Read Online A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones - Free Book Online Page A

it, I swear it. You are my brother. You’re the only brother I have and I’m so glad you’re here, Billy, because you’re good and nice and those girls are terrible.”
    He continued to sob into the pillow without a sound.
    “That boy did something very bad to me yesterday while you were at the doctor’s,” I said. “He made me take my clothes off and then he took out his thing that didn’t look like yours at all. At all.”
    His shoulders stopped shaking beneath my hand. He said something into the pillow I could not understand.
    “What?” I said, thrilled that he had deigned to say anything to me.
    “What did it look like?” he said sniffling, turning his head to the side, away from me.
    “Like a finger,” I said.
    “Like a finger?”
    “Yes. I was so scared, Billy, I jumped out of the tree house and ran home. That’s how come I was mad. I wanted you to stick up for me like you do with those stupid girls.”
    “It’s not fair,” he said and let out a long and terrible sigh. “It’s not fair that you can say things like that.”
    “I know,” I said, and began to cry.
    “You’re just scared you’re going to get into trouble with Daddy,” Billy said.
    “I’ll go tell him right now, before Mary-Ellen does. I’ll go tell him what I said so he can punish me.”
    “No, don’t,” Billy said. “She won’t probably say anything anyway. Just go away, all right? Just leave me alone.”
    I went to my room and curled up with Christmas Bear. Sobs ripped from my chest into his furry body and I thought I was going to choke.

    Everything seemed almost normalized by dinnertime. I had knocked on Billy’s door and asked him to come downstairs with me to eat. The five of us children and our two nannies were sitting at the round table in the kitchen eating in silence when our fathers came in looking like two horrific thunder-clouds.
    “Channe,” my father said evenly, “I heard something really terrible today.”
    Billy looked up from his plate, stopped chewing although his mouth was still full, and stared at me with horror in his big blue eyes. Candida got up and went to the stove. She always backed off when my father made such an entrance.
    I glanced at Mary-Ellen. She was very erect, very pleased with herself as she daintily sliced a piece of meat with a bent wrist.
    “Did Channe say something terrible to you today, Billy?” my father asked. “I’m not asking you what she said. But did she say something she’s not supposed to say?”
    Billy looked at me with those eyes and my own filled with tears, out of terror for myself, shame toward him, and hatred for Mary-Ellen. Billy looked quickly at Mary-Ellen, quickly at me, and then at the fathers standing by the doorway. He swallowed his unchewed food with a loud gulp and then said, “No,” as though he were thinking hard to remember. He made a completely flat, innocent face, a face he’d probably learned from watching Gillis charm the parents.
    “Channe didn’t say a terrible thing to me today. We didn’t have a fight since we came here from Paris,” he said.
    My father’s mouth twitched into a peculiar smile. He must have known that Billy was lying, but the fact that he was sticking up for me must have meant more to him than the fact that I’d broken the iron rule.
    “All right,” he said, beginning to turn away.
    “But Mary-Ellen came to me and told me she overheard—” Mr. Smith began in a peeved tone.
    “Mary-Ellen must’ve not heard right,” Billy said flatly.
    Mary-Ellen’s eyes flashed lightning bolts at us. She was shaking with humiliation and fury.
    “Little brats,” she hissed. “God, do I hate brats.”

    The Smith girls did not turn out badly at all but I still don’t like them. Close to twenty years have passed since that summer, and Cassandra is one of the most successful women I know. She makes over $300,000 a year as a stockbroker on Wall Street. She is not married. Mary-Ellen is still fat, much fatter, in fact, and