Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews

Author:V. C. Andrews [Andrews, V. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781476775852
Amazon: 0671729411
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2014-01-07T06:00:00+00:00

The Long Winter, and Spring, and Summer

Never had our mother spoken truer words when she said now we had a real window to look into the lives of others. That winter, the TV set took over our lives. Like others—invalids, sick people, old people—we ate, bathed, and dressed, so we could sit down to watch other people living fake lives.

During January, February, and most of March the attic was much too cold to enter. A frigid vapor hung in the air up there, eerily misting everything over, and it was scary, you bet. And miserable; even Chris had to admit that.

All of this made us very content to stay in the warmer bedroom, cuddled close together as we stared and stared and stared. The twins adored the TV so they never wanted to turn it off; even at night while we slept they wanted it on, knowing it would then wake them up in the mornings. Even the scramble of dots after the late-late shows was better to them than nothing at all. Cory, in particular, liked to wake up and see the little people behind the desks giving the news, talking about the weather; for certainly their voices welcomed him more cheerfully into another day than did the covered, dim windows.

The TV shaped us, molded us, taught us how to spell and pronounce difficult words. We learned how important it was to be clean, odorless, and never let wax accumulate on your kitchen floor; never let the wind muss your hair, and God forbid if you had dandruff! Then the entire world would hold you in scorn. In April I’d be thirteen, approaching the age of acne! Each day I examined my skin to see what horrors might pop up any moment. Really, we took commercials literally, believing in their value as a book of rules to see us safely through the dangers life held.

Each day that passed brought about changes in Chris and in me. Peculiar things were happening to our bodies. We grew hair where we hadn’t had hair before—funny looking, crispy, amber-colored hair, darker than what was on our heads. I didn’t like them, and I took the tweezers and plucked them out whenever they appeared, but they were like weeds: the more you plucked, the more came back. Chris found me one day with my arm upraised, seeking diligently to grasp one single, crinkly amber hair and ruthlessly yank it out.

“What the heck are you doing?” he shot out.

“I don’t want to have to shave under my arms and I don’t want to use that depilatory cream that Momma uses—it stinks!”

“You mean you’ve been pulling hairs from your body wherever they appear?”

“Sure I do. I like my body nice and neat—even if you don’t.”

“You’re fighting a losing battle,” he said with a wicked grin. “That hair is supposed to grow where it does—so leave it alone and stop thinking about looking childishly neat, and begin to think of that hair as sexy.”

Sexy? Big bosoms were sexy, not crinkly, wiry hair.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.