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

didn’t just give up on someone like me, she might say. You shook her completely out of your memory. I was sure she was chafing at the bit just thinking of the free rein she would have in our house now, never worrying about any comment I might make about something she had done or wanted to do.
    The midafternoon Southern California freeway traffic suddenly began to swell. Somewhere along the highway artery, there was a blood clot, I thought. We slowed to a crawl. It didn’t bother me. Whenever we were on the freeways and traffic slowed to a crawl or came to a standstill, I would continue reading or researching something on the internet. My father had bought me my first laptop when I was just a little more than three, and later he made sure I was always hooked into a satellite or had a PDA so I could get onto the internet. Whenever we had company and someone asked a question no one could answer, he would turn to me and say, “Mayfair, why don’t you look that up for us?”
    Like a father watching his son in a Little League game, he’d sit back with pride and watch me, at three or four years old, get the right website and come up with the answer, usually in less than a minute.
    I was on the internet now, researching the community where Spindrift was located. It was in the Coachella Valley, just outside the small city of Piñon Pine Grove, named for the piñon pine trees that populated its borders. There were some small factories providing building materials and one that made store racks, plus some industrial farms. Not exactly an exciting new community, I thought, but I didn’t exactly enjoy Los Angeles, either. I rarely visited the museums or the parks.
    Researching the community and the school, I was quite content with the delay, but I knew the traffic jam put butterflies and worms in Julie’s stomach. If anyone wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, it was she. I imagined the only reason she’d come along was to make sure my father didn’t change his mind. Of course, she acted as if she was concerned and cared about me, at least for his sake. She was concerned, all right, concerned that I would somehow be rejected at the door and end up back at home with Allison, who had been left behind with the maid. After what I had done, the faster and the farther we were separated, the better it would be in Julie’s eyes.
    â€œHow do people do this every day?” Julie asked, nodding at the traffic.
    â€œIs that a hypothetical question?”
    â€œWhat?” she said, turning around to me again. She had to struggle to make it look like a painful effort. She was that tightly wrapped.
    â€œ Hypothetical means you really don’t expect a specific answer. You ask it to begin a conversation, a larger discussion. Do you want an answer?”
    She stared a moment. “You have an answer?”
    â€œPeople do this every day because they have little choice, Julie. Their jobs are far away from their homes. They want their kids to go to better schools. They want to live in safer neighborhoods. The commute and all this traffic on weekends to get to malls or stores,” I said, waving at the cars in front of us, “are the trade-off. It’s probably far worse on weekday mornings and late afternoons.”
    She dropped the corners of her mouth and pressed her lower lip under her upper one. “Well, I couldn’t do it,” she said.
    â€œYou don’t have to do it. You don’t even have to shop for food.”
    â€œMayfair,” Daddy said, with that little upturn in his voice to indicate that I should go into retreat.
    I knew that the whole episode at school, including what had recently occurred between me and the girls I called the “bitches from Macbeth ,” had exhausted him. He looked like he had aged years. He was afraid of any conversation between Julie and me continuing for more than a few seconds. He was quite aware of how easily I