Free The Unwelcomed Child by V. C. Andrews

said.
    “Well?” he said, turning to his sister. “Meet my imagination. Are you satisfied now?”
    “What are you doing spying on us?” she demanded, not happy about being wrong.
    “She wasn’t spying on us. Were you?” he asked. He smiled, liking the idea. “How many times have you done it?”
    I shook my head. “Never.”
    His sister looked as if she didn’t believe me. “Why haven’t we ever seen you at the lake?” she asked.
    “I haven’t been at the lake for a long time.”
    “How long?”
    “Years,” I said.
    “Why not, if you live so close?”
    I didn’t answer.
    “You were spying on us, and you have been many times,” she insisted.
    “No, really. I’m not lying.”
    “You’re not being very friendly, Claudine, cross-examining her like this. Please excuse my sister’s behavior. She doesn’t meet many people in the forest,” he said, smiling.
    I looked at her. Suddenly, she looked a little amused. Her smile started in her eyes and curled around her soft, full lips. I saw again how the resemblances between them were so clear.
    “What are you holding so dearly?” she asked me.
    “My drawing pad,” I said, but I didn’t show it to her.
    “You’re an artist. That’s it,” her brother said. “She came to the lake to be inspired, like Renoir’s famous Near the Lake painting. My mother has a print of that in her bedroom back home.”
    “Back home?”
    “We’re from Manhattan. This is only our summer home,” he said. “Our parents go back and forth. Dad’s an attorney, and Mom has her own decorating business.”
    “Don’t be so eager to tell her our life story, Mason.”
    He laughed.
    “Were you drawing us?” the girl asked. “Is that why you were spying, hiding in the bushes, and why you’re clinging so desperately to your pad?”
    “No,” I said, feeling the blush come into my face at the very thought.
    “What if she was? This is terrific. We don’t know anyone close to our age here. I’m Mason Spenser, by the way, and this is my impolite sister, Claudine.”
    “Yes, we’re twins,” Claudine said, like someone who was asked the same question all the time. “I’m older.”
    “By four minutes.”
    “Vive la différence,” she said.
    “Ha, ha,” Mason said.
    “You know what that means, Elle?” she asked.
    I shook my head.
    “It’s French for ‘long live the difference.’ People say it when they’re happy or proud of the difference,” she added, sounding a little like my grandmother when she was homeschooling me, but she turned her eyes on Mason. “I have more wisdom, being older.”
    “Ignore her, Elle. She likes to act superior.”
    “Only because I am,” Claudine followed. “So what else do you do around here, besides spy on your neighbors once every ten years or so?”
    “I wasn’t spying,” I insisted. “I went to the lake to draw ducks and heard you laughing and then saw you go swimming.”
    “Sounds plausible,” Mason said.
    “So what are you going to do now, run home and tell everyone you saw a naked boy and girl swimming?”
    “No. I wouldn’t do that. I can’t do that,” I added, but she didn’t pick up on my point.
    “You should come swimming with us,” Mason said.
    I must have looked quite shocked, because he immediately laughed.
    “Don’t worry. You can wear a bathing suit, and we’ll put ours on if you come,” he said.
    “Speak for yourself,” Claudine said.
    “I always do.”
    “People think that because we’re twins, what one of us believes the other does, too. Nothing could be further from the truth,” she told me. “If anything, I tell him what to do and think. I have better grades in school. Half the time, I have to do his homework.”
    “She likes to blow her own horn,” Mason said, and she punched him in the shoulder. He cried out and rocked as if the punch was strong enough to knock him over.
    I noticed how her towel slipped a bit, revealing more of her breasts. She saw where I was looking and smiled