Bittersweet Dreams by V.C. Andrews Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t help my silence. Maybe I was sadder than I would admit, and I wasn’t sulking as much as I was crying inside. But that was something I would never reveal to her.
    Everyone talked to himself or herself. Perhaps I did it more than most people, because I had running conversations going as if my brain was on Facebook or something. It was probably another reason so many other students kept their distance at my old school. To them, I always looked as if I were on another planet, in another dimension, listening to some other voices. It bugged some of my teachers, because they thought I wasn’t paying attention to their important comments, but when they questioned me to catch me so they could bawl me out, I always had the answer.
    Was I very sad about leaving my home? I knew that any other girl would have looked back at the house and gotten all choked up inside. It wasn’t only because of what the house was, an eight-thousand-square-foot, two-story Spanish-style hacienda in Bel Air, complete with a beautiful oval pool, a cabana with a built-in barbecue grill, and a clay tennis court. I’d heard my father say the house and the grounds were estimated to be worth upward of twelve million dollars. He bought it when he was promoted to CEO of Pacifica Advertising, which had contracts with major pharmaceutical companies and some entertainment firms. He was now a major stockholder in the company, a fact I was sure was not lost on Julie.
    I had mixed feelings about leaving, because I grew up in this house. My best memories of my mother took place in this house, and now I was being deported from it. Deported was the right word. How often I had felt like a foreigner now in my own home. But when I looked back and thought about it more, it was like cutting the umbilical cord again. I wasn’t just separating from my father and my mother’s memory. I was losing them. They were drifting off like smoke in the wind, falling behind as we drove on. I was never so afraid of being alone.
    Nevertheless, I refused to let myself get emotional. I had talents and skills few people had, number one of which was harvesting the most value from any experience. What I had in that house I was taking with me. I was able to internalize all of it. I treasured all the memories, no matter how small or insignificant someone else might think they were. Not Julie, not the school administrators who had come down on me, no one could take any of it from me.
    â€œHow much longer?” Julie asked, as if she were being waterboarded.
    â€œNot far now,” Daddy said. He turned and flashed one of his rah-rah, sis-boom-bah, high-octane, successful-advertising-executive smiles at her.
    â€œYou sure you know where you’re going, Roger?”
    â€œHe has it on the GPS,” I muttered. “If he makes a wrong turn or something, it will let him know.”
    She ignored me, but my father said, “Mayfair’s right. We can’t get lost.”
    â€œI don’t trust those things,” Julie said, and I laughed a little too loudly for her. She didn’t trust the GPS because she couldn’t grasp how to use it. The one in her car was never turned on. She had trouble with a television remote. It was a wonder she could work her blow-dryer, and if it did get too hot and shut off, she’d scream, “Roger, the electricity in the house is off!”
    â€œTry to figure it out yourself, Julie,” I would tell her. “How can the electricity be off if the lights are on?”
    Just like back then, she glared at me angrily now in the car and then turned quickly away. I didn’t have to wonder what she was thinking. She had made that perfectly clear many times. Almost from the day she and my father had married, she’d always accused me of ridiculing her in one way or another. Why should it be any different even after what I had done? I was irretrievable, unrepentant, and impossible to change or improve. You