Summer Of Fear by Lois Duncan

of denim shorts and faded plaid shirt that I had worn all summer the year before.
    But he was not kind enough to try to hide his reason for coming.
    “Is Julia around?” he would ask, avoiding my eyes. And Julia always was.
    “You’re not mad, are you, Rae?” she asked me. “It wasn’t as though I could help it. These things do sometimes happen.”
    “You made it happen,” I said bitterly. “You knew Mike was mine.”
    “He wasn’t yours,” Julia said in a reasonable way. People don’t own other people. You told me yourself the first day I was here that you weren’t going steady. I didn’t break anything up. Mike says you were just good friends, that you’ve always been like a little sister to him.”
    “That’s not true.” I tried to speak with dignity. “He may say that now, but he wouldn’t have said it a month ago.”
    “Things change,” Julia said with a shrug.
    This could not be denied. Things did change, and the thing that seemed to have changed the most was Julia herself. When I think back now, it is hard for me to decide exactly whom to picture when I say the name “Julia.” There were three Julias—all different. There was the Julia who arrived with my parents that first day, hesitant and frightened, the haunted, tight-faced girl who stood uncertainly in the doorway in the shadow of my father, and held out her hand to me and said, “Hello.” Then there was the later Julia, relaxed and self-confident, the quaint touch of the hills gone from her speech. This was the Julia who plucked her eyebrows so that they no longer hung like bushes over her huge eyes and used my lip gloss to widen her mouth and make her thin lips fuller and warmer. This Julia laughed and chattered and used Albuquerque slang and went with Carolyn to the hair dressers’ and had her thick mane cut and styled into a long shag.
    “She’s copied Carolyn,” I remarked to Peter, who immediately bristled as though he had been personally insulted.
    “You’re jealous,” he said. “You’ve turned into a real cat since Mike threw you over.”
    “Threw me over!” True though they were, the words cut me to the core. I could not believe that my brother had said them. “What about you? Do you feel thrown over?”
    “I never went with Julia.”
    “But you would have if you could,” I said cruelly. “You fell for her like a ton of bricks, and you know it. And you’re not over it either.”
    “So?” Peter said. “That’s why I understand how Mike feels about her. No guy in his right mind could help falling for a girl like Julia, and she’s got a right to choose anybody she wants. It burns me up to hear you run her down just because she has something that you haven’t.”
    “What is it she has?” I asked, really wanting to know. “What are the qualities that have you and Mike so enchanted?”
    “I can’t explain it,” Peter said. “It’s just—something, A kind of feeling. A sort of—magic.” And he blushed, embarrassed at having used a word that sounded so romantic. “She’s just—special somehow.”
    This was the second Julia. There was a third Julia too. I would meet her later.
    So, by my own request, there was no birthday celebration for me. I looked at myself in the mirror that morning as I was brushing my teeth and told myself, “You’re sixteen now—sweet sixteen—the age when lovely things begin to happen.” But nothing lifted and sang within me. At the breakfast table there were some packages waiting for me containing a blouse and some earrings and two record albums. I opened them and said my thank you’s, but it was al rather flat and forced. I did not even feel like trying on the blouse, and instead of playing the albums I put them away.
    In the middle of the morning Carolyn came by on her way out to the pool to ask if Julia and I would like to go with her.
    “We can have lunch there,” she said. “It’s my treat because of your birthday.”
    “I don’t feel like it,” I said. “Thanks