Big Little Lies Read Free

protested Madeline. “And I was very careful and very quick! And I’m
forty
years old!”
    “Today,” said Chloe knowledgeably. “You’re forty years old today.”
    “Yes! Also, I made a quick call, I didn’t send a text! You have to take your eyes off the road to text. Texting while driving is illegal and naughty, and you must promise to never ever do it when you’re a teenager.”
    Her voice quivered at the thought of Chloe being a teenager and driving a car.
    “But you’re allowed to make a quick phone call?” checked Chloe.
    “No! That’s illegal too,” said Madeline.
    “So that means you broke the law,” said Chloe with satisfaction. “Like a
robber
.”
    Chloe was currently in love with the idea of robbers. She was definitely going to date bad boys one day. Bad boys on motorcycles.
    “Stick with the nice boys, Chloe!” said Madeline after a moment. “Like Daddy. Bad boys don’t bring you coffee in bed, I’ll tell you that for free.”
    “What are you babbling on about, woman?” sighed Chloe. She’d picked this phrase up from her father and imitated his weary toneperfectly. They’d made the mistake of laughing the first time she did it, so she’d kept it up, and said it just often enough, and with perfect timing, so that they couldn’t help but keep laughing.
    This time Madeline managed not to laugh. Chloe currently trod a very fine line between adorable and obnoxious. Madeline probably trod the same line herself.
    Madeline pulled up behind the little blue Mitsubishi at a red light. The young driver was
still
looking at her mobile phone. Madeline banged on her car horn. She saw the driver glance in her rearview mirror, while all her passengers craned around to look.
    “Put down your phone!” she yelled. She mimicked texting by jabbing her finger in her palm. “It’s illegal! It’s dangerous!”
    The girl stuck her finger up in the classic up-yours gesture.
    “Right!” Madeline pulled on her emergency brake and put on her hazard lights.
    “What are you doing?” said Chloe.
    Madeline undid her seat belt and threw open the car door.
    “But we’ve got to go to orientation!” said Chloe in a panic. “We’ll be late! Oh,
calamity
!”
    “Oh, calamity” was a line from a children’s book that they used to read to Fred when he was little. The whole family said it now. Even Madeline’s parents had picked it up, and some of Madeline’s friends. It was a very contagious phrase.
    “It’s all right,” said Madeline. “This will only take a second. I’m saving young lives.”
    She stalked up to the girl’s car on her new stilettos and banged on the window.
    The window slid down, and the driver metamorphosed from a shadowy silhouette into a real young girl with white skin, sparkly nose ring and badly applied, clumpy mascara. She looked up at Madeline with a mixture of aggression and fear. “What is your
problem
?” Her mobile phone was still held casually in her left hand.
    “Put down that phone! You could kill yourself and your friends!” Madeline used the exact same tone she used on Chloe when she was being extremely naughty. She reached in the car, grabbed the phone and tossed it to the openmouthed girl in the passenger seat. “OK? Just stop it!”
    She could hear their gales of laughter as she walked back to her SUV. She didn’t care. She felt pleasantly stimulated. A car pulled up behind hers. Madeline smiled, lifted her hand apologetically and hurried back to be in her car before the lights changed.
    Her ankle turned. One second it was doing what an ankle was meant to do, and the next it was flipping out at a sickeningly wrong angle. She fell heavily on one side. Oh, calamity.
    That was almost certainly the moment the story began.
    With the ungainly flip of an ankle.

3.
    J ane pulled up at a red light behind a big shiny SUV with its hazard lights blinking and watched a dark-haired woman hurry along the side of the road back to it. She wore a floaty, blue summer dress and