"Obviously."
"I don't know what happened to me. I don't know why my nightgown is on the floor. I don't know why I . . . I feel strange. I have these visions running through my head."
"Oh, I'm sure it's all just a dream," she said, smiling. "So you overslept. Big deal. I wish I had a dollar for every day I missed school. I'll see that Mrs. McAlister prepares a late breakfast for us." She smiled. "It'll be nice spending the whole day together. Wash up and get dressed. meet you downstairs, okay?"
I stared at her and then nodded.
"You're just having dreams," she insisted. "Stop worrying about it. We both drank a little too much last night, but it was fun, wasn't it?"
"Yes," I said, even though the night before still remained very vague in my thinking.
She nodded and then left. I sat there a while, trying hard to think, to remember. Something terrible was bothering me, something very bad.
I looked down at my naked body and saw what were clearly black and blue marks on my thighs. I touched each of them, and they hurt. It looked like I had been squeezed very hard, like . . . someone had seized my legs.
Images of hands all over my breasts, down my stomach, flowed past my eyes. I felt lips on mine, on my neck, on my breasts and on my stomach.
What had happened to me? What couldn't I remember?
Walking like someone still in a daze, I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. There were red blotches on my neck and on my breasts. I closed my eyes. Basil's cologne filled my nostrils again, and again I opened my eyes and looked about quickly. I almost called out to him.
Visions paraded across the mirror. I was being embraced, held, twisted, and lifted. What it suggested struck me so hard, I felt a ball of ice drop into my stomach, sending chills up around my heart. Slowly, I returned to my bed and pulled the blanket back. Then I brought my face to the sheet and inhaled. Basil's cologne reeked.
My head snapped back, and I gasped.
What had happened to me? What had he done?
I felt like screaming. Panic seized my feet, froze me in place. I stood there embracing myself, my mouth open in a silent cry, trembling.
And that was how Ami found me, nearly twenty minutes later.
17
All Orphans
.
"What's the matter with you, Celeste?" Ann
asked, her face twisting before me as if it were made of rubber. I wavered as if I was standing on a ship at sea, tossed about in a small storm.
"I don't . . . I think . . . did Basil come back last night?"
"Basil? No, of course not. He went to the hospital. Remember? The accident at the warehouse? What's this all about? Why ask about Basil?"
Yes, why ask about Basil? I wondered and then remembered.
"Smell my bed, my sheets, my blanket," I said. "Why? Did Mrs. Cukor put garlic in them again?"
"No, it's something worse. It has nothing to do with Mrs. Cukor."
She pulled in the corners of her lips and lowered her chin.
"Are you still drunk?"
"Smell them!" I cried.
"I will not. That's the stupidest request . . . Go take your shower and come down to breakfast and stop this nonsense immediately," she ordered, and then she smiled. "Later, we'll do something together, take a nice ride, maybe to the discount shopping center they just built."