Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover Read Online Free PDF Page A

crank to the ground, and it lands wonderfully close to his right tennis shoe. “If you’re going to narc, do it already, and shorten this special moment.”
    He crosses his arms. “Exactly what are you doing?”
    “Breaking and entering,” I say.
    “Why?”
    “I love detention.” I wrench open the window, pitch my body through the narrow space, and crash into a stack of chairs. The chairs scatter across the room, and I scramble to my knees and listen. A door opens somewhere at the end of the hall.
    Bolting to the wastebasket, I grope until I find two waddedup pieces of paper, one covered mostly in doodles, the other, twenty neat lines.
    “What’s that?”
    “Shit!”
    Nate stands six inches behind me, his fists on his hips, his biceps straining against the sleeves of his polo, like some preppy detention-room guardian. He crawled through the window without a sound, all strength and agility and grace. Definitely a sporto.
    He tilts his chin at Kennedy’s bucket list in my shaking hand. “What’s that?” he asks again.
    I jam the paper into the thigh pocket of my cargo pants. “Trash.”
    “Now you’re stealing.”
    “Someone threw it away. How can that be stealing?”
    “It’s not yours.”
    “It’s trash!”
    Footsteps clomp outside in the hallway. The door handle rattles. No time to argue about garbage.
    I stuff the other list into my pocket, rush to the window, grab a chair, and balance it on a desk.
    Climbing my makeshift ladder, I hurl my body through the window and don’t bother to worry about how Mr. Squeaky Clean is going to get out of this mess.

    THE LUNCH BELL RINGS, BUT I DON’T HEAD FOR MY normal spot near the bike racks, a lunchtime hangout haunted by the Del Rey School’s other detention regulars. Nor do I go to Miss Chang’s fifth-period art class, where I sometimes help her first-year students. I would never set foot in the cafeteria, a place for people wanting to see and be seen, like Cousin Penelope and the Cupcakes. Instead, I swim upstream through the crush of bodies to the locker courtyard in search of Death.
    At a locker bay near the drinking fountains, I spot a black hoodie. “I need to show you something,” I tell Macey.
    Macey throws her math book into her locker and pulls out two bulging plastic grocery bags.
    “What?”
    I slip my hand into my pants pocket, my knuckles brushing the piece of paper I’d stolen from the detention-room wastebasket. After checking into second-period AP English, a class I actually enjoy, I got a pass and spent most of the hour in the bathroom near the auto shop building reading Kennedy Green’s bucket list. “Not here. It’s something kind of personal.”
    Macey closes her locker. “I’m … uh … kind of busy.”
    I take one of Macey’s bags and tilt my head at the end of the locker bay. “Fine. We’ll talk while you do your ‘busy.’”
    For a moment, Macey looks startled, but she takes me along the breezeway to Unit Four and into one of the Family and Consumer Science classrooms.
    The FACS teacher waves at us. “Hi there, Macey. I’m so glad you decided to come after all. And you brought a friend! Wonderful. The kitchen’s ready. Let me know if you girls need any help.”
    Macey mumbles something that sounds like I’ll be fine or You have the eyes of a swine . She takes her bags to one of six tiny U-shaped kitchens and unloads a truckload of strawberries and bags of sugar and flour.
    I hoist myself onto the counter, the heels of my flip-flops tapping a cupboard door. “Did you hear about Kennedy Green?”
    Macey takes a large glass bowl and measuring cup from the cupboard. She opens a bag of flour and starts spooning flour into the measuring cup.
    “She’s the princess who was in detention with us yesterday. Blond ponytail.” Perky no longer. I hop off the counter.
    Macey puts the cup on a scale, squints, and scoops another spoonful of flour.
    “She’s dead.”
    Macey’s spoon hovers above the measuring cup.
    “She