Claim to Fame by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Author:Margaret Peterson Haddix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

I slumped in my chair. There were so many defenses I could throw back at her: I didn’t ask him to fall in love with me. It’s not my fault. Why do you assume all actresses are alike? Why do you always think the worst of me? Why is it your business, anyway? Can’t Toby take care of himself? I was getting madder with each imagined question. I settled for the cruelest dig I could think of.

“Are you jealous?” I taunted. “Mad that he’s in love with me and not you?”

Roz didn’t react the way I expected. She snorted, a sound that I might have taken as amusement, except that her jaw was still tight with anger, her eyes still squinted in indignation.

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Didn’t anyone tell you? Toby’s my cousin!”

I stared back at Roz.

“I didn’t know that,” I said weakly.

“Of course not,” Roz said, back to her full-scale fury. “You don’t know anything about him. Or me. You think you can just use him and cast him aside and it doesn’t matter.”

I opened my mouth to object to that—I hadn’t used Toby, or cast him aside—but there was no interrupting Roz. She was on a tear.

“You don’t know that when Toby was in seventh grade his stepfather beat him so badly that he was in a coma for ten days. He was trying to protect his mother. My aunt. He was trying to keep his stepfather from beating her. It didn’t work. He just beat her worse. And—Toby hasn’t been quite right ever since.”

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