The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

Julie and Deepa under blankets on the sectional sofa above them. Lauren’s throat was scratchy-dry, and her eyes were clumped and sticky with the stage makeup she’d slept in. Last night’s hairpins were piercing her scalp and she was holding back a cough and she badly had to pee. Still she lay there, listening to the tick-tick of the mantelpiece clock, comfy mounds of living blankets rising and falling slightly all around her. She wanted always tofeel this cozy, this embracing joy of belonging.

She crossed her arms in front of her, each hand on the opposite bicep, and felt Mr. Smith’s hand gripping her upper arm, squeezing,sliding up and down, in the doorway to Tedquarters last night, just before they’d left for the movie.

“Congratulations again, and listen—don’t worry about Andy, all right?”

His thumb nicked the side of her breast, and again. He hadn’t meant to do it. She put her hands on her hips, to move the armhe was rubbing away from her chest.

“I won’t, I promise,” Lauren said.

“I think what it is, is he likes you, and he doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“Um, okay,” Lauren said, looking over his shoulder at her classmates milling around. Anyone could overhear. Gary Wisniak,the affable head of the set construction team, came past them, offering Lauren a high five. She returned it, taking the chanceto step back a foot from Mr. Smith, his hand slipping off her arm. “Well, thanks for everything,” she said to Mr. Smith.

“Don’t you think so?” he persisted, stepping forward. She was cornered again.

“I don’t think he thinks about me much, unless I’m getting on his nerves for some reason.”

“To be honest, I’m surprised that boys your age pay attention to you at all.”

“What?!”

He stepped back and grinned. “Because they’re all terrified of you.”

“Huh. I doubt it.”

“You’re too mature for them. Way out ahead of them. That’s why they don’t appreciate you. When you get closer to college,all of that will change.”

“Okay, well, I guess I’ll look forward to that. Good night, Mr. Smith.”

She turned over onto her other side in her sleeping bag and thought about the movie. At the beginning, the two sisters arelazing in the screened-in porch of their house at twilight, in their old-timey underclothes, listening to a love ballad onthe phonograph, telling their small troubles to the man in the moon. The sisters are bored and bickersome, but this is whenthey are happiest in the whole movie. Not when the boy shows up and the excitement starts, but right then, when they are justrolling around in themselves and taking each other for granted and waiting for something to happen.

Lauren wondered if either of the sisters had figured out how to masturbate. It was the ugliest word she had ever heard. Mrs.Graziano, the health teacher at Mayer Middle, had taught the word to them. Lauren had figured out how to do it by accidenttwo summers ago, lying on her stomach on the living room couch reading Flowers for Algernon while everyone else was out of the house, and she was pressing her hips against the cushions because it felt so nice, andthen it all overcame her and she knew from then on she’d have to do this at least once every single day.

Lauren crept out of her sleeping bag inch by inch, working to preserve her new friends’ sleep, a game she could play and win by herself. She found her backpack in a little pile on the hearth, found a bathroom in the hallway off the kitchen, peed, splashed some water on her face, dabbed at her clotted eyelashes with a tissue, wiped at smeared eyeliner, plucked out the hairpins. Crimped locks of her hair stuck straight out from her head. She rummaged around in her backpack for a comb and found the tape that Stitch had given her. Claire and Abby had noticed how Stitch had underlined each word in the title of each song.

“Song titles should be in quotation marks, but still, that is so cute,” Claire had said.

Lauren tried to tamp her hair down with wet fingers, then bent over and held her head under the running faucet. The waterran cold then tepid. She was relieved that none of the other girls had seen her like this. She rubbed her hair with a handtowel, and her face went hot as she remembered: Mirela onstage, Mom running into the wings, the tears, the speeches. As cozyas she had felt just a few minutes before, she now felt urgently that she needed to leave this house, that she could not beseen, that the older girls had only been doing a kindness by asking her out with them, that they would not want to see hernow, having caused such a commotion with her weirdo family.

Abby’s mom was in the kitchen, slicing strawberries and watermelon, frying eggs. “Good morning, Mrs. Yoon,” Lauren said, puttingup a goodbye hand. “I’m Lauren. Thank you very much for having me over.” A promise not to bother her further, to get out ofher way.

“Hello, good morning!” Mrs. Yoon waved at Lauren with a charming urgency, as if from some distance. “Stay, please stay.” Sheput one hand on Lauren’s shoulder, the gentle pressure of her touch substituting for the language Lauren didn’t speak.

“I couldn’t bother you, ma’am, but thank you so much.”

She cut through the dewy yards in the thin morning light. The front door was locked—Mom always locked up the house at nightnow—and Lauren let herself in with her key. Everyone was still asleep. After weeks of getting home late or sleeping over atPaula’s, she hadn’t seen her house in a while, not in daylight, not alone without somewhere else she already had to be.

Dark scuff marks all over the hallway walls. Puncture wounds here and there. In the living room, the carved-wood mallard ducks on the mantelpiece and the clusters of framed photographs on the piano had disappeared. The chunk of rock from the trip to Italy when Mom and Dad fell in love, gone. The line of