Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Read Free Page B

Stanley Neville, reproductive endocrinologist, offices on Spruce Street--in the same building, I noted ruefully, as the doctor who treated my recently diagnosed arthritis. "He can do an ultrasound of your ovaries."
    "Good times," I said, and gave him back the card. I thought of our lives, perfectly arranged, the three of us safe, cocooned from the world. My garden, after ten years of attention, was in full flower, with espaliered roses climbing the brick walls, hydrangeas with blue and violet blossoms as big as babies' heads. My house was just the way I'd always wanted it. Last month, seven years of searching had finally yielded the perfect green-and-gold antique grandfather clock that sat on top of the staircase and melodically bing-bonged the hours. Everything except for the tiny and no doubt fixable matter of Joy's grades was perfect.
    Peter touched my shoulder. "Whatever happens, whether this works out or not, our life is good just the way it is. I'm happy. You know that, don't you?"
    Beneath us, a parade of waiters and waitresses, in their bodysuits and bikinis, exited the kitchen bearing salad plates. I nodded. My eyelids were still burning, and there was a lump in my throat, but I wasn't about to start bawling in the middle of the Constitution Center. I could only imagine the gossip that would start if Shari got wind of it. "Okay," I said.
    "Candace," he said fondly. "Please don't look so worried."
    "I'm not worried," I lied. He handed me his plate, but for one of the rare times in recent memory, I wasn't hungry at all. So I set it back on the table and followed him down the stairs, past the windows and the moon hanging high in the sky, flooding the lawn with its silvery light.

T WO
    T odd plopped himself down on my bed and stared at me eagerly. "So what were you guys doing in there?" he asked.
    I pulled the bobby pins out of my hair, letting my curls tumble around my shoulders, smiling without saying a word.
    "We're your best friends," Todd pleaded. "James is our cousin. We can give you inside information. I think he's a hottie."
    Tamsin, in her sleeping bag on the floor, pursed her lips and noisily flipped the page of her book. Todd was still wearing his suit, but his sister had gotten out of her dress the minute my bedroom door was closed, and looked much happier in her Lord of the Rings night-shirt and her sweatpants, with her face scrubbed clean of the makeup her mother had made her wear and her freckles back in full force on her nose.
    "We didn't do anything," I lied as Frenchelle, my dog, hopped onto my bed and curled up like a Danish at my feet. The truth was, I'd danced with Todd and Tamsin's fifteen-year-old cousin, James, three times. Then James had offered me a sip of his drink, which had turned out to be a whiskey sour that his older brother had given him, and I'd said okay to that, too. Then he'd taken me into the darkened auditorium where they do the "Freedom Rising" multimedia presentation and pressed me against the carpeted wall, and we'd stood there in the darkness, him in his shirt and tie and me with his jacket draped over my shoulders, kissing like something out of a movie, or at least a music video. I'd worried a little when he started rubbing himself up and down against me, but when he put his hand on my breast, I just moved it away, and when he didn't put it back, I let myself relax. It was so dark in the auditorium that I could pretend he was anybody. At first I'd pretended that he was Dustin Tull the singer, and that had been good, and then I'd pretended that he was Duncan Brodkey, my crush from school, and that was even better, standing there in the darkness with James's thin lips pressing against mine so hard that I could feel the bumps of his teeth.
    You're so hot, he'd murmured in my ear, and that was the best thing of all, because I thought he believed it: that in that dress, for that night, it might actually have been true. Then one of James's hands had slid back to my chest, and he'd