Judith McNaught Read Free

tightened on the yellow pencil as she fought back the familiar feelings of frustration and angry despair that swamped her whenever she was expected to read something. She'd learned the word cat in first grade, but nobody ever wrote that word anywhere!
    Glowering at the incomprehensible words on the card, she wondered furiously why teachers taught kids
    to read dumb words like cat when nobody ever wrote cat anywhere except in stupid books for first graders.

    But the books weren't stupid, Julie reminded herself, and neither were the teachers. Other kids her age could probably have read this dumb card in a blink!
    She was the one who couldn't read a word on it, she was the one who was stupid.
    On the other hand, Julie told herself, she knew a whole lot about things that other kids knew nothing about, because she made a point of noticing things.
    And one of the things she'd noticed was that when people handed you something to fill out, they almost always expected you to write your name on it…
    With painstaking neatness, she printed J-u-l-i-e-S-m-i-t-h across the top half of the card, then she stopped, unable to fill out any more of the spaces.
    She felt herself getting angry again and rather than feeling bad about this silly piece of paper, she decided to think of something nice, like the feeling of wind
    on her face in springtime. She was conjuring a vision of herself stretched out beneath a big leafy tree,

    watching squirrels scampering in the branches overhead, when the receptionist's pleasant voice made her
    head snap up in guilty alarm.
    "Is something wrong with your pencil, Julie?"
    Julie dug the lead point against her jeans and snapped it off. "The lead's broken."
    "Here's another—"
    "My hand is sore today," she lied, lurching to her feet. "I don't feel like writing. And I have to go to the bathroom. Where is it?"
    "Right beside the elevators. Dr. Wilmer will be ready to see you pretty soon. Don't be gone too long."
    "I won't," Julie dutifully replied. After closing the office door behind her, she turned to look up at the name on it and carefully studied the first few letters so she'd be able to recognize this particular door when she came back. "P," she whispered aloud so she wouldn't forget, "S. Y." Satisfied, she headed down the long, carpeted hall, turned left at the end of it, and made a right by the water fountain, but when 6

    she finally came to the elevators, she discovered there were two doors there with words on them. She was almost positive these were the bathrooms because, among the bits of knowledge she'd carefully
    stored away was the fact that bathroom doors in big buildings usually had a different kind of handle than ordinary office doors. The problem was that neither of these doors said BOYS or GIRLS—two words she could recognize, nor did they have those nice stick figures of a man and woman that told people like
    her which bathroom to use. Very cautiously, Julie put her hand on one of the doors, eased it open a crack, and peeked inside. She backed up in a hurry when she spotted those funny-looking toilets on the wall because there were two other things she knew that she doubted other girls knew: Men used weird-looking toilets. And they went a little crazy if a girl opened the door while they were doing it. Julie opened the other door and trooped into the right bathroom.

    Conscious of time passing, she left the bathroom and hurriedly retraced her steps until she neared the part of the corridor where Dr. Wilmer's office should have been, then she began laboriously studying the names on the doors. Dr. Wilmer's name began with a P-S-Y. She spied a P-E-T on the next door, decided she'd remembered the letters wrong, and quickly shoved it open. An unfamiliar, gray-haired woman looked up from her typewriter. "Yes?"
    "Sorry, wrong room," Julie mumbled, flushing. "Do you know where Dr. Wilmer's office is?"
    "Dr. Wilmer?"
    "Yes, you know—Wilmer—it starts with a P-S-Y!"
    "P-S-Y… Oh, you must mean