Boys Rock! Read Online Free PDF

have to pretend it was your idea too.”
    “What it means is we’ll have to watch those guys like hawks to see what else they’re up to,” said Eddie, pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage. “Why didn’t
I
name the newspaper first? How could I have been so stupid?”
    Caroline, however, was only half listening, because she saw the mail truck stop at the bottom of the driveway. She watched Mr. Hatford reach out and open the Malloys’ box, put some mail inside, and turn up the red metal flag to show that there was mail.
    Instantly, she was out the door and down the steps and was running down the long driveway toward the road. Mr. Hatford gave a soft toot of his horn as he drove away. When Caroline opened the box and found the envelope she had been waiting for, addressed toCaroline Lenore Malloy, she took it up to her room before her sisters could see it.
    Eddie and Beth were all wrapped up in making the newspaper, their father was in Ohio seeing about taking his old job again, and their mother was preoccupied with the possibility of moving. No one else in the family could ever understand the youngest Malloy daughter—
her
—she was sure of it. And of course Caroline didn’t expect them to. No one else in the family wanted to go onstage, so this burden of being a misunderstood and unappreciated actress-in-the-making would be hers alone.
    Caroline closed her bedroom door and eagerly tore open the envelope. There was the booklet she had seen advertised on the back of a movie magazine, a booklet for which she had paid two dollars and ninety-five cents plus postage:
Your Aura: Making It Work for You
.
    What her family did not understand, Caroline told herself as she settled down in her chair by the window, was that actresses have to spend their whole lives getting people to pay attention to them. Once people stop paying attention, all the good roles in plays and movies go to someone else, and soon that actress is only a has-been. If Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes had an aura, there was no reason why Caroline Lenore Malloy shouldn’t have one too. She believed in working hard for what she wanted, and an aura just might help.
    Caroline opened the booklet to the first page:
An aura is psychic energy drawn from the soul, which
radiates out to other people and alerts them to your presence
, she read.
    Caroline reached for the package of corn chips she kept in a drawer and popped one into her mouth. Then another and another as she read on:
    An aura broadcasts a woman’s intelligence, beauty, sensitivity, and passion. A light scarf worn over the head will contain the aura until the desired moment is at hand. Once the scarf is removed and the aura is released, replace the head scarf and repeat the following exercises
.….
    Caroline read about the position in which she should be sitting, the manner in which her fingertips should be touching, the thoughts she should be thinking, and whether her eyes were to be open or closed. The hum, of course, was her own idea.
    Half an hour later, Eddie peeped into the room and found Caroline sitting cross-legged on her bed with a thin white curtain draped over her head. She was humming one long, low note.
    “Caroline, what the heck?” Eddie said.
    When Caroline didn’t answer, didn’t even open her eyes, Eddie went over to the bed and picked up the booklet in her sister’s lap: “ ‘…; psychic energy drawn from the soul, which radiates out to other people …;’,” she read aloud. “Caroline, where do you get this stuff? It’s unscientific! Utter nonsense!”
    “Well, it’s true, Eddie, or it wouldn’t be in print,” Caroline said, peeping out from under the curtain.
    “Just because something’s in print doesn’t make it true,” Eddie told her. “I could write that the Hatfordboys were the smartest people on the planet, but that wouldn’t make it true.”
    “Then why would someone bother to print up this booklet?” asked Caroline.
    “Because