at that warehouse to meet a boy she met online. She met him through her MySpace page.”
“That’s like saying she met him at church. Or at school. Literally everyone I know has a MySpace page. It doesn’t mean anything!”
“It means people you know nothing about can get in touch with you,” Michael said, rising from his crouch. “I want your page down tomorrow morning.”
Alison gaped at him. “You’re kidding!” How could someone like her father be so backward as to demand something so ridiculous? “It took me, like,
Michael’s expression didn’t change. “Do I look like I’m kidding? I want you to sign off with Cindy right now, go to bed, and take that page down tomorrow morning. And I don’t ever want to hear about you chatting online with anyone you don’t know, ever again. You and Cindy and the rest of your friends can use Windows Messenger or AOL or anything else. But not MySpace.”
“Come on, Dad! You’re overreacting,” Alison insisted, but her father’s expression remained implacable.
“You saw those pictures.”
“Like I’m going to go and get myself killed,” she said with all the sarcasm she could muster.
“Alison,” he said, his voice low and calm, but even more obdurate than before. “I’m telling you to do this because I’m your father and I know what’s important. One way or another, you’re going to do this, and I hope you’ll do it without complaining, because I’m telling you that what you’ve been doing is not good. Whether you believe me or not makes no difference — what you’ve been doing can be very dangerous, and it’s going to stop.”
Alison bit back the angry words that formed on her tongue and turned back to her monitor, where the cursor was blinking.
Cindy was still standing by.
And there was no use arguing. “Okay,” she sighed. “I’ll do it. I don’t want to, and I think you’re being ridiculous, but I’ll do it.”
Finally, Michael smiled. “You’re more than welcome to think I’m ridiculous. In fact, I hope I
Alison ignored him and sat quietly with her hands in her lap until he’d left her room and closed the door. Then she began typing.
YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT MY DAD JUST SAID.
While she waited for Cindy to respond, she realized that her MySpace page would only be down for a week.
Next Sunday, she’d be moving to Beverly Hills, and her mom wouldn’t care what she was doing on her computer. She’d have the page back up before going to bed next Sunday night.
She just wouldn’t tell her father….
13
TOO BIG.
That was the problem — Conrad Dunn’s house was just too big. The weird thing was, it hadn’t seemed this huge when she’d been here before, but now that she was moving in, everything was just way too enormous.
The house. The garden. Her bedroom. Even the closet was so large that all her underwear vanished into a single one of the twenty-four shallow glass-fronted drawers built into the left front corner, while in the right front corner a rack big enough to hold at least a hundred pairs of shoes had swallowed up her half-dozen pairs as if they weren’t even there.
And halfway back on the left, her clothes—
Alison took the last empty box, which had contained what seemed like way more underwear then she needed until she unpacked it into that single drawer, and added it to the pile in the hall, then went back into her room.
Ruffles, the little white terrier that had belonged to Conrad’s first wife, watched her every move, looking as lost on the enormous bed as she felt in the room itself.
As she came close, his little nub of a tail began wagging furiously, and when she picked him up to stroke his soft fur, he wiggled around until he could lick her face. “I’ll never get used to it,” she said. “And you’re so tiny, just going downstairs is a major hike. How do you stand it?”
He licked her chin.
“You’d have loved my room at home. It wasn’t even a quarter as big as this, but at least I felt like I fit into it.” She gazed at the king-size bed with its vast expanse of brocade spread and the array of at least a dozen designer pillows — every one of them perfectly placed — and wondered how she was going to cope with it. Even though all her stuff was now unpacked and put away, it still didn’t feel anything like her room should feel.
Instead, it felt like a hotel.
A huge, empty hotel. But it wasn’t a hotel, and never had been. Rather, it had been built by some old movie star who died before her mother had even been born. She still wasn’t sure how Conrad’s family had come to own it, let alone why they’d even wanted it.
Alison shivered and hugged Ruffles closer, carrying him to the window seat, where together they gazed out over the formal gardens and reflecting pool, at the far end of which was the swimming pool and cabana. A gardener was just finishing his day, picking up his tools and heading for the potting shed behind the garage. She sat then, with the dog, as the lights of Los Angeles began to shine and an orange sunset spread across the sky. The window seat, at least, felt the right size for her, and she suddenly knew that this was going to be her own personal space, the one small spot in the house that would be completely hers.
Getting up, she went to the closet, found the quilt her grandmother had made for her, brought it back and spread it out so it covered the needlepoint cushion on the seat. The fact that the homey, handmade quilt didn’t go at all with the decor of the rest of the room was just fine.
This nook was where she would make her home.
“Miss Alison?”
She started at the disembodied voice, then looked around for its source before remembering the intercom system her mother had told her about. She went to the small speaker on the wall by the door and pressed a white button. “Yes?”
“Dinner is served,” the faintly tinny voice said.
“Okay,” she replied. “Tell Mom I’ll be down in a minute.”
Now all she had to do was find her way to the dining room.
The empty moving boxes she had just put outside her door were already gone. She turned left and walked down the wide hallway lined with oil paintings hung on silk wallpaper, the sound of her footfalls swallowed by the Oriental runner that ran the full length of both the house’s wings.
At the top of the sweeping staircase that led down to the foyer, she gazed up at the domed ceiling that reminded her of a church, then started down toward the intricately inlaid marble floor, in the center of which stood a great round table with an enormous display of fresh flowers.
She paused, realizing she actually
“There she is,” Conrad said, rising from his seat at the head of the dining room table as she came in.
The table had a dozen chairs around it tonight — with a dozen more standing against the walls for nights when the table was fully extended — but only three places were set, flanking Conrad. As she slid silently into the chair opposite her mother, Alison decided she’d far rather be eating at the breakfast bar at her dad and Scott’s