Read Online Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later by Francine Pascal - Free Book Online Page A

Todd and Winston. As usual, Winston is being his goofy self, hopping up on the ladder, pulling erotic titles down from the shelves, and suggesting he read them to me.
    “That reminds me, I’m gonna need Thursday night…” he says to Todd in a fake confidential voice, “… alone.”
    “No good, man. I have that physics final Friday,” Todd says.
    Winston climbs down from the ladder and hands the books to Elizabeth, who starts to put them back on the shelf.
    “Come on. Wasn’t I nice to you a few weeks ago?” Winston gives Todd a kind of leering smile. “Remember, San Diego?”
    Elizabeth is busy with the books, her back to Winston and not really listening, but the reference to San Diego grabs my attention.
    “You probably didn’t even know that I got back Saturday night.” Looking at Elizabeth, he says, “I knocked, but you guys were very busy.”
    At that point, I like deflect the action, quickly handing a book to Elizabeth, who automatically takes it and turns to find a place for it on the shelf.
    “I had to crash at Bruce’s pad that night. And man, he wasn’t happy. You owe him one. Me, too.”
    “What are you talking—” Then it hits Todd what night Winston is referring to, and his face freezes.
    I catch his change of expression and know my own face is like registering the same shock. Winston, who is momentarily confused, sees Todd’s expression, then mine, and to my amazement, he seems to read it right immediately. All the while, Elizabeth is busy trying to squeeze a fat edition of Havelock Ellis back onto the shelf.
    It is only the strange silence that makes her turn around.
    “Huh? What’s up? Something wrong?”
    Strangely, it’s Winston, the insensitive clown, who so saves the moment for us by doing a really funny bit about mistaking his girlfriend for her dog. He like tells it so fabulously that Elizabeth practically falls off the ladder, and even Todd and I can’t help laughing despite the horror of the situation. Rescued just in time, but too late for their friendship.
    When someone knows a terrible secret about you, and you can’t in good conscience kill them, you get them out of your life. And that’s exactly what Todd does that very day. With some clichéd excuse about like needing his own space, Todd moves out and finds an apartment on the other side of town.
    Time passes and only a few people notice that the relationship between the best friends has dissolved. Of course, I’m one of them. Elizabeth like sort of notices and I hear her ask Todd a few times where Winston is, but he always has some reasonable-sounding excuse. She even mentions it to me a couple of times, but I say I don’t know anything.
    After awhile Winston’s absence becomes as natural as his presence had been and for us, the ex-lovers, the betrayers, senior year, like the longest year of our lives, crawls on toward the relief of graduation.

     

5
    New York
     
    Even on pain of losing the best opportunity she’d had, it still took two days for Elizabeth to work up the courage to come back to the theater. Her return was inauspicious, to say the least; dressed in black, she slipped in, keeping her back against the wall and taking advantage of the darkness. She found a seat on an aisle twenty rows back in the orchestra, well away from the clot of the hierarchy, i.e., producers, director, and, of course, the monster playwright.
    During that first week of rehearsals Elizabeth became an unnoticed fixture sitting quietly, silently actually, in the back. She spoke to no one.
    Without the warmth and bubble of an audience, the atmosphere in the darkened theater was grim. Its rows of empty seats were outlined only by the dim work lights from the stage, which gave no cheer. Nor was there any cheer from its only occupants: the unfriendly, clannish producers, the angry writer, or the kinglike director. Onstage, nervous actors bumping into new lines lent an unmistakable air of desperation.
    No theater magic here. And if