Cold Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page B

I had fistfuls of my black shirt in each hand as I stared at the accumulated junk that we had let pile up over the years.
    I had no idea what I expected to do. What I wanted was to blow a hole in the sky, explode a star, let the burning embers scorch me and everything they touched.
    I jumped when my mother’s hand landed on my shoulder again, warm and firm. She rested one palm against my cheek and handed me a chipped dish from a pile on a shelf. “Go on,” she said. “It works just as well.”
    I stared at her, not understanding, every vein throbbing with the need to let all that energy out. But that wasn’t what she meant. She picked up another—a cracked bowl from a set of green-striped dishes we used when I was really little—and smashed it against the dull gray cement floor.
    I jumped again as the sound of it echoed inside me, and then I let the dish in my hand drop. It crashed among the broken shards of the bowl, pale blue pieces as sharp as the noise.
    “Harder,” Mom said, and handed me a mug without a handle. FIRST NATIONAL SAVINGS BANK was printed neatly around it in bright red letters. I hurled it at the bare spot on the wall beside the dryer, and it shattered so violently, pieces of it bounced over the floor to land between our feet.
    In fifteen minutes we managed to break every old piece of dishware down there, until the floor was a jagged carpet of smashed pottery, When there was nothing left to throw, I sank to my knees and started to cry, the kind of huge, gulping, embarrassing sobs that make you blotchy and shaky. Mom settled down beside me, pulling me into her body until my face was pressed against her shoulder, and I had to wonder if she’d thrown things when Dad left, if she’d felt this alone and helpless.
    I felt better afterward. Not right, not good, but not tied up in so many emotions I couldn’t untangle them all.
    There was a lesson there, I realized later. I didn’t learn it, though.
    “What are you thinking about?”
    It’s almost eleven, and Danny and I are lying on his bed, legs tangled together under an old blanket. I had to wait till Mom was asleep to sneak back to the loft tonight. I didn’t stay long the first time, after I let Danny smoothe all the rough edges from running into Gabriel. This time Mom was in bed, the little TV on her dresser flickering softly in the dark. Robin was snoring in her room, one hand on Mr. Purrfect, her orange tiger cat. He blinked at me in the dark when I peeked through the crack in her door, yellow eyes cold and uninterested.
    I never know what to tell Danny when he asks questions like that. Your funeral? The fact that Becker still hasn’t come back to school because one of his legs doesn’t work right, and he’s flying on painkillers most of the time anyway? The way Ryan can barely look at me anymore? How much I really hate running into your mom in town, and how often she still looks like she just finished crying?
    “Wren?” Anxious, almost pleading. Needy. His fingers tighten around my arm.
    “French,” I whisper, letting my lips brush the cool smoothness of his cheek. “Madame Hobart’s been on the warpath lately. And I still fuck up pluperfect conjugations.”
    “I told you, you should’ve taken Spanish,” he says, and he almost sounds like the old Danny when he laughs. “I think Mr. Hill is stoned most of the time.”
    I can’t help but smile at that, because he’s right. Mr. Hill wears the same tie for days at a time, and blinks like a startled owl when anyone asks him a question. Danny was always talking about him, back when he was … well, still in school.
    And still alive, a voice in my head whispers. A nasty, accusing voice, even though I wasn’t the reason he died. That was his fault, his and Becker’s, for being assholes and taking Becker’s car out to the park way on the west edge of town after they’d been drinking. The roads there, a giant spiderweb through the walking trails and trees, are narrow and twisty