The Girl Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

floor. Both apartments were owned by the management company, and rented. When they’d begun, both empty spaces were a symphony of innocuous beige and taupe. Within weeks, Madison’s had been transformed, Charlotte’s merely disguised a little. Madison had a big turquoise sofa and expensive‐looking cushions with graphic prints on them. A wenge wood console with a dozen photo frames. Madison was in each of the photographs, smiling her big white smile. Here against a backdrop of sand dunes with her parents and her brothers, there hoisted on to the shoulders of two big men in football uniforms. Raising a cocktail glass among identikit girlfriends. Centre stage was given to Madison in graduation robes, her hair perfect under the mortar board. The first time Madison had seen Charlotte’s chaste single bed, dressed with a quilt and a small lace pillow, she’d twittered about how sensible it was to leave more room for storage and clothes and stuff, and how, with her queen bed, she’d barely enough room for her shoes.
    She’d come, borrowing milk, in her gym kit, one morning in the very early days, and she’d been coming ever since. She’d wanted skim, expressed disappointment at Charlotte’s 2%, but taken it anyway. Charlotte didn’t think she had ever knocked on Madison’s door. The pattern of their friendship – if that was, indeed, what it was – was that Madison came to her. Whenever she needed anything, be it milk for her cereal (and Charlotte bought skim now – how silly), a needle and thread to sew a button on, or a conversation to make her feel better about her place in the universe again. They had never been out together, and Charlotte knew that they never would. That was not what she was for. She didn’t mind. She was ambiguous about Madison in general. She supposed that Madison, if she ever stopped and thought about it, might expect Charlotte to be desperately jealous of her, envious of her looks, and her ease, and her place in the world. But Charlotte was smarter than that. She was curious, and sometimes mildly alarmed or vaguely amused. If Charlotte had had a pen pal back home that she wrote to about the big bad city (although she did not), her letters would have been full of the adventures of Madison Cavanagh.
    Madison was the first promiscuous person Charlotte had ever known. (And the first adult person besides herself that Charlotte had ever seen entirely naked, Madison having once stripped off completely while seeking Charlotte’s opinion on which short and sparkling outfit she should wear to some party or other.) Sex was, for Madison, something completely separate from love. On one, she considered herself a talented expert. As for the other, she claimed to have had several misadventures and been left wounded and vulnerable, although Charlotte wasn’t convinced. Her own virginity was a subject they never touched upon. Charlotte didn’t volunteer, and Madison didn’t probe. If it wasn’t about Madison, it wasn’t really worth discussing, and virginity hadn’t been about Madison for many years.
    It had been shocking to Charlotte, at first, to hear details. ‘Play by plays’, Madison called them, laughing. But she was used to it now. Madison had a new theme recently. Jackson Grayling III. Trip, as he was known. She’d been out with some college friends from Wall Street, who’d been joined by some guys who worked nearby. They’d been connecting the dots of their lovely lives, as young people like that did. And she’d found out that Trip, the scruffy but undeniably good‐looking, nocturnal guy who lived on the fifth floor, was this filthy‐rich trust‐fund guy whose parents owned half of Texas, or something.
    Madison didn’t link sex with love. But she sure as hell linked love with money. Charlotte didn’t care much about money, so long as she could pay the rent and bills and buy books. She sent about twenty per cent of what she earned home, where it helped cancel out the debt she owed