Ellis argued, looking at Meredith’s shoulder-length pale blond hair and then her turquoise eyes. I’ve gone on a diet, and I want to do something with my hair. 'It isn’t them, it’s me, but I’m going to change, Meredith announced. Well, I never! There must be something wrong with the children in your school. . . .

You have no friends? Why not?ĭesperately in need of someone to confide in, Meredith said, I’ve only pretended that everything is fine at school. Ellis, who’d worked for the Bancrofts for less than a year, looked amazed. You have some baby fat there, that’s all. Look at me, she said, pointing an accusing finger at her reflection.

To prove it, she scrambled off the antique bed and marched over to the mirror above her dressing table. The door to her bedroom opened and Meredith hastily yanked the picture from her chest as the stout, sixty-year-old housekeeper came in to take her dinner tray away. Her gaze switched to Parker’s picture, and a dreamy smile drifted across her face as she clasped the newspaper clipping to what would have been her breasts if she had breasts, which she didn’t. Contact lenses would definitely help, she concluded. Her gaze shifted to her picture and she regretted again the streak of vanity that had caused her to take off her glasses for the photograph without them she had a tendency to squint-just like she was doing in that awful picture. It did not seem at all fair that the other girls who were fourteen, just a few small weeks older than she was, should look so wonderful while she looked like a flat-chested troll with braces. Dumpy! she pronounced with a pained grimace. Impartially, Meredith compared herself to the other girls in the elf costumes, wondering how they could manage to look leggy and curvy while she looked . . . Standing off to the left, supervising the proceedings, was a handsome young man of eighteen, whom the caption referred to as Parker Reynolds III, son of Mr. Beneath the caption was a large picture of the elves-five boys and five girls, including Meredith-who were handing out presents to the kids in the children’s ward. The caption read Children of Chicago socialites, dressed as elves, participate in charity Christmas pageant at Oakland Memorial Hospital, then it listed their names. With her scrapbook opened beside her on her canopied bed, Meredith Bancroft carefully cut out the picture from the Chicago Tribune.

Paradise novel judith mcnaught