Double Wedding Ring Read Online Free PDF

This person moved like a cloud. This person wasn’t skinny; she was slender and perfect.
    This couldn’t be Susan Foster. This person in the window was a...a...a girl. And he meant that only in the best possible way.
    Tag sat up. His mouth felt dry and his chest felt big and empty, the way he felt when he got the wind knocked out of him on the football field.
    â€œLet’s go over to your house,” he said.
    â€œNah. That’s a drag. Besides, I told you, Susie’ll be down soon and she’ll mess up everything. Let’s go into town, see who’s at the Dairie Dreme.”
    Almost a week passed before Tag found a way to get over to Crash’s house without Crash figuring out what was going on. He and Crash’d had plans to double-date with Debbie Compton and Alta Fay Wills that Friday night, but Tag backed out at the last minute. Alta Fay was knock-kneed, anyway, and he’d only agreed because Crash said Debbie wouldn’t go out with him alone the first time. Buddies came through for buddies.
    This time, though, Tag figured Crash was on his own.
    Almost every night after seeing her that first time, Tag had figured out a way to be sitting in his mama’s garden about the time Susan Foster went upstairs to practice. He watched her and thought about goddesses in the mythology junk he’d managed to tick off Old Lady Strawbridge by not reading. Some nights, Susie wore her hair loose, and it hung way past her shoulders, down her back, like a cloak of butter-colored dandelion fuzz. He wondered what it would be like to hold a fistful of that hair in his hand and blow it, watch it float away, feel the weightlessness of it.
    He knew he was getting mush-headed over a girl, because his grandpa had warned him this day would come. He’d never believed it before. Not that he hadn’t felt an itch that needed scratching real bad sometimes, but feeling that kind of itch was a whole lot different from this. Grandpa was right. This was mush-headed.
    The hardest part was acting like nothing was different during the day at school. Because the worst thing that could happen would be for Crash to find out that his best friend since the first grade had a crush on his kid sister. Crash clearly had not matured enough to recognize that his kid sister had been transformed into a goddess.
    So Tag kept away from her at school and resorted to spying on her at night from the protective darkness of his mama’s circle of azaleas, which would soon curl up and turn brown. Seemed like a waste to Tag, tending them and fretting over them and babying them all year long, like his mama did, for a few short weeks of color every spring. But for this short week, the delicate blossoms seemed somehow tied to Tag’s discovery of this delicate creature who now lived in the body of a one-time pesky kid. All of it—flowers, music, stars, girl with the cloud of butter-colored hair—were some form of magic, and he walked into the spell willingly, eagerly.
    He discovered Crash was right. After she danced, she came outside, onto the screened-in side porch, and curled up on the porch swing. She set the swing in motion with one bare toe, then set to work.
    Tag made up his mind he would talk to her, that he would make her realize that if she could overcome her years as pesky Susie that he, too, could be transformed. He hoped that didn’t mean he would have to start letting people call him Eugene Junior. But if it did, so be it.
    This night, with Crash safely at the movies with Debbie Compton, Tag made his move.
    She sat there, just the way she always did, only this time she was closer. He came around from the back of the house, knowing he didn’t have the guts to march right up the front walk with her looking at him, all curious. So he was at the back edge of the porch before she realized he was there.
    â€œYou scared me, Tag Hutchins. What are you up to, sneaking around like that?”
    He realized her