Butterfly by V. C. Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

I had a wart on my nose. I remember my face became hot and tears felt like boiling drops under my eyelids. I turned and ran away. Later, when our teacher, Miss Walker, found me sitting alone in a corner of the playground, she asked if I was sick.
    "Yes," I said. It was a convenient way to escape any more ridicule. "I have a stomachache."
She sent me to the nurse's office and I was told to lie quietly after the nurse had taken my temperature even though she found that I didn't have a fever. I suppose that was why people thought of me as sickly. Whenever I felt singled out, I would often get these "stomachaches" and be thankful for the excuse to disappear. Being an orphan made me want to be invisible.
"Most of Madame Malisorf's pupils," Celine continued, "come from the finest families, people of culture who have raised their children in a world of music and art and dance. They have a head start, but don't you worry, dear," she added, reaching out to touch my cheek. "You have me and that, that is a much better head start than any of the more fortunate ones have had."
After dinner I sat with her and Sanford and listened to Celine's descriptions of some of the dances in which she had performed.
"Madame Malisorf compared me to Anna Pavlova. Have you ever heard of her?" Celine asked. I hadn't of course. She shook her head and sighed. "It's a crime, a crime that someone like you, someone who is a diamond in the rough, has been denied so much, denied the opportunity. Thank Heaven I saw you that day," she declared.
No one had ever even suggested I had any sort of talent, much less thought of me as a diamond in the rough. When I left Celine that night and went to my room, I stood in front of my full-length mirror in my new pointe shoes and my leotards and studied my tiny body, hoping to see something that would convince me I was special. All I saw was an underdeveloped little girl with big, frightened eyes.
I crawled into bed that night terrified over what was to come.
The next morning after breakfast, Sanford took me to the Peabody School, a private school. The principal was a woman named Mrs. Williams. She was tall but not too thin, with light brown hair neatly styled. I thought she had a very warm, friendly smile, and was nothing like the principal in my former school, Mr. Saks, who seemed always to be grouchy and unhappy, and who was always anxious to punish students for violating one rule or another. Often he perched in the corridors like a hawk watching and waiting. He was always charging in and out of the bathrooms, hoping to catch someone smoking.
Peabody was a much smaller school, and also much cleaner and newer. I was surprised when I was brought to a classroom where there were only eight other students, three boys and five girls. For my grade there was one teacher, Miss London, who taught English and history, and another teacher, Mr. Wiles, who taught math and science. Our physical education teacher, Mrs. Grant, also taught health education. I discovered there were only 257 students in the whole school.
"The classes are so small you know you're going to get special attention here," Sanford told me. He was right. All of my teachers were very nice and took the time to explain what I had to do in order to catch up with my classmates.
What I liked most of all was that I was enrolled and introduced to the other students as Janet Delorice, and no one was told that I had been adopted and had been an orphan before this. Everyone simply assumed I was transferring from another private school, and I did nothing to cause them to think otherwise.
I thought most of the girls were snobby as well as most of the boys, but one boy, Josh Brown, who wasn't all that much taller or bigger than me, gave me the warmest smile and greeting when I sat next to him in my first class. Afterward, he walked with me and told me about the school and the teachers. The color of his hair was so similar to mine, we could have been brother and sister. He didn't