Wintergirls Read Online Free PDF

guy carried out a kid-sized bike and a pink plastic dollhouse. I crossed my fingers. Our development was still raw, mostly unfinished skeleton houses and freezing pits of mud. I was dying for somebody my age to play with.
    My babysitter walked me and a pot of coffee across to meet the new people. The house was exactly like ours only flipped backwards, with the same smell of new paint and clean carpets. The mom, Mrs. Parrish, looked old enough to be a grandmother. She had blue eyes that stayed wide open all the time, like she was surprised by everything she saw. The babysitter introduced me and explained about my parents and their million-hour-a-week jobs.
    Mrs. Parrish called upstairs to her daughter. Cassandra Jane shouted back that she was never coming out of her room.

    “Go on up, dear,” Mrs. Parrish said to me. “I know she wants a friend.”
    Cassie was unpacking a box of paperbacks. When she stood up, she was a head taller than me with long blonde hair that curlicued down her back. At first she wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look me in the eye, but she let me hold her mouse, Pinky. His beating heart vibrated against my fingertips.
    Her room was the same size and shape as mine, but filled with different stuff: a canopy bed fringed with lace curtains, the dollhouse marked with black crayon scrib-bles, a tall, skinny mirror that stood by itself in the corner, and a bookcase that didn’t look big enough to hold all those boxes of books. She showed me her antique dolls and plastic horse collection, and best of all, a real treasure chest that had rubies and gold and a piece of green sea-glass born in the heart of a volcano.
    I told her that sea-glass came from the ocean.
    “This is different,” she said. “It’s ‘see-glass,’ like seeing with your eyes. If you look through it when the stars line up right, you can see your future.”
    “Oh,” I said, reaching for it.
    “But not today.” She put the see-glass away and locked the treasure chest. I saw where she hid the key.
    We sat down with a box between us and started unpacking. As I handed her book after book, we compared favorite series and authors and then movies and TV shows and music that we pretended to listen to, even though it was way too old for us. When Mrs. Parrish and my babysitter came in, Cassie put her arm around my shoulder.
    “It’s fate,” she told her mom. “We were meant to be friends.”
    Mrs. Parrish smiled. “I told you things would be fine here.”
    Cassie’s dad was our new principal, hired from up-state after the old one had a stroke. Her mom became our Girl Scout troop leader and the volunteer who chap-eroned field trips and sewed costumes for the school play.
    She invited my mother over for cards and scrapbooking parties and book club meetings, but Mom was too busy transplanting hearts. Mr. Parrish didn’t play squash; my dad didn’t golf, so that was that.
    Cassie was a little moody, but I got used to it. I slept over at her house almost every weekend, but she never slept at mine. She wouldn’t talk about her sleepwalking or the temper tantrums that exploded when her mother nagged her or her father made her do her chores over again.
    Once I heard her mother talking to my babysitter about something bad that had happened in their old neighborhood, something with a boy. I asked Cassie about it. She said I was trying to hurt her feelings and she hated me and we weren’t friends anymore. I sat on my front steps, reading A Wrinkle in Time and gnawing on the end of my ponytail, until she came back an hour later, like nothing had happened, and asked me to ride bikes with her.
    Every afternoon in the summer we’d crawl into my tree house to read armloads of books filled with great quests and dangerous adventures. I made swords out of branches, sharpening the tips with a steak knife stolen from the kitchen. Cassie picked poisonous berries and cut a rose from her mother’s garden. We smeared the berries on our faces and pricked