The Stranger Read Online Free

won’t go to concerts anymore. You won’t have to iron my beautiful medieval gown ever again. Somebody else—somebody named Anne-Louise—gets to dress up and sing like an angel and hear the applause from now on.
    “Speaking as the only man in this family, …” said Nicoletta’s father. He looked long and carefully at his hands, as if reading the backs instead of the palms. “I want to say that if some girl followed me home, walked after me for miles through the woods, and told me she had a crush on me, and then I walked her all the way back to the main road, I would certainly have been hoping for a kiss. And if instead of throwing her arms around me, the girl fled … well, Nickie, I would feel I’d done something incredibly stupid or had turned out to be repulsive close up. I’d want to change schools in the morning. I’d never want to have to face that girl again.”
    Wonderful, thought Nicoletta, wanting to weep. Now I’ll never see him again.
    She struggled with tears. In the other house, she could have wept alone. In this one, she had witnesses. The small-minded part of her tried to hold her parents responsible, and hate them instead of herself, for being a complete dummy and running from Jethro.
    She remembered the cold touch of his hands. I don’t care what Mother says, thought Nicoletta. Jethro’s hands were not normal. He scared me. There really was something strange about him. Something terribly wrong, something not quite of this world. I felt it through his skin. I can still feel it. Even though I have washed my hands, I can still feel it.
    “So,” said her father, his voice changing texture, becoming rich and teasing, “what’ll we do tonight, Nickie? Want me to play my fiddle?”
    Jamie got right into it. Nothing brought her more satisfaction than annoying her big sister. “Or we could slice up a turnip,” Jamie agreed. “That would be fun.”
    Right up until high school, Nicoletta had loved the Little House books. How unfair that she had to live now where the family could go to McDonald’s if they got hungry, check out a video if they got bored, and turn the thermostat up if they got chilled. A younger Nicoletta had prayed every night to fall through a time warp and arrive on the banks of Plum Creek with Mary and Laura. She wanted a covered wagon and a sod house and, of course, she wanted to meet Almanzo and marry him. In middle school, Nicoletta had decided to learn everything Laura had to learn; quilting, pie making, knitting, stomping on hay. Nicoletta’s mother, who hated needlework and bought frozen pies, could not stand it. “You live in the twentieth century and that’s that. Ma Ingalls,” Nicoletta’s mother said, “would have been thrilled to live like you. Warm in winter, snow never coming through the cracks, fresh fruit out of season.”
    When she was Jamie’s age, Nicoletta had made her fatal error. “Daddy never gets out his fiddle and sings songs for me when it’s snowing outside,” she’d said.
    Her father laughed for years. He was always making fiddle jokes.
    The second fatal error came shortly after, when Nicoletta tried eating raw sliced turnip because the Ingalls considered it a snack. Nicoletta’s mother had never in her life even bought a turnip because, she said, “Even the word gives me indigestion.”
    Only last Christmas, Nicoletta’s stocking had included a raw turnip and a paring knife. “Instead of potato chips,” said the card. “Love from Santa on the Prairie.” It was Jamie’s handwriting.
    Nicoletta’s Little House obsession ended with Madrigals: The singing, the companionship of a wonderful set of boys and girls from tenth to twelfth grade, the challenge of memorizing the difficult music filled Nicoletta the way her pioneer fantasies once had.
    She thought of her life as divided by these two: the Little House daydream years and the Madrigal reality years.
    And now Madrigals were over.
    She was not a Madrigal singer. She was just another