The Quiet Room Read Online Free Page B

was very aware of where they ranked in class, what activities they participated in, and what their SAT scores were.
    Even in Scarsdale, though, other kids could occasionally goof off and come home with Bs and Cs. Not the Schiller kids. My parents were upset with anything less than an A. Other kids could hang out, listen to music and just fool around. My parents demanded that we play sports, get involved in school activities,
    I suppose it was because they were both so successful themselves at whatever they did. My mom was beautiful, tall and slender with dark curly hair. Everything she did, she did well, from decorating the house to cooking dinner for fifty people, to being a room mother for the PTA.
    And my dad—well, we were all so proud of my dad. He had come from a poor family in the Bronx, and had been the first person in his family to graduate from college. Now he had a Ph.D. My parents expected big things from themselves, and they expected big things from us too.
    Mom and Dad drilled us endlessly in proper behavior. Keep your napkin in your lap. No elbows on the table. Spoon your soup away from yourself and don't snarf your food down faster than you can swallow.
    They encouraged us in all our accomplishments, and loved to show us off. Whenever they had parties, they paid me and Mark and Steven to serve hors d'oeuvres for them. And when supper was over, Mom and Dad used to ask me to sing.
    Actually, I had a voice like a crow, and I could barely carry a tune. If I sang alone in my room, I could almost always count on some smart aleck shouting up the stairs: “Lori, are you all right?” my father would call. “Is there a wounded animal in your room?” my mother would chime in. I was no great shakes on the guitar either. I had taught myself to play from a book, but I had such a bad sense of pitch that I had to keep going back to the music store where, laughing, they would retune the strings for me.
    But still, I did what my folks wanted. With the guitar as my support, I played John Denver and James Taylor songs, because they were the easiest, and somehow managed to stay in tune. Even though it was hard, it was something I prided myself on. If I had to do something—even something difficult—somehow I found a way to do it. I so much wanted my mommy and daddy to be proud of me.
    But after I came home early from camp that summer, I suddenly had a new task: keeping my terrible secret. It took all of my determination, and all of my drive. I was putting on a super performance nearly every day. I was pretending that nothing had changed, even though nothing at all was the same.
    When the camp staffer dropped me off at my house, my parents weren't home. With all of us away at camp, my parents had driven back to Michigan to visit relatives. Some friends of my parents were staying at our house. By the time I arrived home, I had pulled myself together enough that I only looked a little drained. That was easy enough to explain.
    “I have a bad flu,” I told them. “I just want to go to bed.”
    They called my parents, and reassured them that I was fine, with nothing wrong that a few days’ bed rest wouldn't fix right up. So nobody seemed surprised when, armed with this excuse, I went into my room and stayed there, sleeping most of the day … and the next.
    By the time my parents returned, the worst seemed over. I must have seemed more myself, because they didn't seem unduly concerned. The only person who was concerned was my best friend, Gail. And she was only worried that I was mad at her. Quite by accident she had dropped by and found me home from camp three weeks before she had expected me.
    “You didn't even call me!” I could hear the hurt in her voice. She had stayed up late before I had left, sewing my name tags into my clothes, just laughing and being with me before we were to be separated for the summer.
    It was the first time I ever kept anything from Gail. We had been as close as sisters. We did everything