Stranger With My Face Read Online Free PDF Page B

my father’s keyboard clicking away on its evening stint. The living room, as I passed it, was dark and empty, the Monopoly
     game long over.
    I paused at the door to the kids’ bedroom. The moonlight fell across Neal’s pillow, painting his sleeping face with silver.
     His lips were parted, and he was breathing through his mouth with a whistling sound. In the bed across from him, Megan was
     lying crosswise, her feet thrust out from beneath the covers.
    I went in and gently pulled her into a more comfortable position and drew the blanket over her. She came partly awake and
     reached up to touch my cheek.
    “I saw you there—outside my window,” she murmured sleepily.
    “Oh, you did, did you?” I exclaimed, taken aback. “You were spying on me?”
    Meg mumbled something indistinguishable and rolled over onto her stomach. Then abruptly she raised her head.
    “You were up so high,” she said clearly. “How did you get there?”
    “I was—what?”
    “High,” she said, and sank back on her pillow and was immediately asleep.
    I shook my head, bewildered as always by the directions eight-year-old minds can go in, and more than a little irritated by
     the thought of my sister standing at the window, absorbed in the sight of Gordon and me making out. Tomorrow, I told myself, she and I are going to have a good, long talk .
    I left their room and continued up the stairs, passing the open door to my parents’ room, where Mom lay in bed, reading.
    “Night, hon,” she called to me as I went by, and I called back, “Good night.”
    The next few steps brought me to the short hall leading to my own room. I moved along it gingerly and stopped in the doorway.
     The moonlight streamed through the east window to lie upon my bed, just as it had upon Neal’s, and the rest of the room was
     sunk in shadows. I shivered slightly and reached around the door frame to switch on the overhead light.
    Of course, there was no one there. Had I really thought there would be? Everything looked absolutely normal. The aura of the
     foreign presence I had sensed so strongly that afternoon seemed to have faded. I stepped into the room, feeling more comfortable
     than I had expected to, but I left the door standing open to afford contact with the rest of the house.
    I became aware of how terribly tired I was. The illness the night before and the long day filled with so much tension and
     confusion had left me drained and exhausted. I pulled off my clothes, let them lie where they fell, and got a nightshirt out
     of the dresser drawer. I put it on and picked up my brush, and then decided to bypass this nightly ritual.
    Glancing across, I saw myself reflected in the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony. I stared at the reflection, wondering
     as I often did what it was that attracted Gordon. Why had he chosen me over Natalie and Darlene and Mary Beth and the others?
     The girl in the glass gazed back at me with wide, dark eyes. Her hand held a brush, half raised to her thick, black hair,
     and her body was slim and straight beneath the thin material of her summer nightshirt. As I watched, the full mouth began
     to curve upward at the corners, as though this mirrored Laurie was pleased at what she saw.
    It was not until I had turned off the light and climbed between the sheets that I realized what had been wrong with the picture.
    The mouth on the reflected face had not been my mouth.
    I had not been smiling.

I barely slept that night. For a long time I lay trembling beneath the covers, trying to tell myself that what I had seen could not have been real. Perhaps a warp in
     the glass, an angle of the light, a trick of my own eyes had altered the image. Perhaps I had smiled without realizing it.
     I had not been thinking about my expression as I stared at the reflection in the sliding door. I had been thinking about Gordon,
     about the fact that we were back together, that we had survived our first big misunderstanding without a breakup. I