New Year's Eve Read Online Free

mouth.
    Sometimes Gwynnie sat with Beth’s group at lunch. Anne might say, “I was thinking of going to Lord & Taylor’s to look at lingerie.” And Emily would moan, “I’d go but I’m so broke. I might fall in love with something I can’t get.” And Kip would say, “I never care about whether I can afford it. I just like to look at it and touch it.”
    Gwynnie would say, “I prefer the West Indies.”
    Everybody would sit for a moment studying their Jell-O and chicken noodle soup and wonder what to say to that.
    It was Beth Rose’s opinion that Gwynnie was not human.
    â€œThen what is she?” Kip asked. “A vampire?”
    â€œThat seems all too possible,” Beth Rose admitted.
    Nevertheless, they were all going to Gwynnie’s after the ball at The Hadley. This was partly just to see Gwynnie’s house. Her parents (who appeared to be quite normal for people whose daughter was a vampire) had built on a hill on the outskirts of Westerly. Easily visible from the road, the house was enormous and very modern, with vertical light-gray sheathing and windows that rose two stories. The house sprawled over the hillside and stabbed the sky. Beyond the four-car garage was an indoor swimming pool with jungle-like vines growing against the glass walls. A long driveway curved through a meadow, and the meadow became velvet lawn, and the lawn turned to manicured gardens. The doorway was marked by a six-foot piece of polished marble, which curved like a welcoming hand to show you where to enter.
    In winter, the gray and glass house was sculpture against black silhouettes of trees and white billows of snow.
    You would think that anybody who lived in that house would go back and forth to school in her own Jaguar. You would think the girl who lived there would look like her house: tall, sleek, elegant. But no, it was crazy Gwynnie who got off the schoolbus.
    Beth Rose had always been afraid that Gary would drift on. Staying in one place did not suit his personality. But how—how!—could Gary have chosen bizarre, semi-human Gwynnie over her?
    New girl in town. She took my man.
    Oh, it sounded like a bad country and western song, didn’t it? The Other Woman. The New Girl In Town. She Stole My Man.
    Beth Rose forced herself to think about the ball.
    Beth Rose had never been to The Hadley.
    She did not have the kind of parents who dined there, or the kind of boyfriend who would take her, and she certainly did not have the money to go herself. The Hadley was the tallest building in Lynnwood, right downtown, part of the successful urban renewal in that city. Everybody said The Hadley would fail, nobody would rent offices there, nobody would open stores in the interior mall, nobody would park in the huge parking lot beside it. Most of all, everybody said nobody would pay all that money to eat in the revolving restaurant on the top floor.
    To look at what? everybody demanded.
    Horizons of Lynnwood and Westerly?
    Maybe in New York they went up elevators in skyscrapers and sat in revolving restaurants, but not in Lynnwood. Those people are going broke, said everybody, nodding knowingly.
    But they were wrong.
    Everybody—even the people who said nobody would go there—went there.
    And now, at last, Beth Rose would, too.
    The Ball was being held in the revolving restaurant. They would dance far above the snow, and the floor beneath them would turn slowly, slowly, while the lights of the cars and the streets below became golden jewels in the dark night. The Hadley would fill with the throbbing rhythms of dance bands and the shouting screaming exhilaration of New Year’s Eve.
    New Year’s Eve, Beth Rose Chapman thought. I’m bald, my ears look like doorknobs, I’m going with Kip’s little brother George, and I have an invitation to my ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend’s for breakfast.
    The phone rang.
    Her parents had already left for their New