All The Pretty Dead Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

been getting around on the subways or grabbing cabs ever since her grandparents decided she was old enough to go out unsupervised. When necessary, her grandparents had given the nod for Radcliffe to chauffeur her around in the town car, but riding around with a uniformed driver always made Sue uncomfortable. Putting on airs, as her grandmother liked to say. So when she turned sixteen, finally old enough to drive, Sue had asked for a car of her own—but while her grandfather had agreed she might take driving lessons and get her license, he’d refused outright to get her a car.
    “You are too young,” he’d told Sue in no uncertain terms—and Sue had learned early in life not to argue with her grandfather. His word was law in their family.
    Still, she’d been kind of hoping that she might get a car for her graduation from Stowe Academy. There had been hints, like commenting on other cars to get Sue’s reactions to them. She’d scrunched up her nose at the Mini Cooper, and declared the Range Rover to be “too masculine,” but she’d licked her lips when they’d passed a white Lexus much like this one. Yet when graduation rolled around, she was left confounded. Her graduation gift, her grandparents announced, was a three-week holiday in Paris.
    As much as she’d enjoyed their strolls down the Champs d’Elysée, however, Sue kept wondering about a car. And finally, here it was, her own wheels, just in time for her move to college, when she would finally be out from under her grandfather’s thumb. No more rules or restrictions. Sue felt like singing.
    Of course, it wasn’t like Wilbourne College didn’t have its own set of rules—part of the reason, Sue suspected, that her grandparents had pushed the school so insistently on her. That and some other reasons, of course. Life in the dorms, Sue had read in the school manual, was pretty strict. No parties, no alcohol, and certainly no boys. But compared to living in her grandparents’ apartment on Central Park West in what some of her friends from Stowe called “the concentration camp”—she was indeed free.
    And now, driving herself more than three hundred miles to her new school, speeding along the highway and coasting through stop signs, Sue exulted in that freedom.
    It was hard not to be excited. She was eighteen, and on her own for the first time in her life. She’d been looking forward to college for as long as she could remember. And she now had her own car to boot.
    And nothing had prepared her for the joy of hurtling down a highway at over eighty miles per hour, the stereo blaring, the wind down and her hair getting tossed about in the wind. Nothing had prepared her for how it felt to have a warm sun coming through the windshield, her expensive sunglasses perched on her nose, stopping whenever she felt like it, passing slower cars without a second thought as she drove farther and farther north. Now I know why people are so attached to their cars, she thought with another grin. It’s all about freedom, she thought as she glanced into the rearview mirror. For eighteen years, her life had been defined by the walls of her grandparents’ apartment. While she had her trips to Florida and Paris, they were always arranged and controlled by her grandfather. For the first time, Sue was on her own.
    If I wanted to, she thought giddily, I could just keep driving, see wherever the road leads, see parts of upstate New York I’ve never seen, head to the border and cross over into Canada. I can go wherever I want to whenever I want to.
    College was the first step to adulthood, and this was just a small taste of freedom. But the practical side of her mind soon stepped in.
    Don’t be silly, you can’t just keep driving on. You have responsibilities and dreams and ambitions—and college is the first step.
    Sue had a feeling she was destined for big things. She was smart—all her teachers at Stowe had told her so—and certainly her grandparents had raised her with