Summer Of Fear by Lois Duncan Read Free Book Online Page A

anybody the next. She’s just a doll!”
    “Peter has a crush on her,” I confided.
    “You’re kidding! Peter?” Carolyn widened her eyes incredulously. “Old woman-hating Peter with a crush! Say, do you suppose he’d want to take her to the dance? We could triple.”
    “I think his band is playing for the dance,” I said. “But we could take Julia and he could join us afterward, I don’t know how he’d feel about that or whether Julia likes dances or if she’d want to go out anywhere so soon after a family tragedy. But I can ask them and—”
    I let the sentence drop because Julia was sticking her head out from behind the curtain of the dressing room.
    “Come see what you think,” she called.
    Carolyn and I went over, and Julia pulled back the curtain a little way so we could see her in the suit. I think I made some sort of gasping sound. It wasn’t polite, I knew, but I was so stunned I couldn’t help it, for in that swimming suit Julia was—well—incredible.
    Although all of us teenagers wore bikinis, it was seldom that you ever saw anybody built exactly right for one. By the time a girl got enough up top to fill one out properly she usually had too much down below. Julia was the exception. She didn’t look like a girl, but like a young woman. Now I could understand why the bodice of the yellow dress had looked so tight, for she had the kind of figure I had always dreamed of having someday, maybe when I was about twenty. Her waist was small and her stomach absolutely flat and she curved softly in all the right places, and her legs were long and slim but full enough through the calves so no one would ever call them skinny.
    “Wow!” Carolyn expressed it for both of us. “You look just great! That’s your suit, all right!”
    “Do you think the color’s right?” Julia asked, frowning a little.
    “Perfect,” I said, although until then I hadn’t even noticed the color. It was a light pink of almost the same shade as the material I had chosen for my new dress. With it for contrast, Julia’s skin no longer appeared sallow but creamy and rich looking.
    “It’s lovely,” I said. “It couldn’t be better, Julia, really!”
    I paid for the suit with Mother’s credit card and we stopped at Walgreen’s for cokes and then we caught the bus for home. We all three crammed into one seat, and Carolyn started telling us about her adventures wall-cleaning. Carolyn is made for story telling; she has one of those rubber faces that can go into a hundred different expressions, and by the time she was halfway through I was laughing so hard I was crying.
    Julia was laughing too. I had not seen her laugh before. She was a little stiff about it, as though she wasn’t used to laughing much, or as if she didn’t quite know why the story was funny but wanted to be part of things anyway.
    Carolyn must have seen this, because when we got off the bus at the corner of our block she slipped her arm through Julia’s and fell into step beside her as though they had been friends for a long time. It was a kind thing to do, and I felt pleased that she liked my cousin and was making such an effort to be nice to her. At the same time I felt sort of funny, walking behind them, because the sidewalk wasn’t wide enough for three unless somebody walked in the gutter.
    It was one o’clock by this time, and the sun was high and pleasantly warm, although not hot the way it would be in a couple of weeks. In the yard before the Gallaghers’, Professor Jarvis was kneeling in the grass, putting in a line of petunias along the edge of the driveway. The professor was retired now, but until two years ago he had taught with the sociology department at the University of New Mexico.
    As we came abreast, he looked up and smiled and raised a grubby hand by way of greeting. We stopped, and I introduced Julia.
    “She’s my cousin, Julia Grant,” I told him, “from Pine Crest, Missouri. She’s living with us now.”
    “Pine Crest?” The