Dreaming Anastasia Read Online Free PDF Page A

“You know, Swan Lake? I’m in pointe class this year, and we have to go to at least one ballet each semester so that we can…”
    I dry up. There’s no point in babbling if he’s only going to stare. Even if maybe Tess was right and he is sort of hot. But then I remember Adam and remind myself that guys who can’t carry on conversations usually try to express themselves in other ways that eventually get boring and repetitious.
    â€œI’m Anne,” I tell him. I have no idea why I’m telling him, except that it’s been an odd couple of days with the dreams and all, and maybe my defense system isn’t what it used to be. “Anne Michaelson. And you are—?” I flash him a smile and hope it will finally encourage him.
    Amazingly, it does.
    â€œEthan,” he says. “Ethan Kozninsky.” He smiles back and opens his mouth as if to start another sentence, except the warning bell bleats and cuts him off just as things are finally starting to get somewhere.
    I bend down to retrieve my fallen backpack. But Ethan bends down too, and we sort of smack into each other again. And his arm brushes—hard—against mine as we both grab the backpack at the same time.
    We both jolt backward. A rush of something that feels like energy courses through my arm, flashes upward until I feel it in my face like a fever. Ethan holds my gaze with those blue eyes. And then he smiles.
    â€œSome static,” he says mildly.
    â€œStatic?” I grab the pack from him. Pain still spikes through my arm so intensely that for a few seconds, it’s hard to collect my thoughts. “That was more than static. I don’t know what it was, but it was way more—”
    The bell rings again. A few feet in front of us, Mrs. Spears’s door is still open. If I sneak in now, I can escape getting another tardy.
    â€œAnne,” Ethan says. And then he pauses.
    â€œI’ve gotta go,” I tell him. I make a dash for the room. But something makes me stop just as I’ve got one foot in the door. I turn around.
    And realize that once again, Mr. Stealthy is gone.

Tuesday, 11:00 am
    Ethan
    Dude.” A girl with a ring through her eyebrow and a small stud right at the top of her lip steps out of the bathroom as I head down the hallway, now mostly empty. “Can I bum one of those? I’m all out.”
    It’s only then that I look down and realize I’ve yanked the pack of Marlboros out of my pocket.
    â€œUh, sure,” I tell her.
    Clearly, I haven’t grown any more articulate in the last thirty seconds.
    Or any brighter, as she continues to stand there until it occurs to me that I need to pull a cigarette or two out of the pack and hand them over since that’s what I’ve offered.
    â€œThanks, dude,” she says, and then I hustle myself out of the building before I make an even bigger mess of things than I already have.
    I’m still dying for a cigarette, but as I’ve finally remembered that I’m supposed to be an eighteen-year-old senior standing on the sidewalk outside his public high school, that’s pretty much out of the question. So is the dying, for that matter, but that’s quite another story—one to add to things I’ll eventually impart to Anne. Once, that is, I figure out a way to stop actually acting like the tongue-tied schoolboy I seem to be.
    So I have to wait until I’m well out of sight and headed down the street to where I’ve parked my car before I fish the Marlboros back out of my jacket pocket, light one up, and take a few deep drags.
    I realize that I could smoke the entire pack and still be what Anne would call me if she knew the word.
    Zalupa . As in, Russian for dickhead. As in, the guy who waits and searches for decades for this specific girl and then when he finds her, stands there like an idiot and just stares. As in, the guy who is me.
    Ethan Kozninsky. Zalupa.
    Maybe the words froze