8 Sandpiper Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

flight, hug them all and bring her small gifts. Everyone else in their family might want to forget Dad, but not her.
    Standing by herself, Tanni stared into the fire. The flames were mesmerizing as they crackled and sizzled, thrusting orange-and-yellow tongues toward the night sky.
    One of the guys from the goth crowd separated from the group and walked in her direction. She didn’t want to look at him for fear that would encourage conversation. Still, she gave him a brief surreptitious glance but didn’t recognize him. That didn’t mean much, since Tanni tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible. She didn’t want or need anyone’s attention. If she could’ve found a way to get out of school altogether, she would gladly have taken it. All she wanted was to be left alone.
    The boy didn’t say anything. If he’d spoken a single word, she would’ve told him to go away.
    Instead he just stood there, silent as a rock.
    She glared at him.
    He ignored her.
    “Hey, Shaw, you gotta see this,” one of the other goths shouted.
    This was Shaw Wilson? Tanni had heard plenty about him. He wasn’t a student at Cedar Cove High anymore. Rumor had it that he’d never graduated. He hung around town and drove a blue Ford station wagon that everyone seemed to think was cool. The little Tanni knew about Shaw she liked.
    The whole school had taken sides when Anson Butler was accused of starting the fire at The Lighthouse Restaurant two years ago, when Tanni was a freshman. The arson had been the main topic of conversation for months.
    Shaw was Anson’s best friend; he’d defended him no matter what anyone said. Allison Cox had, too, since she was Anson’s girlfriend.
    Later, when it turned out that Anson was innocent and some crooked builder had been responsible for the fire, most of the kids said they’d believed Anson from the get-go. Yeah, right. The same people who were ready to hang Anson out to dry were now claiming to be his close personal friends.
    Other than Allison, the only person who’d been loyal from the very beginning was Shaw. He’d been the one real friend Anson had, and if no one else remembered that, Tanni did. She valued that kind of loyalty and hoped Anson appreciated everything Shaw had endured on his behalf.
    “You’re Shaw?” she asked, looking directly at him.
    “Yeah. You’re Tanni, right? Tanni Bliss.”
    She nodded. Trying not to be obvious, she stepped closer to Shaw.
    “I’ve seen you around,” he said. Like her, he kept his hands buried in his coat pockets.
    “I’ve seen you around” was another way of saying he’d noticed her. Despite everything, Tanni felt pleased. If she had to be noticed, she wanted it to be by someone like this.
    “Why aren’t you with your friends?” he asked.
    She shrugged rather than explain that she didn’t really have friends. Okay, she had a few sort-of friends, Kara for one, but she didn’t consider any of them good friends. Her old pals had drifted away after her father died in a motorcycle accident. Well, actually she’d pushed them out of her life because most of them seemed to think there was a prescribed amount of time to grieve and then she was supposed to snap out of it. It hadn’t even been a year. But apparently Tanni was taking longer than they deemed necessary.
    One so-called friend had said she should just “get over it.” The thing was, Tanni didn’t want to get over losing her father. She wanted to cling to every precious memory, remember every detail she could.
    “I saw your pencil drawing,” Shaw said, breaking into her thoughts. “You’re good.”
    “Thanks.” His words flustered her. The graveyard sketch had been a project her art teacher had praised. Without Tanni’s knowing it, Mrs. White had entered the sketch in a local competition. Then, at some art fair sponsored by the community, Tanni had been awarded top prize. She didn’t really care. The attention embarrassed her. Besides, her mother was a fabric artist who