27 Blood in the Water Read Online Free Page A

retarded.”
    “It’s worse than retarded,” Heather said. “It’s really gay.”
    “Maybe she’s got some kind of thing on him,” LizaAnne said. “Maybe she’s blackmailing him. Maybe he’s hiding out from the law or something and that’s why he came home.”
    “Maybe she’s one of those sick people who can’t stand to be with anybody her own age,” Heather said. “Maybe she’ll have a psychotic breakdown and end up in an insane asylum. Then when people come to see her her hair will hang down in front of her face and she’ll scream.”
    LizaAnne picked up more of her jewelry. She had dangling earrings with little emeralds in them. She had whole sets for each of the four piercings on each of her ears, each in a different color.
    “I wish she wasn’t on that committee,” she said finally.
    And then, because that was the thing they had both been trying very hard not to say, they both fell silent.
    LizaAnne looked around her room. She liked her room. She thought anybody would like it. She looked past the vanity at the clothes hanging in the walk-in closet. She put all her jewelry back in her box.
    “There’s an arrangement,” she said. “My father said so. Every girl who’s going to be eighteen and out of high school in the spring is going to be invited. The committee has to.”
    “That makes sense,” Heather said. “It’s not her who’s paying for it. It’s our fathers who are paying for it.”
    “He said even if she did try to pull something, we wouldn’t have to put up with it,” LizaAnne said. “We could sue the committee, and the membership board of the club, and that kind of thing.”
    “She won’t try anything,” Heather said. “It’s not like people want her here. That’s the thing. It’s not like she’s Stanford-Pyrie or somebody that everybody sucks up to. Nobody can stand her.”
    “Those breasts of hers are fake, don’t you think?” Liza Anne said.
    “Of course they’re fake.”
    “Nobody could have breasts that really look like that. And if they do have them, they don’t keep them.”
    “They don’t keep them?” Heather sounded confused.
    “They get them reduced. My mother said. She thinks she’s so perfect, hanging around the pool in a bikini the size of a postage stamp, and she’s what? Forty? I think there ought to be a law against people wearing little tiny bikinis when they’re forty,” LizaAnne said.
    Suddenly, talking to Heather was just making her tired. She got up and got the phone out of its stand. It really was retarded, this whole stupid thing. And it was boring.
    “I’m going to hang up,” she said. “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
    “Okay,” Heather said. “Ten minutes would be fine.”
    LizaAnne made a face at the phone. With Heather, ten minutes would be fine, and so would be two, or sixty. It could be any time at all.
    “I’ll be ten minutes,” LizaAnne said again. Then she shut off the phone, so she wouldn’t have to hear Heather’s stupid boring voice any more. Heather was a stupid boring person with a stupid boring voice.
    In fact, everything about Waldorf Pines was stupid and boring, but at least it wasn’t retarded.
    4
    Eileen Platte had been up all night, all twenty-four hours of it, waiting. It was not the first time she had done this, and her greatest hope this morning was that it would not be the last. She’d been waiting for the last night for a long time now. There had been the day she had finally got up her courage to go through Michael’s drawers when he was at school. He’d been twelve that year, in sixth grade, and they had still been living in Wayne. She had been thinking about it for weeks, watching Michael when he came through the door off the school bus, watching him at dinner. He would lock himself in the bathroom for hours at a time, and she would sit there, just a few feet away, waiting.
    In the end, she hadn’t found anything she hadn’t expected to find. She had gone through his drawers one by