Paperweight Read Online Free

everything, but they’re kind of young and they seem like they have their own thing going, you know?”
    I almost laugh. Roomie. Like it’s summer camp. I focus on the cool plastic of my cell phone, pressed reassuringly against my chest. When they weighed me and hooked me up to the EKG machine like a lab rat, I tucked the phone in the soft folds of my jeans, beneath the pile of my clothes on the floor.
    â€œLook—” I stop just short of using her name, even though there are so many to choose from. Bulimic. Worthless. Waste.
    â€œAshlee.”
    Perfect. She looks like the kind who spells her name with a double e at the end. The kind who just barely made it onto the cheerleading squad at school, on unspoken probation for the dimples in her thighs. Ash! Lee!
    Before I can tell her that she’s wasting her time, a male nurse claps his hands together. “Okay, girls. Nine o’clock. The cottages should be unlocked now. Have a good night.”
    â€œFinally.” Curly Blonde shoves back her chair and ditches her trash. I follow her outside and into the yard. The icy-cold desert air surprises me. “It was getting claustrophobic in there.”
    She leads me around the side of the villa and nudges me up a steep, gravelly hill. “Come on. This way.”
    I hear the rhythmic heave of her step beside me, blending with the thump of my heart as we ascend the hill. Cottage Three sits at the peak. There’s a small porch in the back with two rocking chairs.
    â€œSo where are you from?” she asks.
    â€œOutside Atlanta.”
    â€œCool. I’m from Dallas.” She sucks in greedily, already out of breath. “What do your parents do?”
    Parents. Plural.
    The gravel under my flip-flops crunches beneath my weight, an echo of a familiar sound—the crinkling of the foil-wrapped truffles my mother used to keep in an etched glass dish on her desk at work. Even as a little girl, I knew better than to take the candy from that dish. There were six truffles there, always six.Chocolate was for clients only, against the rules for little girls like me. So much was against the rules.
    I was almost never allowed to go to work with my mother. A law firm was no place for a child, she told me. I begged every summer. The office was cool and polished and still—everything she was, and everything I wanted to be. On my eighth birthday, she gave in. I packed a tote bag and followed her to a high-rise in downtown Atlanta, all steel and glass perfection. I passed the hours pretending that the glossy mahogany conference table was a ship or a cabin, making forts of dusty books from the used bookstore a few blocks from our house. Anna Karenina and Holden Caulfield and Jo March formed walls of protection around me, and I crouched behind them, breathing in their musty smell while my mother sat behind a desk, bathed in the white light of her computer screen. She wore a crisp collared shirt. She had a long, thin dancer’s body and cherry lips that never faded.
    She was the only female partner in her firm. Around her, people who mattered whispered words like Washington and judgeship . She had Promise. I asked her once if it made her proud, the way people talked. Promise was like a precious stone, she told me: hypnotizing, but after a while the weight of it could sink you.
    â€œMom?” I frowned at the open book in my lap. Flaubert. In her life before law, my mother had majored in French lit. She had promised me that one day we would travel to France, just the two of us. She would show me everything: where she attended classes at Université Paris-Sorbonne, the apartmentshe rented in the Latin Quarter, the café where she finished editing her thesis.
    â€œMmm?” Her voice sounded from the other side of the fort.
    â€œDoes Madame Bovary love Berthe?”
    â€œBerthe is her daughter, my love. All mothers love their little girls.”
    â€œBut it doesn’t seem like she loves