Her chapped lips parted into a grin as she whispered into Sandi’s ear. She tucked her long, brown hair straight as ribbons behind her freckled ear with one hand while covering her lips with the other. The three of us sat next to each other on the grade school’s hallway radiator warming our corduroyed bottoms against the sound of the pipes clanking. Our Treetorn sneakers dangled at the end of gangly legs that didn’t yet reach the floor. Samantha only shared secrets with Sandi. At least that day. On others, I was the recipient of her wicked whisperings, and Sandi was shunned. It was never the secrets Samantha shared that interested me much. It was the way she excluded me that intrigued me, with a style far too coy and sly for a ten-year-old. I devoured her whisperings like a child eager for the next spoonful of applesauce. She gave me guilty pleasures out of excluding the uninformed. The day I discovered she couldn’t keep a secret I saw her reign of popularity heightened. As children, secrets were weapons on the playground, ammunition in the locker room.

The “sss” sound of the word “secret” echoes the soft-spoken sayings that often ricochet off an ear, carrying a protective cloak over its second syllable. I see secrets as nuggets of knowledge and, consequently, power, necessary to understanding someone or something. I find that secrets, or information kept from someone for a purpose, are often the worst of contradictory temptations. I like keeping them yet I don’t like when they are kept from me.

Objects, I have found, often reveal more than whispering lips. When I was thirteen, I stumbled upon an accordion file in our family attic of handwritten letters written on crinkly, sea-blue stationary with foreign stamps and “par avion” printed on their corners. I recognized my parents’ handwriting and a date prior to the year they married. The moment my mother discovered me in full perusal she whisked away the file as quickly as I had tried to open it.

I understood her actions only the day in which I caught my brother reading one of my childhood journals when I was in sixth grade. Out of revenge, I took one of his records and split it in half over my knee. My journals, full of lists of boys I dreamed of kissing when I was twelve, rest on a ledge, covered in dust, in my childhood bedroom’s bookcase. I can’t bear to open them and reread the trivial secrets of a vulnerable age.

Another time, visiting my seventy-year-old babysitter in her home, I nibbled on a gumdrop while seated on her couch. On a side table rested a pad of paper with the date written by her on the top. Underneath the date were the kind of numbers scratched in her pen much like those I’d always seen in cartoons of inmates counting the days they were in jail. When I asked her what they meant, she held my gaze and blinked her eyes rapidly. “It’s the number of commercials I see a day in between soap operas and sitcoms,” she explained. Her answer told me more than any confession she might later have whispered to me about loneliness. I regretted that I had quizzed her on it.

When pregnant last year, I realized how so much of a pregnancy is not only mysterious but secretive. Carrying a human life, I felt the bearer of one of life’s biggest secrets. Strangers would smile at me on the street when my tummy no longer allowed zipping shut my winter coat. A knowing smile or a sympathetic smirk suggested to me that they, too, knew what I was going through. Yet each time I smiled back, I thought to myself how little they knew about what I had been through to carry the baby. When I see pregnant women, I now wonder if the pregnancy came easily to them, if there is an acknowledged father, if they had a miscarriage or suffered worse. I wonder what secrets they are hiding in their tummies.

The hardest secret I’ve had to keep was the gender of my child. With so few secrets left in life, I wanted to be surprised on my child’s birthday. But my husband didn’t. I gave in, feeling that a pregnancy is primarily a woman’s thing. The least I could do, I concluded, was to help him feel he, too, was participating in the excitement of waiting to meet our child. When we found out, we were too proud to keep the secret from anyone. It was one of the few times I didn’t feel guilty about leaking.

I told my son numerous secrets when he was in my tummy. He, too, will have to fight for a spot on the radiator of life in choosing which secrets he keeps and those he might even tell. But, for now, he’s my greatest confidant.