Cindy and the Prom King Read Online Free

out a handful of parking tickets.
    Cindy gasped. The name on the tickets was Victoria Lee. “Are you Victoria?”
    She nodded. “Almost every day I find one on my car. Why? What did I do wrong?”
    “You parked in a no-parking zone.” Cindy said. “Maybe just the wrong side of the street.”
    “I didn’t see any sign. And in Hong Kong you can park wherever you find a place.”
    You’re not in Hong Kong anymore
, Cindy thought. “You need to pay the fines or you’ll be arrested,” she told Victoria.
    Victoria gasped. “Arrested? Oh, no, can’t I just pay someone off? That’s what we do at home.”
    “You could try, but it probably wouldn’t work. You’d get arrested for trying to bribe an officer.”
    “Okay.” Victoria slowly put the tickets back in her bag.
    Cindy wasn’t sure the girl understood the gravity of the situation. “You should take care of it today,” she said. “Have you been here long?”
    “I came this summer.”
    “You speak English very well.”
    “Thank you. I should. My father’s American and I went to an international school in Hong Kong. I wanted to stay there with my friends, but my parents decided to invest in California property, so they sent me here to live in the house they bought. Then they went back. My mother wants to live close to her family and my father …” Victoria bit her lip and looked down at her sandwich. “I’ve been told by certain people that I have a tendency to overshare with strangers. I hope I haven’t bored you with the details of my life.”
    “No, not at all. I’m new too. You mean you live alone?” “For now, but my parents are going to hire a housekeeper. Actually I’m getting used to being on my own,” she said a little defensively.
    “So am I,” Cindy murmured. Now who was oversharing with a stranger? Maybe it was because she
was
a complete stranger.
    “Where are your parents?” Victoria asked.
    “They’re dead.”
    “I’m sorry. Then you know what it’s like to live alone.” “No.”
Unfortunately.
“I live with my stepmother and stepsisters.”
    “You have sisters? You’re lucky. I’ve always wanted a sister.” “These are
stepsisters.
We’re not really related at all. What happened was their mother married my father. That’s how I got them.”
    “Oh, I see. How many do you have?”
    “Two. Two too many,” Cindy added lightly.
    Victoria nodded but she looked puzzled. Maybe in Hong Kong people’s fathers didn’t marry witches with two awful daughters. Or if they did, the father’s daughter kept her mouth shut about how she felt about the new additions to the family. Usually Cindy did keep her mouth shut and never complained, but there was something about Victoria that caused her to say what she felt.
    A certain awareness showed in the way Victoria looked at Cindy. “There’s an old Chinese story my grandmother told me about a girl who lived with her stepmother and stepsisters,” she said. “They were very mean to her.”
    “Really?” Cindy asked faintly. Maybe the Cinderella story was a universal myth. If only it was just a myth. Unfortunately Cindy was forced to live out the reality of the myth every day in every way. She didn’t want to act too interested in case Victoria felt compelled to launch into the story, and then Cindy would have to pretend she’d never heard it before and it had no bearing whatsoever on Cindy’s life.
    On the other hand, since Cindy really shouldn’t be talking about her family problems anyway, maybe she should just let her tell it and hope it had the requisite happy ending. “How does it go?”
    “A poor girl named Yeh-Shen who lived with her wicked stepmother and her sisters had nothing, no clothes and no friends, until she got a beautiful azure outfit made from magic fish bones.”
    “Fish bones?” Cindy asked. This was not the same story. Or perhaps there was something lost in translation. “It must have been kind of scratchy,” she murmured.
    “You’re right,”