Night Vision Read Online Free PDF Page B

today.”
    The deal was that Hillary could live at home free of charge as long as she helped her dad with the upkeep of the house and also did the cooking and grocery shopping. Sure, her dad was ill, but he also used his illness as an excuse to get out of doing his part. “Can’t you make yourself a peanut butter sandwich or something?”
    â€œThat’s what I had for dinner last night—and the night before.”
    â€œWell, I’m crazed, can’t you see that? I can’t deal with anything else.” She charged up the stairs to her room. She saw now that the dress she’d picked was all wrong. She needed a more professional look. Her closet was crammed with clothes—all the way from size ten up to size sixteen. She was a fourteen at the moment. And that thought made her remember the dark blue suit she’d bought last fall for a funeral.
    â€œHere,” she whispered, pulling it free. She shimmied out of the dress, dug through a drawer until she found a white silk blouse that wasn’t too wrinkled, then slipped it on. Next came the pants. They were a little tight, which was just about the last straw, but she was
able to get them zipped. The suit coat fit her perfectly. This, finally, was the right image. Professional but approachable. Friendly. Young. Hungry but definitely not desperate.
    On the way to the airport, Hillary experienced everything from dry mouth to vertigo to shakes to nausea. She was a mess—both exhilarated and scared to death. She’d never met a celebrity before. Every off-ramp she passed was an opportunity to turn back, but she refused to look at them. She had to keep going. The alternative was just too horrible to contemplate.
    Hillary had been lucky, which was another reason she thought this meeting with Joanna Kasimir was meant to be. She knew a guy—Noel Dearborn—who was an intern at the Allen Grimby Repertory Theater. He’d been itching to date her forever. She kept putting him off but never totally shut him down. The day he overheard the top brass at the theater talking about Joanna’s plane coming in on September 24, three-ten P.M. at Flying Cloud, he called Hillary and told her the news. That was three weeks ago. Noel knew that Joanna Kasimir was Hillary’s film idol. Hillary talked about her all the time. Hillary asked him once if he thought she looked like Joanna Kasimir. He said yeah, definitely. Which just confirmed what she’d already believed.
    Forty-five minutes after she’d left her dad’s house, Hillary parked her white Toyota Tercel next to a gray minivan. She’d never been to Flying Cloud airport before. The MapQuest directions had confused her, but amazingly, she’d made good time. So good, in fact, that she had almost an hour to wait until the plane landed. In an effort to get her mind off her anxiety, she decided to make a mental list of the things she wanted to say.
    Except, instead of concentrating on the task at hand, Hillary was immediately overwhelmed by all the negative voices in her head—the ones that told her she was a failure; a rotten writer. A liar. A sham. She had no business thinking she could be a professional journalist. She was just setting herself up for a fall. Joanna Kasimir wouldn’t give her the time of day because she’d see Hillary for the fraud she really was. The smart thing to do would be to leave right now, not waste everyone’s time. But if she did leave, if this didn’t work out, Hillary
wasn’t sure what she’d have left. If her life didn’t change, she was beginning to think it wasn’t worth living.
    Leaning her forehead against the steering wheel, Hillary felt the weight of her own negativity squeeze the air out of her lungs. She’d been so upbeat, so thrilled when she’d first learned Joanna would be coming. She and Joanna were kindred spirits. They’d both suffered and survived. They were destined to be not