Breathless by Jessica Warman Read Free Book Online Page B

kidding.
    “Mandatory,” she repeats, like I don’t know what “compulsory” means. “If you don’t go, you’ll get a demerit.” She shakes her head at me. “You don’t want to start your Woodsdale career that way. Besides, tea parties are fun. You’ll see.”
    Before I know it, I’m blinking back tears. “I don’t have any white gloves.”
    “Oh, honey. Come on.” And she leads me down the hallway, into her home, past the kitchen and the living room, where her husband is asleep in his bathrobe on the sofa. Once we’re in her bedroom, she goes to a bottom dresser drawer and produces a stack of impossibly white gloves in all different sizes, each of them ironed crisp and cleaner than anything I’ve ever seen. “Don’t be afraid,” she tells me, winking. “You aren’t the first new girl, you know. You just have to understand what people expect from you.”
    I pull a glove over my palm, my fingers still wrinkled from swimming all morning. “What do they expect?”
    She seems surprised by the question. “Well, they expect you to succeed. They expect greatness. And”—her powdered nose wrinkles—“oh, I don’t know, a sense of gratitude. Have you ever read King Lear ?”
    I shake my head. It’s already far more of an explanation than I was expecting.
    “I’ll show you—right here.” We go to the bookshelf in the living room. She plucks a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s Collected Works off the shelf, goes directly to a bookmarked passage, and reads aloud: “ ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low. An excellent thing in a woman.’ You’ll read this . . . in senior-year English, I think.” She replaces the book on the shelf and reaches outward to squeeze my gloved hand. “But remember it now.”
    From the sofa, her husband—who I’d thought was asleep—sits upright and gives us both a big grin. “Best advice you’ll ever hear, sweetie,” he says, winking at me before lying back down and turning up the volume on the TV.
    Everything here is monogrammed: the awnings on the front porch of the headmaster’s house; the stone walkway leading to the front door; the napkins, the teacups, the plates—they all bear the Woodsdale Academy insignia, which is a large capital W with a smaller capital A formed in the W ’s center, all contained within a circle. I can hear Will hissing over my shoulder; I can almost feel his breath and smell nicotine and rotten teeth and teaberry gum. He says, “Kind of looks like a pentagram, doesn’t it?”
    Everybody sits around sipping from teacups that barely hold anything, balancing their elbows on crossed legs while the female faculty wander about, mostly talking to each other.
    “There you are,” somebody says from behind me. It’s Estella. Her friend Lindsey is beside her. They’re both smiling.
    “Hi,” I say.
    “Hi,” Lindsey says.
    Estella narrows her eyes. “I think you forgot something.”
    Oh, God. I’m probably wearing the wrong shade of pastel, or my skirt is an inch too high.
    “Your name tag,” she supplies. “Over there, on the table in the foyer. If Dr. Waugh sees you without it, she’ll come over and bother us.”
    I stare at their name tags. Lindsey Maxwell-Hutton. Estella Delilah Brinkley-Wallace. I suddenly feel incredibly inadequate with only two names. I can sense these girls, with their lineage on such display, staring at me with what must be pity, sizing me up based on my borrowed gloves and my simple name: Kathryn Kitrell. It looks ridiculous in calligraphy, even on the paper name tag.
    I follow them—I don’t know what else to do—to the corner of the living room, where we can lean against one of the wall-to-wall bookshelves.
    Lindsey puts me at ease almost right away. “I wish we could take these stupid gloves off,” she says, talking around a mouthful of egg-salad sandwich. “I have to borrow them from my mom every year. She keeps them in her nightstand drawer.” Lindsay shudders. “I’m afraid she and