Born at Midnight Read Online Free PDF

money into her purse and started out. His footsteps dogged hers. She felt him behind her. Felt him lean in a little closer, his shoulder brushing against her back.
    “My name’s Derek, by the way.”
    Caught up in listening to his deep voice and feeling Derek behind her, she didn’t see Blond Boy jump out into the aisle. In mid-step motion, Kylie had one of two choices. Plow into Blondie or fall back into Derek. An easy decision. Derek’s hands caught her by the upper forearms. His fingers pressed against her bare skin where her sleeves ended.
    She looked up over her shoulder and their gazes met.
    He smiled. “You okay?”
    Amazing smile. Like Trey’s. Her heart did a little jump. God, she missed Trey.
    “Yeah.” She pulled away, but not before noting Derek’s warm touch. Why that seemed important she didn’t know, but the pale girl’s coldness had left an equally odd impression.
    They moved out of the bus and made their way into a large cabin-like structure. Right before Kylie entered the door, she heard a strange kind of roar. Like a lion. She paused to see if she heard it again, and Derek bumped into her. “We’d better move inside,” he whispered.
    Kylie’s stomach fluttered with fear. As she took that first step over the threshold, she somehow sensed her life would forever be changed.
    About fifty or sixty people filled the huge dining hall that had large picnic tables running parallel to each other, and the air smelled like pork-n-beans and grilled hamburgers. Some of the kids were sitting, others were standing.
    Something felt off, odd. It took her a minute to realize what it was. Silence. No one spoke. If this was the school’s lunch room, she probably wouldn’t be able to hear herself think. And that’s what everyone appeared to be doing right now. Thinking.
    A quick sweep of the crowd had Kylie once again feeling as if she didn’t belong here. There was a large amount of what Kylie’s mom would call “rebellion evidence.” Sure, Kylie rebelled. But she guessed she did her thing in less noticeable ways, not so much with her clothes and such, but in her surroundings. Like the time she and Sara had painted her room purple without permission. Her mom had freaked.
    These kids, they didn’t just paint their rooms, they wore their rebellion boldly. Like Miranda’s hair or that other kid on the bus who had nose rings and piercings. As Kylie’s gaze shifted around, she noticed a couple of kids had tattoos or shaved heads. And there were tons more goth-dressed kids. Black obviously had not gone out of style with troubled kids.
    Uneasiness started crawling on Kylie’s skin. Maybe she had hung out with Sara too long, but it seemed evident that she didn’t fit in. But unlike Sara, Kylie wasn’t so eager to become one with this crowd.
    Two months. Two months. She repeated the words like a litany in her head. In two months, she’d be out of here.
    Kylie followed Blond Boy to an empty table in the back. And when she got there, she realized all her bus companions had hung together. Not that she felt as if she belonged with them, she hadn’t even had eye contact with some of them, but face it, a known freak was better than an unknown one.
    Suddenly, Kylie started feeling people turn and look at her. Or were they looking at all of them? The new kids were on display. The crowd’s gazes became a collage of cold stares with different-colored eyes, but similar expressions and a lot of eyebrow twitching.
    Weirded out to the max, she looked at Derek, then Miranda and even Pale Girl and Blond Boy, and damn it if they were doing it, too. The eyebrow thing. It wasn’t cartoonish, and not as noticeable as Sara’s whole roll your eyes and pucker your brows kind of thing, but just a little twitch.
    Like Derek had done back at the convenience store.
    What was it with the eyebrows?
    Looking back into the crowd, fighting the urge to look down at her shoes, she forced herself to hold their gazes. Face it, she didn’t