Fatality Read Online Free PDF

be friends. Every few weeks you’d identify a different girl as your best friend, but in actual fact, it was only a girl you didn’t happen to be scornful of at the moment Kids moved through school like fish, flashing through the halls, turning into piranhas to attack one kid, into minnows to follow another.
    Then came freshman year in high school. Kids who had treated Rose like a toxic waste site were nice again. Sophomore year was positively civilized. Rose knew herself to be popular, or at least cheerfully tolerated.
    Which itself was a problem. Friendship was based on telling everything. She had to face her friends and tell them nothing. Shocked, they would say, You stole a police car? Laughing nervously, they would demand, You tell us every detail! They’d be fascinated. But Rose would have to be silent with them, and unlike parents and police and lawyers and probably the judge, her classmates would not let it go. Silence would be an insult that friendship could not withstand.
    Eighty students clambered out of one bus and Rose Lymond prepared for the onslaught of questions.
    The week after her visit to the Loffts, every acquaintance had lined up, demanding details. Everybody wanted to know if the fabulous estate was really fabulous and the great adventure really something to be jealous of. If Rose had been a clever liar, she would have come up with some great adventure. But all she could say was, Nothing happened.
    By the end of that terrible week, the murder and her possible connection to it had been made known. Now the demands for information were ceaseless, her classmates hoping Rose would be a pivotal witness in a glamorous trial. How disgusted they were with her responses, how unwilling to accept her boring statement. Nothing happened.
    Today, Rose reached her locker before it dawned on her that nobody knew about yesterday. Just because it had shattered her life didn’t mean it had been on TV or radio or in the papers. Just because police lights had swirled in her front yard didn’t mean that neighbors had been home, or noticed, or gossiped. Perhaps the car theft would never be made public, since she was a juvenile and had privacy rights not accorded to adults.
    “Rose!” bellowed Ming. Ming was Chinese, adopted in infancy, and had the smallest bones of anybody in school, but the largest voice. “You didn’t answer my e-mail yesterday!” yelled Ming. “You weren’t sick, were you? You’re never sick.”
    In her lifetime, Rose had not failed to check her messages. Yesterday had been traumatic.
    Emma said, “You know perfectly well her family went somewhere cool and she was too busy for us. We never go anywhere. I want to be born again in your family, Rose.”
    “Did you finish your botany project, Rose?” asked Caitlin. “I had to ask for an extension. I’m dead, because even with an extension, I’m not going to have enough to turn in.”
    She, Rose, academic from her pencil tip to her laptop, had forgotten her homework. She felt unhinged, like a door that no longer closes.
    The girls hurtled into school together, unaware that Rose was not participating in the talk.
    Richard caught up to them. Alex. Keith. And far down the hall, Chrissie was shouldering two huge bags, one for books, one for sports equipment.
    Rose would have written more about Chrissie in the diary than anybody else because they had been best best best friends in elementary school and from habit went on seeing each other in middle. But they had grown apart. Chrissie was ferociously athletic, eager to be a basketball star and play on a winning college team, like UConn or Tennessee. If Chrissie was not practicing layups, she was on the rowing machine or lifting free weights or swimming laps. She also studied fiercely, not because she cared about her subjects but so she’d be referred to as a basketball star taking premed instead of a basketball star taking remedial math.
    Ming was a close friend now but had been just one of the crowd