For Keeps Read Online Free PDF Page B

in college.”
    College, the one place my mother never got to go. Instead she got her GED. And a big, fat belly.
    One time I asked her why she didn’t go back to high school after I was born, to finish her senior year, and she said, “It wasn’t my choice, Josie.” It was Grandma Gardner who wanted her to work, who pushed her to take the job at the bookstore.
    “College,” my mom says again, shaking her head. “I can’t believe it.”
    “I know, right?” Liv says, shaking her head right along with my mom. “ Six more years and we won’t even be in school.”
    You would think that Liv, being an expert in the art of sarcasm delivery, is mocking my mother, but she’s not. Liv loves school. There is no one, and I mean no one who embraces the first day like Olivia Weiss-Longo. For as long as I can remember, she has been the kid with the fifty-pack of perfectly sharpened #2 pencils in her book bag and an apple for the teacher.
    She’s also the one in the crazy outfit. In middle school, if all the girls were wearing jeans on the first day, Liv would show up in a peasant dress. If miniskirts were the rage, she’d wear camouflage. Liv is so anti-cool, she actually raises coolness to new heights. So I had to laugh when I saw her this morning, in kneesocks and a plaid kilt fastened with one of those giant safety pins. I guarantee tomorrow half the freshman girls will be wearing the same thing.
    At a stoplight, Liv scrambles into the front seat next to my mom. “O licensed driver over the age of twenty-one, can I drive?”
    “No, you may not.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because if I let you drive, then I would not have the pleasure of chauffeuring you on the first day of your junior year.”
    “Pleeeeeease, Kate?”
    “Noooooooo, Liv.”
    Liv pretends to pout, but she doesn’t mean it. She loves my mom. My mom is the mom Liv never got to have. Her and Wyatt’s biological mother is an egg donor/surrogate from Minnesota, a Princeton grad with a genius IQ. Pops and Dodd joke about this, saying next year Liv can apply to Princeton as a legacy, but we all know she’s so smart she would get in anyway.
    “Who do you have for English?” I ask from the backseat.
    Liv looks at her schedule. “Uh . . . Montrose. Fifth period.”
    “AP?”
    “Yup.”
    Advanced Placement English. I rest my case. I’m about to ask about math when Liv changes the subject. “Look, Jose,” she says, pointing out the window. “Wendy Geruntino is wearing a thong!”
    Sucker that I am, I look.
    Wendy Geruntino, walking along the sidewalk with the same wheely pink backpack she’s had since seventh grade, is wearing baggy jeans and a sweater down to her knees.
    “Ha-ha,” I say.
    Liv crosses her eyes and grins.
    Wendy Geruntino would never in her life wear a thong. Wendy Geruntino is secretary of the student council and co-chair of the Christian Students Fellowship. She is also the founder and president of Elmherst High School’s Chastity Club, which is essentially a society for virgins. Last year in assembly she tried to get the entire student body to sign a purity pledge, inspiring a bunch of senior guys to yell, “Eat me!” from the back of the auditorium.
    It’s mind-boggling how Wendy keeps up the cause, trying to convince everyone to “stay pure” until marriage, when ninety percent of the school rags on her.
    “I don’t know why anyone would wear a thong,” my mom says. “They seem so uncomfortable.”
    “Don’t knock it till you try it, Kate,” Liv says.
    “Please,” I say. “Don’t encourage her.”
    The last thing I need is my mom showing up to one of my soccer games in dental-floss underwear. It’s bad enough that she’s barely aged since high school—that her butt looks as good in low-rise jeans as my friends’ do, and that guys my own age check her out. She’s my mother .
    We pull up to the curb in front of school.
    “Junior year,” my mom says again, gripping the steering wheel. “I still can’t believe