When Audrey Met Alice Read Online Free

parents always encouraged me to share my opinions at the dinner table.
    My mom smiled as Denise stuck the folder into her overstuffed attaché case. “We’ll get to it, eventually. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m overdue for a family dinner.”
    Denise had already swept over to stand beside my dad’s chair, hovering like a vulture. “Jeffrey, I’d like to speak with you about school visits that we need representation at this month. I already spoke to Susan.” Susan Pierpont is my dad’s chief of staff. “Perhaps you can give me a call after dinner?” Denise never turns off work mode. I’m convinced that she works even while she sleeps, that the dream version of Denise composes e-mails and drafts memos and writes meeting agendas during every REM cycle.
    “Why don’t we set up the dates right now?” My dad stood up from his chair and started conferring with Denise. I swear, getting my whole family to sit down together is like herding cats.
    My mom, out of her staffers’ clutches, sat down at her place and smiled at me. “Hi, dear.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. Her heavy-lidded eyes betrayed the chronic tiredness her makeup artist works so hard to hide. She looked way older than she used to, but I knew better than to tell her that. “How are you doing?”
    “Decent. How’s, um, the country doing today?”
    She laughed. “It’s doing fine.” My dad sat back down at the table. Like clockwork, a kitchen employee materialized from behind the doors with plates full of food. Just a normal night at the Rhodes family dinner table, if eating scalloped potatoes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can ever be considered normal. And if I can’t consider it normal, I doubt anyone else can.

Chapter 3
    Friends Academy is too fancy to have a normal bell. Instead, a recording of the theme from Mozart’s Sonata in C major tells us when fifty-five minutes are up. “Mozart stimulates the brain,” the smarmy guide had explained during my tour. Whether or not that’s true, I think using music as a bell is pretty cool; my public school in Minnesota used your typical earsplitting buzzer.
    On Friday when Mozart started wafting out the speakers at the end of second period, I lingered around my desk until the other kids filed out of the room. French class had been odieux . During small-group conversation practice, my partners, Stacia and Claire (who happen to be Madeline’s besties), refused to talk about anything but the fête at Madeline’s country house the coming weekend. Of course, she hadn’t invited me. I fiddled with my charm bracelet and tried to act like I wasn’t listening to the conversation. “ Vas-tu à la fête , Audrey?” asked Stacia. “ Je ne peux pas ,” I replied. I hung my head and flipped to the index of my textbook as though I was looking for something. Is it too late to switch to independent-study Mandarin? The fewer classes with Madeline and her minions, the better.
    Quint was waiting outside the room when I slunk out at the tail end of the sonata snippet. “Who died, Rhodes?”
    I secretly love that he calls me by my last name. That is a good type of pet name for someone (in contrast to Fido ). “My soul, a little.” I heaved my bag over my right shoulder. “Why—is it that obvious I’m miserable?”
    “To me, maybe. Your mouth is doing its frowny-face thing, you know, when you’re not exactly frowning but you’d like to be. Also, you’re superslouchy.” Quint smiled and continued before I could think of some snappy comeback. “Which is weird for you. What’s wrong?” How does he know so much about my posture and facial expressions? Thinking about Quint thinking about me made my heart flutter.
    “Madeline’s fête this weekend, which I wasn’t invited to. Not that I could go, anyway. I think there’s a State Dinner or something.”
    “I probably can’t, either,” Quint shrugged. “My parents are kinda strict about parties. I was only going to beg if you were