Bennington Girls Are Easy Read Online Free Page A

things turned out, they would bicker almost incessantly.
    “No, no, she wants to
keep
it, she says. She wants to
raise
it in Hawaii, she says.”
    Idiot, thought Sylvie to herself. All of her classmates were idiots. But then she turned to Vicky and in her sweetest, most charismatic tone of voice said: “Hey, that’s so cool about the loft in TriBeCa. I forgot if I mentioned it already, but
I’m
going to New York, too. Any day now.” (
Bullshit!
Gala Gubelman was tempted to hiss, as she narrowed her eyes at Sylvie behind the lenses of her Italian sexpot sunglasses.) “But!” Sylvie carried on in all innocence. “I haven’t figured out where I’m going to be living yet. Do you think there’s any way that maybe I could crash at your mom’s till I found a place?”
    Sometimes there can be much wisdom in asking for things directly because so few people do it, and in this case it worked. Vicky was pleasantly surprised by Sylvie’s candor, especially coming from this pretty, upbeat girl who made the most delicious tuna fish sandwiches anybody had ever tasted. Just the kind of girl who could stay with one’s mother, she thought. The room was available, and it would be no trouble at all. Also, she still felt a good deal of guilt over the trust fund left to her by her dead father, an aristocratic French art collector. Letting Sylvie stay in her bedroom at her mother’s would ease her conscience about getting the place in TriBeCa.
    —
    Sylvie has guts, Cassandra thought to herself on hearing the news that come September she was going to be living rent-free in a brownstone in the West Village. I would never have dared ask Vicky that. But she hugged her and said:
    “Oh my God! New York! Sylvie, that’s so wonderful! And who knows? Maybe I’ll move there someday, too. After all—everyone from Bennington’s already there anyway.”
    Sylvie thought this was just like Cassandra, making someone else’s news all about herself; and the thought came to her that maybe she didn’t want her best friend ever since high school to come to New York. Maybe she wanted New York City all to herself.

CHAPTER 6
    H er first month in New York, Sylvie got a job at Petunia Bakery, in the West Village. Later on, of course, she would feel a mixture of emotions around that first job and what it said about her. On the one hand, she felt that its being a famous bakery—the one responsible for igniting the cupcake craze all over the city—conferred on her a certain cachet. But on the other hand, that was just the problem. Because some people—some of the die-hard New Yorkers whom Sylvie tried to emulate—blamed the cupcake craze, and places like Petunia, for gutting the soul of the city. Years after she had left Petunia, whenever the subject came up, she would always make sure to say that she had worked at the “original” location in the Village, and not one of the ones that sprang up later on in Rockefeller Center or around Columbus Circle.
    But in the beginning anyway, Petunia was a confectionary paradise, its red velvet cupcakes and saucy, ruffled vintage aprons the perfect antidote to the Colonial austerity of Black Currant. Also, there were plenty of guys there, and all of them had crushes on the cute new girl, having long since tired of the other ones behind the counter. And Sylvie, herself, hadn’t yet learned to find the kinds of guys who worked at Petunia annoying. By those kinds of guys, she meant adult men who were not ashamed to be caught dead working in the vicinity of cupcakes. But then, let it be said that in their generation, masculinity was not what it once was; just recently Gala Gubelman had had all of her friends in hysterics at an account of a date she had gone on during which the boy had tried to impress her by offering to share his homemade peanut brittle recipe.
Peanut brittle recipe?
the girls had repeated to one another, incredulous.
    Sylvie made $8.25 an hour working at Petunia. But that was okay—everything