Whitefern by V.C. Andrews Page A

couldn’t help wondering if he was right, but the death of your mother was such a deep loss, even a mother you saw only in photographs. How could you not be affected by it, think about it often, and blame yourself?
    â€œI wouldn’t worry about it. You have to be an adult to feel guilty,” Arden once said as a response to my fears for Sylvia. “You have to develop a conscience, and that takes a little more intelligence than she possesses.”
    I didn’t come right out and ask him the question about him that always haunted me, but I thought it,especially then: Was that why it took you so long to confess about witnessing what had happened to me and not stopping it or telling anyone else about it so the bad boys could be punished? Is that your excuse, that you were still a child and you didn’t have a fully developed conscience yet?
    I did think there was some truth to what he was saying, however. Adults were always warning us not to be in a hurry to grow up. Maybe this was a big part of why. Growing up meant responsibility, and responsibility brought guilt as well as satisfaction. In the end, conscience would always be king.
    In any case, I wasn’t going to stop trying to help Sylvia grow more mature in any way I could. Educating her was a big part of it. Whether I liked it or not, I had to be as good as any special education teacher in a public school. Papa put the responsibility on me when I was young, and I naturally continued it all after his death. I was motivated by that one big fear Papa had put into my head: if something happened to me, Sylvia would find herself in some institution where she was sure to be abused. I would have let Papa down in a very big way just by dying. I wanted so much for Sylvia to be able to survive on her own, to learn enough of the basics to get by.
    Ever since she was fourteen, when I looked at her and realized she had developed a woman’s figure almost overnight, I knew she would need special care and protection. I realized she had a beautiful face and a shapely young body. It was then that a girl really became vulnerable and needed to know how to protectherself and what to look for in a man’s face that would tell her he was lusting after her only for his own selfish pleasure. I didn’t think it was possible to get her to recognize that. She had a child’s trusting nature. The warnings and alarm bells simply were not hooked up inside her the way they were for most girls and women.
    Of course, she knew nothing about what had happened to me. Even if Arden or Papa had made some reference to it in her presence, it was as if they had spoken a foreign language. For a moment, she might listen, but then it would pass right through her and be gone like a breeze.
    Occasionally, when she was younger, Papa would warn her about being alone, especially going too far away from the house by herself. But the smile on her face would tell anyone that she had no idea what terrible things he was afraid would befall her. She would nod and go on with whatever she was doing. He would look at me with frustration but also with a warning that I’d better protect her. I should be her shadow, the way she was his.
    I spent almost all my free time with her. I worked on Sylvia’s writing, spelling, and math and still did even today. One of the exercises was my dictating our shopping list for the supermarket. She sat at the table and painstakingly copied down the items, sometimes looking at the boxes or bottles to get the spelling right. I was amused at how important that was to her. Lately, she had become much better at it. She had good handwriting, probably because of her artistic talent. Ifa cashier saw our list, he or she usually had a compliment for whoever had printed it.
    â€œMy sister does that,” I would say proudly.
    Nothing brought Sylvia’s shyness out more than when she was given a compliment. She would always look down to hide her smile, and her