Mason to step up, too.
    “My parents won’t be back until late tomorrow,” Mason said as we started toward their house.
    “Not that they would care about us bringing you here,” Claudine added.
    “No, no. They’re always after us to make some friends up here. We’ve tried.”
    “Tried,” she emphasized as we all walked toward the summerhouse. “We went to a mall and hung out, but neither of us saw anyone we would want to know, even for a few summer months.”
    “Even for a few summer hours,” he added, and they laughed.
    “You’re the first interesting person we’ve met,” Claudine said, and surprised me by reaching back for my hand. “You must trust us and tell us all about yourself, especially how you’ve grown up under lock and key.”
    “I didn’t say that she was brought up under lock and key, exactly,” Mason told her.
    “He made it sound clearly like that.”
    I looked from one to the other. “I suppose he’s right,” I said, surprising both of them as much as I surprised myself. After all, it was the first time I had trusted anyone other than my grandparents with anything, especially the truth.
    Claudine opened the rear screen door and stepped back for me to enter first. Their summerhouse was larger than our home. It was a three-bedroom house with a large eat-in kitchen and a living room about half again as large as ours, with very modern acorn-brown leather furniture, glass tables, and a fireplace with fieldstone up to the ceiling. Mason explained that they had a basement, too, with sliding patio doors that opened to another approach on the lake.
    My attention was attracted to all the paintings on the walls. They were lake scenes and scenes of mountains and valleys, some with people and some with wild animals. I wondered if I could ever paint a picture that looked as good as those. I couldn’t help looking for any religious icons or pictures. There was none in the rooms I was in.
    “Ham and cheese or peanut butter?” Claudine asked him.
    He glanced at me and said, “Peanut butter.”
    “Great. We’ll all return to the sixth grade,” she said.
    “C’mon. I’ll show you the basement,” Mason told me. “We have a pool table down there.”
    “What?”
    “Pool table.” He took my hand and brought me to the door for the stairway. I had heard of pool tables and seen some on television but had never seen one firsthand. We descended.
    The walls of the basement were paneled in a light oak, and there was wall-to-wall matching brown carpeting, a bar with stools, and another fireplace, with almost as much furniture as I had seen in the living room. Again, there were beautiful scenic paintings but no religious icons or pictures.
    “You ever play pool?”
    I shook my head. I knew you had to knock a ball into a hole, but that was it. How foolish I felt. Was this the way it was going to be for me when I attended public school, feeling dumb about things everyone else took for granted? After they