Free Bittersweet Dreams by V.C. Andrews

home whenever she and my father discussed my school situation and the special way I was being treated by my teachers and the school administration was, “She won’t grow up normal.”
    I couldn’t help but correct her. “You mean, I won’t grow up to be normal, Julie. Or you could say I won’t grow up normally . Adverbs and nouns,” I added, “have different destinies in sentences.”
    â€œWhat? What did she say? And when are you going to make her call me Mother? I’m so embarrassed when she calls me Julie in front of other women, and it’s a very bad influence on Allison. She’s starting to call me Julie, too. I had to slap her this morning.”
    Allison was nearly eleven at that time, and I was almost fourteen. I wasn’t just reading Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, which was Greek to my classmates, but I also read science books like Lives of a Cell or The Evolution of Amphibians and graduate-level sociological and psychological essays and discussions. I was fascinated by everything in my textbooks and never at a loss for a new question, even if it was about something my teachers would not be presenting for months, maybe years. I was that far ahead in my reading and my thinking.
    Despite what I had told Julie, I knew in my heart that the real truth was that my teachers shoved me out of the classroom to escape from me, not to make things better for me or the rest of the class. They weren’t programmed to work as hard as they would have to work if I remained in the room. Calling what I was doing independent study was just a fancy way of saying, “Get her out of my hair.”
    They were all probably happy that I had been taken completely out of their school, I thought now as we drove on to Spindrift. There was no longer a possibility of having me as a student, of being challenged and made to look inadequate in front of the other students. Some of them were probably saying they had suspected that someday I might do something as outrageous as what I had done. They might even cite some notorious people who were highly intelligent but had done bad things, just so they could justify their antagonism for someone they had to admit was mentally advanced, someone they should normally cherish and nurture.
    â€œShe’ll probably end up working for some clandestine organization like an even more secret branch of the CIA,” one of them would say, and most of the them would nod.
    As we drew closer to Piñon Pine Grove, Julie primped her hair and checked her makeup. She never could understand why I didn’t care more about my appearance. She actually encouraged me to wear lipstick and paint my toenails and fingernails when I was eleven. Many of the girls in my class were doing just that.
    One of the happiest but soon to be frustrating days she spent with me was instructing me in how to put on makeup at her vanity table. I was there because I didn’t want to disappoint my father. Allison stood off to the side, watching jealously. I would have gladly given her my seat and let her take my place. My mind kept drifting back to the calculus problem I was attacking in the twelfth-grade math book I was using, so I was inattentive. I was sloppy about putting on fingernail polish.
    â€œWhenever you have no interest in something, you rush it and mess it up,” Julie complained, moaning as if I were ruining one of her precious works of art or something. “Maybe some of your grade-school teachers were right. You have ADD.”
    â€œNo. They were wrong. They’ve admitted that. They’re not the best judges of the problem, despite being teachers.”
    â€œHow could you say that? They were your teachers.”
    â€œYou need to be a doctor to diagnose it properly, and many teachers use it as a convenient excuse for why students don’t pay attention to their boring presentations of material. Don’t you recall having teachers like that? My