Read The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel for Free Online

that is – after that, everything changed. Or maybe I just didn’t get the message before then. I don’t know. I must have misunderstood something along the way. I often do that, misread people. I’m really not very good at picking up on the finer nuances of interpersonal exchanges. Everybody else in my family seems to be able to do that just fine. They’re all confident and functional and socially at ease, and all that.
    Julia has always been fiercely protective of me, from the very start, really. There are more pictures of her holding me when I was a baby than there are of my mother. Actually, thinking about it, there are barely any photographs in our family album in which we aren’t together: usually I’m holding her hand and we’re dressed in matching outfits. Or at least that was the idea – I was a bit of a copy-cat. I always wanted to wear exactly what Julia was wearing. But my outfits kind of ended up being not just pale but comic and weird-looking imitations of hers – I just didn’t have Julia’s sense of style, and of course I didn’t have the aura and personality that one needs to get away with more risky choices, either. Even on those days when Julia was super-nice to me and chose every single item of my outfit, and put together a really beautiful combination that would have looked amazing on anyone, it didn’t work. The other day, I flipped through one of our old photo albums again, and almost every picture of me made me cringe.
    When Julia went through a brief Goth phase – I think she was about fourteen or fifteen – I also insisted on wearing only black and on painting my eyes dark with kohl, trying never to smile and all that. But while Julia looked like a beautiful Victorian vampire in her velvet capes and long lace dresses, I just looked like a soot-covered chimney sweep. When Julia and her friends hung out in someone’s house to smoke and read world-weary poetry and listen to The Cure, and when they went to gigs, I trailed along. I don’t know how the others saw me – they probably thought of me as a peculiar little mascot or something like that. I’m pretty sure I did real damage to the group’s otherwise impeccable cool-factor.
    I really don’t know whether Julia thought of me that way, back then. I hope not. She never said so. But who knows? Maybe she was just being nice, and it cost her a superhuman effort not to lose her temper around me. Or maybe she just felt sorry for me. I don’t know how she did it, putting up with me like that, day after day, for years on end. How annoying must it be when someone copies everything pretty you do, and makes it all look totally ridiculous in the process, like a caricature or something? Not that I would know, of course – nobody would ever want to copy my style.
    Back then, Julia was always lovely and supportive and nice to me – really, I can’t remember a single occasion when I didn’t feel safe and protected in her company. She was simply amazing. She was the only person I ever felt at ease with, like I could just be myself and it was OK, you know? She still is, although she doesn’t speak to me anymore, of course.
    In any case, none of her friends ever dared to question why I was always with her – she could be pretty scary and forbidding when she felt that people were criticizing her decisions. When I was with Julia nobody ever had the nerve to treat me with anything but respect. And being with her meant that I could be in a group of people who would normally not even have looked at me – her friends were always by far the coolest types around. But without Julia by my side, I was nothing – the weird, sickly freak-sister, whom no one would ever speak to.
    I’ve always been frail – I have asthma and was born with a little hole in my heart, and other things I won’t bore you with. I needed a lot of medical attention when I was little. For some reason, it was always Julia and not my mother – although, ironically, she’s