I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel by Laura Lippman Read Free Book Online Page B

would look better if she had boobs, real boobs instead of these A-cup nothings. Real boobs would balance her out. But she was okay with how she looked, today. Gazing in the bakery window, she thought about going in, but the problem was that she wanted everything : the lacy pizelles, the cunning pink-and-green cookies, the cannolis, the éclairs. Lately, she never felt satisfied, no matter what she ate. Theoretically, she could buy one of each, eat them all, then throw them up, but she had failed repeatedly at the throwing-up part, no matter how her girlfriends coached and encouraged her.
    She continued up Frederick Road, trying to catch her reflection in the windows she passed along the way. Elizabeth wanted to know what she looked like when no one was looking. She wanted to stumble on herself unawares, sneak up on her image, but she had yet to master that trick. She was always a split second ahead, and the face she saw was too composed—mouth clamped in what she hoped was a shy, and therefore alluring, smile, chin tilted down to compensate for her nose, her nostrils, which she found truly horrifying. “Pig snout,” Vonnie had said, and that one had stuck, although her mother said it was a “ski jump” nose. Elizabeth had asked her mother if she could have a nose job for her sixteenth birthday, and her mother had been unable to speak for several seconds, a notable thing unto itself. She was a psychiatrist, but a really interesting one, who worked with criminals at the special prison for the insane. She could never talk about her work, though, much to Elizabeth’s disappointment. She would love to know about the men her mother met, the things they had done. Right now, she was pretty sure that her mother was working with a boy who had killed his parents, his adoptive parents, just because they asked him how he did on a test. He was actually kind of handsome; Elizabeth had seen his picture in the newspaper. But her mother was careful never to speak of her work. Her father, also a psychiatrist, didn’t speak of his work, either, but all he did was sit in an office and listen to teenagers. Elizabeth was pretty sure she already knew everything her father knew, probably more.
    Elizabeth’s friends thought it was weird and creepy, what her parents did. They thought the Lerners could read minds, which was silly, or see through lies more easily than “normal” parents. “They’re not witches,” she told her friends.
    In some ways, her parents were easier to fool than others. This was because Elizabeth told them so much that it didn’t occur to them that she ever withheld anything. Of course, what she mainly told them about was her friends—Claudia’s decision to have sexwith her boyfriend while her parents were away one weekend, Debbie trying beer and pot, Lydia getting caught shoplifting. Each time she shared one of these stories, her parents would ask, gently, if Elizabeth had been involved, and she could always say “No!” with a clear and sunny conscience. This made it easier to keep what she needed to keep to herself. Trying to make herself throw up after eating too much, for example. She knew it was bad, but she also knew it was a problem only if you couldn’t stop . Given that she never got to the point where she actually threw up, she couldn’t see how there was anything wrong with trying. Claudia said she should use a feather or a broom straw if she couldn’t force her finger far enough down, but— gross . The idea of a feather made her want to throw up, yet the fact of a feather didn’t. Was that weird? It was probably weird. Elizabeth worried a lot about being weird. Unlike Vonnie, she didn’t want to stand out, didn’t want to attract too much attention. She wanted to be normal. She wanted just one boy to look at her like, like—like that way Bruce Springsteen looked in that video, when he rolled out from under the car