The Ugly Sister Read Online Free Page B

of Cleo’s people, the ones who do the housekeeping, must spend all day tidying and polishing. It’s
intimidating. Abi finds herself wondering all over again if this is such a good idea. She and Cleo hardly know each other. Caroline is long gone. Abi isn’t sure any longer what she was hoping to achieve by spending the next two months in a house of near strangers. Part of her, she knows, has been fantasizing that the sisters can somehow recapture some ofwhat they once had. That Cleo’s mask will fall and there will be the old Caroline, funny and clumsy and, above all, Abi’s friend. But, actually, now that she’s here, she really isn’t sure Caroline could be alive and well living in a house like this.
    When Caroline and Abigail were fourteen and eleven they took a vow that they would be each other’s best friend forever. They were too squeamish to swear in blood so they used tomato ketchup instead, smearing it on their thumbs and rubbing them together, laughing at the gory mess they’d created. Abigail felt safe and secure knowing her big sister had her back, and about a week later, when a boy in Caroline’s class who Abigail had liked for ages asked her if she wanted to meet him in town on Saturday morning, Caroline had proved her worth as protector.
    Gary Parsons had a haircut like Ian McCulloch from Echo & the Bunnymen and Abigail had often seen him smoking in the alleyway beside the school and thought he looked very big and very clever. She’d taken to hanging around outside Caroline’s classroom at break time (cue much shouting of ‘Why are you hanging around me all the time? It’s embarrassing’) in the hopes of reaching the dizzy heights of him one day saying ‘all right?’ and her being able to say ‘yeah, you?’ in a cool and insouciant way. She’d been practising. Anyway, to cut a long story short, they had all righted and yeah, you’d? successfully acouple of times and then one day they exchanged a couple of other scintillating words and then Gary had dropped his bombshell of asking Abigail to meet him upstairs at McDonald’s in town at eleven o’clock that Saturday.
    It was her first date. She was nearly faint with excitement. She couldn’t wait to tell Caroline. Caroline got asked on dates all the time. Sometimes she went, sometimes she didn’t. She didn’t seem that bothered. But she’d mirrored Abigail’s excitement when Abigail blurted out her news, she’d indulged her in her trauma about what to wear and how to do her hair. She’d coached her in the art of captivating conversation based on her observations in class of what Gary’s interests might be.
    Then, on the Thursday, just as Abigail’s excitement peaked, with the watershed that was the coming weekend – the transitional step between her childhood and the fabulous, glamorous life of an adult – set firmly in her sights, Caroline had come home from school, taken Abigail up to her tiny attic bedroom and told her that Gary was not the boy Abigail thought he was. He had betrayed her already without ever really giving their love a chance.
    Caroline had found herself sitting next to him in double Biology and somewhere along the life cycle of the frog, between amplexus and the metamorphosis, he had admitted to her that it was she, Caroline, that he was really interested in and not Abigail. In fact,Caroline had said in a half whisper to emphasize how awful she felt for having to tell Abigail this, he had said that he had only got friendly with Abigail in the first place to get closer to Caroline. Then he’d asked Caroline to meet him in McDonald’s and to tell Abigail not to bother, Caroline told Abigail, a look of horror mixed with concern clouding her face. Could she believe that? The cheek of it. Caroline had turned him down, obviously, telling him exactly what she thought of him. He wasn’t good enough for either of them she’d said, so loudly that the teacher had asked her what was going on.
    Abigail had cried from the