Free Peyton Place by Grace Metalious Page B

was true that God always acted in one's best interests, you would receive whatever He wanted you to receive anyway. Prayer, thought Allison, was a dreadfully unfair, rather unsportsmanlike affair, with all the advantages on one side.
    When she had been younger, she had prayed and prayed that her father might be returned to her, but nothing had come of that. It had seemed unreasonable to her then that a loving God who could perform miracles any time the urge struck Him should want to see a little girl go without a father. Now that she was twelve, this still seemed unreasonable, and unfair as well.
    Allison looked up at the gray skies of October and wondered if it was possible that there was no God at all, just as there were no real fairy princesses, no magic elves.
    She roamed the streets of the town with an air of searching, and it left her with a hollow feeling of loss when she pulled herself up short and asked herself what she was looking for. She dreamed vague, half-formed dreams that were easily broken, and every day she waited impatiently for tomorrow.
    “I wish it would hurry and be June,” she told her mother. “Then I'd be ready to graduate from grade school.”
    “Don't wish time away, Allison,” said Constance. “It goes much too quickly as it is. In a little while, you'll look back on these times as the best years of your life.”
    But Allison did not believe her.
    “No, don't hurry time, Allison,” repeated Constance, and peered into the mirror on the living room wall, searching the corners of her eyes for small lines. “You'll be thirteen next month,” she said, and wondered, Can it be possible? Thirteen? So soon? Fourteen, actually. I'd almost forgotten. “We'll have a nice little party for you,” she said.
    “Oh, please, Mother,” protested Allison, “birthday parties are so childish!”
    A few days later Allison said, “Perhaps a party would be nice after all,” and Constance rolled her eyes heavenward, wondering if she had ever gone through this phase of never knowing what she wanted.
    If I did, she thought sourly, it's no wonder that my poor mother died young!
    To Allison, she said, “All right, dear. You go ahead and invite your little friends and I'll take care of everything else.”
    Allison almost screamed that she did not want a party after all, if her mother was going to refer to her classmates as “her little friends.” Her mother did not seem to realize that Allison would be thirteen in two more weeks, and on the verge of entering something described in magazine articles as “adolescence.” Allison pronounced this word, which she had read but never heard spoken, as “a-dole icents,” and to her it had all the mysterious connotations of hearing someone speak of “entering a nunnery.”
    Allison was not unaware of the physical changes in herself, nor did she fail to notice many of these same changes in others. Size, she had decided, was something that one was stuck with, no more alterable than the slant of one's cheekbones. Selena, she realized, had been different from younger girls for quite a while now, for she already wore a brassière all the time, while Allison was sure that she herself would have no need for such a garment for a long time. She locked herself in the bathroom and examined her figure critically. Her waist seemed slimmer, and she was definitely beginning to develop breasts in an unobtrusive way, but her legs were as long and skinny as ever.
    Like a spider, she thought resentfully, and hurriedly put on her bathrobe.
    Boys were different now, too, she had noticed. Rodney Harrington had a slight shadow above his upper lip and boasted that soon he would have to go to Clement's Barbershop every day to be shaved, just like his father. Allison shivered. She hated the idea of hair growing anywhere on her body. Selena already had hair under her arms which she shaved off once a month.
    “I get it over with all at once,” said Selena. “My period and my