Avalon High Read Online Free PDF Page B

sky through his Ray-Bans. Whatever Mom hadsaid, he clearly wasn’t bothered by it. “Something about a broad, clear brow.”
    My stomach lurched. “‘His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d’?” I asked nervously.
    “Yeah,” Will said. “That’s it. What was that about?”
    “Nothing,” I said, vowing silently to kill my mom at a later date. “It’s a line from a poem she likes— The Lady of Shalott . Tennyson. She’s taking the year off from teaching to write a book on Elaine of Astolat. It’s making her a little crazier than usual.”
    “That must be cool,” Will said, his raft heading perilously close to Spider Rock, though he wasn’t, of course, aware of the potential spider-related danger he was in. “To have parents who talk about poetry and books and stuff.”
    “Oh, you have no idea,” I said, in the flattest voice I could.
    “How’s the rest of it go?” Will wanted to know.
    “The rest of what?”
    “The poem.”
    She was so very, very dead. “‘His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d,’” I quoted from memory. It’s not as if I hadn’t heard it seventy times this week alone. “‘On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;/From underneath his helmet flow’d/His coal-black curls as on he rode,/As he rode down to Camelot.’ It’s a very lame poem. She dies at the end, floating in a boat. Weren’t you supposed to meet some people at Dairy Queen after practice today?”
    Will glanced over at me, as the question had startledhim. I didn’t blame him. It had startled me, too. I have no idea where it had come from.
    Still. It needed to be asked.
    “I guess so,” Will said. “How’d you know about that?”
    “Because I heard Jennifer ask you about it when I saw you today in the hallway at school,” I said. Nancy, I knew, would freak out if she’d heard me say this. She’d be all, Oh my God! Don’t let on that you know about Jennifer! Because then he’ll know you went to the trouble to look her up, and then he’ll think you like him!
    But not mentioning Jennifer just didn’t seem very practical to me.
    Nancy wouldn’t have liked the next words that came out of my mouth, either.
    “She’s your girlfriend, right?” I asked, looking at him as he floated past.
    He didn’t look at me. He lifted his head up to take a sip of his lemonade, then dropped it back down to the air cushion on his raft.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Going on two years.”
    I opened my mouth to ask what seemed to me to be the next natural question—the one Nancy definitely would have forbidden me from asking. But before I could get a word out, Will lifted up his head, looked right at me, and said, “Don’t.”
    I blinked at him from behind the lenses of my sunglasses. “Don’t what?” I asked, because how was I to know—then—that he could read my mind?
    “Don’t ask me what I’m doing in your pool instead ofhers,” he said. “Because I honestly don’t know. Let’s talk about something else, okay?”
    I could hardly believe what was happening. What was this totally great-looking guy doing in my pool? Not to mention, reading my mind?
    It didn’t make any sense.
    But then, I’m not sure it made sense to him, either.
    So instead of asking him about it, I asked him something else that had been bothering me: just what, exactly, he’d been doing in the ravine that first day I’d seen him.
    “Oh,” Will said, sounding surprised I’d even ask. “I don’t know. I just end up there sometimes.”
    Which pretty much answered my question about what he was doing in my pool instead of his girlfriend’s: He was clearly mentally unstable.
    Except that—the being-in-my-pool-instead-of-Jennifer’s thing aside—he seemed totally normal. He was able to make perfectly lucid conversation. He asked me why we’d moved from St. Paul, and when I told him about the sabbatical, he said he knew what that was like—having to move around a lot, I mean. His dad, he said, was in the navy, and had been