Social Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

as the exhaustion that crept in after lunch hour. As much as the hunger that she tolerated day in and day out, and sometimes in the night as she tried to sleep. It was the churning of the new. Her new friendship with Amanda and the informal club she was now a part of. Her new discovery of Kyle Conrad, and the feelings he stirred up. And at moments like this one, when she teetered between this new world and her life inside that house, it was driven by the impossibility of living in both.
    She could see it in their eyes, each and every one of them. Her mother was more pissed off than worried. Cait was now interfering with her plan—the plan that had worked so well with her older brother, who was now a jock at Choate. Keep them busy, keep them on a schedule, and they will grow like structures off an architect’s drawings. Cait’s refusal to try out for varsity squash, her inability, which was taken as unwillingness, to get A’s at the Wilshire Academy meant mommy dearest would need a different plan. Different drawings. Such a bother with all her charity work and luncheons and, of course, the incessant baby-making.
    Her father, on the other hand, was more worried than pissed off. The vertical lines between his bushy eyebrows were becoming deep caverns drawn into his face. Nothing a little Botox couldn’t fix, but Daddy was hardly the type for that, and even if he was, this thought did little to alleviate the guilt that was thrown into the brew that had infected Caitlin’s blood. She was Daddy’s little girl, his first girl, and the only one until Mellie was born. After her brother left, she’d been Daddy’s best buddy, then an occasional buddy. Once upon a time, she’d loved board games, cards in particular, and he had taught her to play blackjack. Once upon a time, that had made her feel edgy and grown-up, listening to him talk about Las Vegas, how he would take her there when she was older. He’d taught her to drive, let her peel around on the grass in his coveted Creamsicle Corvette.
    It wasn’t fair that he expected this never to change. She was fourteen. Card games were the equivalent of a merry-go-round to the Amanda-Kyle roller coaster. The first time she’d broken a plan, he looked like a child who’d discovered the cruel farce of Santa Claus. Fuck him anyway. He’d canceled on her for business meetings before his retirement. And what? Now that he was bored out of his mind, she was supposed to provide entertainment, like his cars and scotch and arm-fart contests with her little brothers? This was her
life
, her defining moment that would dictate everything for the next four years. She had been a social nobody since before she could remember, the blanks having been filled in by her older brother.
Remember when we had to beg kids to come to Caitie’s birthday party? Remember when Caitie puked in kindergarten and no one would talk to her?
Even the Barlow name hadn’t saved her from herself all those years, and those were the years that had set the stage.
    It was cruel how this was sorted out in towns like this one. Preschool, lower school, middle, and upper. They had grown up side by side, the Amandasof Wilshire and the Caitlins—the ones who lacked that something, the secret ingredient that was necessary to be in and not out, though what that ingredient was, Cait still had no clue. At first blush, she had the obvious things, some of them in spades. Enormous estate. Private plane. Servants. World-renowned father, socially connected mother. As for her appearance, even in a place like Wilshire where you’d have to search the maid’s quarters to find a fat chick, Caitlin Barlow was attractive. Petite like her mother. Skinny legs. Blond hair, long and straight. Blue eyes. Straight teeth. Adequate tits for a fourteen-year-old. Clearly showing potential. Not too smart, not a retard either. By all accounts, Cait should have been popular.
    And yet, she