Bennington Girls Are Easy Read Online Free

honey-blond creature with spectacles, the good-egg type often found at Bennington sitting under an apple tree with a group of similarly undistinguished girls and a pile of knitting. Nevertheless, Cassandra was jealous not to have been invited to go with, and was most put out to discover that their good friend Gala Gubelman just happened to be on the Vineyard, too.
    “She’s not staying with Vicky, though,” Sylvie reported over the phone once she got there. “She’s been dating this anorexic slut from Bryn Mawr and
that’s
who she’s staying with, not Vicky. Turns out her parents have this big place out in Edgartown.”
    “Wait, Gala is dating a girl
after
graduation?”
    “I know, right? That’s what I said! I said: Gala, you are being
ridiculous.
”
    “What’s the girl like?”
    “Absolutely impossible—” Sylvie began, before launching into an exquisitely detailed tirade about the finer points of the anorexia from which she was “supposedly” in recovery, and what a drag it was to have to go out to eat with her; the girl’s name was Tess Fox.
    Exhibitionists all, this quartet of lithe young girls—Sylvie, Vicky, Gala, and Tess—spent the better part of that weekend on the nude beach. On Sunday afternoon, just before she had to go and catch the ferry, Sylvie was lying there and feeling stricken at the thought of having to go back to Black Currant. It was August by now; September, that month of new beginnings, fresh starts, was coming. Worse, it appeared that almost everybody she knew was going to be in New York City that fall except for her. Tess said that Gala could move into the studio apartment her parents had bought for her in the East Village, no problem, the two of them would be so cozy there; and Vicky revealed that she had just signed the lease on a loft in TriBeCa.
    “Wait,” said Sylvie to Vicky, remembering something, “you’re a native New Yorker, aren’t you?”
    Vicky nodded.
    “You grew up in Greenwich Village, right?”
    “Well, when I was born we actually were living upt—”
    Sylvie got right to the point.
    “Your parents, though. Do your parents still live there? In Greenwich Village?”
    “My
mother
does. My
father’s
dead, remember.”
    Sylvie was so carried away with her ulterior motives, she didn’t even bother to say
I’m sorry.
Instead, she rolled over on her stomach and sulked. So obviously this meant that nobody would be living in Vicky’s childhood bedroom come September. The thought filled Sylvie with emptiness on this splendid summer’s day. Then—rage! Why should Vicky’s bedroom go unused, in the most fashionable neighborhood in New York City, with so many people desperate for housing? It wasn’t fair!
    She sat up straight, looked down at her sleek brown breasts and belly, then scooped up a palmful of sand and let it cascade through her fingertips, enjoying the soft heat of it against her skin. She felt full to bursting with life.
    “Oh my God, did you hear the one about Penelope Entenmann?” Gala was now saying.
    Penelope Entenmann was the name of the leggy cello student who was famous for letting Professor Sobel nail her in the Secret Garden.
    “Oh no, what is it?” Vicky asked, being the good-egg type, genuinely concerned.
    “Pregnant.”
    It was presumed to be the professor’s child, and in fact was. Sylvie made a note to tell Cassandra, who had had a crush on him back at Bennington and would surely be interested in the latest about him and Penelope.
    “Oh, no! What is she going to do?”
    “Keep it,” said Gala authoritatively. “Rumor is she’s going to have it in Hawaii.”
    “And what, like, give it up afterward?” Sylvie wanted to know. “Why doesn’t she just have an abortion already?”
    “That’s, like, really judgmental of you,” Tess Fox cut in. Over the course of that weekend she and Sylvie had not exactly hit it off, so to speak, and this was too bad, since they were in for a long ferry ride together, during which, as