Haunted Houses Read Online Free PDF Page A

school, where the trouble might at any time happen to her. The two friends didn’t discuss the terms of Celia’s neutrality; it just existed.
    Just as suddenly as the trouble had begun it stopped, and Grace was allowed back into the fold. But this was never, never going to happen to her again. Never. For she had determined that when it was over—the word over had magical properties—when it was over, she would have emerged a new person, a girl much too irresistible and tough for that to happen to ever again.
    The house was never quiet. Ruth and Grace fought about everything. Grace took her dinner in front of the TV or in her room. She hated the way her mother chewed, she hated the sound. Ruth called her names and dumped her dresser drawers, and Grace fought back by ignoring her, or giving her dirty looks. You’re bad, you and your stupid friends, her mother would yell. Grace had been told by her algebra teacher that when she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad she was better. Now that Grace was a freshman in high school, or a fresh girl, as Ruth put it, when she got to school, home didn’t exist.
    She wanted to be the most popular girl in her class. With the boys or with the girls, Celia asked tartly. Both, Grace said. Are you going to let them feel you up? Maybe, Grace answered, if I feel like it.
    Seeing herself as leading a double life, not unlike Philbrick in
I Led Three Lives
, she kept to herself at home, smiling very little, staying in her now too small and messy room. She kept the door shut. It didn’t have a lock. Grace could hear her mother outside, moving around, doing things. She talked to her dog, and waited for phone calls, or made some. You talk on the phone too much, Ruth would say angrily. And what happened to that nice girl, Marlene? It’s none of your business, Grace would say, looking for food in the refrigerator, finding only raisins. You never buy anything good to eat, she flung at her mother, returning to her room, closing the door hard behind her. Ruth was gaining weight and wearing housedresses most of the time. Grace followed her diet, and although she was thin, she thought she looked fat.
    Your room’s a mess, Ruth yelled, you can’t leave it like that. Leave me alone, Grace yelled back, slamming the front door, going to meet Celia at the diner. As she walked she pulled herself together, into her other self, the popular girl she was when she wasn’t at home. Celia surprised Grace because other people simply liked her while Grace continued to feel two ways about her all the time. But she was already there, in the diner, waiting, as she had always been in Grace’s life, just there. Grace ordered a bran muffin. Bran muffins were delicate food, the right thing to eat, and not fattening. Celia and she watched who came in and who walked out and drank a lot of coffee, Little Louie’s cautionary dark circles and stature absent even from memory. Grace drank carefully and without sound. My mother tried to hit me again but I held her hand, she reported sarcastically to Celia. Grace’s face hardened. I hate her guts. Just then a cute boy walked in and Celia didn’t have to reply, while Grace’s face recomposed itself into a prettier picture. Celia didn’t know what to say anyway.
    Grace watched Celia’s eyes widen and freeze, then set; she enjoyed shocking people, or scaring them. Her drive for popularity was hindered by a bluntness that bordered on meanness. Celia would tell her that some of the girls didn’t understand that she was just being honest. Girls are so critical, Grace told Celia, meaningfully. She envied Celia’s ease with friends, her girlfriends, and said, I think I like boys better, and watched Celia’s eyelids open and close like a venetian blind. Envy made Grace feel weak and sinful, and she didn’t like not feeling strong. She prided herself on being reckless.
    When Grace got called down to the principal’s office to discuss her grades and her