To Die For by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online

one in. She was the one who told me I should bleach my freckles. I never would’ve thought of that. She even got me doing these exercises, to uncross my eyes.
    “This is great,” she said, when I signed up to be in her video. She said she’d be working pretty close with this group for the next couple months and it would be good to have someone she could share some girl talk with.
    I told her I never did anything like this before. She was so nice. She told me that was fine, at least I wouldn’t have any bad habits. She said she’d teach me everything she knew, like a big sister. She had this perfume on. In the end she gave me my own bottle, I loved the smell so much. Pavlova. They named it for a famous ballerina.
    Of course I heard about Larry right away. For one thing, you couldn’t miss her ring. It was such a big diamond. Plus she kept their wedding picture on her desk.
    And in the beginning she was always saying how great everything was. How lucky she was, what a romantic guy she married, how he was always bringing her flowers and presents and stuff. One time he surprised her over the weekend with a whole bedroom set. Another time it was a sheepskin cover for the driver’s seat in her car. Or they would’ve gone away to Atlantic City for the weekend. Or to some real romantic hotel in the mountains with a heart-shaped bathtub. They seemed like the perfect couple.
    The only other people in the video were Jimmy and Russell. And they were always such total washouts. I mean, they’d show up stoned, or one of them would walk in and say something really dirty about some girl he was with over at Little Paradise Beach the night before. They’d slump into their chairs with their hands on their, you know, between their legs. There was Mrs. Maretto, acting like she was having lunch with a couple of senators, only it was Russell Hines and Jimmy Emmet sitting there instead, scratching themselves. But she always did what she told me. She acted like you never knew who might come in, who might be watching that might make a difference.
    This video we were working on. The idea was to take some kids, meaning us, and get to know us and our inner feelings and stuff. So a big part of the time she wasn’t filming us or anything, because like she explained, first we had to really get to know each other, get to be friends. So this one day she invited me to come along with her to her aerobics class, just Mrs. Maretto and me. She let me wear this extra sweatsuit of hers that she said was too big for her, and took me into the special locker room in her health club and everything. We took our showers side by side, which made me feel kind of weird on account of how she was so skinny and I’m such a total mess. I held my stomach in, but still.
    After the shower, we went in the sauna together, and then she brought me in this hot tub where you sit naked, just letting the water swirl over you. I’d never been at a place like this before.
    All of a sudden I look over at Mrs. Maretto, and she’s crying. “Larry doesn’t understand why my work is so important to me,” she says. “I could never explain my career to him. I come home from a day like this, where we’ve done all this great talking, and I got such terrific footage. And he doesn’t even ask me how it’s going.”
    Well I didn’t know what to do. Right in the middle of the hot tub, seeing Mrs. Maretto crying like that. She wasn’t going crazy or anything. I mean, she splashed some water on her face right away and that looked like the end of it. But after, in her car, driving me back to my house, it was like she became a different person. She starts telling me all sorts of stuff. How he never wants to party and go to clubs anymore. He just wants to stay home and watch TV. How he wants to have kids and she’s still on the pill but she can’t tell him because he says it’s time to start a family, and Joan Lunden has kids but look how fat she got for a while there, and besides,