Blood Waters 1 : The Boy From The Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

guys think that he was one insult away from jumping them and cutting their throats; but he also had a quote from Shakespeare to cover just about any occasion. The first time Mila saw him, she was waiting for friends by the rust-and-fiberglass bleachers of the dilapidated track, and he walked onto the crumbling surface, did two stretches, and lit out. She could still recall how her breath caught in her throat as she watched him fly over the track, the grace with which his long limbs floated over the ground, and the steely determination in his eye as he kept what seemed an impossible pace. Her friends had laughed at her when she asked them who he was. "Don't you know? That's Tre Davis! He's like, only the biggest track star Middlebrook has ever had."
     
    "I'm going to ask him out."
     
    Which she never did. Instead, she went to the track every day after school; and just watched him run for up to half an hour-that was all the time she had, because she needed to get to the pool to do her laps. Sometimes he said "hi," and on those occasions, she'd wave shyly.
     
    "Why are you here?" he asked her, one cold November day.
     
    "I like to watch you run," she said.
     
    "No, I mean, why are you here?" he repeated, grinning.
     
    "I like to watch you run," she said, smiling back.
     
    "You think you can catch me?"
     
    "Haven't I already?" she retorted.
     
    And he blinked in surprise, and then he smiled. That was when she knew: she'd won him over.
     
    They never dated. Her parents spent December making plans to move to Mexico, and in January, they boarded the plane. There simply wasn't enough time to progress from slightly-awkward-friendship to possibly-in-love in a month, especially since he was two years ahead of her. They'd exchanged emails before she left, but they never wrote each other. At first, it had simply been a matter of there not being anything to say. And then, it was just too awkward to break the silence.
     
    As time went by, the silence began to serve a different purpose: it allowed her to imagine that it was still possible to climb on a plane, fly back to Boston, and pick up where they'd left off. For two years, Mila had clung to this dream; to save her sanity, to mitigate her loneliness, to remember that there was a world where things worked and the water was safe to drink and people lived in houses that didn't blow over in a hurricane. But tonight, for the first time, Mila began to seriously consider that maybe her life in Boston was over. She began to think about a life with Tomas. Factually, of course, her life in Boston had ended when she boarded the plane to Mexico. But before Tomas, there had always remained a bit of hope: maybe Tre wouldn't have a girlfriend, maybe she might be able to find a job that miraculously paid well enough for her to get an apartment and a car and eat. Accepting that that part of her life was over was a lot easier now that she had someone to start a new chapter with.
     
    Of course, this was based on the premise that Tomas liked her as well. She was fairly certain that he did. The confessions he'd made to her were not the sort of things Gloria would appreciate hearing, or George would understand. But she couldn't know for sure, because if Tomas trusted her enough to tell her the secret fears of his heart, then that implied that she should trust him with her great secret: her plan to get herself back to the US. And that was something she just couldn't do, because making him her confidant would require him to lie to her parents.
     
    It wasn't hard for her to justify stealing from her parents-a dollar here, five there, padding the exchange rates to cover a ten. To her mind, they'd brought this upon themselves, moving her into the middle of nowhere. At least in Mexico City or some of the larger cities, she could have gotten a job and made her own money. It didn't feel right, but it did feel justified, a distinction which explained why she could now buy herself a plane ticket back to