Read Debutante Hill for Free Online Page A

dressed and put on lipstick, her purpose was beginning to falter a little. It was fairly easy to be noble at night, in a moment of sentiment, but in the bright light of day, the thought of the morning ahead of her was a little more difficult.
    Dodie did not help matters.
    â€œYou’re crazy,” she said at breakfast, helping herself to a handful of toast. “You should never have let Daddy talk you into something like this. I’m darned if anybody’s going to talk me out of being a debutante next year. I’m going to be the debutantiest one of them all.”
    â€œI’ll bet!” Lynn said irritably. “Just you wait Daddy will have something to say about it when the time comes.”
    â€œHe can say what he wants,” Dodie declared, “and it won’t make any difference. I’ll kick and scream and throw things at the walls. Daddy can’t hold out against something like that and he wouldn’t have held out against you either, if you had stood your ground. You just give in too easily.”
    Lynn thought of her father the night before, standing in the doorway. He had been ready to give in then. He had
said, “If it means so much to you, Lynn—” All she would have had to reply was, “It does, Daddy. It means everything.”
    But she had not said it. Now she wished she had—but now it was too late. Her decision was made, and she was stuck with it.
    Lynn swallowed her orange juice and blotted her mouth carefully with a napkin, so as not to blur her lipstick. “Ready to go?” she asked her sister.
    Dodie glanced at her watch. “You go ahead. I told Janie I’d stop by her house and walk over with her.”
    â€œJanie!” Lynn exclaimed with an impatience not natural to her. “Janie, Janie, Janie! You two are inseparable. What do you see in her, anyway? I mean, she may be a nice enough girl, but you and she can’t have much in common. You’re a straight A student and I hear she flunked both her language courses last year.”
    â€œShe won’t this year,” Dodie said. “I’m going to tutor her.”
    Lynn shook her head in bewilderment. Dodie never ceased to surprise her. Everything she did seemed out of character. It was difficult to imagine sharp-tongued Dodie sitting down patiently to tutor somebody in Latin. Sometimes Lynn felt that she did not understand her younger sister at all.
    The walk to school was a long and lonely one. The year before, she had always walked with Ernie and Nancy, but now Ernie was away and, somehow, she had missed Nancy. Evidently her friend had left too late or too early for her to intercept her on the way. She caught sight of some of the other girls from the Hill, walking ahead of her, but she was in no hurry to call out to them.

    They will have received their deb invitations, Lynn thought bitterly, and that’s all they will want to talk about.
    She sighed and walked on alone, arriving at school just as the first bell rang.
    It was not until lunch time that she had a chance to draw Nancy aside and confront her with the bad news.
    â€œI’m not going to be one of the debutantes this year.”
    â€œYou’re not!” Nancy stared at her in amazement. “Lynn Chambers, what on earth are you talking about? Why, you were telling me on the phone just yesterday afternoon that you received your invitation.”
    â€œI know I did,” Lynn said. “But that was before I told my parents. Daddy doesn’t want me to make a debut.”
    â€œHe doesn’t!” Nancy’s disbelief was slowly changing to horror. “You mean, you can’t be part of it all? How perfectly horrid! Why would he say a thing like that? How can he be so mean?”
    â€œHe’s not mean,” Lynn said shortly, surprising herself at her immediate loyal defense of her father. “He doesn’t approve of debutantes, so he doesn’t want me to be one.