Second Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

now, and it’s time you started doing more things with the crowd. What better time for you to start than on your birthday?”
    Though she already felt faintly sick, Melissa knew there was no point in trying to argue with her mother.
    Silently, she went up to her room and started getting ready for the party.
    Melissa sneaked a look at the clock as she escaped into the small powder room under the main staircase and locked the door. It was only four, which meant that the party was going to go on for hours yet—the disk jockey hadn’t even arrived, and the caterers from the club had just started setting up the buffet on the terrace around the pool. Andyet to Melissa it seemed as if the afternoon had already gone on for an eternity.
    She’d at least saved herself the humiliation of wearing the pink organdy dress her mother had picked out for her. She’d had it on, had even been ready to go downstairs, when she’d heard a car pull up in front of the house and seen Brett Van Arsdale arrive in the black Porsche he’d gotten for his sixteenth birthday two weeks earlier. There were six people crowded into the little car, and as they untangled themselves, Melissa had seen what they were wearing.
    Tennis whites.
    The boys’ shirts were still soaked with sweat, and it had been obvious to Melissa that they’d come straight from the club, not even bothering to change first.
    As she heard the door bell ring, immediately followed by her mother’s voice commanding her to come downstairs, she’d rushed back to her room, wriggled out of the dress, and pulled on a pair of shorts and a blouse, which she realized as she fumbled with the buttons had fit fine last summer but was too tight now. She’d shoved her feet into a pair of sneakers and started downstairs, but had to stop to tie her laces when she tripped and almost fell the last ten steps. When she looked up from her shoes, the kids were already in the foyer, staring up at her.
    Among them was Jeff Barnstable, on whom Melissa had had a secret crush for the last two summers. Next to him—holding his hand—was Ellen Stevens.
    “We already played tennis,” Ellen said, pointedly staring at Melissa’s shoes. “We thought we’d take a swim now.”
    Without waiting for a reply, the kids had trooped through the house and out to the pool, where they’d found bathing suits in the pool house. By the time Melissa had gone upstairs to change, a game of water polo was in progress.
    Melissa had stood silently at the edge of the pool, waiting for one of the teams to invite her to join them.
    Neither had.
    When her mother had come out to watch a few minutes later, and asked Melissa why she wasn’t playing, Melissa had insisted she didn’t want to.
    But she could see clearly that her mother knew the truth.
    The next two hours had been more of the same. Now, Melissa wondered how long she could stay in the powder room. It wouldn’t be long, she knew, before her mother would come looking for her.
    Suddenly she saw the doorknob turn, the impatient rattling immediately followed by the sound of Ellen Stevens’s voice: “Well, is this dismal, or what? First we have to come over here for a mercy party, and now you can’t even get into the bathroom.”
    “Let’s go upstairs,” Cyndi Miller replied. “Maybe I can find one of Melissa’s lipsticks.”
    The powder room echoed with Ellen’s sharp laughter. “Melissa’s? Even if she has one, it’ll be some terrible color. Why don’t we just leave?”
    “We can’t,” Cyndi answered. “My mother said we have to stay until at least nine, no matter how bad it is. Otherwise she’ll have to listen to Mrs. Holloway talking about how rude we were to her precious little daughter.”
    Suddenly Melissa had enough. She pulled the door open and stared at the two girls, willing her tears not to overflow and run down her cheeks. “You don’t have to stay,” she said in a low voice. “I never wanted you to come in the first place.”
    The two