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

otherwise completely abandoned her. Her pain was deep and honest and alive, and that meant she could sharpen it into the curve of a blade. She could make her pain into other people’s pain. There was a heinous beauty in it. It glinted in her eye. It was the violence of it that held her in place in the back seat, hidden from Mom’s eyes. It kept her from saying a gentle word to Mom, placing a hand on her shoulder. The slightest little thing. She had won, but one false move you lose.

 

“Don’t worry, you’ll get there eventually,” Rajiv said over his shoulder as he passed Lauren in the hallway between classes.Giggles from whoever was walking with him. It wasn’t worth the effort to register who they were. She could sit down rightthere in the stream between class periods without caring who saw her or what they thought. She was fumbling through a sandstorm.

“Can’t we all get alloooonng?” Rajiv was keening down the hallways. Mocking sobs. Even Stitch had told him how crazy-making it was.

She was encased in a suit of armor. Lifting and maneuvering her limbs took a great, crushing, cranking effort. All the passagewaysof her body constricting, her blood flow slowing, rerouting itself, turning on itself, jellifying. Hands and feet gone blueand cold. Her skull screwed on too tight—her bones had thickened, too, and they were expanding and contracting, and her brainjangled around inside. Sirening white streaks at the corners of her sight. She rattled and chanked around, most people too polite or dismayed to ask her what was wrong, her steel boots sliding deeper into the sand.

She could drop out of the musical. Even now. The day of. It could be done. Lauren’s understudy, Leslie Cochrane, attended every rehearsal, whether she was required to or not. Lauren’s stupid Pink Ladies jacket would fit Leslie just fine, even if her saddle shoes were a half size too small—Leslie would accept any hardship for the sake of the role. But dropping out meant drawing on empty reserves of energy. Finding an acceptable excuse for dropping out, finding the right time and words for telling Mr. Smith, finding the courage to say the words and deflect his reaction, having to tell Mom and her classmates and her teachers, having to tell Paula and Stitch, and the whispers and scoldings to follow, and worse, the clucks and warbles of sympathy—it was too much to bear, too much to think about, far more trouble than the drudgery of chank-chanking through her paces in the company renditions of “Shakin’ at the High School Hop,” dimly aware of the laughing boys andthe squinting girls and Mr. Smith in the middle distance, arms crossed. If she dropped out, then there was officially, formally,something wrong.

She could not disappear completely, but oddly she could come closer to disappearing onstage than if she refused to go on it.Mindy had decided to turn “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” into an ensemble number for all the Pink Ladies, “addressing theirshared insecurities as young women,” she explained, patting Lauren’s arm. They would sing and dance in unison, no solos. They’dgone to all that trouble just for her.

“Lauren can’t do anything by herself,” Brendan said. “Can’t sing by herself, can’t dance by herself, can’t sleep by herself . . .”

“You are so fucking stupid,” Deepa told him.

“Can’t we all get alloooonng?” Andy brayed at her. Rajiv’s disease was catching.

Leslie kept telling Lauren she could take over for her. “You know, if that works for you,” Leslie said. “Don’t think twiceabout it.” Like stealing from her would be doing her a favor, like Leslie’s greedy pity was a gift.

“Honestly, Lauren, Ted wouldn’t be so hard on you if you didn’t have such an attitude,” Claire said on the afternoon of opening night, during pizza break in Tedquarters. Lauren sat in the saggy center of one of the sad couches, a paper plate of pizza on her lap, Claire on one side of her and Stitch on the other. Lauren shifted positions constantly and winced as she did it. She didn’t try not to wince; perhaps she winced more than was strictly necessary. Her hip touched Claire’s hip, her knee touched Stitch’s knee, and she felt the space she took up in their imaginations. They wondered what was going on with her but wouldn’t ask, not directly. Or they knew and didn’t need to ask. She would remain in the room with them after she’d left it. Maybe they talked about her the way Paula talked about her rock stars.

Abby drew up a chair to the couch. She had a Pyrex full of salad. “Do you want some, Lauren?” she asked. The voice of a coolcloth on a feverish forehead. Abby crammed a lettuce leaf into her mouth, as if to demonstrate. Lauren shook her head andlifted her slice of pizza off the paper plate almost to her lips. Her stomach hitched forward, and she put the slice downagain. The cheese was congealing; the oil dotting the pepperoni slices was changing from translucent to a lurid orange. Thepaper plate was starting to sweat into her jeans.

“Here, Lauren, I can hold that for you,” Stitch said, and Lauren nodded. He took the plate and set it down on the table.

The object with pizza break, as with any other unit of time—a class, a rehearsal, the gap between class periods—was to waitit out. Not only make it to the end but stretch it out long enough to delay the transition to the next task, and perhaps throughthis delay she could eliminate a few of the other tasks that the day demanded of her, like when she would be so late to classthat it would be disruptive and quite frankly unfair to the teacher and other students to show up at all, like if she layon the bathroom floor with her face on the cool tile long enough it would be too late for Mom to bother kicking up much ofa fuss about whether or not Lauren came