Colorblind Read Online Free PDF Page A

food, favorite color. I don’t know. Anything.”
    “Okay. Let me think.” She furrowed her eyebrows, staring hard at me for a moment and then, straight-faced, declared, “Your hair’s in like a super messy bun right now, but it looks amazing. How do you do that? Seriously. I look like an ogre if I don’t spend half an hour in front of the mirror.”
    I laughed at her and turned my nose up. “That secret stays with me.”
    “No! Please? I’m jealous.”
    I felt a flush creeping up my cheeks and saw her grin. She knew she was making me nervous. That only made me more nervous. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
    “No problem, Harper,” she said. That sly, amused look from the day I met her was back. My gut told me the way she was looking at me was a good thing, even if my head disagreed. “Okay.” She cleared her throat and wrapped the remnants of her cone up into a napkin. “A real question: where do you work?”
    I forced a laugh. “God. It’s this fast food place called ‘Daily Fries’. It sucks. We serve clogged arteries on buns, pretty much. I mean, I’m all for high-calorie, tasty food, but the stuff we make is toxic.”
    “You hate your job?”
    “Loathe it, ugh.” I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. “Who likes working in the fast food industry?”
    “Why don’t you quit?” She asked the question like she genuinely didn’t know the answer. I thought it was obvious.
    “Because I need the money. My dad wants me to start saving up for when I go off to college. I can’t quit.”
    “Well, you could get a job you like,” she suggested.
    “It’s not that simple.”
    “It could be. You won’t know unless you try.”
    I laughed and joked, “Can you sew that inspirational quote onto a pillow for me so I can look at it every day before I wake up?”
    She pressed her lips together like she was trying not to laugh and then tossed her balled up napkin at me with a pouty, “Don’t make fun of me.”
    I grinned a grin I couldn’t make go away, and for another moment, I forgot what I knew about Chloe’s fate. That was something no one had ever managed before. It’d taken less than a couple of hours, but just like that, I was officially invested.
    I should’ve aborted my idiotic non-plan right then and there, gone home, and saved myself the heartache. But something kept my brain from working properly and kept me there with her outside the theater.
    Maybe it was the same omniscient power that had given Chloe her number. Maybe, just like there wasn’t a way to stop the numbers, there also wasn’t a way for me to come to my senses and leave Chloe alone.
    At least, if there was … I’d spend months struggling to find it.
     
    * * *
     
    I’d always imagined that my first real crush would be like it was in the old movies my dad and I watched together. Love was Robert Walker as soldier Joe Allen running after Judy Garland’s bus, calling out to her to meet him under a clock tower, or it was Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer swaying together in the moonlight, or Claudette Colbert tearfully telling Clark Gable that she couldn’t live without him. It was foreign: unattainable. I mean, I couldn’t really even let myself get close enough to a girl to start to like her as a person , let alone as a friend or anything more.
    Chloe shattered that image with a smile and a laugh, and after just a day together, I was wondering why I’d chosen now to let my guard down. Maybe a part of me really liked the attention: the way she was obvious about wanting and enjoying my company. Probably a part of me really liked her , and liked the way she so clearly liked me back. Liked me first even, because it was fairly obvious after just a few conversations that she hadn’t been so pushy about hanging out with me without a reason. When I watched romances or read stories, I inserted myself into the main character’s dilemma. I was the piner: the one loving someone and waiting for them to love me back.
    But this was real