The Sisterhood by Helen Bryan Read Free Book Online

class brainbox, teacher’s pet, and model of good behavior. The scrawny duckling had only emerged as a swan during her final yearin high school, and by then boys saw her as the class valedictorian, not someone to date.
    But she had blossomed, strikingly. At nineteen she was tall and slender, fine featured, with a smooth olive complexion and dark hair that offset her beautiful sapphire eyes. Up close, despite her ready smile, a certain tentativeness in her manner and a slight shyness in those lovely eyes betrayed the fact that her beauty was a recent development—one she was still getting used to.
    Even now she didn’t quite believe how she’d changed, whatever her mirror and her doting parents said. Not that she spent much time worrying about how she looked. She had had to develop the good sense not to and besides, she knew she was a bit of a nerd—she had learned long ago that the best antidote to feeling plain and left out of the giggling cliques of her girl classmates was to bury herself in her schoolwork. It made her parents proud when she got all As and was at the top of her class and the star of her high school honors program. And she actually really, really enjoyed school.
    But not being popular left her with time to fill. So she found a way to do that, too.
    No one had ever disparaged Menina’s Hispanic origins, and indeed, the Walkers had always stressed that she should be proud of them. When they gave Menina the medal and the old book on her sixteenth birthday, just as they had promised Mother Superior they would, Virgil had made a little speech about how important her heritage was and how her birth parents might have put the medal round her neck, hoping it had some miraculous power to save their child. Menina had taken his words to heart.
    But she had gleaned early on that, as a
Mano del Diablo
orphan and the Walkers’ adopted daughter, she was privileged. She was uncomfortably aware of the local prejudice against Mexicans and the other Hispanic immigrants, with their battered trucks full of shabby kids, and their willingness to sweep hardware stores, pumpgas, and do heavy yard work for less than the minimum wage. There was a lot of local resistance when money was donated to build a Hispanic community center on the outskirts of town, and a joke made the rounds at the high school. “What do you call a Hispanic maid? Answer: Spic and Span.” When Menina heard it she was angry. That very afternoon after school, she had ridden her bicycle to the center.
    She found the director’s office—a small room smelling of plaster where workmen were putting up a large brass plaque noting the community center was the gift of the Pauline and Theodore Bonner II Charitable Trust—and offered to volunteer. Soon Menina was tutoring children in English and helping their parents with advice and referrals and forms for practical things like health care and food stamps. She enjoyed feeling useful, and she began to relearn Spanish in the process, though when she tried to test her Spanish on the old book from the convent, she found the book just too difficult. The
s
’s all looked like
f
’s and it just seemed to be about nuns. A convent record, like her parents said. Not all that interesting.
    When the time came for college, Menina preferred not to leave home. She won a scholarship to study art history at a local all-girls junior college called Holly Hill. It was, the old ladies of Laurel Run thought, a ladylike choice, which only raised her in their estimation. As did her choice of subject.
    Holly Hill was one of those anachronisms that survived in southern states. Founded by two bluestocking spinsters late in the nineteenth century as a “female academy,” it had offered girls Latin, history, and sciences at a time when flower arranging, embroidery, and a smattering of French were all that was thought necessary for a young lady’s education. The founders’ motto was “If a girl can read Cicero she can read a recipe,”