The Inseparables Read Online Free

place together, like roommates, like friends, even, but found that she didn’t have the courage to ask.
    “Yes,” Oona said.
    Henrietta noticed the alarm in Oona’s voice.
    “Yes,” Oona said again. “She’s my daughter.”

2.
    It was Monday, not that it mattered, rain falling, weak light through the dead trees on Mount Thumb. Lydia sat in the back of a golf cart the color of persimmon, driven by a member of the school’s disciplinary staff, a man in a faintly militant peacoat, his collar propped up. The iron arched gates of Hartwell Academy passed overhead, rusted and bearing a carved Latin inscription that meant either Truth and Wisdom in Learning or something like Forget What You Thought: This Is the Place Where You Will Truly Actually Learn to Feel Deep Shame and Humiliation About Your Body. This place. She took a very deep breath.
    She had been here since September. A boarding school in southwestern Vermont advertised for gifted students, Hartwell Academy had looked vastly more promising in its brochures than the public school she’d attended at home in Crestview, with its legions of boys lingering near their lockers in expensive jeans and enough Abercrombie cologne to fumigate a basement. Or: those same boys in the parking lot after seventh period with their hundred-millimeter Kools and their cell-phone porn. She had found Hartwell online, after prompting Google with the phrase “Are there any normal schools anyplace where everyone isn’t a pervert or a criminal?” If she had a sense of humor about this past week, it was possible she might find it amusing that she’d ended up here.
    From the back of the cart, Lydia had to scream over the din of the motor to be heard.
    “What about everyone else?” Lydia called out. They were passing the long line of brick dormitory houses where the boys lived, and as they went by she saw faces in the window peering back at her, pale and blond and aggressively well groomed and very likely sinister. For days it had been like this. “What about everyone else harassing me? Every other single human on this campus! Do they need to do this, too?”
    The driver turned around. His name was Abernathy. Officially he worked as an assistant to the dean of students, but in reality he was a recent college graduate whose job it was to shuttle students around this large campus. “I don’t know about anyone else,” he said. “I only know about you.”
    Given everything, this was the single most unsettling thing he could have said. A week ago a nude picture of her had begun spreading around the school. At this point, it was difficult to say which was worse: the embarrassment or the ridicule. The fact was, everyone here had seen her naked, or was about to, and evidently at Hartwell being naked was cause enough to endure a hellacious torrent of harassment. Forget the strenuously constructed veneer of high culture this school prided itself on: the instant her nipples began popping up on people’s phones all hell had broken loose for her.
    Lydia slumped in her seat. She was dressed in layers, hoping that all the wool and cotton she had on—the long johns, the tightly wrapped scarf, the big parka zipped to the top—would create a kind of armor. All week she had suffered the urge to discover a way to vanish.
    Abernathy offered her a kind smile. “If you want my advice, don’t bring your phone in with you.”
    She looked up. She was exhausted. She had not slept. She was fifteen years old. Her makeup, she knew, probably could not cover her new, fledgling paranoia.
    “Because they’ll search you,” he said, conspiratorially. “And if they find it, you’ll get extra time. Especially with this. You don’t have your phone on you, do you?”
    Technically speaking, phones were not allowed on campus. Digital technology ran afoul of the school’s stated ambition to create in its student body what it called a “linear brain,” which was its term for a brain capable of reading the printed