Sister Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the Year is ever well liked.
    The chaperone was a dandy fake, had they but known it. Lola was wild, and Aunt Fan was the perfect cover. After the dances, Lola sent her aunt home in a hired car. Then she herded the timorous girls and swaggering boys into their cars, and led the caravan to the honky-tonks in nearby Gadsden. (She claimed she had once won an amateur striptease contest, and Marit believed her.) Back at home, Aunt Fan would knock on the Brevards’ bedroom door. They propped themselves up on pillows and tried to read until Lola got in, no matter how late. “Our baby is sound asleep,” Aunt Fan would whisper. “She could hardly stay awake to get undressed.”
    Fanchon Pickett, grand-niece of General George, was as false as brass and as tart as a crabapple. There was nobody she liked, and only one thing in the world that she cared about. That year Lola paid all of Fan’s bridge debts (out of an allowance that had tripled when Lola was elected Valedictorian), and sent her spinster aunt off to Las Vegas, where she spent a week under the green light at the poker tables, sleeping two hours a night, waiting to retire until the Texas oilmen had packed it in.
    Lola’s wildness was of the coltish or tomboy variety: breaking curfew; outdrinking boys on boilermakers; driving on the wrong side of route 46; not being too careful of her skirts when she got out of cars or taught the Lindy. She had a dirty mouth, and ran an uncatalogued course in sex education, but she was as safe from scandal as Christopher Robin. It got noised around that Maddie Blanton was two months pregnant. “Isn’t that just about the tackiest,” sighed Lola when she heard it; and sexual experiments in their group lost all prestige, at least for that season. Boys never tried anything with Lola, not since she had kissed Tilden Chace in the ninth grade and scared him blue by asking him kindly why he never used tongues. The boys figured that she had picked up all that sexual lore somewhere, and credited her with experience, rather than a talent for library research. Her knowledge kept them from taking liberties, or mooning at her, which was the way she wanted it.
    As further insurance, she went to dances with two escorts, and put to use her little old-fashioned dance card. It made a nice, competitive effect; the young men lined up between sets, signing its ivory leaves with a tiny pencil as thin as a knitting needle. During the fad for cutting in, Lola set herself apart by dancing each dance through with one partner. “Cutting in makes you all feel popular? Why, I’d feel like a sexual beanbag!” she had declared to a peevish delegation in the powder room. She had them there, and they hated her for it, but not one of them ventured to copy her. Pre-emptive was Lola’s middle name. She had the edge on all those frilly, het-up bunnies, who could feel an erection through six layers of crinoline and tulle, and traded “stiff scores” at the end of an evening. What kept her head clear and her wits sharp was that she did not feel anything.
    When she did feel something, it was her own power that she felt, the excitement of her power over Taylor Blackwell. Lola had promised her parents that she would stay interned the full two years at the Meade Institute, one of Virginia’s first “early colleges.” The fancy term annoyed Lola, since Meade had yet to send a girl to “later college”; but she had a certain interest in the journalism courses. Lola relaxed in that isolated setting like a retired general who had never lost a battle. Campaign memories were sweet and sufficient to her, and she rode bareback, let her hair grow, and refused invitations.
    One weekend she had Gray House all to herself—or thought she did, until she passed Taylor Blackwell’s suite. Tallie’s girlhood bedroom had been moved to Gray House intact, with yellow gingham curtains and white eyelet valances run up specially, because the windows in the residence hall were longer