Be More Chill Read Online Free PDF

Then: “You think I could?”
    “Sure…You could do whatever you want. I mean, you’re still going to that dance, right?”
    I hadn’t thought about the dance. I’d just been kind of talking about it the night before, in the abstract. Here in the light of day with real females present, the dance is more
terrifying. I have not had good experiences with dances. I wasn’t even good at those super-hippie modern dance “movement” classes I took in fifth grade. I couldn’t be a
spider right.
    “I was kinda…”
    Christine walks out of math. Maybe she was in there talking to Mr. Gretch, or one of her friends. She strides past me and I’m at eye level with her legs and calves and I think they might
just be the most beautiful calves I’ve ever seen, better than the Hot Girls’. Then I think about how when computer imaging guys are making special effects for movies, one of the hardest
things they have to do with CGI light is to get it to reflect off complex surfaces the right way, but if any of those CGI guys ever needed a model for how light should bounce off a girl’s
leg, pixel for pixel, this is it.
    And the two forces that battle for real estate in my brain—fear and lust—they reach an agreement and I turn to Michael.
    “Yeah, I’m going,” I nod.
    “Really?” He stands up.
    “Yeah. You still not going?”
    “That’s the plan.”
    “Then could you give me a ride at least? After school or something? After play rehearsal, actually, down to Halloween Adventure sometime. So I can buy a costume.”
    “You’re getting a costume and the whole deal? Who are you gonna bring to the dance?”
    “I guess nobody. But”—I watch Christine fade—“I have to get there somehow.”

I grab the seat next to Christine’s for our second
Midsummer
read-through. (A girl named Jessica gets Mr. Reyes’ Hot Pocket today, while we males construct a
haphazard circle of chairs.) I don’t know why; I’m just setting myself up for heartbreak, but I have fast reflexes and go with my instincts.
    My arm shifts as we begin the reading. It inches so close to Christine’s that static electricity pulls our armhairs together, my dark ones vs. her sunburned ones. If we both were to sweat,
the beads would join up and form a little Bering Strait for microbes to swim across from her skin to mine. All I have to do now is pull a phrase out of the air, a phrase among all the trivia and
trends and hot items in the world, that’ll make her start talking to me like she did yesterday. A phrase like,
Wow, I heard this thing about Tupac’s mom
or
I really like
Picasso over Matisse
, but that might not be it. When I think about it, probably only one tenth of one tenth of one seventeenth of things are it.
    “Hey, Christine, I heard this thing that human beings aren’t evolving anymore.”
    “Wheh?” She turns with a mix of annoyance and bafflement. But what could I expect? It’s a start.
    “Yeah, seriously…” I glance over at Mr. Reyes; he’s dozed off. “I heard about it on, uh, the Discovery Channel. We’re totally evolutionarily
stagnant.”
    Christine turns her pupils toward the sheet of paper on her lap. “‘Through the forest have I gone But Athenian found I none, On whose eyes I might approve…’”
    Right, I forgot. She has lines. When she finishes, she turns to me and says the most wonderful thing: “Actually, I heard that too.”
    “Really?” I almost forget to whisper.
    “Of course not, Jeremy.” Her lips curl beautifully. “Only you would know stuff like that. But it, uh, sounds interesting.”
    There’s conspicuous silence around the circle. Christine pokes me (with her pen, not her actual flesh): “Your line.”
    “
Mrph
…‘Fair love, you faint with wand’ring in the wood.…’”
    “Talk when rehearsal is over, okay?” Christine says.
    I smile so wide that I check myself, because I know wide smiles make me look bad. Christine flicks her pen back and forth between her teeth.
    I brush my