Lasher Read Online Free

Ancient Evelyn. She brought dresses for Mona, who hated to go shopping.
    “You know you ought to dress more like a teenager these days,” Gifford had volunteered only a few weeks ago.
    “I like my little-girl dresses, thanks,” said Mona, “they’re my disguise. Besides if you ask me, most teenagers look tacky. I wouldn’t mind looking corporate, but I’m a bit short for that.”
    “Well, your bra cup is giving you away! It’s hard to find you sweet cotton frocks with enough room in them, you know.”
    “One minute you want me to grow up; the next minute you want me to behave. What am I to you, a little girl or a sociological problem? I don’t like to conform. Aunt Gif, did it ever occur to you that conformity can be destructive? Take a look at men today on the news. Never in history have all the men in a nation’s capital dressed exactly alike. Ties, shirts, coats of gray. It’s appalling.”
    “Responsibility, that’s what I’m talking about. To dress your age and behave your age. You don’t do either, and we’re talking about two contrary directions of course. The Whore of Babylon with a ribbon in her hair just isn’t your garden-variety teenage experience.”
    Then Gifford had stopped, shocked that she’d said that word,
whore
, her cheeks flaming, and her hands clasped, her bobbed black hair falling down around her face. “Oh, Mona, darling, I love you.”
    “I know that, Aunt Gif, but please for the love of God and all we hold sacred, never refer to me as garden-variety anything, ever again!”
    Mona knelt on the flagstones for a long time, until the cold started to bother her knees.
    “Poor Antha,” Mona whispered. She stood up, and once again smoothed her pink dress. She brushed her hair back off her shoulders, and made sure that her satin bow was still properlypinned to the back of her head. Uncle Michael loved her satin bow, he had told her that.
    “As long as Mona has her bow,” he’d said this evening, on the way to see Comus, “everything is going to be all right.”
    “I turned thirteen in November,” she’d told him in a whisper, drawing near to hold his hand. “They’re telling me to turn in my ribbon.”
    “You? Thirteen?” His eyes had moved over her, lingering just for a split second on her breasts, and then he had actually blushed. “Well, Mona, I didn’t realize. But no, don’t you dare stop wearing that ribbon. I see that red hair and the ribbon in my dreams.”
    Of course he meant all this poetically and playfully. He was an innocent and wholesome man, just really nice. Anyone could see that. But then again, there had been a bit of blush to his cheeks, hadn’t there? After all, there were some men his age who did see a thirteen-year-old with large breasts as just one species of uninteresting baby, but Michael didn’t happen to be one of those.
    Well, she’d think a little bit more about strategy when she got inside the house, and close to him. For now, she wanted to walk around the pool. She went up the steps and out along the broad flagstone terrace. The lights were on beneath the surface of the water, making it a shining blue, and a faint bit of steam rose from the surface, though why it was heated, Mona didn’t know. Michael wouldn’t swim in it ever again. He’d said so. Well, Come St. Patrick’s Day, whatever the temperature, there would probably be a hundred Mayfair kids in there. So best to leave the heat on.
    She followed the terrace to the far end, near the cabana, where they’d found the blood in the snow, which meant that a fight had taken place. All clean now and swept, with only a little sprinkling of leaves. The garden was still down a bit from the snows of this mad winter, so unusual for New Orleans, but due to the warmth of the last week, the four-o’clocks had come back and she could smell them, and see their tiny little blooms in the dark. Hard to imagine all this covered with snow and blood, and Michael Curry floating under the surface of