A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty Read Online Free PDF Page A

real rueful. “It’s a tragedy for Earth, I tel you.”
    That almost made me smile. If he hadn’t been with me, I would have cracked and run for the bus by now. Roger had been my only friend at Calvary. He stil was, even though I was at Pearl River High now. It was like that year in Baptist exile had made me lose my place. The girl who’d been my best friend since kindergarten, Briony Hutchins, had come back from her summer in Nevada twenty pounds lighter, except in the boobs.
    She’d also straightened her hair and found poisonously beautiful cheekbones. She sat between Kel i Gutton and Barbie Macloud now, the two of them turned in toward her like she was the Tome of Gorgeous and they were the prettiest pair of bookends available, whispering about hair-tossing techniques and being way too good for me.
    “Keep studying,” he said. “I’l watch.”
    I shook my head. I put the book and Roger’s note in my backpack and then hesitated. I felt like my lungs were slowly fil ing up with beach sand, so I could only get oxygen in smal er and smal er sips. My palms leaked sweat. I gave in and rummaged down to the bottom until my hand found the two-pack of dol ar-store pregnancy tests tucked under my pink Trapper Keeper. I pul ed them out and waved the box at him. “I need to go pee.”
    “Love a duck,” he said. “Again? Real y?”
    “I need to,” I said, and he rol ed his eyes. He knew that the hawtest sex action I’d ever seen was when Dougie Breck and I touched tongues on a dare in sixth grade. “Whistle if you see Tyler’s truck?”
    “You’re such a ’tard,” he said, but that meant he would.
    I got one of the tests out and tucked it down into my bra. Lord knows my bra didn’t have much else in it to speak of, so it might as wel make itself useful. I peered through the foliage, but I didn’t see any of our neighbors out, and Big and Liza were likely stil in the den, where the windows pointed at the street. I shimmied down the back of the oak and skimmed over the fence to the woods behind our house as fast as I could. Big took me to Girl Scouts when I was little, so I knew to watch for poison oak and ivy when I left the trail. I found a good spot behind some bushes. I got the test out and said a quick thanks heavenward that Roger had beat me to the tree house, so I hadn’t changed into my jeans. The skirt made it so much easier.
    I squatted down over the stick, and even before I started peeing on it, I felt more air getting down into me, like my squeezed-shut insides were untwisting, even though I already knew the test would come out negative. That was kind of the point, to hold this solid piece of plastic proof that I wasn’t going to turn out like Liza and kil Big in the heart. I yanked my underpants back up and sat on a log with the stick beside me. A minute passed, two, three, and I sat watching while the pink line that told me the test was working properly formed, real bright and obvious. Beside it, the window that would get a pink line if I was pregnant stayed blank and white, the way it always did. It was perfect and clear, and the leaves and dirt and trees around me got fuzzy and out of focus, and I looked only at that pure white window.
    I don’t know how long I sat staring at the test stick with the morning air tasting real clean and sweet to me. I sat until I heard a quick, sharp whistle, and then my heart leaped up and started trying to jam itself into my throat, undoing every bit of good the pee had done. Roger’s whistle came again, but I stil took thirty seconds and dug a hole and dropped the test down it and covered it. Big didn’t come out to the woods hardly ever, but if she caught me with a preggo test, she’d crap herself. Then she’d murder me before she even paused to change her pants.
    I hightailed it back to the fence, popped quick as I could over it again, and scrambled up the tree.
    Roger said, “There.”
    I turned to crane out the window. Sure enough, Tyler’s filthy white