Rivals Read Online Free PDF Page A

I thought we had to get to a doctor ourselves. I thought—”
    She rubbed
away her tears with the balls of her thumbs and grabbed for a tissue. When she
looked back in the mirror she got a shock. She had managed to rub mascara all
over her cheeks and temples and up onto her forehead. It was like she had
taken a paintbrush full of black paint and swiped it just right across her face
at eye level. It looked…
    Well, it
looked like she was wearing a mask.
    She didn’t
know whether to laugh or cry so she did both and she must have made a lot of
noise because eventually there was a knock on her door and then Grandma came
in. “I didn’t give you permission to enter my room,” Maggie said, rubbing at
her face with the tissue. Where was the cold cream? She couldn’t let Grandma
see her like that. The old biddy would think she was playing dress-up or
something.
    “Young lady,
turn off this music right now,” Grandma said, loud enough to be heard.
    Maggie reached
over to her computer and turned it up, slightly.
    “You’re
certainly your father’s daughter,” Grandma said. “Wild.”
    “Dad was a
good man,” Maggie insisted.
    “He was a
hellion. Never worked an honest day in his life. All he wanted to do was
traipse about in the desert all the time, probably half-naked like a little
boy!”
    Maggie spun
around in her chair. She couldn’t believe this. “He was an engineer! He
worked harder than you ever did.”
    “He ruined my
little girl. Your mother. Made her crazy, too. Neither of them ever understood what family really means. Well,
I’m not going to let that happen to you. Now you and I have had our
differences over the years—”
    Maggie
snorted.
    “—but
that ends now. You kids need a parent around here. The Lord knows I’m too old
for the job. And He also knows I don’t want it. But I am going to keep you on
the straight and narrow. Something happened out there in the desert and now
you’ve got the papers calling, and the government watching you. That is not
acceptable. Not at a time when you need to focus on your studies. I am going
to make sure that you both get off to college, where you’ll study nice,
respectable subjects. And if I have to tan both of your hides to get you
there, I will.”
    Maggie rolled
her eyes. “Why are you always such a hardass, huh? My father just died. I
just got out of the hospital. Be nice to me!”
    “Nice,”
Grandma said. She brought her hands up where Maggie could see them. She
showed her the engagement ring on her finger, with its tiny little diamond.
That ring was one of her favorite threats. Always, when she slapped Maggie,
she turned the diamond around so that it was inside her palm, and then she
would hit Maggie with the back of her hand. She had threatened many times to
hit her with an open palm—which would rake that diamond across Maggie’s
cheek and cut her, maybe even leave a scar.
    “Before she
died, your mother told me about you,” Grandma said, when they were both clear
that niceness was not going to be part of their relationship. “She told me
about your little problem. About your sticky fingers.”
    Maggie blushed
despite herself. “She didn’t. Mom would never do that.”
    “She told me
how worried she was about you. She told me you had stolen a bag full of makeup
from a store downtown. Or at least, that you tried. She told me she had to go
down there and talk your way out of the store, had to grovel in front of a security guard to keep the store from pressing charges. Do you
know what I told her?”
    “No,” Maggie
said. “I’m not psychic.”
    Grandma leaned
forward. Her eyes were very large and very bright behind her glasses. “I told
her she should have let you rot in jail. But since that’s not an option this
time, I need to make sure nothing like that every happens again. I came in
here to lay down some ground rules. First off, no boys.”
    “Excuse me?”
    Grandma
scowled at Maggie. Nobody could scowl like Grandma. “I called